The large scale destruction of lives and livelihoods in 2020 caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in India and its inept handling by the government has been accompanied by another sort of destruction, much more deliberate and calculated. It is the destruction of the democratic rights organizations (DROs) of India, as part of a vicious plan of the BJP government to irreparably shrink the democratic space for a future that we can only tremble to think about. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance” is an oft-repeated statement, usually wrongly attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Notwithstanding who first made this statement, it is the democratic rights organizations who have historically taken the responsibility for the vigilance that is required to safeguard and protect our liberties, hard won in struggles waged and sacrifices made by our freedom fighters. These same democratic rights organizations have been targeted by the government in India in a process to delegitimize and finally destroy them, to clear the space for the inauguration a system where rights and liberties will only be for a chosen few and the rest of the people will be cowed down into subservience.
Democratic rights organizations, also called as Civil Liberties-Democratic Rights (CL-DR) groups, have had a long history both in India and internationally, and have played important roles in every democratic society. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is a 100 year old organization that proudly proclaims itself as “our nation’s guardian of liberty”, and wields a lot of authority and prestige, and has often stood against government policies and measures during its long history. In India the initiative to set up a civil liberties organization was taken by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1936 when he wrote to a large number of political leaders and intellectuals about the need of a broad-based civil liberties organization. These efforts culminated in the formation of the Indian Civil Liberties Union on 24 August, 1936. This was immediately followed by the setting up of units in the Calcutta, Bombay and Madras presidencies and in Punjab. ICLU had illustrious figures such as Rabindranath Tagore as its first honorary President and Sarojini Naidu as its first working President. Rammanohar Lohia, M Venkatarangaiah and S Pratap Reddy contributed to popularise the concept of civil liberties by writing pamphlets and articles.
The second impetus for the formation of democratic rights organizations came in the backdrop of the widespread state repression on the revolutionary movements in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, leading to the formation of Association of Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) in West Bengal as the first democratic rights organization in India in 1972. This was quickly followed by the formation of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC) in 1974. Then came the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975, which was a direct show of naked state power curtailing the democratic rights of the people. The mass movements against the Emergency led to the formation of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and Democratic Rights (PUCLDR) in 1976 by Jaya Prakash Narayan. Justice V.M Tarkunde was its president and Krishan Kant the general secretary. After the Janata Party government came to power PUCLDR became mostly inactive but the Delhi unit remained active under advocate Gobinda Mukhoty and led to the formation of Peoples’ Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) in February 1981. A number of other civil liberties organizations also came into being during this period such as Organisation for Protection of Democratic Rights (OPDR) in 1977 at Hyderabad and Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) and Lokshahi Haq Sanghathana in 1977 and 1979 respectively in Bombay. The process initiated by JP in PUCLDR, and involving luminaries such as justices V M Tarkunde, and Rajindar Sachar, advocates KG Kannabiran and Arun Shourie activist and author Rajni Kothari and others culminated in the formation of Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) as an all India civil liberties organization in 1980.
Over the last 40 years the democratic rights organizations have played a very important part in the socio-political process in India, and have really been the conscience-keepers of the nation. Their interventions and activism on various issues, ranging from custodial deaths to encounter deaths, from displacement to draconian laws, from political prisoners to peasants’ rights have been exemplary and have safeguarded the flawed and limited democracy that we have had in India. Their legal interventions have given rise to judicial landmarks and helped influence major changes in the treatment of the citizenry by the state. For example, the landmark D.K. Basu vs the State of West Bengal judgement of 1996 which has laid down the guidelines for arrest and detention by the police was in response to a letter written to the Supreme Court by D.K. Basu, who was the chairman of Legal Aid Services, a CL-DR group, which was considered as a Public Interest Litigation (PIL). Fact-finding missions and their reports by democratic rights organizations have brought to light numerous cases of oppression, illegal actions and even massacres by state and non-state actors and helped provide a semblance of justice to the victims. Democratic rights organizations have consistently criticized repressive actions by the government, irrespective of the party in power, both at the centre and in the states. Major debates have taken place within and between democratic rights organizations, and contrary to the version of those in power, democratic rights organizations have criticized not only the state but even when groups opposed to the state have indulged in violence or violated democratic rights. For example, K. Balagopal, one of the most well known democratic rights activists actually left the APCLC on the question of condemning Naxalite violence and started Human Rights Forum (HRF), another democratic rights group. However, democratic rights organizations have recognized the basic power asymmetry between the state and its allies and the ones opposed to state, as a general principle of politics recognized all over the world. Similarly, democratic rights organizations have opposed majoritarian tendencies and stood for the rights of minorities and the historically marginalized sections such as dalits and adivasis. The CL-DR groups have been a vibrant part of Indian democracy over the ups and downs of the last 40 years, and nearly every state has given birth to its own democratic rights organizations which have functioned locally and often coordinated among themselves to form nationwide democratic rights bodies such as the Coordination of Democractic Rights Organizations (CDRO). CDRO, for example, consists of 17 CL-DR groups from 14 states which coordinate with each other and amplify the issue of protection of democratic rights countrywide.
Because of their consistent criticism of the state’s role in violating democratic rights of the people, democratic rights organizations have always been the bête noire of governments, whatever be the political ideology of the party in power. It is remarkable how democratic rights activists and organizations have been targeted for repression by governments in the centre and states, irrespective of the party in power. For example, Dr. Binayak Sen, a world renowned paediatrician and public health expert, who was a national vice-president of PUCL, was accused of charges of sedition and imprisoned for nearly three years between 2007 and 2011. This was at a time when there was a BJP government in Chattisgarh and a Congress government at the centre. Democratic rights activists have been repeatedly arrested and imprisoned and democratic rights organizations targeted for state repression in various ways in nearly every state of India during this period.
However, the ascent to power of the BJP government under Narendra Modi opened a new, and unprecedented, chapter of repression of democratic rights organizations. A process of deligitimization of democratic rights organizations started by branding them as “anti-national”, an umbrella term to brand anyone or any organization that opposes the majoritarian and authoritarian agenda of the RSS-BJP. Ministers sent out signals to the paramilitary forces and police that democratic rights was not something to be bothered about in their areas of operation as the government would “manage” that. And a discourse was created in society that the democratic rights organizations are actually not what they are, but “frontal organizations” of some organizations which are banned under laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). This discourse, ably amplified by mainstream media talk-show hosts who have no idea about the history and the activities of democratic rights organizations and social media elements subscribing to the RSS-BJP, has culminated over the last two years into a situation that every democratic rights organization in India today is under the threat of destruction. It has created the opportunity for state investigative agencies such as the National Investigation Agency (NIA), armed with extraordinary powers like the Gestapo under Nazi rule, to go about interrogating and arresting democratic rights activists all around the country. The UAPA, originally promulgated in 1967 and amended multiple times with the last amendment done by the BJP government in 2019, has been made into an instrument of targeting democratic rights organizations, although the preamble to the act clearly states that it is “for the prevention of, and for coping with, terrorist activities”. It is ironic that democratic rights organizations have themselves been made the target of a law which they have long opposed as draconian and undemocratic.
Therefore over the last two years we have witnessed the systematic deligitimization of democratic rights organizations all over India, which has culminated in 2020 in a full scale attack. The ground has been prepared well for this by the amendments to the UAPA, making it more draconian, and to the NIA Act, giving unbridled powers to the NIA. The well known Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad case, under which 16 academics, authors, activists, advocates, poets and social workers have been arrested and imprisoned over the last two years has been used as a central weapon in this process of destruction of democratic rights organizations. Besides being all the above, what is common to most of these sixteen people imprisoned under UAPA is that they have been active and leading members of the major democratic rights organizations in India such as PUDR, CPDR, PUCL, Indian Association of Peoples Lawyers (IAPL), Committee for Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP) and Persecuted Prisoners Solidarity Committee (PPSC). Scores of other members of these and other democratic rights organizations have been interrogated, intimidated and harassed by the NIA during the purported investigation of this case. And through a bland statement in the voluminous supplementary chargesheet submitted to the special NIA court in Mumbai in October 2020, the NIA has labelled nearly all major democratic rights organizations in India including CDRO, CPDR, PUDR, CRPP, PPSC and IAPL as frontal organizations of the CPI(Maoist)! It is breathtaking that an organization such as the NIA, set up barely a decade ago and whose constitutionality under a federal setup has itself been under question, can have the audacity to label organizations that have more than 40 years of history of functioning in India as “frontal organizations”. It is even more saddening that such a branding of organizations which have involved some of the foremost legal and intellectual luminaries of India has barely caused a ripple in the society or the polity of India. It is a matter of fact that such allegations by the NIA will have to be proved in a court of law, but the mere fact that such labelling can be done without raising a hue and cry in the country is a telling sign of the times. It is also a sign of the times, and of the discourse that has been built over the last six years, that the state can even deny the basic agency to such organizations, which have been built over decades by some of the best minds of India, and merely consider them to be fronts of others. It is as if members of such organizations cannot have minds and agencies of their own and would be happy to function as proxies. It is sad that today there is no one in India to point out that in fact BJP is a proclaimed frontal organization of the RSS, a paramilitary organization which has itself been banned a number of times in independent India due to its terroristic activities and which has openly proclaimed its opposition to the Constitution of India.
Today, at the end of 2020, we are therefore in a scenario that major democratic rights organizations in India such as PUDR, CPDR and CDRO are under such threat that their functioning is seriously jeopardized. Organizations such as CRPP, whose focus is the release of political prisoners, or IAPL, which has tried to provide legal aid to victims of state repression or PPSC, which tries to help the thousands of adivasis, dalits and minorities who are suffering imprisonment as a result of state persecution in the conflict zones in India have virtually been decimated with most of their leading activists such as Rona Wilson, Sudha Bharadwaj, Surendra Gadling, Arun Ferreira and Stan Swamy being in jail. Beyond these, nearly every other democratic rights organization functioning in India has also been targeted. Amnesty International, one of the largest international human rights NGOs functioning in 150 countries, was forced to stop its functioning in India as its bank accounts were frozen and its staff harassed due to its opposition to violation of human rights by the government of India. In state after state, this is the current situation. In Kashmir, the residences of Khurram Parvez and Parveena Ahangar, activists of Kashmir’s main CL-DR group Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) were raided by NIA in October as the agency accused the democratic rights organization of “carrying out secessionist and separatist activities”. In Andhra Pradesh, 67 members of the democratic rights organizations HRF and APCLC including the state coordinator of HRF, V S Krishna, vice president of HRF, K Jayashree, and general secretary of APCLC, C Chandrasekhar were named in FIRs charging them under UAPA. In Assam, democratic rights activists Akhil Gogoi, and his colleagues Bittu Sonowal and Dhairjya Konwar, belonging to the organization Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti have been arrested by the NIA and imprisoned under UAPA for their involvement in the anti-CAA protests.
Overall in 2020, in the backdrop of a pandemic ravaging the country, laws have been forced through by the BJP government to rob the livelihoods of labourers in the form of the four labour code acts and of farmers in the form of the three farm acts, and the citizenship rights of a large number of the most marginalized sections of the society through the CAA-NRC-NPR process. While this full scale attack on the rights to life and livelihood of the majority of our population continues, the deliberate destruction of the very organizations which stand in vigil of our rights and liberties is a crucial part of this process. Unless our courts, media, civil society and common citizens wake up to this fact and oppose this, the country will be heading towards a system conforming to the authoritarian-majoritarian worldview of the RSS-BJP. Some may call this system “Hindu Rashtra”, but its real name is Fascism.
Partho Sarothi Ray is a social activist
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India is passing through very difficult times in terms of economic and livelihood crisis, threats to plurality and ‘unity in diversity’, as well as erosion of democratic rights and norms. Tens of millions of working class people are deeply worried about threats to their livelihood and loss of income. Even millions in the more secure middle class are worried about their jobs and economic security. While the minorities are worried about increasing insecurity and less than equal opportunities, many others may not themselves suffer from such insecurity but nevertheless feel very sad about the decline of plurality and secular ethos.
In the middle of all these worrying problems and difficulties, there is quite naturally a search among people regarding who among them can help to check the rising threats and who can be trusted to stand up to the dangers of facing authoritarian onslaught, instead of reaching an unprincipled compromise when faced with growing pressures? People need someone who is committed to social and communal harmony, as judged by past record, as well as to secularism. When people search all around for some organized force which meets all these requirements, the presence of left forces is a source of reassurance and hope for them, of a feeling that we will overcome.
It has been widely said in recent times that the left has weakened in India. Going by the presence in the Parliament this is certainly true . There have been other setbacks also, and the left must learn from them. Despite this the left has kept steady a significant level of core support, based on worker and farmer unions and organizations, as well as committed student and women organizations. Counting only the left organizations committed broadly to constitutional path of change, they together have a national presence, reaching almost all parts of the country.
What is more, the left has often been able to punch above its weight by taking on highly relevant issues which other political forces ignore. This includes issues concerning onslaught of imperialism and crony capitalism. Many people, and not just affected workers, are worried about the scandalous erosion and impending sale of several important public sector units. Many are worried about the future of nationalized banks, and even more about the Life Insurance Corporation of India, truly a national institution with many-sided contributions, and they feel that the left has been raising important questions regarding these trends and resisting the onslaught, even though in a limited way. In this context one often sees ordinary people, not a part of left forces, praising the stand taken by left forces.
The left has stood consistently for many important livelihood rights and issues, pushing for good changes, resisting wrong policies. The left forces have been in the forefront of consistently opposing recent legislations widely seen to be harmful to the interests of farmers and workers, even before the events of the last six weeks or so. It has consistently and strongly opposed the drift towards communalism, and the resulting increasing insecurity of minorities seen in recent years.
Hence when people look for a secular force to strengthen inter-faith unity and harmony, a force which can at the same time protect livelihood concerns while guarding also critical national interests regarding public sector and foreign trade, banking and insurance, they invariably think of the left forces whose presence all over the country is reassuring and a sign of hope. This is a great strength , this trust of people on some issues of critical importance is a very important asset of the overall left movement, a strength on which it should build further, carefully and with commitment, very thoughtfully and with dedication, keeping in view also the needs of these exceptionally difficult times.
While building on its strengths the left should also seek to strengthen its weak points; for example the left has been relatively weak on environmental issues and in integrating environmental issues with justice issues. Strengthening the unity not just of left forces but of all forces committed to the steady pursuit of justice and equality through constitutional, broadly non-violent path of struggle is a huge challenge. An advantage for left forces is that they have a base among workers as well as farmers, in villages as well as towns and cities.
Although in many places this base may only be a limited one, the broader unity of left forces can help to expand this. Then linking up with other secular political parties and forces, who may not entirely share the economic program of the left, is yet another big challenge requiring care and caution but also some flexibility so that certain adjustments can be made without sacrificing any core principles. In addition there is of course the need for self-introspection, an honest willingness to acknowledge mistakes and to learn from them, without which real progress is not really possible.
Several tasks ahead relating to protection of livelihoods to saving national institutions, including financial institutions, protecting communal harmony as well as democratic norms involve the cooperation of many forces in the country with the left forces having a special position of strength due to their better organization and experience. The left should use this position of strength not to dominate these efforts but to create a feeling of equal importance even when dealing with small players, and to facilitate the emergence of many new participants, particularly the youth, who will bring their own creativity, energy and ideas.
Cooperation with several Gandhian organizations on these issues can open even more creative avenues of benefiting from the strengths of each other and learning from each other. Then there are aspects of environmental protection, bio-diversity, sustainability, compassion for other life-forms and social reform on which left forces have been weaker and have much to learn from other creative forces in society. So the overall approach in these difficult times is certainly for the left forces to play a leading role of resistance and to prepare and strengthen for this, but at the same time avoid having a narrow view of just increasing their own role and instead adopt a broader approach in which all forces of communal harmony, secularism, economic justice and equality, democracy, protection of national institutions , protection of natural resources and environment, are strengthened, contributing to creating a better society all the time while also resisting the onslaught of authoritarian forces.
Bharat Dogra is a journalist and author. His recent books include Planet in Peril and Protecting Earth for Children.
Apologists try to equate it with “crime of passion” but crimes of passion are abrupt, unmediated, and impulsive acts of violence committed by persons who, in their own lights, have come face to face with an incident wholly repulsive and unacceptable, and who technically and for the duration of the act, are insane and incapable of self-control. One well known and illustrative example is that of an Indian Naval officer, Commander Nanavati who some thirty years ago went to his apartment, found his wife and her paramour in conjugal embrace, shot both of them, went out, accosted a traffic policeman, confessed to the killing and demanded to be arrested. The policeman demurred, he could not arrest an officer, so he took over directing the traffic, sent the policeman to fetch a police inspector who arrived in due course, and arrested him.
I have not been able to find a striking or so well documented example of such Honor killing in Pakistan as this one, though stories of enraged, out of control, husbands, fathers, and brothers abound. Murder of a “guilty” female is reported about once a month in Pakistani newspapers, though according to reliable statistics it occurs, on the average three times a day.
The usual honor killings in the tribe and clan ridden Pakistan, on the other hand are in most cases deliberate, well planned and premeditated acts, when a relative of a female kills her ostensibly to uphold his honor, though it is well established that in most cases the overriding motive is monetary/property loss entailed in giving away a female out of tribe, biraderi etc.
The practice is a relic of the times when law and order was a matter of tribal code (A recent variant is sanctioning gang rape of a woman for alleged insult to a member of a powerful family by a member of “low” family, for example the Mukhtaran Mai case in Pakistan) and the British on assuming control, and with a view to pacifying the natives and minimizing opposition to their over lordship, incorporated honor killing in their jurisprudence, even though it was repugnant to their code of justice and fair play. But they imposed very stringent conditions viz sexual activity was actually observed, the perpetrator confessed, had an otherwise upright character, had blood/marriage relation with the girl and reported to the police immediately.
Under the British rule it was a rare incident. The perpetrator would not be sentenced to death but there would be a long jail sentence and social sanctions as well.
But above all, the crime was deemed to have been committed against the state in contravention of law and not a simple private affair.
Qisas (eye for an eye) and Diyat (blood money) as part of Hudood laws were promulgated as Presidential Ordnance, not requiring parliamentary assent, by General Zia, the military dictator of Pakistan from 1977 to 1988, are closely related relics of pre Islamic societies, where the concept of these offences being family affairs, was accepted. Islam made these violations of law crimes against the state (though clerics in their role of props of the ruling class generally look the other way or even support the practice).
Since the departure of the British and with them fear of the law and judicial procedures and especially since the dark days of Zia Ul Haq, women have been relegated of to a third class status.
This intolerant theology was invented over a hundred of years after the prophet of Islam (PBUH) at the behest of Abbasid Caliphs, and revived in the eighteenth century by a person by the name of Abdul Wahab, with whom the progenitor of the Saudi royal clan had signed a compact that the clan chief would look after the worldly affairs and Godly ones would be assigned to Wahab.
It did not get any where till the successors of the clan chief on the one hand and those of Wahab on the other got together to fight with the “infidel” British and the French against fellow Muslims, the Turks. The house of Ibn e Saud utilized the fanatics as a weapon against their local rival, Shareef the ruler of Mecca who claimed descent from the prophet of Islam; wholly repugnant to the spirit and word of Islam.
The British had promised Hejaz to Shareef but gave it instead to Saud and left the former with consolation prizes of Iraq and Jordan.
Pakistan inherited a tolerant version of Islam. I recall from my childhood that we shunned extremists and socialized with non-Muslims. Over the following several decades, as the leaders failed to come up to expectations, social services deteriorated, the ruling clique led the country down the disastrous path of wars, military rule, subservience to foreign interests, curtailment of expenditure on nation building, widening divide between the rich and the poor and finally civil war and loss of half of the country. Orthodoxy took hold of the imagination of people in the country.
Bhutto pledged an egalitarian society, but ended up by rejuvenating his feudal class. Ziaul Haq hammered the final nail into the coffin of liberal Pakistan.
Feudal lords have ruled Pakistan even since its inception; all levers of power, Army, Civil service, Mullahs and Press have been under their control.
Army is the most effective tool of feudal society as it has brute power and can ignore with contempt the law of the land. Other components of the Evil Quad (Feudals, Army, Civil service, and Mullah) willingly cooperate. Civil servants and judges supinely obey the army. (The stand taken by CJ Iftikhar Choudhury is the sole exception; he was letdown by the lawyer’s movement leader Aitzaz Ahsan, but that is another discussion). Expression of opinion is prohibited and all coercive apparatus of state is used to crush opposition.
Education is discouraged and whatever little is allowed, is subverted by distortion of curricula. Honor killing is a made to measure cover for them.
If Pakistan were encumbered only with the problem of fanaticism and relics of the colonial times, it would not be so bad. To compound the misery uncontrolled growth of population was allowed in the name of religion. West Pakistan (now the only Pakistan) had a population of 35 million in 1941. Now it is 200 million and growing at over three percent per year.
Even if the government functioned honestly, sincerely and efficiently (which admittedly it does not) no innovation in methods of production could cope with the immense increase in the number of mouths to feed.
Health, education, nutrition, physical and mental development continue to deteriorate. A Human sub-species incapable of protest is being created.
In any case, few in Pakistan have the time, inclination, means or education to think, read books, and analyze the machinations of the “Evil Quad”. Zia literally ignored unfavorable articles in “Dawn” and is believed to have said that the reader ship of the newspaper was only 40,000 (45,000 on Friday).
There are no doubt valiant voices in the country and among expatriates and in Pakistan), but they are akin to straws in the wind. All conferences, seminars, resolutions and press notes in effect and in substance are irrelevant. They look to the west specially U.S.A for putting pressure on Pakistani authorities to respect human rights and law.
But the west is not interested in human rights in third world countries. They supported Taliban in Afghanistan where the fanatics were perpetrating the worst crimes against the Afghans.
A total structural change in society is needed. It would be tantamount to a revolution. Revolutions are historically indigenous and cannot be imported or imposed from outside.
Following is a summary of the report of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International recommendations, and The Protection and Empowerment of Women act 2003, presented to Pakistan National Assembly, with a fond hope that it will stimulate some minds and goad them to initiate the struggle against the Evil Quad.
Human Rights Commission Of Pakistan:
Honor killings 1998 to 2002 1464 (married 659- unmarried 534)
Amnesty International Recommendations
Review criminal laws to ensure equality before law and equal protection of law to women.
Make domestic violence in all its manifestations a criminal offence.
Make sale of women and girls or giving women in marriage against financial considerations a criminal offence.
Under take wide-ranging awareness programs.
Provide gender-sensitization training to law enforcement and judicial personnel.
Ensure that human rights activists, lawyers, and women’s rights activists can pursue their legitimate activities with out harassment
The 2003 “Act”:
Government to ensure equal participation of women in all walks of life
Discrimination in pay on basis of gender is prohibited.
Domestic violence and honor killing be punishable in the same manner as personal injury or culpable homicide.
Every woman shall be entitled to marry a person of her choice.
At least one third of seats on Islamic Ideology Council and other government commissions be reserved for women.
Separate/independent enclosures in jail for women controlled by female police.
Bio:
I was born in Dewa Sharif, UP, India in 1939.
I went to school from the fourth to eighth class in Gonda, UP and the 9th grade in Jhansi, UP, India.
We moved to Quetta, Pakistan and went to school for the 10th grade and intermediate college in the same town.
I was in Karachi University 1954-57, then Dow Medical College 1957-62. I Was in the National Students Federation from 1954 to 1962, trained in surgery in the Civil Hospital Karachi 1962-65, proceeded to England 1965 and trained in General surgery and orthopedic surgery till 73, when I left for Canada 1973-74, USA 1974-83, back to Karachi 1983 and built a hospital and went back to the USA in 1991, been in the USA since.
I retired from surgery in 2005.
I have worked in various HR and Socialist groups in the USA.
I have Published two books ,:”A Medical Doctor Examines Life on Three Continents,” and ,”God, Government and Globalization”, and am working on the third one, “An Analysis of the Sources and Derivation of Religions”.
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Apparently, the highest official of the US government owned by wealthy investors in war inadvertently let himself be overheard making an off-hand truthful remark that contradicts what the CIA overseen criminal media tells the world in excusing America’s genocidal crimes against humanity in Vietnam. Important is how criminal media seeks to ridicule someone saying something truthful about the the war it lied about and promoted
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later that someone of high notoriety would blurt out the truth about the American genocide of Holocaust proportion in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and lift for a moment the tacky iron curtain of imbecility that keeps why-me-worry silly American society, self-indulgent in sales and sports, gung-ho slap-happily accepting what its criminal media tells it about being proud of its Vietnam War veterans and proud of today’s American soldiers, who have invaded whatever little countries on criminal orders or are stationed in active duty in 150 countries. [1]
What comes to mind are photos of dead babies and their mothers lying in a ditch in South Vietnam shot point blank by American soldiers. …of America soldiers setting fire to the straw roofs of village homes with their cigarette lighters…of an American tank dragging a roped Vietnamese ‘enemy’ behind it down the road … of naked children with burnt skin running from fiery napalm dropped from an American fighter plane over farm houses … of photos of B-52 bombers high-altitude carpet bombing ‘free fire zones’ … of planes dropping Agent-Orange to destroy whole forests in South Vietnam … of super heroes like US Senator and presidential-candidate-to-be pilot John McCain, who dropped bombs for months on Hanoi city before being shot down, and who Nuremberg Trial Prosecutor Gen.Telford Taylor would have prosecuted as a war criminal. [2]
“We were wrong, terribly wrong,” the former Secretary of Defense broke down in tears.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara from 1961 to 1968, formerly President of the Ford Motor Company, had pushed so hard for deeper American military involvement in Vietnam that the US conflict in French Indochina became nicknamed “McNamara’s War,” but 20 years after the US embarrassingly mortifying withdrawal in 1975, he wrote a book in which he confessed “We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.” He broke down in tears while talking to Diane Sawyer of ABC News.
McNamara claimed he once sent President Johnson a note warning, ”There may be limits beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission … is not a pretty one.” After presiding for years as the Devil incarnate over the deaths of millions, McNamara, upon his resignation, was appointed President of the World Bank! (In America, war seems to be just business and money, while life, on the other hand, is cheap. Like many Americans, McNamara was emotional about the Americans who died because of his decisions but never seem to care about the nearly a hundred times more Vietnamese who died because of his commands.)
Recently, more than a half-century after the US lifted its years of cruel international sanctions on Communist Vietnam, an American president reportedly called the American war in Vietnam “a stupid war.” From Associated Press and “According to one former senior Trump administration official: ’When the President spoke about the Vietnam War, he said, ‘“It was a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker,’” Jennifer Griffin, a national security correspondent for Fox News, confirmed the president’s remarks. [3] What is important is how something critical said about the Vietnam debacle that took millions of lives has been ridiculed and characterized as wrong headed and improper by America’s criminal media which lied about that war in its time and continues to lie about it even today.
What did today’s US president have in mind when he reportedly referred to the war as “stupid”
#1. Why “stupid?”
The war was supposed to prevent a communist run government in Vietnam.
Today the Communist Party of Vietnam runs Vietnam which is currently America’s 8th greatest trading partner at $9 billion worth of goods traded per year. So why did Americans bring death to all those millions of fellow human beings. For what? For nothing. All that mega colossal amount of grief and sorrow and pain. For what? Stupid right? Why is a Communist Vietnam okay now, but before was worth murdering millions of people to block some Communism and protect Capitalism – French Colonial Capitalism at that?
#2. “Stupid?” Before sending in American armed forces, President Truman brought back the French Colonial Army in US ships, and America funded eight years of France’s bloody war to reconquer Vietnam. That French Colonial Army had been Vichy French fascist, an ally of Nazi Germany, and had run Vietnam for the Japanese and caused a million Vietnamese to starve because the Japanese took away so much rice to feed their soldiers. Stupid? Americans on the side of racist murdering former fascist French military colonialism? How famously brutal the French were in Haiti and Algeria besides in Indochina. (Oh, the French were so joyous when US troops liberated Paris from the Nazi Germans.)
#3 “Stupid?” America betrayed its Vietnamese WW II ally Ho Chi Minh, who the US awarded a medal for his work saving the lives of American downed airmen. A high America officer had stood by Ho Chi Minh’s side as he declared Vietnam independent. Then Americans murderously betrayed their Vietnamese heroic WW II ally! Stupid, or was, is, the American government by nature racist, sneaky and war loving?
#4. “Stupid?” After the Vietnamese at great cost of lives had defeated the US backed French Colonial Army, President Eisenhower blocked the election for president of all of Vietnam that he admitted Ho Chi Minh would have won with 80+% of the vote. Just “Stupid?” Or were, are, Americans undemocratic by nature and imperialists in trying to have made the South of Vietnam a separate country and a US neo-colonial satellite. (Eisenhower also had both Congo and Guatemalan democracies murderously overthrown and Laos bombed. Ike was very beholden to the Military-Industrial-Complex he warned against.) No, not stupid! Undemocratic! and a crime against humanity.
#5 “Stupid?” Six US Presidents oversaw 30 years of genocidal slaughter of the innocent soft-spoken Buddhist basically farming population of the three French colonies of the Indochinese peninsula, first by the US backed French and afterward with the Americans dropping three times the amount of bombs the US dropped during all of the Second World War in Europe and Asia, [4] while eventually introducing a half-million US troops with tanks and helecopters and river patrol boats and state of the art military equipment. Then Americans ignominiously gave up and leveled inhumanly cruel international sanctions on the then liberated Communist Party run Vietnam. In retrospect, super stupid, just plain daft, but in reality, it was genocide!
#6 “Stupid” for an American fascination with body counts
58,310 American troops were reported ‘Killed in Action.’
These 58,310, plus two and a half million more American troops, who didn’t die, made an 15 year invasion and occupation war that brought death to ten times that number, 587,000, of soft-spoken poor Buddhists Vietnamese civilians! and death to 1.1 million of the amazingly brave and patriotic Vietnamese, who fought against the American invasion. [5]Were Americans just long term highly stupid or just enthralled with killing? Were Americans cruel people then, during their Vietnam debacle war, or are they still, rotten, uncaring people today causing children in Yemen to die of starvation or American guided missiles, while American soldiers kill in Afghanistan and Somalia.
#7 “Stupid” or evil?
Unexploded illegal anti-personnel cluster bombs dropped by Americans from planes so many years ago, continue to detonate and kill people today. The Vietnamese government claims that unexploded ordnance has killed some 42,000 people since the official end of the war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia according to Vietnamese government databases. Horrible birth deformities and cancers by the thousands continue to occur from Agent Orange. Were Americans, are Americans, inhumanly irresponsible in their behavior?
The current US President also is reported to have said regarding Vietnam, “Anyone who went was a sucker.”
Since the TV channels of America’s CIA overseen six giant entertainment/news controlling conglomerates still hail Vietnam veterans as heroes, let’s try to imagine what today’s US president had in mind when he reportedly insinuated that Vietnam War veterans were all “suckers.” Let us consider the President’s calling Vietnam veterans ‘suckers’ in the context of Americans seeming to love, or at least accept, watching their military continually bomb and invade smaller countries.
Did the present American president actually mean, “Anyone who went” to risk his life to participate in what turned out to be the slaughter of upwards of 3 million Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian men, women and children, “was a sucker” for believing his government was decent and would not send him to kill poor and innocent people, “a sucker” for not knowing what his government was doing in French Indochina or a sucker for not wanting to be threatened with time in prison if he refused to be drafted into the US Army?
Well, apparently, a half-million guys refused to be suckered into killing anyone, because during the Vietnam War, approximately 570,000 young men, more than half a million, were classified as draft offenders,[6] and approximately 210,000 were legally accused of draft violations; however, only 8,750 were convicted and only 3,250 were jailed.
Some draft eligible men were angry enough at the government’s attempt to sucker them into war to publicly burned their draft cards, but the Justice Department brought charges against only 50, of whom 40 were convicted.
Those who were drafted made up more than one third of the 3,403,100 (Including 514,300 offshore) personnel, who served in the Southeast Asia Theater (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, including flight crews based in Thailand, and sailors in adjacent South China Sea waters).
World Heavyweight Champion Mohammad Ali’s draft board statement should have been guidance for all prospective draftees: “I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over,”
If we take the word of the only American whose birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, then guys who participated in the merciless slaughter of the men, women and children of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia did not ‘serve’ their country. No, what they did to poor people in France’s Indochina colonies shamed their country, and was worse, much worse behavior than that of those Americans who Martin Luther King said betrayed their country at home by their silence. King reminded them that the famous Italian poet Dante in his ‘I’inferno,’ warned that “the hottest fires in Hell are reserved for those who in times of moral crisis, maintain neutrality.”
In his world shaking New York sermon a year before he was shot dead, King pointed out, “So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They languish under our bombs …primarily women and children and the aged as we herd them into concentration camps. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. They see their children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food, see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.”
Anybody who let themselves be sucked into participating in the genocide that was American war in Vietnam is to be pitied. Sure men were being drafted and threatened with jail time if they refused induction into the US Army, but 20 or 30 thousand just moved to Canada. More thousands demanded and got deferment as conscientious objectors. Few went to jail.
Huge percent of GIs in combat realizing that they had been ‘had’ turned to drugs and some turned to ‘fragging’ their officers.
A great percentage of GIs in constant danger of being killed or maimed in combat realized that they had been suckered into a deadly and ignominious trap of killing people fighting in and for their own country, turned to illegal drugs and quite a number covertly murdered their immediate officers or non-commissioned officers in what was called ‘fragging’ being that fragmentation hand grenades were the usual weapon of choice. A well calculated estimate is that 1,017 fragging incidents may have taken place in Vietnam causing 86 deaths and 714 injuries of U.S. military personnel, the majority officers and NCOs.[7]
According to a 1971 report by the Department of Defense, 51% of the armed forces had smoked marijuana, 31% had used psychedelics, such as LSD, mescaline and psilocybin mushrooms, and an additional 28% percent had taken hard drugs, such as cocaine and heroin. But drug usage wasn’t just limited by what enlistees could illicitly buy on the black market. Their military command also heavily prescribed amphetamines, which were used to boost endurance on long missions, sedatives were prescribed to help relieve anxiety and prevent mental breakdowns. In his book ‘Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War,’ author Lukasz Kamienski argues that amphetamine withdrawal may be partly to blame for some of the atrocities committed against Vietnam’s civilian population, with strung-out young servicemen overreacting to the already stressful conditions of war.
How many veterans committed suicide out of shame for what they did in Vietnam? More U.S. veterans have committed suicide between 2008 and 2017 than the number of U.S. soldiers that died during the entire Vietnam War. According to the defense news site Military.com, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) shared these alarming rates in a September 2019 report. The U.S. suffered around 58,000 fatalities over the course of the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. This number has now been eclipsed by the more than 60,000 U.S. veteran suicides in a recent span of just 10 years. More than 6,000 veterans committed suicide every year during that timeframe. Many were veterans of horror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Dominican Republic, Panama or Somalia, but a lot of suicides were by Vietnam vets.[8]
In ‘Shame, Guilt, Self-Hatred and Remorse in the Psychotherapy of Vietnam Combat Veterans Who Committed Atrocities’ author Mel Singer, L.C.S.W. describes the plight of a subgroup of Vietnam veterans suffering from combat-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), who committed atrocities while serving in Vietnam. Years after their service in Vietnam ended, certain veterans continue to exhibit shame, guilt, self-hatred and a sense of being interminably unforgivable, all feelings related to the atrocities they committed. …Some have committed suicide and others remain at risk. One suffering veteran’s guilt was apparent as manifested by emerging themes of retaliation. He believed that it was only natural for his enemy to kill him. After all, if they did to him what he had done to them, wouldn’t he be seeking revenge? The American combat soldier in Vietnam averaged between 19 and 20 years of age and had little more than a high school diploma.
This article has sought to bring attention to the impossible-to-describe amount of suffering caused by Americans willingly, though some against their will, to Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians in French Indochina.
Calling that unjustifiable genocidal American war in French Indochina “stupid” is a mega vast understatement, inappropriately dismissive sounding regarding the crimes against humanity Americans committed.
Calling the unfortunate Americans who went there, some to die, some to be crippled and all to kill, “suckers” trivializes the inestimable suffering and seems dismissive of the deadly crimes of those who went and those who sent them to make war on poor and innocent people.
This Writer Was Himself ’a Sucker’ During the American War in Korea
The writer of this article can give a personal parallel experience, because in 1952, he, with his 19 year old head filled with thoughts of women, music and making his pals laugh, let himself be drafted into the US Army during the Korean War without even attempting to find out what that war was about and didn’t even read the newspaper and as didn’t realize his government was killing Koreans by the hundreds of thousands in their very own country.
I was a sucker to believe in my government. I know now that the North Korean army had overthrown the American Army created mass murderous police state in South Korea in a just few weeks before the Americans invaded the South while it bombed flat all 38 cities of the North. [see Endnote #9 for South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission report]
I was so distracted by the healthy routines and camaraderie of basic training that I never once had the thought that the weapons I was practicing with could kill somebody, and never thought about Korea while having fun training in the mountains of Pennsylvania.
I could have wound up killing relatives of the Korean students I came to be teaching in subsequent years. I could also have wound up having my dead body thrown into a pit in North Korea as did four bunkmates and members of my squad from basic training. My poor buddies had never even heard of Korea before being sent there to fight and die.
I was a sucker to believe my government was not a criminal war investors run government and to have allowed myself to be drafted and be part of its killer war machine, but ignorance is never a legal or moral excuse. I was fortunate to have been sent to be part of the occupation forces in former Nazi Germany, while my buddies were sent to kill and be killed in Korea.
I was so blind and ignorant to have been comfortable in my US Army uniform, but I was stationed in what had been criminally insane Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany, which most of the world including America had to fight a war with. I didn’t know then what I know now that it was American industrialists that had armed Nazi Germany by heavily investing in, and joint venturing with, a financially prostate and completely disarmed Germany building Hitler’s army up to world’s number one military power in five short years. But I only learned of American tycoons backing of Hitler to attack Communist Russia many years later. In 1952, I was a patriotic sucker, indulging in my youthful life and not much interested in my government’s anti-communist war in Korea.
Another famous African-American gave succinct guidance for those, who like your author, were foolishly asleep to the reality of a murderous war yawning. “You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” – Malcolm X
The Need for this Article
This writer has sought to take advantage of a inadvertent awkward slip-up by a high official lackey of the deep state investors in war who control our existence. Apparently, a criminal American President, just one in a long series of criminal US Presidents, let himself be overheard making an off-hand truthful remark that contradicts what the CIA overseen criminal media tells the world in excusing America’s genocidal crimes against humanity.
When a crack in the deep state wall of TV inculcated self-indulgence, dis and misinformation and limitless militant subservient patriotism opens up, with an awkward truth jutting out, jump on it! Don’t let smiling commentators make a joke out of some truth about America’s genocides that accidentally slipped out in relaxed conversation. No, don’t let a truth that slipped out and contradicts the lies told on TV about Vietnam and Vietnam veterans be forgotten.
Remember how ‘they’ made a joke of Senator Barak Obama’s family pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s anguished cry, “God bless America? No, no, God Damn America for killing innocent people!”
Remember how American peace activists failed to take the ball from presidential candidate Ron Paul, and run with it, failed to keep repeating what he said on prime time coverage of the presidential candidates debate: “All the bombings and invasions beginning with Korea were illegal, unconstitutional and a horrific loss of life!” The silence of the rest of the candidates and the commentators was striking, but seemed to fit the public apathy. Our war torn world continually threatened with nuclear winter is our payment for public apathy.
* Whether anyone actually called the Vietnam war stupid and its veterans suckers is not what is important. Important is how criminal media sought to ridicule someone saying something truthful about the genocide of poor and innocent men, women and children Americans committed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and keeps calling Americans, who participated in that horrific genocidal crime of Holocaust proportion, heroes.
Call attention to that crack in the wall within your family, among friends and acquaintances! Humankind is in an ugly period of suffering in the bloody hands of imbecilic investors in war, who own our governments and media and who cannot stop themselves from planning war, even terminal nuclear war, since they know from centuries of experience that wars make money.
If and when we can have the resources and money the reigning investors in war dedicate to war and preparation for more war to use for maintenance of the planet and feeding well the starving, what a happy world it will be!
Let’s have a New Year’s resolution to start talking about our Democratic and Republican parities’ immensely dangerous subservience to the investors in war! Would that being independent of political party affiliation were compulsory for all candidates for public office!
Endnotes
- [“’Endless Wars,’ Here’s Where About 200,000 Troops Remain,” New York Times Oct. 21, 2019. ]
- [Gen.Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials is reported as having said that he would be proud to lead the prosecution of U.S. pilots captured in Vietnam. Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968 wrote in Bomber Pilot McCain: War Heroism or War Crimes? published by Institute for Public Accuracy, October 15, 2008, writes, “I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals — and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.” https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/55841SOURCE: OpEdNews.com
10-19-08 Jay Janson: U.S. Nuremberg Trials Prosecutor Would Have Proudly Prosecuted McCain As a War Criminal
- https://www.syracuse.com/us-news/2020/09/fox-news-confirms-trump-mocked-us-troops-as-suckers-biden-calls-him-a-disgrace.html
- Clodfelter, Micheal Vietnam in Military Statistics: A History of the Indochina Wars, 1792—1991′. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 1995, p. 225.
- [Lewy, Guenter (1978). America in Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press. Appendix 1, pp. 450–53]
- [Cortright, David (2008). Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 164–165. ISBN 978-0-521-67000-5.]
- [Gabriel, Richard A. and Savage, Paul L. (1978), Crisis in Command, New York: Hill & Wang, p. 183] [Lepre, George (2011). Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted their Officers in Vietnam. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press.]
- [‘More U.S. Veterans Have Committed Suicide In The Last Decade Than Died In The Vietnam War,’ by Marco Margaritoff, Published November 11, 2019, Updated April 13, 2020
- South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung (once condemned to death under military governments), established a first Truth Commission in 2000. When this Commission completed its work in 2004, the Parliament felt that a further, much broader Truth and Reconciliation Commission was needed to examine Japanese colonialism, the partition of the Peninsula, and decades-long anticommunist dictatorships. In 2005, the South Korean Assembly therefore enacted a law establishing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Here are excerpts of Commission member of five years Prof. Kim Dong-choon’s article for Asia-Pacific Journal, March 1, 2010, titled: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War -The Other War: Korean War Massacres:
“Few are aware that the South Korean authorities as well as US and allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. The official records of government, military and police, as well as survivor testimonies, reveal that mass killings committed by South Korean and U.N forces occurred before and during the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953). These incidents may be categorized into four types.
The first category involves summary executions of civilians and political prisoners suspected of opposing or posing a threat to the ROK (Republic of Korea) regime.The second category involves the arrest and execution of suspected North Korean collaborators by the ROK police and rightist youth groups. …
The third category includes killings conducted during ROK counterinsurgency operations against Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Minority Perspective, UK and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which Dissident Voice supports with link at the end of each issue of its newsletter.communist guerillas.The ROK employed a three-all policy (kill‐all, burn‐all, loot‐all), which was a scorched earth policy used by Japanese Imperial forces while suppressing anti‐Japanese forces in China. [Officers of the Southern armed forces were made up of Koreans who fought in the Japanese Army, whereas the cadre of the Northern armed forces were Korean guerrillas who had distinguished themselves fighting the Japanese in Manchuria.]
Counterinsurgency atrocities also occurred in North Korean occupied territory. As the ROK police and rightist youth groups followed the U.S. military across the 38th parallel, they encountered people they suspected to be communists and collaborators. A typical massacre occurred in Sinchon (a county located in southern North Korea). North Korea accused American troops of killing 35,380 civilians, but newly released documents disclose that right‐wing civilian security police, assisted by a youth group, perpetrated the massacre.
The fourth category involves civilian and refugee deaths from bombings and shootings in U.S. combat operations.
A History of Silencing Bereaved Families and Oppressing Memories of Atrocities
The Jeju Island April 3 incident of 1948 occurred shortly before the first general election, and was unique in the number of victims, and the lasting effect on the Jeju Island. Since the incident occurred during the period of US military government, the operation, which resulted in numerous civilian deaths, was conducted under the sponsorship of U.S forces. Embedded in a strong collective regional identity, the Jeju people’s tragedy became a popular theme for novels and poems. The world’s most famous artist Pablo Picasso painted his masterpiece Massacre in Korea. There is a wall in Jeju Island Peace Memorial Park with the names of the estimated 30,000 Jeju uprising victims. While the final report of committees of investigation failed to confirm or spell out a US or UN role, it concluded that 86% of the 14,373 deaths reported were committed by security forces including the National Guard, National Police, and rightist groups. …
Frantic anti-communism paralleled the rise of McCarthyism in the U.S., heavily influencing South Korea’s political atmosphere from 1953 onward and resulting in society’s collective amnesia over the mass killings committed by ROK and U.S. troops. …
In 2008, President Ro Moo-Hyun made an official apology on behalf of the state for the massacres of the Korean War.
In 1996, Chun Doo-hwan, former South Korean army general who ruled as the President of South Korea from 1979 to 1988, ruling as an unelected coup leader was sentenced to death for his role in the Gwangju Massacre of 1980. His successor as president, Roh Tae Woo, was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison. The Gwangju Uprising, alternatively called May 18 Democratic Uprising by UNESCO, and also known as May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement. This past February 2018, it was revealed for the first time that the army had used McDonnell Douglas MD500 Defender and Bell UH-1 Iroquois attack helicopters to fire on civilians. Defense Minister Song Young-moo made an apology.
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Minority Perspective, UK and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which Dissident Voice supports with link at the end of each issue of its newsletter.
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