Dear Friend,
Today, the life-system of the Amazon is at the forefront of my mind as I increasingly come to terms with the realisation that my survival is part of a system that depends on the Amazon’s survival. The life-system includes the trees, insects, Indigenous peoples, waters, plants, air, animals and soils. The Amazonian life-system is being killed, meaning that we are also being killed – or perhaps we should say, murdered.
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In Solidarity
Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
Our Lungs Are Under Attack—We Must Protect Them to Stay Alive
by Stuart
Basden
Today, the life-system of the Amazon is at the forefront of my mind as I increasingly come to terms with the realisation that my survival is part of a system that depends on the Amazon’s survival. The life-system includes the trees, insects, Indigenous peoples, waters, plants, air, animals and soils. The Amazonian life-system is being killed, meaning that we are also being killed – or perhaps we should say, murdered.
Since I was a child in the 1980’s I have heard calls to protect the Amazon. I remember watching videos of massive trees being cut down, soil washed away, and areas of lush forest burnt and cleared. I was told McDonalds was the villain, as the land was being destroyed for cattle farming, soy monoculture and fast-food burgers. As a six-year-old I decided not to eat McDonalds, but that only lasted until my teen years when my determination wavered – in my mind the Amazon became ‘just some far-away trees’. After all, could a few burgers really make a difference?
As an adult I am increasingly expanding my awareness about the impact I have on the world around me. I’ve researched the connections between the food I eat and the agricultural & economic systems that produce the food. After years of inquiry I have concluded that yes, my dietary choices make a difference. I’ve investigated the connections between how the patterns of thought and behaviour in one area of my life affect other areas – by carelessly eating at McDonalds I actively reinforce patterns for carelessness in other areas of my life that ripple out in countless ways. A few burgers really do make a difference!
Unfortunately, this is no longer ‘just’ about burgers, nor even just about trees. Today, the life-system of the Amazon is at the forefront of my mind as I increasingly come to terms with the realisation that my survival is part of a system that depends on the Amazon’s survival. The life-system includes the trees, insects, Indigenous peoples, waters, plants, air, animals and soils. The Amazonian life-system is being killed, meaning that we are also being killed – or perhaps we should say, murdered.
Large forests create biotic pumps for rain systems that actively draw water from the ocean into the forests as clouds and rain, and these life-giving systems are being disrupted. The Amazon’s biotic pump cycles 20% of the world’s fresh water through the hydraulic cycle. However, within the next year the Amazon is predicted to stop producing enough rain to sustain itself as a forest.
This rich refuge, the most biodiverse and abundant area on the surface of the planet, which has survived for 50 millions years through massive planetary changes, may well be coming to its end. This life-system would be replaced by a dry and barren scrubland or savannah. Instead of sequestering 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon annually, acting as the “lungs of the planet”, the forest would be incinerated by fires over the coming decade, and hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon would be released – heating the planet to such a degree that human life becomes nigh impossible.
My human life. And yours. And countless lives in the more-than-human realm. Without healthy planetary lungs we will die.
You may wish to pause for a moment to let that sink in.
However, all is not lost, yet. It is still possible to reverse this global dying, and the Indigenous people who live in the Amazon know how to do it. They’ve been doing it for several thousand years, at least. This isn’t just about protecting trees, it’s also about preserving those who know how to enhance the life of the forest. It’s been said that the most advanced technology is knowing how to live sustainably on the planet, and Indigenous peoples are the holders of that knowledge. We must learn from our planetary elders – those who know how to live on this planet without destroying life. They have valuable life-technology and they’re willing to share it, despite the West’s atrocious history of industrialised capitalism, extraction, imperialism, genocide, ecocide and forced religious conversion. However, in order to receive the help of Indigenous communities, we first have to stop the onslaught. They need the support of the global community.
Over the past two years Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has launched an unprecedented assault on the land, waters and peoples of the Amazon. Bolsonaro has ripped apart environmental protections and Indigenous rights. Bolsonaro’s disregard for life is mirrored in his response to the Covid pandemic, with Brazil becoming the epicentre (alongside the US, the other epicenter of fascism and denialism). Indigenous peoples are being severely battered by the virus (you can check out the Amazon Emergency Fund to find out more information and how to support).
Mercenaries indirectly employed by multinationals have intentionally set forest fires to destroy the land and the people who live there, exposing it for extractive industry (mining, agribusiness and logging). Now that the dry season is starting, the fires are starting to rage. And the smoke of the fires further imperils those infected by the pandemic. Amazon defender Chief Paulinho Paiakan recently died of Covid, probably contracted through interaction with miners and other workers in the extractive industries. Bolsonaro’s racist disdain for Indigenous peoples is inciting further violence, including murder. And if this all wasn’t enough, Bolsonaro has recently tried to legalize crimes against the Indigenous peoples.
Yet this isn’t all about a rogue dictator in a distant land. The extremist neo-liberal policies that Bolsonaro is implementing are driven by Western states, the military-industrial complex, and multinational companies that have headquarters in the UK, EU and US. Companies like Blackrock, BNP Paribas, Bayer/Monsanto, and Johnson & Johnson are responsible for the ecocidal trajectory of the Brazillian state, as well as the global economy of industrialization and extraction in general. It’s our responsibility to stop these companies from fueling the fires and bringing about planetary ruin.
As a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (XR), I’m proud that the movement has stood in solidarity with the Amazon and the Indigenous protectors that live there. One of the first XR actions was outside the Brazillian embassy in London, and members of XR Youth sailed across the Atlantic ocean to build connections with Indigenous peoples deep into the Amazon. The fourth major wave of rebellion in the UK has just been announced for 1st September 2020. Yet while there have been some incredible actions, the fight for the Amazonian life-system needs to be even more central to climate & social justice movements.
Indigenous peoples are the immune system of the Amazonian life-system, fighting to protect its continued life, and the continuation of life on the planet. They are the front-lines of the struggle, and many of them are paying with their lives. In January 2020 Indigenous leaders published the Piaracu Manifesto to inform the international community of the urgency of the threat facing them, the Amazon and the world.
For those of us who live in the midst of the major economic, political and military powers, it’s our duty to live in active solidarity. Yes, refusing to eat beef and soy could help, yet the situation is dire, and we are being called to do far more than that. Our actions in the middle of the empire must be disruptive enough to bring attention to, and dis-assemble, the immense economic and political forces of capitalist ‘growth-fundamentalism’ that are driving the momentum of destruction.
What passed as ‘normal’ life before Covid included the consistent destruction of the Amazon, massive species annihilation, societal-scale depression, systemic racism and other structural oppressions. It’s up to us to not slip back into the hyper-normality of destruction and violence – a path to our collective end.
Listening to what the Indigenous knowledge-holders are telling us is the starting requirement for any meaningful action. After all, they are the Cura Da Terra, the “cure of the Earth”. Right now, they’re calling for an immediate moratorium on extraction from the Amazon. We must do everything we can as active citizens to ensure this happens.
For each of us to move away from our norms will require our creativity, determination, devotion and love – to actively seek new ways of living, both individually and collectively. This will involve inner transformation as well as taking action in the world. No one has the answer as to what the life-systems of the world are calling you to do at this time. Perhaps for you living a meaningful life will involve taking action on the streets. Maybe it will involve writing, filmmaking, or creating crafts, arts, music and events. If it’s your thing, pray, and be part of collective ceremonies for the Amazon. Organise in community groups, starting from where you’re at. If you’ve got money, live in the spirit of the gift. You will need to find your own path, yet you’re not alone; we are living in through our defining evolutionary moment, the event horizon that will bring us together.
Simultaneously, we must start having a broader public dialogue about post-capitalism, de-growth economics (especially in the West), universal basic income, commons management approaches, regenerative agriculture & agroforestry, Indigenous stewardship of land and other alternatives that already exist. There is no shortage of ideas. It’s our responsibility to create the political will and cultural context to make these alternatives our shared, lived reality.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
U.S. jobless claims top 1 million again in latest week as the pandemic keeps on biting workers
by Countercurrents Collective
In the U.S., the number of people who filed for unemployment benefits rose for the second consecutive week last week as coronavirus cases surged around the country. The number of people collecting
jobless benefits also increased to 17 million, up from 16.2 million the week prior.
In the U.S., the number of people who filed for unemployment benefits rose for the second consecutive week last week as coronavirus cases surged around the country. The number of people collecting jobless benefits also increased to 17 million, up from 16.2 million the week prior.
More than a million people filed for unemployment benefits in the latest week, showed U.S. Labor Department data on Thursday. The data is the evidence of the ongoing pandemic’s disastrous impact on the U.S. economy. At least 54 million jobless claims have been filed since the coronavirus pandemic began biting the U.S. economy.
The new unemployment claims have exceeded 1 million for 19 consecutive weeks, with well over 50 million now out of the workforce.
Following are the main findings from the report, compared to consensus estimates compiled by Bloomberg:
- Initial jobless claims, week ended July 25:434 million vs. 1.445 million expected and 1.416 million during the prior week
- Continuing unemployment claims week ended July 18: 01 million vs. 16.2 million expected, 16.197 million during the prior week
The unemployment data is yet another sign that “the economy has lost momentum in recent weeks as the spread of COVID-19 intensified in many areas,” wrote JPMorgan Chase economist Daniel Silver in a research note on Thursday.
The tick higher in jobless claims “Was the second straight weekly increase, and while the recent increases have been relatively modest (by COVID-19 standards), they marked the end of a run of fifteen straight weekly declines for the claims data,” he added.
Continuing claims have been closely watched by Wall Street as an indicator of how well the job market is healing. The jump to 17 million in the latest week bodes ill for the recovery, given that it was the first weekly rise in that category since late May, Silver pointed out.
It also suggests a “net increase in the number of unemployed people during the week ending July 18, although other factors beyond employment status can influence the data, including rules about eligibility,” he added.
The U.S. economy’s contraction in the second quarter was the worst on record
A report by The New York Times said on July 30, 2020:
“Economic output fell at its fastest pace on record last spring as the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses across the United States to close their doors and kept millions of Americans shut in their homes for weeks.
“Gross domestic product — the broadest measure of goods and services produced — fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday. On an annualized basis, the standard way of reporting quarterly economic data, G.D.P. fell at a rate of 32.9 percent.”
The report said:
“The collapse was unprecedented in its speed and breathtaking in its severity. The only possible comparisons in modern American history came during the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II, both of which occurred before the advent of modern economic statistics.
“Unlike past recessions, this one was a result of a conscious decision to suspend economic activity to slow the spread of the virus. Congress pumped trillions of dollars into the economy to sustain households and businesses, limit long-term damage and allow for a rapid rebound.
“The plan worked at first. In recent weeks, however, cases have surged in much of the country. Data from public and private sources indicate a pullback in economic activity, reflecting consumer unease and renewed shutdowns.
“‘In another world, a sharp drop in activity would have been just a good, necessary blip while we addressed the virus,’ said Heather Boushey, president of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank. ‘From where we sit in July, we know that this wasn’t just a short-term blip.’”
A report by Fortune said on July 13, 2020:
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projects that GDP dropped a record –35.2% in the second quarter. Put simply: No event in American history has wrecked the U.S. economy faster than the pandemic-driven recession, or pancession for short.
But even before we get that official GDP number, the economy might already be turning the corner. The unemployment rate shot up from a 50-year low of 3.5% in February to a staggering 14.7% in April, but has since fallen two consecutive months coming in at 11.1% in June.
Near-zero interest rate
The U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) on Wednesday held interest rate at near-zero as the central bank continues efforts to support a recovery. However, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said high-frequency data pointed to an economy that appears to have slowed since COVID-19 cases began surging in mid-June, adding to an infection count of nearly 4.5 million and killing over 150,000.
“On balance, it looks like the data are pointing to a slowing in the pace of the recovery,” Powell said — adding that consumer surveys appear to be “softening again,” while labor market indicators pointed to a slowing of job growth, particularly among small businesses.
Unsung martyr: Udham Singh who avenged the Jallianwala Bagh massacre
by Shamsul Islam
It was 80 years ago (July 31, 1940) Udham Singh died on the gallows in the Pentonville prison of London
How the national movement influenced our art, culture and cinema
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat
https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/how-the-national-movement-influenced-our-art-culture-and-cinema/
Today is the 30th death anniversary of legendary playback singer Mohammad Rafi. Rafi Saheb passed away on 31st July, 1980. We also remember Munshi Prem Chand doyen of Hindi writing on his 140th birthday. But there is another important day today which is the martyrdom day of Shaheed Udham Singh who was executed by the British for killing General Micheal O Dwyer, who was responsible for the massacre of innocent people
at Jalianwallah Bagh on the Baishakhi day in 1919
EIA 2020: Why is it so perilous?
by Bishaldeep Kakati
Amidst the corona virus pandemic, the government of India (The Union ministry of environment, forest and climate change) unveiled the Environment Impact Assessment 2020 draft to the public in March 2020 seeking to replace the 2006 version of the law. The latest draft has already created a lot of hype amongst the concerned citizens, with many environmental activists and climate change experts opposing the provisions incorporated in the draft
Hagia Sophia: Heritage of Entire Humanity
by Irfan Engineer
The re-conversion of Hagia Sophia from a patriarchal cathedral built by Justinian I in 537 CE to Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque in 1453 after the conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet II and into a museum of the same name by Kemal
Ataturk in 1934 and again into a mosque of the same name on 24th July 2020 has thrown up quite a controversy
Commemorating the writings of Emily Bronte
by Sohana Manzoor
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights treats children and their sufferings in a very different manner. Peter Coveney observes, “the symbol which had such strength and richness in the poetry of Blake and some parts of the novels of Dickens became in time the static and moribund child-figure of the Victorian imagination” . Emily Brontë perhaps captures this idea more acutely than any other of her contemporaries.
Narendra Modi has no right to lay the foundation of Ram temple
by Sandeep Pandey
Swami Sanand had held Narendra Modi responsible for his possible death in his three letters and Narendra Modi didn’t do anything to save
the life of Swami Sanand, who was superior to him in all respects. How can Narendra Modi for whom Swami Sanand had sought punishment from Lord Ram lay the foundation of Ram temple?
Gender stereotypes plaguing the pandemic response
by Shobha Shukla
As per a recent news, a senior bureaucrat in Lucknow said, “The increase in female infection (of COVID-19) ratio is a clear indication that women are going out in the market and not following the precautions [for COVID-19 prevention]”. This statement is not only devoid of any scientific evidence but also reeks of a deep-rooted patriarchal mindset. It also assumes as if men are ‘following precautions’
Eulogy or Elegy?
by Mirza Yawar Baig
I am writing this as a reflection and a reminder to myself and to you. Express appreciation to the one who was good to you and added value to your
life before they die. Don’t wait for someone to die before you tell them that you love them or are grateful to them. For after they are dead, everyone else will read and hear what you said, except the only one whose reading and hearing it would have mattered.
CPI Opposes Privatisation and Commercialisation in New Education Policy
by Press Release
50,000 educational institutions will now be converted to only 15,000 and all colleges with less than 3,000 students will either be closed or merged with others. This will lead to regional disparities in a big way.
A strong voice against Hindutva in Greater Vancouver lost
by Gurpreet Singh
The news of Chinmoy Banerjee’s death has greatly saddened the South Asian community in BC. 80-year-old scholar and activist of Indian
heritage, Chin Daa, as we affectionately called him, was not keeping well for the past several days. He passed away on the morning of July 29, leaving behind a powerful legacy of tireless activism.
How the West Stole Democracy From the Arabs
by Jim Miles
Elizabeth Thompson creates a readily accessible book detailing the many facets of this topic, facets of larger empires with larger goals. It is in essence the foundational period for our contemporary problems in the region and thus our current situation cannot truly be understood without reading works such as How the West Stole Democracy From the Arabs.
How the West Stole Democracy From the Arabs. Elizabeth F. Thomson. Atlantic Monthly Press, NewYork, 2020.
Having just read The War That Ended Peace [https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-war-that-ended-peace-book-review/] the title How the West Stole Democracy From the Arabs appeared as an intriguing and fortuitous follow up. Its subtitle describes its more narrow focus: The Syrian-Arab Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its Historical Liberal-Islamic Alliance. Essentially it is the story of how the imperial powers of Britain and France overcame the U.S.’ Wilsonian ideals being used as a formulation for the League of Nations. The colonialism of the prewar era resettled itself into the Middle East after the destruction of the Ottoman empire, wishing to retain imperial glory and control of the newly ‘free’ Arab sectors of the Ottoman empire and in this region, its relatively new found wealth of oil.
Within this narrow slice of history many events are involved. The events of World War I and the many different promises made by different people to different entities, the most important ones made in secret (Sykes-Picot agreement) while others floated freely in public (the Balfour letter). For the Arabs the big hopes, the large promises, were those of the British to have their own independent state but more importantly the ideals of Woodrow Wilson, in particular his calling for national populations to have their own voice in determining their governance. It was not to be, as western imperial colonial desires managed to deter any independence for Arab countries. Many factors were involved, but as indicated the largest was the imperial desires of the European colonialists, and for Syria in particular, France takes the largest responsibility.
After the war, after the eviction of Ottoman forces, various Arab representatives established their own commissions and in short order made a remarkable achievement – a declaration of independence and a constitution that could serve as a guide even to contemporary western governments. Other forces prevailed, mostly political, some military.
The British remained in occupation of the southern portion of Ottoman Syria, the lands of Palestine, and argued for a mandate ostensibly until the Palestinians could govern themselves, more realistically to allow for the promised Jewish homeland and to secure access to oil, Iran, and India. The French had few forces in the region but quickly established their presence on the promise of the Sykes-Picot agreement.
One of the principal characters for the French was one Robert de Caix, a “powerful leader of the colonial lobby” who “considered Wilsonianism an epidemic.” Using the traditional language of colonialism he would, “by mobilizing the colonialist networks that he had cultivated for twenty years…single handedly reverse French diplomacy in the Middle East….He undermined any basis for Arab liberal democracy to flourish again.” His use of Article 22 of the new League of Nations came “as an imposition, by force, of direct French rule.”
That does not let anyone else off lightly, as many other players did not want an independent Arab government anywhere in the Middle East (or the whole of the former Ottoman empire). The U.S. stepped aside, leaving behind broken ideals, ironically rejecting the Versailles Peace Treaty “because they feared it would enable colonial expansion.” The remaining Turkish rump state still had a large army and was able to secure for itself a much better outcome as it fought French forces to a standstill along its southern border and imposed its own ethnic cleansing on different groups within what was to become Turkey.
The Arab ideals centered on a secular state, “that would separate religion from state.They believed that Islam did not support unbridled kingship but rather required its leaders to consult the people and that legislatures exercising the authority of popular sovereignty could block corruptible monarchs from selling out their countries to Europeans, as the Iranian Shah and the Egyptian khedive had done,” and further that “liberal constitutionalism was an authentic expression of Islamic values, not a Western corruption.” Reading through Thompson’s work provides the justification that not only did they have the ideals, but contrary to colonial mythologies of Britain and France, they did have the ability to organize and establish such a government.
The western liberals lost out to their colonialist rivals and that makes up much of the story of this lost – stolen – Arab opportunity. The defeat was both military and political put also very slimly on the Arab leadership as it “had no time to gain the experience needed to combat the wily methods of Europe’s imperial diplomats,” nor it should be added, the overwhelming firepower of their military, for which it had no time to arm itself and indeed faced international embargoes on military supplies.
With its defeat the movement split and eventually disappeared. “France’s repressive apparatus and patronage of anti-democratic elite raised new barriers to democratic politics….the seeds of dictatorship and antiliberal Islamism sprouted.”
The book is well written, well referenced, and includes the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,but a broader historical background will help the reader understand the larger context of these events. The broader context is well presented in The War That Ended Peace (above) or Paris 1919 – Six Months That Changed the World (Margaret MacMillan, Random House, 2003). The latter enlarges on the Versailles Peace treaty discussions covering similar topics more narrowly focussed on in Elizabeth Thompson’s excellent work. Two other strong works on the era are by Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (Presidio Press, 2004) and The Proud Tower (Random House/Ballantine Books, 1996).
Elizabeth Thompson creates a readily accessible book detailing the many facets of this topic, facets of larger empires with larger goals. It is in essence the foundational period for our contemporary problems in the region and thus our current situation cannot truly be understood without reading works such as How the West Stole Democracy From the Arabs.
Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews. His interest in this topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which encompasses the militarization and economic subjugation of the global community and its commodification by corporate governance and by the American government.
How Americans Remember (and Forget) Their Wars
by John Dower
Some years ago, a newspaper article credited a European visitor with the wry observation that Americans are charming because they have such short
memories. When it comes to the nation’s wars, however, he was not entirely on target. Americans embrace military histories of the heroic “band of [American] brothers” sort, especially involving World War II. They possess a seemingly boundless appetite for retellings of the Civil War, far and away the country’s most devastating conflict where American war deaths are concerned.
Some years ago, a newspaper article credited a European visitor with the wry observation that Americans are charming because they have such short memories. When it comes to the nation’s wars, however, he was not entirely on target. Americans embrace military histories of the heroic “band of [American] brothers” sort, especially involving World War II. They possess a seemingly boundless appetite for retellings of the Civil War, far and away the country’s most devastating conflict where American war deaths are concerned.
Certain traumatic historical moments such as “the Alamo” and “Pearl Harbor” have become code words — almost mnemonic devices — for reinforcing the remembrance of American victimization at the hands of nefarious antagonists. Thomas Jefferson and his peers actually established the baseline for this in the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which enshrines recollection of “the merciless Indian Savages” — a self-righteous demonization that turned out to be boilerplate for a succession of later perceived enemies. “September 11th” has taken its place in this deep-seated invocation of violated innocence, with an intensity bordering on hysteria.
Such “victim consciousness” is not, of course, peculiar to Americans. In Japan after World War II, this phrase — higaisha ishiki in Japanese — became central to leftwing criticism of conservatives who fixated on their country’s war dead and seemed incapable of acknowledging how grievously Imperial Japan had victimized others, millions of Chinese and hundreds of thousands of Koreans foremost among them. When present-day Japanese cabinet members visit Yasukuni Shrine, where the emperor’s deceased soldiers and sailors are venerated, they are stoking victim consciousness and roundly criticized for doing so by the outside world, including the U.S. media.
Worldwide, war memorials and memorial days ensure preservation of such selective remembrance. My home state of Massachusetts also does this to this day by flying the black-and-white “POW-MIA” flag of the Vietnam War at various public places, including Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox — still grieving over those fighting men who were captured or went missing in action and never returned home.
In one form or another, populist nationalisms today are manifestations of acute victim consciousness. Still, the American way of remembering and forgetting its wars is distinctive for several reasons. Geographically, the nation is much more secure than other countries. Alone among major powers, it escaped devastation in World War II, and has been unmatched in wealth and power ever since. Despite panic about Communist threats in the past and Islamist and North Korean threats in the present, the United States has never been seriously imperiled by outside forces. Apart from the Civil War, its war-related fatalities have been tragic but markedly lower than the military and civilian death tolls of other nations, invariably including America’s adversaries.
Asymmetry in the human costs of conflicts involving U.S. forces has been the pattern ever since the decimation of Amerindians and the American conquest of the Philippines between 1899 and 1902. The State Department’s Office of the Historian puts the death toll in the latter war at “over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants,” and proceeds to add that “as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease.” (Among other precipitating causes for those noncombatant deaths, U.S. troops shot most of the water buffalo farmers relied on to produce their crops.) Many scholarly accounts now offer higher estimates for Filipino civilian fatalities.
Much the same morbid asymmetry characterizes war-related deaths in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War of 1991, and the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq following September 11, 2001.
Terror Bombing from World War II to Korea and Vietnam to 9/11
While it is natural for people and nations to focus on their own sacrifice and suffering rather than the death and destruction they themselves inflict, in the case of the United States such cognitive astigmatism is backlighted by the country’s abiding sense of being exceptional, not just in power but also in virtue. In paeans to “American exceptionalism,” it is an article of faith that the highest values of Western and Judeo-Christian civilization guide the nation’s conduct — to which Americans add their country’s purportedly unique embrace of democracy, respect for each and every individual, and stalwart defense of a “rules-based” international order.
Such self-congratulation requires and reinforces selective memory. “Terror,” for instance, has become a word applied to others, never to oneself. And yet during World War II, U.S. and British strategic-bombing planners explicitly regarded their firebombing of enemy cities as terror bombing, and identified destroying the morale of noncombatants in enemy territory as necessary and morally acceptable. Shortly after the Allied devastation of the German city of Dresden in February 1945, Winston Churchill, whose bust circulates in and out of the presidential Oval Office in Washington (it is currently in), referred to the “bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts.”
In the war against Japan, U.S. air forces embraced this practice with an almost gleeful vengeance, pulverizing 64 cities prior to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. When al-Qaeda’s 19 hijackers crash-bombed the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, however, “terror bombing” aimed at destroying morale was detached from this Anglo-American precedent and relegated to “non-state terrorists.” Simultaneously, targeting innocent civilians was declared to be an atrocity utterly contrary to civilized “Western” values, and prima facie evidence of Islam’s inherent savagery.
The sanctification of the site of the destroyed World Trade Center as “Ground Zero” — a term previously associated with nuclear explosions in general and Hiroshima in particular — reinforced this deft legerdemain in the manipulation of memory. Few if any American public figures recognized or cared that this graphic nomenclature was appropriated from Hiroshima, whose city government puts the number of fatalities from the atomic bombing “by the end of December 1945, when the acute effects of radiation poisoning had largely subsided,” at around 140,000. (The estimated death toll for Nagasaki is 60,000 to 70,000.) The context of those two attacks — and all the firebombings of German and Japanese cities before them — obviously differs greatly from the non-state terrorism and suicide bombings inflicted by today’s terrorists. Nonetheless, “Hiroshima” remains the most telling and troubling symbol of terror bombing in modern times — despite the effectiveness with which, for present and future generations, the post-9/11 “Ground Zero” rhetoric altered the landscape of memory and now connotes American victimization.
Short memory also has erased almost all American recollection of the U.S. extension of terror bombing to Korea and Indochina. Shortly after World War II, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey calculated that Anglo-American air forces in the European theater had dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs, of which 1.36 million tons targeted Germany. In the Pacific theater, total tonnage dropped by Allied planes was 656,400, of which 24% (160,800 tons) was dropped on the home islands of Japan. Of the latter, 104,000 tons “were directed at 66 urban areas.” Shocking at the time, in retrospect these Japanese numbers in particular have come to seem modest when compared to the tonnage of explosives U.S. forces unloaded on Korea and later Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
The official history of the air war in Korea (The United States Air Force in Korea 1950-1953) records that U.S.-led United Nations air forces flew more than one million sorties and, all told, delivered a total of 698,000 tons of ordnance against the enemy. In his 1965 memoir Mission with LeMay, General Curtis LeMay, who directed the strategic bombing of both Japan and Korea, offered this observation: “We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both… We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound to ensue.”
Other sources place the estimated number of civilian Korean War dead as high as three million, or possibly even more. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war who later served as secretary of state, recalled that the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” In the midst of this “limited war,” U.S. officials also took care to make it clear on several occasions that they had not ruled out using nuclear weapons. This even involved simulated nuclear strikes on North Korea by B-29s operating out of Okinawa in a 1951 operation codenamed Hudson Harbor.
In Indochina, as in the Korean War, targeting “everything that moved” was virtually a mantra among U.S. fighting forces, a kind of password that legitimized indiscriminate slaughter. Nick Turse’s extensively researched recent history of the Vietnam War, for instance, takes its title from a military order to “kill anything that moves.” Documents released by the National Archives in 2004 include a transcript of a 1970 telephone conversation in which Henry Kissinger relayed President Richard Nixon’s orders to launch “a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”
In Laos between 1964 and 1973, the CIA helped direct the heaviest air bombardment per capita in history, unleashing over two million tons of ordnance in the course of 580,000 bombing runs — equivalent to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes for roughly a full decade. This included around 270 million bomblets from cluster bombs. Roughly 10% of the total Laotian population was killed. Despite the devastating effects of this assault, some 80 million of the cluster bomblets dropped failed to detonate, leaving the ravaged country littered with deadly unexploded ordnance to the present day.
The payload of bombs unloaded on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos between the mid-1960s and 1973 is commonly reckoned to have been between seven and eight million tons — well over 40 times the tonnage dropped on the Japanese home islands in World War II. Estimates of total deaths vary, but are all exceedingly high. In a Washington Post article in 2012, John Tirman noted that “by several scholarly estimates, Vietnamese military and civilian deaths ranged from 1.5 million to 3.8 million, with the U.S.-led campaign in Cambodia resulting in 600,000 to 800,000 deaths, and Laotian war mortality estimated at about 1 million.”
On the American side, the Department of Veterans Affairs places battle deaths in the Korean War at 33,739. As of Memorial Day 2015, the long wall of the deeply moving Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was inscribed with the names of 58,307 American military personnel killed between 1957 and 1975, the great majority of them from 1965 on. This includes approximately 1,200 men listed as missing (MIA, POW, etc.), the lost fighting men whose flag of remembrance still flies over Fenway Park.
North Korea and the Cracked Mirror of Nuclear War
Today, Americans generally remember Vietnam vaguely, and Cambodia and Laos not at all. (The inaccurate label “Vietnam War” expedited this latter erasure.) The Korean War, too, has been called “the forgotten war,” although a veterans memorial in Washington, D.C., was finally dedicated to it in 1995, 42 years after the armistice that suspended the conflict. By contrast, Koreans have not forgotten. This is especially true in North Korea, where the enormous death and destruction suffered between 1950 and 1953 is kept alive through endless official iterations of remembrance — and this, in turn, is coupled with a relentless propaganda campaign calling attention to Cold War and post-Cold War U.S. nuclear intimidation. This intense exercise in remembering rather than forgetting goes far to explain the current nuclear saber-rattling of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un.
With only a slight stretch of the imagination, it is possible to see cracked mirror images in the nuclear behavior and brinksmanship of American presidents and North Korea’s dictatorial dynastic leadership. What this unnerving looking glass reflects is possible madness, or feigned madness, coupled with possible nuclear conflict, accidental or otherwise.
To Americans and much of the rest of the world, Kim Jong-un seems irrational, even seriously deranged. (Just pair his name with “insane” or “crazy” in a Google search.) Yet in rattling his miniscule nuclear quiver, he is really joining the long-established game of “nuclear deterrence,” and practicing what is known among American strategists as the “madman theory.” The latter term is most famously associated with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War, but in fact it is more or less imbedded in U.S. nuclear game plans. As rearticulated in “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence,” a secret policy document drafted by a subcommittee in the U.S. Strategic Command in 1995 (four years after the demise of the Soviet Union), the madman theory posits that the essence of effective nuclear deterrence is to induce “fear” and “terror” in the mind of an adversary, to which end “it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed.”
When Kim Jong-un plays this game, he is simultaneously ridiculed and feared to be truly demented. When practiced by their own leaders and nuclear priesthood, Americans have been conditioned to see rational actors at their cunning best.
Terror, it seems, in the twenty-first century, as in the twentieth, is in the eye of the beholder.
John W. Dower is professor emeritus of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His many books include War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War Two, which have won numerous prizes including the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle award. His latest book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two (Dispatch Books), has just been published.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Originally published in TomDispatch
Copyright 2020 John W. Dower
Iran And Israel Spar Over Cyber Warfare
by Haider Abbas
The latest attack now on Iran has been on its seven-ships at Bushehr Port on July 15, 2020 10 in which however no casualties were reported. There are many reports in US newspapers which are openly suggestive that Israeli intelligence chief Yossi Cohen had got planted a bomb inside Natanz nuclear site where advanced nuclear centrifuges were being enriched.
There is a whole lot of churning going on in Iran, which has been at loggerheads with US, for around more than five-decades, as it traces its modern tussle with US to the way Muhammed Musaddiq government was over thrown by US in 1953 1, which later was followed by setting of a new nationalist government after US sponsored Shah of Iran was removed in what is known as Iranian revolution in 1979 2, paving way for a guided-democracy in Iran, and in its wake, inviting the severest backlash from the monarchies of the Gulf region. The oil kingdoms, ruled by their respective oligarchs feared that democracy would upset their applecart and hence pummeled their resources to anyhow nib the Iranian revolution and the entire turmoil in the last forty years in the whole of Middle-East is what the story is all about. ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ has been the raison d’être of the Iranian revolution and which continues to be the life-line of the State of Iran.
The last two-decades and the events unfolding in Middle-East has been much to chaos as millions of people have been misplaced, millions turned to refugees, and millions have died in the wake of US invasion of Iraq, after Afghanistan was invaded, and later on when its fires reached Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Lebanon, with the exception, that as the Muslim nations went down on their kneels Israel strode to insurmountable power, aided, abetted, supported and sponsored by US, so much so that Israel today strikes inside Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine and also at Iranian assets as a sports-macho, so much so that it challenges even Russia for its support to Syria which is also supported by Iran. Russia, which had entered into the embroiled waters of Middle-East, by its support to Syria 3 has helped Assad regime to sustain, much to the disliking of US and Israel, and in a way has also halted the US grandiose plans to invade Iran too or for that matter engineer a regime-change in Iran by sponsored public protests. Remember US president George Bush had once called, on Jan 29, 2002, around 18 years back, ‘Iran, Iraq and North Korea as Axis of Evil’ 4 . Iraq has been reduced to a rubble and Iran and North Korea as still a constant pain in the neck.
China, for the first time, in the last around half a century has entered into the tumultuous currents of the Middle-East, by making a deal of 400 billion USD with Iran on July 13, 2020 5, which surprisingly, has come when Iran is in a midst of fire from Israel, as ‘on June 30, 2020, 19 people were killed in an explosion at a medical clinic in the north of the capital Tehran, which an official said was caused by a gas leak. On June 26, 2020 an explosion occurred east of Tehran near the Parchin military and weapons development base that the authorities said was caused by a leak in a gas storage facility in an area outside the base’ . On July 2, 2020 Iran underground nuclear at Natanz was attacked which some Iranian officials said may have been a cyber sabotage ( of US and Israel combination) and warned that Tehran would retaliate against any country carrying out such attacks’ 6 . The attack obviously has now turned the clock-back, of ongoing Iranian nuclear programme by months 7 as has come the admission from Iran. In fact this cyberattack was quite in the making as US has openly declared that the outgoing US president Obama has accelerated these cyberattacks, which could not hit the bull-eye then, only months after he had assumed office and named is as an operation Olympic-Games, with the help of Israel made worm known as stuxnet. An elaborative article on it had come in The New York Times way back in 2012. 8 On one hand Obama tried to secretly kill Iranian nuclear programme and on the other side forged a nuclear deal touted as a historical deal which would prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear weapons 9 . This is available on Obamawhitehouse.Archives which is now dysfunctional.
The latest attack now on Iran has been on its seven-ships at Bushehr Port on July 15, 2020 10 in which however no casualties were reported. There are many reports in US newspapers which are openly suggestive that Israeli intelligence chief Yossi Cohen had got planted a bomb inside Natanz nuclear site where advanced nuclear centrifuges were being enriched. 11 Skeptics had believed that when Trump terminated the US-Iran deal 12 Iran would make nuclear weapons but what happened has been the opposite as Iran nuclear programme seem to be now at the mercy of cyberattacks from US and Israel, particularly since the abrogation of the US-Iran deal, although Israel has accused Iran of a cyberattack on its water and sewage system in April 2020, a news which remained unnoticed due to the spread of COVID1-19 pandemic. 13 It may be known that Iran-China went ahead with the deal after India was made to bow out of it on July 14, 2020. 14 Needless, to speculate that the deal has come much to the exasperation of US-Israel and India bloc, as US is locked with Iran in Middle- East apart from its fight for supremacy in the world with China, Israel wants to dominate Middle-East and faces a foe in the shape of Iran and India faces a belligerent China staking claim inside its territory.
The series of Israeli attacks have baffled Iran, as the way, Israeli maneuvered past into Iran without being detected is now an altogether new warfare. Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz satired , “Not every incident that transpires in Iran necessarily has something to do with us” 15 which is amply clear that Israel is not only well-into but in fact well ahead in this new mastery i.e. cyber warfare. The latest to add to its arsenal is to master an attack by way of control of sound-waves on sensitive-sites of adversary nations, where internet is used or not. The experience of Israel, by its use of cyber-warfare, to its advantage in Syrian war, by targeting Iranian installations, is a clear enough proof that Israel is leading the arena. 16 But, now with China entering into fray with investments in Iran is a signal that an attack on Iran would be construed an attack on China assets, which exactly happened when India started to air the weather-report of Gilgit-Baltistan on May 9, 2020 17 , which are a part of CPEC and which led to finally take India off-guarded in Ladakh- paving way for a conflict to unfold.
Here, however, what also merits an attention is that Iran too had grounded a premier US Lockheed Martin drone, on December 9, 2011 18 and lately had shot down a US global surveillance monster worth 220 million USD on June 20, 2020 19 owing to its machinations in cyber warfare. This is what is to be the sixth-generation war and the world is much into it.
The writer is a former UP State Information Commissioner. He is also a lawyer based in Lucknow.
References:
Christian Preacher Found Dead In Punjab
by Shibu Thomas
In a shocking series of unfortunate events, yet another Pastor was found dead in the Zira Tehsil of Ferozepur, a district that is situated in the Indian state of Punjab. The body of Balwinder Bagicha Bhatti was discovered by a few people by the roadside on the 27th of July 2020.
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