Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: David Swanson

  • Swamp Infrastructure Construction Kinetics

    Swamp Infrastructure Construction Kinetics

    Now being planned and built in Washington, D.C., which is already just about coated in monuments to wars and particular warriors, are monuments to: World War I, the Gulf War, Native American fighters in wars, African Americans who fought in the U.S. war for independence, and the War on Terrorism, as well as one to Eisenhower the Warrior.

    That War on (make that “of” — an easy alteration) Terrorism monument is supposed to be built by 2024, and the war it glorifies is due to end sometime in the next millennium or, as war planners like to say, “imminently.”

    Most countries glorify their deeds, but many also mourn and regret and warn against repetition of their worst crimes. Not the good old USA, no sir. George Bush the elder said he’d never apologize and didn’t care what the facts were. That’s telling ’em.

    I’m glad to be involved in planning to protest and prevent a weapons parade on November 10th. But the wave of new war memorials in Washington, D.C., deserves all the opposition that Trump’s parade is receiving, 1,000-fold. The memorials will last much longer than the parade — assuming that the militarism they glorify doesn’t put an end to all of us.

    One year after the deadly rally in Charlottesville, the memorials denounced there as racist still stand. They stand because of a Virginia law forbidding taking down war memorials. Once any monstrosity is erected, if it’s for war, it’s here for eternity. That is sure to be true in Washington, D.C. as well. Can you imagine trying to get one of these desecrations of all that is decent removed after it’s up?

    If you’re wondering, Virginia does not have a law banning the removal of peace memorials. You can take one down if you can find one.

    How does Congress get away with dumping the majority of discretionary spending into militarism each year? How does  Trump get away with telling European nations to spend on war based on the size of their economies? Part of the answer is a culture of war. We ought to take a little more seriously the danger that lies in what we choose to glorify.

    These war monuments do not mourn the dead. They omit the vast majority of the dead entirely. The Vietnam Memorial alone would eat up the space being used by several others if it included the names of everyone killed in that war. The war “on terrorism” has been a one-sided slaughter, illegal, immoral, counter-productive, and environmentally and fiscally and culturally catastrophic. Of the tiny percentage of deaths you’re supposed to care about, the majority have come by suicide. The monument will mention nothing of any of that.

    That they are now building monuments to particular demographic groups’ participation in wars threatens all remaining trees and sidewalks left intact thus far in Washington, D.C. But that’s not the worst of it. They’re making a monument to the participation of the remnants of nations destroyed by genocidal U.S. wars — their participation in later wars against other victims. And they have yet to build a monument to the victims of the wars against the native peoples of the continent.

    They’re building a monument to black fighters in the U.S. war for wealthy white male independence that will not only not mention the role of that war in advancing continental genocide, but also omit its role in preserving slavery. The African Americans who fought on the British side for actual independence cannot be expected to show up in monumental glory. And where is the monument to slavery, whose lasting legacy is certainly what has spared us an enormous pro-union Civil War monument eating up half the National Mall?

    The tiny, hidden monument to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans is proving entirely insufficient to the task it takes on with its “never again” language. The absence of any serious peace monuments is killing us.

    Will the Gulf War monument include babies taken out of incubators? I know I say that at the risk of giving them ideas, but I’m sure they’ve already thought of worse. Slaughter of thousands of retreating troops maybe? Decades of brutal blowback perhaps?

    And World War I? What is that about? The total lack of World War I-justifying mythology in our culture, the surrender to its obvious insanity, makes WWI a weak link in the case for World War II’s status as the most glorious mass-killing in history, given the impossibility of World War II having happened without World War I. But now they want to remind us of World War I?

    Clearly the idea is that all war must be glorious regardless of what idiots started it for what nonsensical, sadistic, narcissistic, greedy, cowardly, dishonest reasons. That seems to me exactly the wrong message to be surrounding the White House windows with right now.

    This article was originally published by World Beyond War.

  • Howard Zinn’s the Bomb

    The late Howard Zinn’s new book “The Bomb” is a brilliant little dissection of some of the central myths of our militarized society. Those who’ve read “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,” by H.P. Albarelli Jr. know that this is a year for publishing the stories of horrible things that the United States has done to French towns. In that case, Albarelli, describes the CIA administering LSD to an entire town, with deadly results. In “The Bomb,” Zinn describes the U.S. military making its first use of napalm by dropping it all over another French town, burning anyone and anything it touched. Zinn was in one of the planes, taking part in this horrendous crime.

    In mid-April 1945, the war in Europe was essentially over. Everyone knew it was ending. There was no military reason (if that’s not an oxymoron) to attack the Germans stationed near Royan, France, much less to burn the French men, women, and children in the town to death. The British had already destroyed the town in January, similarly bombing it because of its vicinity to German troops, in what was widely called a tragic mistake. This tragic mistake was rationalized as an inevitable part of war, just as were the horrific firebombings that successfully reached German targets, just as was the later bombing of Royan with napalm. Zinn blames the Supreme Allied Command for seeking to add a “victory” in the final weeks of a war already won. He blames the local military commanders’ ambitions. He blames the American Air Force’s desire to test a new weapon. And he blames everyone involved — which must include himself — for “the most powerful motive of all: the habit of obedience, the universal teaching of all cultures, not to get out of line, not even to think about that which one has not been assigned to think about, the negative motive of not having either a reason or a will to intercede.”

    When Zinn returned from the war in Europe, he expected to be sent to the war in the Pacific, until he saw and rejoiced at seeing the news of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 65 years ago this August. Only years later did Zinn come to understand the inexcusable crime of the greatest proportions that was the dropping of nuclear bombs in Japan, actions similar in some ways to the final bombing of Royan. The war with Japan was already over, the Japanese seeking peace and willing to surrender. Japan asked only that it be permitted to keep its emperor, a request that was later granted. But, like napalm, the nuclear bombs were weapons that needed testing. The second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, was a different sort of bomb that also needed testing. President Harry Truman wanted to demonstrate nuclear bombs to the world and especially to Russia. And he wanted to end the war with Japan before Russia became part of it. The horrific form of mass murder he employed was in no way justifiable.

    Zinn also goes back to dismantle the mythical reasons the United States was in the war to begin with. The United States, England, and France were imperial powers supporting each other’s international aggressions in places like the Philippines. They opposed the same from Germany and Japan, but not aggression itself. Most of America’s tin and rubber came from the Southwest Pacific. The United States made clear for years its lack of concern for the Jews being attacked in Germany. It also demonstrated its lack of opposition to racism through its treatment of African Americans and Japanese Americans. Franklin D. Roosevelt described fascist bombing campaigns over civilian areas as “inhuman barbarity” but then did the same on a much larger scale to German cities, which was followed up by the destruction on an unprecedented scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — actions that came after years of dehumanizing the Japanese. Zinn points out that “LIFE magazine showed a picture of a Japanese person burning to death and commented: ‘This is the only way.’” Aware that the war would end without any more bombing, and aware that U.S. prisoners of war would be killed by the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the U.S. military went ahead and dropped the bombs.

    Americans allowed these things to be done in their name, just as the Germans and Japanese allowed horrible crimes to be committed in their names. Zinn points out, with his trademark clarity, how the use of the word “we” blends governments together with peoples and serves to equate our own people with our military, while we demonize the people of other lands because of actions by their governments. “The Bomb” suggest a better way to think about such matters and firmly establishes that:

    • what the U.S. military is doing now, today, parallels the crimes of the past and shares their dishonorable motivations;
    • the bad wars have a lot in common with the so-called “good war,” about which there was little if anything good;
    • Howard Zinn did far more in his life for peace than for war, and more for peace than just about anybody else, certainly more than several Nobel Peace Prize winners.