Thomas McKelvey Cleaver : George McGovern, the Most Decent Man in Politics

George McGovern during the 1972 presidential campaign. Photo from SIPA / REX.
George McGovern:
The most decent man in politics

McGovern, who flew 35 missions as pilot of a B-24, took what he had learned in those deadly skies and put it into his politics, caring for his country the way he cared for his crew...

By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver / The Rag Blog / October 22, 2012

In 1972, my then-boss met with then-presidential candidate Senator George McGovern, and thus I also got to meet him. The most decent guy I ever met in politics.

To me George McGovern and Richard Nixon perfectly illustrate the basic difference between the two parties, and the point is nowhere better made than to look at their respective careers in the Second World War:

Richard Nixon, who arrived on Guadalcanal a year after all the fighting was done, spent his time in the rear with the gear as a supply officer who played poker well enough to come home at the end of the war with the money for a down payment on his first home. Out for himself, from the git-go.

George McGovern, who flew 35 missions as pilot of a B-24 operating out of Italy, facing the chance of being blown out of the sky 35 times (flak was far more deadly to B-24s than fighters), who cared for his crew, men who loved him all the rest of their lives, who took what he had learned in those deadly skies and put it into his politics, caring for his country the way he cared for his crew, using that courage that had to sustain him then, to take the most unpopular position a politician could take: to oppose the war created by the president of his party, and make the issue stick.

Blue skies, Captain McGovern, sir.

Conor Friedersdorf, no Democrat or liberal, had this to say on McGovern's passing:

Over the course of his career, McGovern made a lot of arguments that I personally find unpersuasive. But he sure did get the most important issue of his time right. Think of all the Americans who’d be alive today if the country had listened to McGovern rather than his opponents about the Vietnam War. Think of all the veterans who’d have been better off. Think of how many Vietnamese civilians would’ve been spared death by napalm.

From Hunter S. Thompson’s legendary Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72:

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

[Vietnam veteran Thomas McKelvey Cleaver is an accidental native Texan, a journalist, and a produced screenwriter. He has written successful horror movies and articles about Second World War aviation, was a major fundraiser for Obama in 2008, and has been an activist on anti-war,  political reform, and environmental issues for almost 50 years. Read more articles by Thomas Cleaver on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : NATO: From Fighting Socialism to Global Empire

The Big Three at Yalta, February 1545: Winston Churchill, prime minister of the United Kingdom; Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of the United States; and Joseph Stalin, Premier of the Soviet Union. Image from U.S. Department of Defense / Wikimedia Commons.
NATO:
From fighting socialism to global empire

Leaders of the three states celebrated a post-war world order in which they would work through the new United Nations system to modulate conflict in the world.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 17, 2012

During World War II an “unnatural alliance” was created between the United States, Great Britain, and the former Soviet Union. What brought the three countries together -- the emerging imperial giant, the declining capitalist power, and the first socialist state -- was the shared need to defeat fascism in Europe.

Rhetorically, the high point of collaboration was reflected in the agreements made at the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, three months before the German armies were defeated.

At Yalta, the great powers made decisions to facilitate democratization of former Nazi regimes in Eastern Europe, a “temporary” division of Germany for occupation purposes, and a schedule of future Soviet participation in the ongoing war against Japan.

Leaders of the three states returned to their respective countries celebrating the “spirit of Yalta,” what would be a post-war world order in which they would work through the new United Nations system to modulate conflict in the world.

Within two years, after conflicts over Iran with the Soviet Union, the Greek Civil War, the replacement of wartime President Franklin Roosevelt with Harry Truman, and growing challenges to corporate rule in the United States by militant labor, Truman declared in March, 1947 that the United States and its allies were going to be engaged in a long-term struggle against the forces of “International Communism.”

The post-war vision of cooperation was reframed as a struggle of the “free world” against “tyranny.”

In addition to Truman’s ideological crusade, his administration launched an economic program to rebuild parts of Europe, particularly what would become West Germany, as capitalist bastions against the ongoing popularity of Communist parties throughout the region.

Along with the significant program of reconstructing capitalism in Europe and linking it by trade, investment, finance, and debt to the United States, the U.S. with its new allies constructed a military alliance that would be ready to fight the Cold War against International Communism.

Representatives of Western European countries met in Brussels in 1948 to establish a program of common defense and one year later with the addition of the United States and Canada, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed. The new NATO charter, inspired largely by a prior Western Hemisphere alliance, the Rio Pact (1947), proclaimed that “an armed attack against one or more of them... shall be considered an attack against them all...” which would lead to an appropriate response.

The Charter called for cooperation and military preparedness among the 12 signatories. After the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb and the Korean War started, NATO pushed ahead with the development of a common military command structure with General Eisenhower as the first “Supreme Allied Commander.”

After the founding of NATO and its establishment as a military arm of the West, the Truman administration adopted the policy recommendations in National Security Council Document 68 (NSC 68) in 1950 which declared that military spending for the indefinite future would be the number one priority of every presidential administration.

As Western European economies reconstructed, Marshall Plan aid programs were shut down and military assistance to Europe was launched. Greece and Turkey joined NATO in 1952, and, fueling the flames of Cold War, West Germany was admitted to NATO in 1955. (This stimulated the Soviet Union to construct its own alliance system, the Warsaw Pact, with countries from Eastern Europe.)

During the Cold War NATO continued as the only unified Western military command structure against the “Soviet threat.”While forces and funds only represented a portion of the U.S. global military presence, the alliance constituted a “trip wire” signifying to the Soviets that any attack on targets in Western Europe would set off World War III. NATO thus provided the deterrent threat of “massive retaliation” in the face of first-strike attack.

With the collapse of the former Warsaw Pact regimes between 1989 and 1991, the tearing down of the symbolic Berlin Wall in 1989, and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, the purpose for maintaining a NATO alliance presumably had passed. However, this was not to be.

In the next 20 years after the Soviet collapse, membership in the alliance doubled. New members included most of the former Warsaw Pact countries. The functions and activities of NATO were redefined.

NATO programs included air surveillance during the crises accompanying the Gulf War and the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. In 1995, NATO sent 60,000 troops to Bosnia and in 1998-99 it carried out brutal bombing campaigns in Serbia with 38,000 sorties. NATO forces became part of the U.S.-led military coalition that launched the war on Afghanistan in 2001. In 2011 a massive NATO air war on Libya played a critical role in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime.

An official history of NATO described the changes in its mission: “In 1991 as in 1949, NATO was to be the foundation stone for a larger, pan-European security architecture.” The post-Cold War mission of NATO combines “military might, diplomacy, and post-conflict stabilization.”

The NATO history boldly concludes that the alliance was founded on defense in the 1950s and détente with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. With the collapse of Communism in the 1990s it became a “tool for the stabilization of Eastern Europe and Central Asia through incorporation of new Partners and Allies.”

The 21st century vision of NATO has expanded further: “extending peace through the strategic projection of security.” This new mission, the history said, was forced upon NATO because of the failure of nation-states and extremism.

Reviewing this brief history of NATO, observers can reasonably draw different conclusions about NATO’s role in the world than from those who celebrate its world role.

First, NATO’s mission to defend Europe from aggression against “International Communism” was completed with the “fall of Communism.” Second, the alliance was regional, that is pertaining to Europe and North America, and now it is global. Third, NATO was about security and defense. Now it is about global transformation.

Fourth, as its biggest supporter in terms of troops, supplies and budget (22-25%), NATO is an instrument of United States foreign policy. Fifth, as a creation of Europe and North America, it has become an enforcer of the interests of member countries against, what Vijay Prashad calls, the “darker nations” of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Sixth, NATO has become the 21st century military instrumentality of global imperialism.

And finally, there is growing evidence that larger and larger portions of the world’s people have begun to stand up against NATO.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Thomas McKelvey Cleaver : Nagasaki and Responding to Calamity

Shinto Shrine in Atomic Ruins, Nagasaki, Japan 1945. Public domain / National Archives / Flickr.
Responding to calamity and
what it says about our character

The people of Nagasaki dedicated their city to promoting international peace and brotherhood.

By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver / The Rag Blog / September 14, 2011

Watching the Tenth Anniversary celebration of national victimhood over the terrorist attacks of 9/11, I had some mixed thoughts. I thought using all this to celebrate and build support for the failed policies of the Bush-Cheney cabal (i.e., our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) in the aftermath of those attacks was an insult to the dead.

I thought about how societies remember calamities. It's said that how one deals with disaster is a better indicator of character than any other event. If that is true, then Americans beating their breasts about how singularly awful 9/11 was, how singularly different and vastly more important our victimhood is to any other anywhere else ever, clearly demonstrates the shallowness of character much of the rest of the world generally ascribes to us as a people.

I thought of another city that experienced a calamity so great it could only be termed a catastrophe, and what their response was to that event, and what it said about their character.

Sixty-six years ago last month, on August 9, 1945, the city of Nagasaki was hit by the last atomic bomb ever dropped in anger. 96,000 people died in the immediate aftermath, with thousands of others dying over the years that followed. It would be difficult to imagine a worse catastrophe that could happen to a city.

But wait, it gets worse.

The bomb was dropped in desperation by a crew that didn't want to return to base with "unexpended ordnance" aboard, who were desperately afraid that if they didn't drop the thing, they wouldn't be able to get back home. They'd tried bombing two other possible targets, but couldn't comply with the "visual drop only" orders they were operating under.

As it was, they had to make three passes over the city, with the bombardier finally telling the pilot he had "visual contact" at the last moment, which was later exposed as a lie; the bomb was dropped blind by radar fix, a violation of all the rules. "Bock's Car" had to divert from returning to Tinian and land at Okinawa, where the airplane had to be towed off the runway after running out of gas within moments of touchdown.

They really did have to get rid of the extra weight, and there was certainly no way this particular bomb would be abandoned over the open sea.

But wait, it gets worse.

Of all the cities in Japan to bomb, Nagasaki was the last place to consider. For over 300 years, since the first European explorers finally reached Japan, it had been Japan's door to the West, and the most traditionally pro-Western city in the country. It was the city that most opposed the military coup d'etat that took over the Japanese government in the late 1920s, and the city most opposed to the Pacific War.

As a result of the European influence beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, Nagasaki was overwhelmingly Christian. When the Shogunate was imposed in the seventeenth century, Nagasaki and the surrounding communities on Kyushu rebelled. Over 200,000 people where killed in the ensuing civil war, and Christianity was outlawed, with the death penalty for its practice. For the next 200 years, until Japan was forcibly opened to the West in 1854 by Commodore Perry's "black ships," the Christians of Nagasaki and Kyushu practiced an underground religion.

Following the Meiji Restoration in 1880, the official persecution of Christians was ended. Over the next 30 years, the Christians of Nagasaki built the Urakami Catholic Church, which was the largest Christian church in Asia, built entirely by the donations of the parishioners.

"Ground Zero" for the bomb was the bell tower of that church. The tower was the only structure remaining upright afterwards, and is today the site of the Museum of the Atomic Disaster.

How does all that strike you for terrible irony? Is that worse enough?

You'd pretty much figure the citizens of Nagasaki would never forget that one, wouldn't you? They'd probably hate the people responsible, too, right?

Wrong.

Unlike Hiroshima, where an American can still be made to feel guilty by the attitude of the citizens today, Nagasaki made a different choice.

The people of Nagasaki looked at what had happened, and concluded (as Americans did after 9/11): "Never again!" But they made a far different choice in how to achieve that. For the people of Nagasaki, the way to be sure such a terrible event never happened again was to work to promote international peace and brotherhood, and they dedicated their city to that principle.

All kinds of cities have all kinds of dedicated mottos, and most of their citizens never know what they are, or if they do, what they mean. That is certainly true here in America.

In Nagasaki, they know. They practice it every day. In 1964, less than 20 years after the event, wearing the uniform of the armed forces of the country that had committed that act, I was in Nagasaki, along with the rest of the ship's company of the old USS Rustbucket.

The young people of the city came down to the pier where we were docked and waited to meet us as we left the ship, and invited us to allow them to guide us through their city, to go to dinner with them, to even visit their homes (that is an amazing act, that gaijin would be brought into a Japanese home -- they're the most private people on the planet). And they told us why they were doing it.

I don't think I have ever experienced such a truly Christian act in my life

[Thomas McKelvey Cleaver is an accidental native Texan, a journalist, and a produced screenwriter. He has written successful horror movies and articles about Second World War aviation, was a major fundraiser for Obama in 2008, and has been an activist on anti-war, political reform, and environmental issues for almost 50 years. Read more articles by Thomas Cleaver on The Rag Blog.]

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David McReynolds : Remembering December 7, 1941

Bombing of Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. Photo from Naval Historical Center.
Remembering December 7th:
The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor

I know that on Monday, when I went to Junior High School, I felt special pride as I saluted the flag. Any questions I might have about flags and patriotism would be many years ahead.

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / December 8, 2010

December 7th now comes as an almost forgotten date. It was only in typing up my notes for the week that I remembered the date and how special it was. 1941. Shortly before 8 a.m. that Sunday Japanese aircraft began an attack on the U.S. military bases in Honolulu. In Los Angeles it was about 11 a.m. when the radio reports reached us. I don't remember whether the family had gone to church, which we would normally have done.

I do remember sitting in the front room of our house at 9121 South Dalton Ave., in the South West part of the city, listening to the radio as reports came in.

My mother was quietly distraught, as one of her sisters, Mary, and her husband and kids, lived in Honolulu. There was no way to find out if they had been hit by the attack. The phone lines were overloaded. It would be hours before the full scope of the attack would be clear. (As it turned out, Mary and her family escaped without injury). My father was unusually quiet. He put the three of us kids in the car, and with my mother, we took a long drive, not knowing what else to do. I was 12 years old.

As a child I hadn't paid close attention to the news. I remember the chewing gum wrappers had bloody images of Japanese troops killing Chinese in Manchuria. But, between chewing gum wrappers and war, was a distance, for a child, of miles beyond imagining.

I don't remember the rest of that day, but I know that on Monday, when I went to Junior High School, I felt special pride as I saluted the flag. Any questions I might have about flags and patriotism would be many years ahead.

My father, who had the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Army Reserves, volunteered almost immediately, though at 38 and with three children he would have been exempt. I don't know now how long before he was in active service.

My memories of the war period are scattered. I remember the night the searchlights were turned on, looking for a Japanese plane alleged to be over Los Angeles. Our neighbors on one side of us moved back to the Midwest, fearing an invasion. Of the roundup of the Japanese I remember nothing at all. Our schools were all white, as was our somewhat lower middle class neighborhood. So this terrible act was largely unseen.

(To the great credit of my Republican grandfather, he and my grandmother made regular trips to visit his secretary and her family, who had been interned. They named their first son after him, and that son was one of the pall bearers at his funeral).

All the world came to us by newspapers, radio, and the newsreels at the theater, between the double features. Because our country had been attacked (let's leave aside all the political issues that led up to the Japanese attack) there was a sense of almost total solidarity with the government. We collected metal and grease. Butter, sugar, and bananas were rationed. (I thought they should have rationed carrots rather than bananas.) Meat, gasoline, were also rationed. Our parents all had ration books.

The news bulletins seem -- if memory serves -- to have come every 15 minutes all through the war. Brief bulletins on the early and terrible setbacks as the U.S. lost the Philippines. The Pacific Coast seemed open to attack, though of course the Japanese had no way at all to transport an invasion force.

(The closest we came to being attacked, as far as I know, was a Japanese submarine which surfaced off the coast near Santa Barbara and fired some shells inland. And, of course, the "fire balloons" the Japanese sent on the air currents, balloons timed to drop incendiary bombs when they reached Oregon and Washington. Those were hugely ineffective, though an inventive effort.)

While the attack had been from Japan, the war turned to the West and focused in the first year or two almost entirely on Europe. (One of the lingering questions is why Hitler declared war on the U.S. after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Nazis were not bound by treaty to attack the U.S. The Axis alliance only called for each member -- Germany, Italy, and Japan -- to come to the aid of the others if they were attacked, but it didn't obligate the countries to join in an attack which one of them had launched unilaterally.)

Image from The Legend of Pine Ridge.
It is true enough that my impressions of the war are those of a child, who watched the war from the age of 12 to 16. (And how eager I was to join the Marines and "fight the Japs.") But my memories are of a time of almost total support for the government. What I think must be termed a "sense of the totalitarian."

In Great Britain the old class lines were to a great extent overlooked, even erased. Germans rallied to the Nazi government as the U.S. and British bombing increased. The Soviets rallied behind Stalin (though in the very early days of the war, when the German armies moved into the Ukraine, some of the Ukrainians were happy to see them as liberators -- if the Nazis had not made the mistake of mass killing of civilians they might have found an ally!).

I learned much later that a friend I met after the war, Robin Prising, had been imprisoned with his parents in terrible conditions in Manila. (Robin's book, Manila Goodbye, is out of print but is a classic account of the Japanese occupation there and the eventual liberation of the Phillipines, by a boy who was then as young as I -- very much worth reprinting or hunting down among used books.)

In that "totality" of war, Japanese became "Japs," the Germans became "huns," and of course, in one of the sleights of hand at which governments are so adept, the Soviet Union became a democracy until after the Allied victory. (To this day few Americans know that while we lost 683,000 men and women, the Soviet Union lost nearly 27 million -- many of these civilians.)

When Roosevelt died, shortly before the end of the war in Europe, the radio broadcast nothing but funeral and classical music for three days. (There was no television.) I remember my High School teacher coming into class in tears to break the news of his death.

Hard, looking back, to realize that in the aftermath of that war, there was an almost universal (and genuine) determination that this had to be the last war, that the nations of the world would move to disarm. So much lay ahead, the liberations of the colonial world which came soon after the end of that war, the beginning of the Cold War, but on this day, December 7th,

I think back to the living room in Los Angeles, to the fear my mother did her best to hide, as she worried about her sister thousands of miles away, and my father, realizing he would feel compelled to volunteer.

What did we do with that victory? How can we, today, justify the tens of millions who died?

[David McReynolds is a former chair of War Resisters International, and was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980 and 2000. He is retired and lives with two cats on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He can be reached at dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com.]

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Budd Saunders : Luck, and Dumb Luck

Sailers in 1946 are shown wearing goggles to shield their eyes from an atomic blast. Dr. Phil Trapp told about how such goggles were expected to protect his World War II Marine flotilla from the effects of a third atomic bomb to be dropped on the beach just ahead of them. Dumb luck saved them. Photo by Bob Landry / Life Magazine.
(And a whole row of 'had's...)
Luck, and dumb luck

By Budd Saunders / The Rag Blog / May 8, 2010

DURHAM, Arkansas -- I ran across a note that had been lost for some time and I want to share its content. The note has nothing to do with politics, war, or anything but English grammar. It is a sentence that contains 11 "had"s in a row, and it is perfectly correct.

My father-in-law wrote it out years ago. My wife Nancy's father is George Armitage Miller, one of the outstanding intellects of the 20th century. Words and communication were his life. Whatever else the sentence is, it is interesting: "John, where Bill had had 'had', had had 'had had'; 'had had' had had the teacher's approval."

When George visited us years ago, Nancy mentioned several things so I would notice them. When her father was sitting in a chair with his head nodding, he wasn't asleep, he was thinking. He would take out a small notebook from his pocket and write in it. I was told not to ask what he was writing because I wouldn't understand it. It was to himself. When he would later communicate, you would understand, like WordNet 2.1. You can find it with your computer and download it. It's free and very useful.

There have been another two disasters and a near disaster recently affecting our country. The oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, Nashville under water, and a car bomb in Times Square. We watched CNN for news on these disasters.

Actually, I rather think the real disaster in the bomb scene was the character who built the "bomb." Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American, had it all worked out. He had placed a vehicle where an explosion would have caused destruction of property and many casualties. His explosives were amateurish at best. But he had transportation to JFK International Airport.

There was an announcement by some government agency representative extolling the various groups involved and how alert they were. Homeland Security had all of the bus stations at the Port Authority covered, but at JFK, Shahzad got through security. That pretty much put the wraps on those characters as the heroes in this made-for-TV drama in which, just as the villain is about to escape, somebody notices that he is on a plane. I can hear the dramatic music build, until the plane is called back to the gate. I suppose it was TSA who went on board and trundled Mr. Shahzad off to be interrogated.

Then the story changed. It seems he only got through security once and hadn't been on the plane after all. The plane was called back because there were "suspected accomplices" on board. I suppose they looked Middle Eastern, which is racial profiling and only permitted in Arizona.

As I have continued watching and listening to the news I have come to a conclusion. It seems that all of the agencies involved were working together. That's good. But it's not so much that they were smarter than the bomber, as that they were very lucky. This guy was just plain dumb.

Luck reminded me of something a friend of ours wrote and I dug it out of one of the many piles of papers around the house. Dr. Phil Trapp is Emeritus Professor of Psychology from the University of Arkansas. He wrote a letter to the Northwest Arkansas Times in 2007 in which he gave some examples of "dumb luck."

In World War II he commanded a flotilla of landing craft destined to invade Japan. They were to invade right after a third Atomic Bomb was "dropped on the beach just ahead of" them. They were to wear goggles to protect them from the "brilliant light" of the bomb. Nobody back then knew about radiation fallout. Fortunately Japan surrendered before the invasion.

Another example he gives of "dumb luck" is the chlorine compound in aerosols and car air conditioners being discontinued before the ozone layer was completely destroyed. Professor Trapp also commanded Marine landing craft at Red Beach on Iwo Jima Island. He survived. And that was really luck.

We can't count on luck, but we can remember (if our attention spans aren't too short) the words of the man who alerted police to the suspicious SUV in Times Square. He was a street vendor and disabled Vietnam War veteran who sold T-shirts. When asked what he had to say about the event, he replied, "If you see something, say something." He saw something different and said something for sure. He told a police officer and thus the comedy began. In the classical sense, comedies all have happy endings. This one did. And a clown for the central character.

Question authority. It's the American way.

[Budd Saunders is a Vietnam veteran who lives in Arkansas and writes a regular column for the Durham Dispatch.]

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin on 'The Bomb' : Howard Zinn Speaks From the Dead

The Bomb:
Howard Zinn's last call
To rebel against war

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2010

The Bomb by Howard Zinn (City Lights Open Media, San Francisco, August 2010); paperback, 100 pp; $8.95.

In his lifetime, Howard Zinn wrote and edited nearly two dozen books, and altered radically the way Americans view their own history with his best selling A Peoples’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. He was compassionate, dynamic, and an unrelenting seeker after justice, and when he died in January 2010, he was mourned by friends and family, students and activists, fellow historians and makers of history like himself.

Zinn seemed to do it all: think, act, organize, and agitate for more than half a century. A G.I., he was also a professor and an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as a critic of the Vietnam War.

In The Bomb, a new book forthcoming from City Lights, he tells the little-known story of his own experience as a bomber in the U. S. Air Force and his role in dropping bombs on Germany during World War II. Zinn also explains that he initially applauded the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“So I wouldn’t be going to the Pacific, and might soon be coming home for good,” he thought when he saw a headline that read “Atom Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima.” Part history, part memoir, part sermon, The Bomb is meant to wake up citizens, to rouse them to reject “the abstractions of duty and obedience” and to refuse to heed the call of war.

It’s as though Zinn speaks from the dead one last time -- to plead for individual responsibility. Perhaps in writing the book, which he finished just before his own death, he also laid to rest ghosts in his own life. The publication of the book coincides with the 65th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are two parts to The Bomb. One of them has to do with Zinn’s own experiences bombing -- and destroying -- the French town of Royen in April 1945 three weeks before the end of the war in Europe, that resulted in the deaths of more than one thousand people. Zinn was a bombardier with the 490th Bomb Group and flying in a B-17 with the crew. “I remember distinctly seeing, from our great height, the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches stuck in fog,” he writes. “I was completely unaware of the human chaos below.”

Twenty-one years later, Zinn returned to Royen to do research about the destruction of the seaside French town. And in 2010, 65 years later he was still haunted by the bombing, and his own role as a bombardier. What Zinn learned from his research was that in the bombing of Royan, napalm or “liquid fire” was used for the first time. He concludes that it was “an unnecessary military operation” and that Royan was bombed to fulfill “pride, military ambition, glory and honor.”

He also argues that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary to win the war against the Japanese. He presents evidence to show that the war was already won, and that the argument that the bombs saved hundreds of thousands of American lives was misleading at best.

For Zinn, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of terrorism, which he defines as “the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose.” The Japanese cities were bombed, he says, because the United States wanted to “show the world -- especially the Soviet Union -- its atomic weaponry.”

Zinn has collected an array of powerful quotations from U.S. presidents and generals that explode like bombshells in the pages of this book. “This is the greatest thing in history,” Truman boasted of the A bomb. General Curtis LeMay said during World War II, “There is no such thing as an innocent civilian.” During the Vietnam War, and speaking of the Vietnamese he said, “We will bomb them back to the Stone Age.”

Zinn has also included stories from Americans who were involved in the bombings of Japan, either directly or indirectly. Father George Zabelka, the chaplain to the crews that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said, years later, “I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians…I was brainwashed.”

The Bomb is Zinn’s last confession. It’s his last sermon, and an account of the ways that he too was brainwashed during World War II. It’s a horrific story that he tells. He brings out the little known fact that American prisoners in Japan also died in the bombing of Hiroshima. A Japanese doctor saw their bodies a day later and said, “They had no faces! Their eyes, noses, and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted.”

The City Lights editor for this book, Greg Ruggiero, says that Zinn “loved small acts of rebellion.” The Bomb is his final act of rebellion. Zinn observes in The Bomb that, “rebellion is a rare phenomenon.” But he doesn’t leave it at that. He urges citizens “to interfere” both with the war machine and the “odd perversion of the natural that we call society” and to save human lives.

[Jonah Raskin is a professor at Sonoma State University and the author of The Mythology of Imperialism and Field Days.]

• Preorder The Bomb at Amazon.com.

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Steve Russell : Ranting on Obama and Ike

Put on the spot by Obama: Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, at weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem Sunday, June 7, 2009. Photo by Jim Hollander / AP.
A rant in recognition of June 6

Yes, it will be difficult. No, he may not pull it off. But I've never felt so hopeful or so proud of my government.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / June 7, 2009

Obama's Cairo speech took my breath away in both form and substance.

It's a measure of his having struck the right chords that he is being pounded now by the Israeli right and the Arab "left," if you can call most of that stuff left. I personally hesitate to define “left” by tolerance for non-combatant body count.

On the home front, the crazed right is going even crazier at the words "Holy Qur'an," let alone quoting from it.

That speech basically took away the platform on which Benjamin Netanyahu ran. Bibi must betray his followers, or rebuild his coalition, or get in a public pissing match with the U.S. The Israel lobby is tuning up to defend the ramparts once again, but they have not managed the full cry they would like to see because American Jews are slow to turn against Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emmanuel.

And he then sent George Mitchell, the guy who negotiated the last impossible peace deal, to kick start Netanyahu's grundy ass.

And it's no accident that Obama's next public appearance was at Buchenwald. Or that he made sure it was Rahm photographed riding the camel and not him.

Goddam, I never thought I would live to see the day when an American President would tell the Arabs flat out that the Holocaust deniers and 9-11 deniers among them are idiots and the Israelis have a right to their own state... and then turn right around and essentially commit to regime change in Israel if necessary to support "Palestine," a word never before uttered by an American President!

Yes, it will be difficult. No, he may not pull it off. But I've never felt so hopeful or so proud of my government. Carter came close, but not this close.

I sent the above rant to a friend of mine, also a boomer, and she replied “I’m not in love with Obama. He’s just the best president of my lifetime.”

After I picked myself up off the floor and my gut quit hurting, it dawned on me that Obama’s good notices by most of my generation are aided by the fact that he follows Bush II -- the president who makes Richard Nixon look like fucking FDR!

Anyway, this June 6 message is only secondarily about Obama, although without Obama there would be more nostalgia and less current events. The larger context is whether the U.S. ever does anything right, whether the left is capable of relating to American citizenship in any manner but shame.

So it seems to me appropriate to append the June 6 message below, conveying the shameless message that this country may be slow, but we get it right more often than any other country that has faced similar challenges. How hard could it be to govern Sweden?

Next time I use my passport, I can do so without slinking around in the shame brought upon us by the last President. Obama has in so many words disclaimed any interest in permanent military bases in Iraq. Yes, I’m aware that the neocons have published an intent to keep our boots on the ground as long as the oil lasts, but notice has been served that they are not making policy any more.

One more story if I may.

A Canadian Indian told me that his dad enlisted just in time to get caught up in the Normandy hairball, and right after he married my friend’s mom. He barely had time to get her pregnant when he explained that he had been drafted and had to go fight Hitler.

She did not learn until after WWII that Canada did not practice conscription at that time.

My friend’s dad had enough ass in his britches to go fight Hitler because Hitler needed fighting, but not enough to tell his new bride.

If you know any of the oldsters who did that, today would be a good day to thank them.

Sent Just Prior to the Invasion:

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

-- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Rag Blog

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Wars: Not Glorious, Ever

Revisionists challenge D-Day story
By Hugh Schofield / June 5, 2009

A revisionist theme seems to have settled on this year's 65th anniversary commemoration of the Normandy landings.

The tone was set in Antony's Beevor's new book, D-Day, which tries to debunk certain received ideas about the Allied campaign.

Far from being an unmitigated success, Mr Beevor found, the landings came very close to going horribly wrong.

And far from being universally welcomed as liberators, many troops had a distinctly surly reception from the people of Normandy.

The reason for this was simple. Many Normandy towns and villages had been literally obliterated by Allied bombing.

The bombardment of Caen, Mr Beevor said, could almost be considered a war-crime (though he later retracted the comment).

Many historians will retort that there is nothing new in Mr Beevor's account.

Harrowing experience

After all, the scale of destruction is already well-established.

Some 20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings.

In some areas - like the Falaise pocket where the Germans were pounded into oblivion at the end of the campaign - barely a building was left standing and soldiers had to walk over banks of human corpses.

As for the destruction of Caen, it has long been admitted that it was militarily useless.

The Germans were stationed to the north of the city and were more or less untouched.

Twenty-five years ago, in his book Overlord, Max Hastings had already described it as "one of the most futile air attacks of the war."

Though these revisionist accounts were written elsewhere, it is in France that these ideas strike more of a chord today.

It is not as if the devastation wrought by the Allies is not known - it is just that it tends not to get talked about.

And yet for many families who lived through the war, it was the arrival and passage of British and American forces that was by far the most harrowing experience.

"It was profoundly traumatic for the people of Normandy," said Christophe Prime, a historian at the Peace Memorial in Caen.

"Think of the hundreds of tons of bombs destroying entire cities and wiping out families. But the suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image - that of the French welcoming the liberators with open arms."

'Sullen' welcome

According to Prime, it was during the 60th anniversary commemoration five years ago that the taboo first began to lift.

At town meetings across Normandy, witnesses - now on their 70s - spoke of the terrible things they had seen as children.

At the same time an exhibition at the Caen memorial displayed letters from Allied servicemen speaking frankly about their poor reception by locals.

That too was an eye-opener for many Normandy people.

For example, Cpl LF Roker of the Highland Light Infantry is quoted in another new book about the civilian impact of the campaign, Liberation, The Bitter Road to Freedom, by William Hitchcock.

"It was rather a shock to find we were not welcomed ecstatically as liberators by the local people, as we were told we should be... They saw us as bringers of destruction and pain," Mr Roker wrote in his diary.

Another soldier, Ivor Astley of the 43rd Wessex Infantry, described the locals as "sullen and silent... If we expected a welcome, we certainly failed to find it."

Sexual violence

In his book, Mr Hitchcock raises another issue that rarely features in euphoric folk-memories of liberation: Allied looting, and worse.

"The theft and looting of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer," he writes.

One woman - from the town of Colombieres - is quoted as saying that "the enthusiasm for the liberators is diminishing. They are looting... everything, and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans."

Even more feared, of course, was the crime of rape - and here too the true picture has arguably been expunged from popular memory.

According to American historian J Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war.

"The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common," writes Mr Hitchcock.

"It also shows that black soldiers convicted of such awful acts received very severe punishments, while white soldiers received lighter sentences."

Of 29 soldiers executed for rape by the US military authorities, 25 were black - though African-Americans did not represent nearly so high a proportion of convictions.

Happy and thankful

So why did the "bad" side of the Allied liberation tend to disappear from French popular consciousness?

The answer of course is that the overwhelming result of the Allied campaign was a positive one for the whole of France.

It was hard for the people of Normandy to spoil the national party by complaining of their lot.

The message from on-high was sympathetic but clear: we know you have suffered, but the price was worth it. Most people agreed and were silent.

In addition, open criticism of British and American bombings raids had long been a hallmark of French collaboration.

In Paris - which, it is often forgotten, was itself bombed by the British - pro-German groups staged ceremonies to commemorate the victims, and the "crimes" of the Allies were excoriated in the press.

After the war, abusing the Allies would have seemed like siding with the defeated and the dishonoured.

Of course, in some communities the devastation was never forgotten.

There are villages in Normandy where until recently the 6 June celebrations were deliberately shunned, because the associations were too painful.

And on the ideological front, there have been intellectuals of both left and right who justified their anti-Americanism by recalling the grimmer aspects of the French campaign - like the "cowardly" way the Americans bombed from high altitude, or their reliance on heavy armour causing indiscriminate civilian casualties.

But in general, France has gone along with the accepted version of the landings and their aftermath - that of a joyful liberation for which the country is eternally grateful.

That version is the correct one. France was indeed freed from tyranny, and the French were both happy and thankful.

But it is still worth remembering that it all came at a cost.

Source / BBC News

Thanks to Deva Wood / The Rag Blog

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MEDIA : The Press and the Atomic Bomb

Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 60,000 feet into the air on the morning of Aug. 9, 2008.
63 Years Ago: Media Distortions Set Tone for Nuclear Age
By Greg Mitchell / August 6, 2008

At this time of year it is always important to look back at how the original "first-strike" was explained to the press, distorted, and then became part of the decades-long narrative of how, in this view, nuclear weapons can be used -- and used again.

Sixty-three years after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Bomb is still very much with us. The U.S. retains over 5000 nuclear weapons -- does this surprise you? -- with better than 4000 said to be "operational." There are plans to reduce this number, but only by 15%. The Russians still have many of their nukes but these remnants of the "superpower" era -- and the lack of airtight security surrounding them -- get little play today. All we seem to hear about are alleged or possible Iranian or North Korean or freelance terrorist nuclear devices.

The fact is, our "first use" policy -- dating back to 1945 -- remains in effect and past Gallup polls have shown that large numbers of Americans would endorse using The Bomb against our enemies if need be. So at this time of year it is always important to look back at how the original "first-strike" was explained to the press, distorted, and then became part of the decades-long narrative of how, in this view, nuclear weapons can be used -- and used again.

The Truman announcement of the atomic bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, and the flood of material from the War Department, written by The New York Times' William L. Laurence the following day, firmly established the nuclear narrative. It would not take long, however, for breaks in the official story to appear.

At first, journalists had to follow where the Pentagon led. Wartime censorship remained in effect, and there was no way any reporter could reach Hiroshima for a look around. One of the few early stories that did not come directly from the military was a wire service report filed by a journalist traveling with the president on the Atlantic, returning from Europe. Approved by military censors, it went beyond, but not far beyond, the measured tone of the president's official statement. It depicted Truman, his voice "tense with excitement," personally informing his shipmates about the atomic attack. "The experiment," he announced, "has been an overwhelming success."

The sailors were said to be "uproarious" over the news. "I guess I'll get home sooner now," was a typical response. Nowhere in the story, however, was there a strong sense of Truman's reaction. Missing from this account was his exultant remark when the news of the bombing first reached the ship: "This is the greatest thing in history!"

On Aug. 7, military officials confirmed that Hiroshima had been devastated: at least 60% of the city wiped off the map. They offered no casualty estimates, emphasizing instead that the obliterated area housed major industrial targets. The Air Force provided the newspapers with an aerial photograph of Hiroshima. Significant targets were identified by name. For anyone paying close attention there was something troubling about this picture. Of the thirty targets, only four were specifically military in nature. "Industrial" sites consisted of three textile mills. (Indeed, a U.S. survey of the damage, not released to the press, found that residential areas bore the brunt of the bomb, with less than 10% of the city's manufacturing, transportation, and storage facilities damaged.)

On Guam, weaponeer William S. Parsons and Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets calmly answered reporters' questions, limiting their remarks to what they had observed after the bomb exploded. Asked how he felt about the people down below at the time of detonation, Parsons said that he experienced only relief that the bomb had worked and might be "worth so much in terms of shortening the war."

Almost without exception newspaper editorials endorsed the use of the bomb against Japan. Many of them sounded the theme of revenge first raised in the Truman announcement. Most of them emphasized that using the bomb was merely the logical culmination of war. "However much we deplore the necessity," The Washington Post observed, "a struggle to the death commits all combatants to inflicting a maximum amount of destruction on the enemy within the shortest span of time." The Post added that it was "unreservedly glad that science put this new weapon at our disposal before the end of the war."

Referring to American leaders, the Chicago Tribune commented: "Being merciless, they were merciful." A drawing in the same newspaper pictured a dove of peace flying over Japan, an atomic bomb in its beak.

At the same time, however, the first non-official news reports began to break into print, including graphic accounts of casualties, a subject ignored in the War Department's briefings.

Tokyo radio, according to a United Press report, called Hiroshima a city of the dead with corpses "too numerous to be counted ... literally seared to death." It was impossible to "distinguish between men and women." Medical aid was hampered by the fact that all the hospitals in the city were in ashes. The Associated Press carried the first eyewitness account, attributed to a Japanese soldier who had crudely described the victims (over Tokyo radio) as "bloated and scorched -- such an awesome sight -- their legs and bodies stripped of clothes and burned with a huge blister. ..."

Americans who came across these reports were thrust briefly into the reality of atomic warfare -- if this information could be believed; The New York Times observed that the Japanese were "trying to establish a propaganda point that the bombings should be stopped." The Hearst newspapers published a cartoon showing a hideous, apelike "Jap" rising out of the ruins of Hiroshima screaming at Americans, "They're Not Human!", with the caption, "Look who's talking."

But in quoting from Tokyo radio, newspapers did introduce their readers to a disturbing point of view: that the atomic bombing might not be an act of deliverance blessed by the Almighty but a "crime against God and man"; not a legitimate part of war but something "inhuman," a cruel "atrocity," and a violation of international law, specifically Article 22 of the Hague Convention which outlawed attacks on defenseless civilians. The Japanese also compared the bomb to the use of poison gas, a weapon generally considered taboo. It was this very analogy many American policy makers and scientists had feared as they contemplated using the bomb, which they knew would spread radiation.

Other condemnations appeared as the War Department's grip on the story weakened slightly. The New York Herald-Tribune found "no satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had produced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind," likening it to the "mass butcheries of the Nazis or of the ancients."

A leading religious body in America, the Federal Council of Churches, urged that the U.S. drop no more atomic bombs on Japan, in a statement issued by two of its leaders, G. Bromley Oxnam and John Foster Dulles, later President Eisenhower's chief adviser. America had won the race for the bomb but it "may yet reap the whirlwind," Hanson Baldwin, military analyst for the New York Times, declared.

Interest in Hiroshima, however, receded as other events in the Pacific war, as well as speculation about a Japanese surrender, took center stage. On Aug. 9, the top two headlines on the front page of The New York Times announced the Soviets' declaration of war against Japan (indeed, some historians would later write that it was this, not the atomic bombs, that primarily forced the Japanese surrender). Not until line three did this message appear: "ATOM BOMB LOOSED ON NAGASAKI." The target of the second attack, a city of 270,000 people, was described, variously, as a naval base, an industrial center, or a vital port for military shipments and troop embarkation, anything but a largely residential city. The bomb, in fact, exploded over the largest Catholic community in the Far East.

That night, President Truman told a national radio audience that the Hiroshima bomb had been dropped on a "military base,"not a large city, although he knew this was not true. "That was because we wished in the first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians," he said. Yet 150,000 civilians had died or would soon perish from radiation disease.

[Greg Mitchell is co-author, with Robert Jay Lifton, of the book, "Hiroshima in America."]

Source / Editor and Publisher

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