Cicero
Found this on tumblr, shared it on facebook as well.
things i wish i'd learned in high school
- everything in your history books, with few exceptions, is filtered through the lens of white Eurocentric eliminationst thought. you will only learn what a board of educators, working with a biased, racist agenda, decide is fit for you to know unless you go out and educate yourself. unless you sit down, shut up, and listen to other voices
- history is not something you absorb and passively take in. history is something you wrest from the mountains of bullshit, something you piece together from bits here and there, something you follow in a patchwork pattern, not a linear progression, something you are constantly expounding on and working with.
- the contributions of marginalized groups do not exist in high school history except as tokens there to contribute to a vision of sanitized and non-threatening ‘diversity’. whatever marginalized group you belong to, you will not see any realistic representation of it in class or in texts.
- the most beautiful truths to be found in global literature are unlikely to be found in your required texts.
- sometimes it is not about learning, but unlearning, and recognizing your privileges and dismantling them. this is not a process with an end. this is a process you choose to engage in for the rest of your life. it is not meant to be easy or comfortable. it is meant to hurt, to disrupt, to be real.
- people have a vested interest in keeping you ignorant.
It was the great Howard Zinn who made the distinction between "old history" and "new history." War criminal Henry Kissinger said, "History is the memory of states." He was talking about old history: history told from the point of view of the oppressors and of the victors. In this version of history, Indians, blacks, women, and working people are shoved into the corner. The heroes in this version of history are people like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, or various military leaders.
"New" history began to pick up steam in the 60s and 70s with the underground youth movements, but in 1980, Howard Zinn brought it straight into America's living rooms with "A People's History of the United States." We have Zinn to thank for what little coverage we get in our classrooms now of things like slavery and Indian
"It is good that we are getting more history from below. We have believed too long in our own helplessness, and the new history tells us how, sometimes, movements of people who don't seem to have much power can shake the rich and the powerful. Even out of their seats of power. Even into the prisoner's dock which they prepared for others."
There are some people out there who fly into a rage whenever anything from new history is brought to their attention (Republicans, pretty much). The idea that the "greatest nation" ever did anything bad doesn't make sense, so they have to eliminate the inconsistency. This is not a big leap away from book burning, and we need to fight it with extreme prejudice. The Tennessee Tea Party is raising a shit fit about this in Tennessee schools right now.
As a result, the Tea Party organizations argue, there should be “no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”
“The thing we need to focus on about the Founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” Rounds explained of his interpretation of the legacy of the Founding Fathers.
They talk about how we should focus on the "majority of citizens." Well, when the Constitution was ratified, women could not vote. So that knocks out half the population right there. Of the remaining men, only white men could vote. And out of those remaining white men, only those who were well off, who owned land, had the right to vote. The "majority" was clearly not in control. This is a historical fact, and it is not the least bit controversial to say it.
This post is going to focus on some of the things from new history, things that are not normally taught in classrooms. I've been working on it for like a week, and it's pretty massive, so you don't have to read it all at once I guess. Maybe I should've posted it in segments...
Old history and new history are both important, and you simply cannot get a full grasp on the past if you only delve into one over the other. But I mostly focus on the new version in this blog, because the old is beaten into our heads from birth, and everyone already knows it all. That's the version of history we all dozed off to in high school. This is the interesting stuff.
The American government has never respected or cared about its soldiers. All this cheerleading about "supporting the troops" is complete bullshit -- easy political points to score about something that no one could possibly disagree with. I'll delve into this more later, but this section will focus on the revolution.
It's easy to find people with common knowledge about the Civil War, because that was the first major war where we began seriously documenting the experiences of ordinary people. Photography and journalism had a lot to with it as well. The Revolution, by contrast, is practically mythical. This is on purpose. Good propaganda.
Revolutionary soldier Joseph Plumb Martin published his memoirs in 1830. Martin's writings are extremely important, because they are the only perspective we have of what that war was like for an ordinary person. And the picture Martin paints is not pretty.
When those who engaged to serve during the war enlisted, they were promised a hundred acres of land, each, which was to be in their or the adjoining states. When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses, and nothing said about land to pasture them upon. Congress did, indeed, appropriate lands under the denomination of “Soldier’s Lands,” in Ohio state, or some state, or a future state, but no care was taken that the soldiers should get them. No agents were appointed to see that the poor fellows ever got possession of their lands… The truth is, none cared for them; the country was served, and faithfully served, and that was all that was deemed necessary. It was, soldiers look to yourselves; we want no more of you. I hope I shall one day find land enough to lay my bones in. If I chance to die in a civilized country, none will deny me that. A dead body never begs a grave;—thanks for that.
These were the exact concerns that sparked Shays' Rebellion in 1786. This rebellion was made up almost entirely of war veterans who felt betrayed by the government they fought to form.
When Thomas Jefferson said "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," Shays' Rebellion is what he was referring to. He was very sympathetic to them, and in fact, they had so much popular support in the country that most of them received full pardons, including Daniel Shays himself.
The central government was weak under the Articles of Confederation, and the response was slow and clumsy. It was left that way on purpose so it could be easily overthrown if it ever became oppressive. The Constitution was ratified in response to the rebellion. This threw out the fiery language of the Declaration of Independence from a decade earlier, which states that a government needs to be "altered or abolished" if it became destructive to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In fact, the Constitution largely only protected property owners, taking that famous phrase back to its original meaning when Locke phrased it as "life, liberty, and property." Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who were anticapitalists, and who wrote the Declaration together, didn't feel that it was government's responsibility to protect property at all.
We will never know just how much women could have contributed to the revolution. Women were repressed at this time, and what role they did play has been suppressed by the history books.
John Adams' wife Abigail is often considered to be one of America's first feminists. She writes to her husband about a women's "Coffee Party":
There has been much rout and Noise in the Town for several weeks. Some Stores had been opend by a number of people and the Coffe and Sugar carried into the Market and dealt out by pounds. It was rumourd that an eminent, wealthy, stingy Merchant (who is a Batchelor) had a Hogshead of Coffe in his Store which he refused to sell to the committee under 6 shillings per pound. A Number of Females some say a hundred, some say more assembled with a cart and trucks, marchd down to the Ware House and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon which one of them seazd him by his Neck and tossd him into the cart. Upon his finding no Quarter he deliverd the keys, when they tipd up the cart and dischargd him, then opend the Warehouse, Hoisted out the Coffe themselves, put it into the trucks and drove off. It was reported that he had a Spanking among them, but this I believe was not true. A large concourse of Men stood amazd silent Spectators of the whole transaction.
In March 1776, as full independence was being debated in congress, Abigail writes to John:
I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
John responded with humor.
That's a screenshot from The Patriot. That white guy spends the entire movie being a racist dickhead to that black soldier. By the end of the movie, seen here, white guy learns his lesson, and learns to stand side by side with his black comrade as an equal. Racism: solved. You're welcome, black people.
In the few cases where American blacks fought in the Revolutionary War, they were slaves fighting in exchange for their freedom, which in fairness, is what the Patriot depicts (I think? It's been a few years, only seen it once because it's shit). What they left out was that the slaves were put into completely segregated regiments, and they put a stop to this "slaves fighting for freedom" policy in 1778 because it was too controversial among the whites. If you watch movies like The Patriot, it's as if racism didn't exist in 1781 America, except in one asshole who eventually learned his lesson.
You know what The Patriot didn't show? In 1992, a mass grave was found in New York City filled with tens of thousands of dead slaves.
Half of the remains were of children under the age of 12... “It seems that it was cost effective for slave traders to work people to death and then simply to replace them, so they sought to get Africans who were as young as possible, but ready to work,” said Mr Blakey.
Washington D.C. was built by slaves, and I can't think of any event that better symbolizes our history. This country was built on the sweat, tears, blood, and -- literally -- bodies of millions of Africans. The importation of slaves from Africa became illegal in 1808. This encouraged slaveowners to focus on breeding Africans selectively, like farm animals. Thousands of families were separated and destroyed. In spite of this, the importation law went largely unenforced, and between 1808 and the Civil War, it's estimated that 250,000 slaves were imported illegally.
Most of the founding fathers owned slaves. I've been inside George Washington's slave quarters. It makes us comfortable to explain the founders as products of their time, to say that they just weren't able to understand what they were doing. That doesn't entirely hold up though. There were abolitionists in 1776, and slaveowners were exposed to their arguments. Slavery was hotly debated at the time, and it was purposely left out of the Constitution because they knew they couldn't resolve the issue. There were many founders who opposed slavery, like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine. The first article Paine ever published was an attack on American slavery. This hypocrisy wasn't lost on the British who observed the revolution. It was common for British politicians to point out that the Americans kept Africans in shackles, as they cried out for their own freedom.
Slavery continued in the south for another 80 years after the Civil War, all the way up to World War II. It is one of the most horrifying, despicable, and overlooked aspects of our entire history. A groundbreaking book called "Slavery By Another Name" was published a few years ago. PBS based a documentary off of it, and it actually just aired. It's up online, you should watch it. Here's a promo.
This recording is from 1949. This voice belongs to Fountain Hughes. He was 101 years old, and a former slave who was freed after the Civil War. Here's a transcript in case you want to follow along.
Whenever I hear a white person imply that blacks should just "get over it," that it was a long time ago and it's no longer relevant, I want to throw them out of a fucking window. American history is not a long time. Think about this for some perspective: The last World War I veteran just died. The year she was born is closer to the Napoleonic Wars than 2012. That should blow your fucking mind.
We can go all the way back and read about how institutionalized racism was introduced to lower and middle class whites in the early American colonies. There are recorded instances of poor whites (indentured servants) banding together with Indians and slaves and rebelling against the imperial power structure. Racist propaganda was introduced as a tool to keep the lower classes from banding together. And it worked.
I'm going to get into conspiracy theory territory now, which I'm extremely uncomfortable with. Implying that something might be true based on evidence that's completely circumstantial is a slippery slope, and I don't like doing it. So here's my disclaimer saying that I'm officially undecided about this. Just some things to think about. Once you get into the section about the CIA later on, scenarios like this might seem a little more plausible.
Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover declared the Black Panthers to be the most dangerous threat to the internal security of the United States. It's well documented that the FBI infiltrated black movements like the Panthers and the Nation of Islam, and carried out planned assassinations against black leaders. What was happening in the 60s and 70s, is that the blacks who had been safely tucked away in America's ghettos were getting educated and angry. The radicalized whites who were on their side weren't many, but they were there.
This was dangerous to the American power structure. Sometime in the mid-1970s, huge amounts of drugs started appearing in America's poorest neighborhoods, precisely when the black power movement was reaching its height. We can't forget the Kerry Committee's findings of cocaine smuggling on CIA/contra aircraft, and reports on the CIA intervening to block prosecution of drug smugglers. Additionally, look at Afghanistan right now. There were two major factions in Afghanistan before the U.S. invasion: the Taliban, who were in power, and opium drugs lords. After the U.S. invasion, the drug lords were put into power. This on its own means absolutely nothing. It's the CIA's blueprint to attach itself to different factions in countries around the world, and help them along into power, in exchange for being American puppets. But now, Afghanistan has become a world center for drugs, and the U.S. has allowed it to skyrocket.
Whether or not you actually think that drugs have been deliberately planted into America's poorest neighborhoods -- whether to keep the profiteering war on drugs going, or as a racist backlash against the Civil Rights movement -- one thing is certain: once drugs entered the ghettos, talk about revolution and black power ended. Whites use drugs just as much as blacks and Latinos, but whites are targeted in the war on drugs only 10% of the time. Blacks and Latinos receive longer prison sentences than whites who have committed the same crimes. There are more blacks in prison today than there were blacks enslaved in 1850. A private prison company just sent a letter to 48 states offering them $250 million dollars, in exchange of keeping their prisons at a 90% occupancy rate. America has 4% of the world's population, and 25% of the world's prisoners. It's a bit difficult to say that slavery has technically ended.
The United States was the first country to undertake forced sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics. This program targeted the mentally retarded and the mentally ill, but also targeted Indians and blacks. It lost support after World War II because of its striking similarities to the whole Nazi thing. This program was still going on as late as 1967 (that I can find). Here's a victim speaking out about it.
Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967. The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized. Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.
“I have to carry these scars with me. I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.
Riddick was never told what was happening. “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said. “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”
There are few people in the history of the world that have been so abused and repressed as American blacks. The black "radicals" like Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael are heroes.
Last month, Rick Santorum had this to say about "classes":
The Governor [Mitt Romney] used a term earlier that I shrink from, and it’s one that I don’t think we should be using as Republicans: “Middle class.” There are no classes in America. We’re a country that don’t allow for titles. We don’t put people in classes. Maybe middle income people. But the idea, somehow or another, that we’re going to buy into the class warfare arguments of Barack Obama is something that should not be part of the Republican lexicon. That’s their job. Divide. Separate. Put one group against another. That’s not the language I’ll use as president.
This is exactly the kind of language one uses if he wants the lower classes to shut the fuck up and shrink back into their corners. And the fact that he can say this without getting thrown off the stage says a lot about America's political climate. The United States is probably the only western industrialized country that is not class-conscious. Half the country, or at least the portion stupid enough to vote Republican, accept this mindset without a second thought. They're not poor. They're temporarily embarrassed millionaires!
This isn't new. Religion isn't as dominant over public life as it used to be, so they can't do this anymore, but the bourgeois used to use the fear of God to keep the masses in check, instead of the illusion of an American dream. "You'll be rich someday!" is just a secular substitute for "Shut up, be good, and you'll be rewarded in the afterlife!" They're both illusions, and neither will ever happen.
Workers used to be aware of this. Here's a song called "The Preacher and the Slave," written by union organizer Joe Hill in 1911. Joe Hill was eventually framed for a crime he didn't commit and murdered by firing squad.
The early 1900s is considered to be the high water mark for socialism in the United States. For all the victories that the labor movements achieved for us at this time, they still saw blacks and minorities as competitors for jobs, and were just as racist as the the rest of the country. The far leftists -- the communists, the socialists, the anarchists -- were the only people talking about full equality among all races and genders.
When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle he brought the realities of the working class into the nationwide discussion. Theodore Roosevelt, who is often hailed as a hero for the working class, hated The Jungle. He hated activists like Sinclair, because he felt all they did was complain without offering any solutions. It's easy to come to that conclusion within a capitalist mindset, because there is no solution for these problems under capitalism (our society is still propped up by sweatshops, it's just that those jobs were simply exported to countries like China). Upton Sinclair was a socialist though, so his solution would obviously be socialism. Roosevelt was an imperialist, and he felt the that left-wing radicals were the "enemy of humanity."
Eugene Debs was one of the founding members of the International Workers of the World (IWW), and the leader of the Socialist Party. They were the only people brave enough to speak out against World War I. The 1917 Espionage Act was meant to prosecute people who obstructed the draft. What that meant in practice, is that you would be arrested if you spoke out against the war. In June 1918, Debs visited three socialists who were in prison for opposing the draft, then spoke to an audience across the street from the jail for two hours. He was one of the country's great orators, and was interrupted again and again by laughter and applause. Debs was soon arrested, and spent the remainder of the war in prison. In 1920, he ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket from behind bars and received a million votes. He famously said, "I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it."
Here's actor Mark Ruffalo reading part of the speech that got Debs thrown into prison.
Frank Zappa once said:
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
There is no better example of this than the Ludlow Massacre. In April 1914, inspired by the murder of one of their organizers, coal miners in southern Colorado went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions, and feudal domination over their lives in towns completely controlled by the mining companies. They were immediately evicted from their shacks in the mining towns, and they set up tents in nearby hills. Gunmen hired by Rockefeller interests began terrorizing the camp with Gatling guns and rifles, and the deaths began to rise. The governor called out the National Guard, with the Rockefellers providing their wages. The strikers at first thought the Guard arrived to protect them. They instead began beating miners, arresting people by the hundreds, and using their horses to ride down parades of women.
On the morning of April 20, 1914, the National Guard set up shop outside Ludlow, which housed a thousand men, women, and children. They opened fire on the tents with machine guns. The miners fired back. The strike leader, Lou Tikas, was lured into some hills to discuss a truce, and murdered. Women and children dug pits underneath the tents to escape the gunfire. At dusk, the Guard moved in with torches and set fire to the camp, and the families fled into the hills. The next day, a man going through the ruins of the camp lifted an iron cot covering a pit, and found the charred bodies of eleven children and two women.
The Occupy movement has so far been safely contained that it can't change the way things work, so they've been lucky enough to only suffer chemical attacks and beatings. There's been brief glimpses of people taking their power back in cities like Oakland, and it was subsequently met with force and crushed. Occupiers need to realize the police who do not side with the people are not our friends. If you step too much out of line, they will not hesitate to shoot you and your families.
In the spring and summer of 1932, 20,000 World War I veterans and families, known as the Bonus Army, descended on Washington D.C. demanding that their bonus certificates -- scheduled to be paid years in the future -- be paid now. The stock market crashed, there were no jobs, and their families needed to be fed. President Hoover ordered the army to evict them.
Four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine gun squadron, and six tanks assembled near the White House, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur. Major Dwight Eisenhower was his aide, and George S. Patton was one of the officers. Troops marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, shot gas at families, and set buildings on fire. This was not tear gas. This was adamsite, and it induced vomiting.
The president ordered the attack stopped, but MacArthur, believing the protest was actually a communist attempt to overthrow the government (really), ignored his orders and had bayonets fixed. The whole encampment was soon ablaze. When it was all over, two veterans had been shot to death, a veteran's wife miscarried, an eleven-week-old baby had died, an eight-year-old boy had been partially blinded by gas, the police fractured two skulls, and a thousand veterans had been injured by gas.
In May 1970, campuses had erupted in a nation-wide student strike. The My Lai massacre, in which an estimated 504 women and children had been slaughtered, had been revealed just a few months earlier, as was the secret bombing of Cambodia. Now, Richard Nixon, who had been elected on the promise that he would end the war, was now expanding it even further (sound familiar?). The anti-war movement was fucking pissed.
The Ohio National Guard was called out to the protests at Kent State. They tried to disperse the protesters with tear gas, but it had little effect due to the wind. Protesters started chanting "Pigs off campus!" and began throwing rocks, but they were too far out of range to hit anything. When it was determined that the crowd was not going to disperse, the Guard began advancing on them with bayonets fixed. The crowd retreated over some hills. Some were dispersing, but many stayed and continued to confront the Guard.
At 12:24 pm Sgt. Myron Pryor turned and fired his .45 pistol directly into the crowd. Guardsmen followed suit, and opened fire with their rifles. 67 rounds of ammunition were discharged in 13 seconds. Four students were murdered. Nine were wounded, one being paralyzed for life. Here's a 14-year-old girl kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller.
Howard Zinn wrote, "In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism."
Zinn visited Hiroshima on the 21st anniversary of the bombing. It had a profound impact on him, and made him rethink his role in the second world war.
In the summer of 1966 my wife and I were invited to an international gathering in Hiroshima to commemorate the dropping of the bomb and to dedicate ourselves to a world free of warfare. On the morning of August 6, tens of thousands of people gathered in a park in Hiroshima and stood in total, almost unbearable, silence, awaiting the exact moment—8:16 A.M.—when on August 6, 1945, the bomb had been dropped. When the moment came, the silence was broken by a sudden roaring sound in the air, eerie and frightening until we realized it was the sound of the beating wings of thousands of doves, which had been released at that moment to declare the aim of a peaceful world.
A few days later, some of us were invited to a house in Hiroshima that had been established as a center for victims of the bomb to spend time with one another and discuss common problems. We were asked to speak to the group. When my turn came, I stood up and felt I must get something off my conscience. I wanted to say that I had been an air force bombardier in Europe, that I had dropped bombs that killed and maimed people, and that until this moment I had not seen the human results of such bombs, and that I was ashamed of what I had done and wanted to help make sure things like that never happened again.
I never got the words out, because as I started to speak I looked out at the Japanese men and women sitting on the floor in front of me, without arms, or without legs, but all quietly waiting for me to speak. I choked on my words, could not say anything for a moment, fighting for control, finally managed to thank them for inviting me and sat down.
For the idea that any means—mass murder, the misuse of science, the corruption of professionalism—are acceptable to achieve the end of national power, the ultimate example of our time is Hiroshima. For us, as citizens, the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggests that we reject Machiavelli, that we do not accept subservience, whether to princes or presidents, and that we examine for ourselves the ends of public policy to determine whose interests they really serve. We must examine the means used to achieve those ends to decide if they are compatible with equal justice for all human beings on earth.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian targets, and the atomic bombs were war crimes. Neither the bombs, nor a land invasion, were necessary to end the second world war. This goes completely contrary to what we're taught in school, and you might be confused, so let me explain.
The Russians were not officially at war with Japan. They had secretly agreed to jump in three months after the war in Europe ended. That turned out to be May 8, so they were scheduled to declare war on August 8. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary on July 28 that Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was "most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in." A land invasion, we are told, would have cost up to a million American lives. This was a figure given by Byrnes. Truman claimed General George Marshall gave him an estimate of half a million. These estimates are not realistic, and seemed to have been pulled straight out of the air. On August 6, two days before the Russians were scheduled to declare war, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing perhaps 100,000 people, almost all innocents. The Russians got to Berlin first; Germany would have to be shared. Japan would be occupied only by the Allies. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could arguably be considered the first acts of the Cold War.
A land invasion was not necessary to end the war. Japan had been feeling around for peace for a year, and in fact the only obstacle to it was unconditional surrender. Japan wanted to keep their emperor, but that was something the Allies could not accept.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after the war, and concluded:
"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
Yamaoka Michiko was fifteen years old on the morning of August 6. She writes of her experience:
They say temperatures of seven thousand degrees hit me. You can't really say it washed over me. It's hard to describe. I simply fainted. I remember my body floating in the air. That was probably the blast, but I don't know how far I was blown. When I came to my senses, my surroundings were silent. There was no wind.
[...]
Nobody there looked like human beings. Until that moment I thought incendiary bombs had fallen. Everyone was stupefied. Humans had lost the ability to speak. People couldn't scream, "It hurts!" even when they were on fire. People didn't say, "It's hot!" They just sat catching fire.
My clothes were burnt and so was my skin. I was in rags. I had braided my hair, but now it was like a lion's mane. There were people, barely breathing, trying to push their intestines back in. People with their legs wrenched off. Without heads. Or with faces burned and swollen out of shape. The scene I saw was a living hell.
Mom didn't say anything when she saw my face and I didn't feel any pain. She just squeezed my hand and told me to run. She was going to rescue my aunt. Large numbers of people were moving away from the flames. My eyes were still able to see, so I made my way towards the mountain, where there was no fire, towards Hijiyama. On this flight I saw a friend of mine from the phone exchange. She'd been inside her house and wasn't burned. I called her name, but she didn't respond. My face was so swollen she couldn't tell who I was. Finally, she recognized my voice. She said, "Miss Yamaoka, you look like a monster!" That's the first time I heard that word. I looked at my hands and saw my own skin hanging down and the red flesh exposed. I didn't realize my face was swollen up because I was unable to see it.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only instances of the Allies deliberately bombing civilians en masse. Saturation bombings of German cities in Europe killed hundreds of thousands of people (this campaign was the first time napalm was used in warfare). In Dresden alone, 100,000 people were killed, more than in Nagasaki. The fire-bombing of Tokyo killed 80,000. To this day, no one has been able to justify why a second atomic bomb had to be dropped on Nagasaki (Nagasaki was a plutonium bomb, whereas Hiroshima was a uranium bomb; some historians suggest it was an experiment). At the Nuremberg trials, it became a common defense for the Nazis to find instances where the Allies had committed the same crimes they had. The Allies sure weren't going to prosecute themselves, so then the war criminals would get off.
When the concentration camps were liberated in 1945, homosexual prisoners were not freed, but were instead made to serve out the rest of their sentences. For all our criticisms of the Germans for their belief in racial superiority, the white Americans weren't all that different. African Americans were being lynched, bombed, and kidnapped and enslaved as punishment for made up crimes. The heroic stories of black soldiers like Doris Miller, or of the Tuskegee airmen are stressed in history classes, but the overall indifference that the black community as a whole felt towards World War II is not widely known. Lawrence Wittner quotes a black journalist:
"The Negro . . . is angry, resentful, and utterly apathetic about the war. 'Fight for what?' he is asking. 'This war doesn't mean a thing to me. If we win I lose, so what?'"
A student at a black college told his teacher:
"The Army jim-crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon. What more could Hitler do than that?"
When NAACP leader Walter White repeated this to a black audience of several thousand, he was expecting them to disapprove. Instead, "To my surprise and dismay the audience burst into such applause that it took me some thirty or forty seconds to quiet it."
Anti-Japanese hysteria swept the country after Pearl Harbor. One Congressman advocated genocide: "I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps. . . . Damn them! Let's get rid of them!" Here's actress Sandra Oh reading Yuri Kochiyama, who was held in one of our camps as a young woman. Kochiyama stressed that the camps they were held in were not the death camps of Europe, but they were still concentration camps, and we should remember them as such.
Howard Zinn writes of the post-war world:
The victors were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work—without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of "socialism" on one side, and "democracy" on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to do. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques-crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States—to make their rule secure.
In the 1962 political thriller novel Seven Days in May, the military plots to oust the president and establish marshal law. They planned to get the people on their side by invoking false images of danger from the communists, when in fact there was none. The book was influenced by right-wing anti-communist political rhetoric. When President Kennedy read it, he felt it was a realistic scenario that could actually happen. The Pentagon did not want the 1964 film to be made. The production team received encouragement from Kennedy himself, and he conveniently arranged a weekend trip away when they needed to shoot outside the White House.
Imagine if the Gestapo had the support of the world's only superpower, and you are imagining the CIA. The CIA is one of the most powerful, dangerous, and evil entities of the modern world. Rising out of the ashes of World War II, the CIA's startup conveniently matches up with when the United States began its international war on what we now call the third world. Conventional imperialism was already bad, but this new type of secretive war -- what could arguably be considered World War III -- is something new entirely, and it continues on to this day. The United States has legally been in a "state of emergency" since the Korean War. Since the end of World War II, the United States has killed an estimated 8 million people in the third world -- about as many as were killed in the holocaust.
The only difference between the modern era, and what we think of as the "Age of Imperialism" -- late 1800s, early 1900s -- is that the old school imperialists fought their wars openly. Nationalism, "God & Country," and all that, were huge things, so they didn't have to much worry about public protests. And the few dissenters that did arise, they could just lock up.
The 60s generation changed everything. The masses stopped mindlessly playing along. If the west wanted to continue their imperialist wars, they needed to change tactics. Modern secret services allow the west to expand their empire covertly, on smaller scales, with little risk of public backlash. These secretive wars sometimes escalate into huge catastrophes, like what happened in Vietnam, but they always try to keep a lid on them. The modern era is stuck in a mindset that we are somehow "wiser" than previous generations who conducted wars for land, power, and resources. We are not.
The CIA does not target regimes for being totalitarian, and they do not spread freedom out of the good of their hearts. They target foreign governments that are in conflict with U.S. business interests. These are almost always democracies, since global capitalism is the natural antithesis to democracy.
These are some heavy claims, and I don't make them lightly. So here's are a few examples.
The point of destabilization is to put pressure on the targeted government by ripping apart the social and economic fabric of the country. These are only words, "social and economic fabric," but what they mean is making innocent people suffer as much as humanly possible, until the country plunges into chaos, and you can step in and impose the government of your choosing. This has been done over 50 times since the end of World War II.
The Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua in 1979. We will never know what this government would've looked like if it had been left on its own without U.S. intervention. Everything they did after 1979 was in the shadow of U.S. manipulations and covert military attacks on their country. However, we do know there was no bloodbath after they took over. They abolished the death penalty at the exact moment the U.S. reinstated it. They released thousands of the hated National Guardsmen in their custody, saying that they would not jail anyone simply for having belonged to an organization; they would have to be convicted of individual crimes. This is in stark contrast of what happened in Cuba, which saw mass executions of political opponents after their own revolution.
The Sandinistas launched a literacy campaign to teach every Nicaraguan to read and write. They set out to build 2,500 clinics so their citizens could have some access to some kind of medical treatment. The first official action the Sandinstas took was to establish a ministry of the environment, to combat the massive pollution and waste the Somoza regime had allowed foreign corporations to dump into the nation's two huge, beautiful lakes. They insisted that the church should be one of the people -- not to be used as a tool for the rich and the wealthy.
It was about 1981 when the contras were formed. Our CIA mercenaries began training and arming this army, and directing them in attacks from Honduras inside Nicaragua. They blew up granaries, sawmills, bridges, government offices, schools, health centers, mines. There were assassinations of hundreds of teachers, religious leaders, health workers, elected officials, and government administrators. The contras forced children to watch as they castrated their fathers, raped their mothers and slashed off their breasts, or forced parents to watch as they mutilated their children. 45,000 people were killed or wounded.
There was a massive propaganda campaign to get Americans hating Nicaragua. Reagan started saying that there was a communist alliance between Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua. After the invasion of Grenada in 1983, bumper stickers on pickup trucks started saying, "Nicaragua Next!" They claimed the Sandinistas were smuggling drugs to finance their revolution, and circulated a staged photograph of a CIA agent landing a plane in Panama, and kicking some bales of pot out on the runway. The U.S. blamed "communism" for Nicaragua's problems, ignoring the contras who were raping and massacring the country. One thing that was not on the Sandanista's minds: plowing through Mexico and invading the most powerful nation on earth from its southern border, just 'cause. They claimed that would happen too.
Here's a trailer for a movie that came out in 1984 called "Red Dawn." In this movie, the Nicaraguans ally with Russia and invade the U.S. The producer went on television and announced that it was his purpose to draw people back to war, that this was a real scenario and we should all be worried. It was shown in Marine boot camps to motivate people. It's just complete insanity, none of it makes any god damn sense.
This shit about the contras all came out in 1986, and Reagan the actor once again hid himself behind his fake populist swagger, defiantly exclaiming, "I am a contra, too." He claimed the contras were the moral equivalent to America's founding fathers.
The rationale behind this destabilization was your typical red-baiting fascist bullshit. We were "fighting Communism" for "national security." They were a "Marxist bastion in our own backyard." We were "returning Nicaragua to democracy." When it was pointed out that Nicaragua didn't have a democracy before the Sandinistas, the rhetoric was changed to the "democratization of Nicaragua," ignoring the fact that Nicaragua had a free election in 1984 that was demonstrably more democratic than the elections we have here in the United States. The Nicaraguans eventually cried uncle and voted in the CIA puppet to get the contras to stop. So the operation was a success.
In 1973, the CIA toppled the democratic government of Chile and helped install the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. 3,000 people are confirmed dead under Pinochet's rule, and 1,000 more are still missing. 400,000 people were tortured. On the weekend following Pinochet's coup, this was the conversation taking place over the phone between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger:
K: The newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
N: Isn't that something. Isn't that something.
BECAUSE THE MEDIA ARE A BUNCH OF COMMUNISTS, I GOT YA NIXON.
K: I mean instead of celebrating - in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
N: Well we didn't - as you know - our hand doesn't show on this one though.
K: We didn't do it. I mean we helped them. ________ created the conditions as great as possible(?)
N: That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played. But listen, as far as people are concerned let me say they aren't going to buy this crap from the Liberals on this one.
K: Absolutely not.
N: They know it is a pro-Communist government and that is the way it is.
K: Exactly. And pro-Castro.
N: Well the main thing was. Let's forget the pro-Communist. It was an anti-American government all the way.
K: Oh, wildly.
Salvador Allende was a socialist. He was freely elected in Chile's first ever democratic election. Here, we have the leaders of the United States admitting among themselves that they will not accept the results of democracy if it interferes with their own economic interests. Food for thought.
Nixon also wanted to drop a nuclear bomb on Vietnam. Here's his recorded conversation with Kissinger, where he throws out the idea, after casually mentioning that he would also like to destroy dikes and drown 200,000 people. Both suggestions are war crimes.
Democrats love pointing out the contras to bash Reagan, but they aren't innocent either. Their memories often seem to fade around Operation Mongoose under their man Kennedy.
Operation Mongoose was the very definition of terrorism. The CIA blew up Cuban hotels, sunk fishing boats, blew up industrial installations, and bombed airplanes. At one point, Mongoose almost blew up the world. After Kennedy and Khrushcev had reached a deal ending the Cuban missile crisis, the Russians met with the Cubans to get the missiles. The popular belief is that the Cubans were just Russian puppets, but that's not true, the Cubans had their own interests (mainly, getting the U.S. to not fucking invade them). The Russians didn't actually have physical control over the missiles, and the Cubans didn't want to give them up. In November 1962, there was a standoff between Cuban and Russian forces, over who actually gets control of the missiles. It was a very tense moment, and no one knew what was going to happen. Then right in the middle of it, boom, one of Mongoose's bombs go off, kills 400 factory workers. We're lucky the Cubans didn't actually react, or there would've been nuclear war.
The CIA was so god damn determined to spark an invasion of Cuba that they were willing to launch terrorist attacks on American citizens for it. The proposals in Operation Northwoods consisted of hijackings and bombings of American targets, and falsifying evidence to blame it on the Cuban government. Kennedy rejected it and fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The CIA still refuses to release all the details about the Bay of Pigs because it would "confuse the public."
In 1998, Bill Clinton destroyed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. This factory supplied 90% of the medicine for that entire country. As a result of the bombing, tens of thousands of people died from perfectly treatable illnesses, many of them children. This was amplified by our own sanctions on Sudan, which further prevented medicine from reaching them. Sudan sought a UN inquiry into the justifications for the bombing, which was blocked by Washington.
On the home front, the FBI launched COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was designed to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" groups the FBI deemed to be a threat. These included communist and socialist organizations, white hate groups, and black power groups. It also included the targeting of Americans like Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr., who were both socialists. King had an affair with another woman, and the FBI had the room bugged and recorded it. Then they used it to try to blackmail him. Their demands: commit suicide. Here's the letter they sent him:
King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability … you are no clergyman, and you know it. … You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. … You are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done. No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. … The American public, the church organizations that have been helping — Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are — an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do [it]. … You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
Remember, the government was mostly on board with King at this point, on the civil rights movement. What was bothering them was King's strong language against the Vietnam War. "Beyond Vietnam" is one of King's best speeches, and it scared the everloving shit out of them.
COINTELPRO was also responsible for a number of assassinations of activist leaders, the most popular example of which is Fred Hampton, who was drugged and murdered in his bed. COINTELPRO "officially" ended once it was exposed, but its tactics are still going on to this day. A scandal just broke where the NYPD has been monitoring innocent people for the crime of being Muslim. One agent followed a group of friends on a rafting trip. The CIA won't disclose its involvement in Occupy Wall Street crackdowns. Expect more language labeling activism as terrorism very soon.
The United States only supports democratic movements when it's convenient. The U.S. supports their allies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Bahrain when they forcefully suppress democratic movements; but as they arise in countries that are diplomatically opposed to U.S. interests -- Libya, Syria, or Iran -- those regimes have to be called out and opposed. The Obama administration just found a loophole to sneak past congress and get weapons to the regime in Bahrain. Russia and China just blocked UN action on the Syrian crisis; they are doing the exact same thing. The Arab Spring is not about democracy to the world powers. It is a game of dominance and influence. The United States is no exception to this.
I could go on and on and on about this shit. Thanks to the bipartisan efforts of the Bush and Obama administrations, and the cowardice and passivity of the American people, the CIA now operates virtually unchecked. May this military-industrial nightmare one day collapse, and the countless generations yet unborn judge us all with hatred and contempt.
Sources:
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Slavery By Another Name by Douglass Blackmon
The Praetorian Guard by John Stockwell
9/11 by Noam Chomsky
Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky
Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges
Further reading:
Overthrow by Steven Kinzer
Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges
Profit Over People by Noam Chomsky
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