A Nagasaki Report
By George Weller
 American reporter George Weller |
[from the website: American George Weller was the first foreign reporter to enter Nagasaki following the U.S. atomic attack on the city on Aug. 9, 1945. Weller wrote a series of stories about what he saw in the city, but censors at the Occupation’s General Headquarters refused to allow the material to be printed.]
Link via Zeynep Toufe who is blogging from the World Tribunal on Iraq and is dismayed and concerned by the growing level of indifference and dislike for Americans:
This is not just a sad turn of events; it is a profoundly dangerous situation for the American people. Mass murder of civilians is rarely the work of lonesome nuts operating totally outside of societal norms and beliefs. On the contrary, scratch the surface of most of the horrors of the twentieth century, and you will find a cold, cruel belief that the victims brought it upon themselves. Everyone shakes their head and loudly condemns the atrocity once the bodies are cold and deep under the earth; however, a close examination of the events as they occurred often reveals that there was an implicit and explicit turning of hearts and faces away from the people who ended up slaughtered. The perception of indifference and complicity of the American people to the crimes committed by their government is obviously not a good development.
Americans’ indifference to their gov’t’s war crimes is not a new phenomenon. And whilst failing to learn from history is not new, it can’t be ignored that the resurrected campaign against antiwar activists/war critics has been very successfull in altering the dynamics of a tolerant albeit dismissive attitude towards groups like the (website) Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament into one so irrational to be absurd, that this frontal attack on individual rights and liberties continues to claim victims, or that it retains so much popular support that vilifying the “rabidly anti-military Left” is regarded as one of the most potent and reliable tricks Rove can pull out of his hat to distract attention from his increasingly unpopular charge. Democrats enable its success, as Paul Street so effectively emphasises, drawing upon Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War [New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005]:
In the partisan political world, Bacevich notes, “the political Right has shown considerable skill in exploiting this dynamic, shamelessly pandering to the military itself and by extension to those members of the public laboring under the misconception, a residue from Vietnam, that the armed service are under siege from a rabidly anti-military Left.”
But, Bacevich hastens to add, the New American Militarism is a richly bipartisan affair. By his account, “the Democratic mainstream – if only to save itself from extinction – has long purged itself of any dovish inclinations. When it comes to advocating the use of force,” Bacevich notes, “Democrats can be positively gung-ho. Moreover, in comparison to their Republican counterparts, they are at least as deferential military leaders and probably more reluctant to questions claims of expertise “(Bacevich, p. 24).
This was clearly displayed in Kerry’s 2004 campaign, which “did not question the wisdom of styling the U.S. response to the events of 9/11 as a generation-long ‘global war on terror.’ It was not the prospect of open-ended war that drew Kerry’s ire. It was simply that the war had been ‘extraordinarily mismanaged and ineptly prosecuted” (Bacevich, p. 15). As I argue in a forthcoming ZNet Sustainer Commentary, the Democratic ‘opposition” candidate did not seriously oppose George W. Bush’s illegal and immoral and occupation of Iraq or the culture of messianic militarism that Bush has advanced. John “Reporting for Duty” Kerry ran on the claim that he was more qualified to properly finish the Iraqi mission. “I,” Kerry proclaimed (to crudely paraphrase), “am the better, more sophisticated man of empire. I am also,” he added, “the only presidential candidate with direct service in the American military assault on Vietnam.”
Liberals opposed to the Bush Doctrine need to wake up and realise they have no champion coming to the rescue from the Democrat party and redirect their outrage accordingly. Peter Beinart has been rooting about the Brookings Institute for several months doing research for a book he hopes will explain why liberals’ blood runs cold on Iraq when these same humanitarian interventionists fervently supported the global crime sprees of Bill Clinton. Unless he’s experienced an epiphany since this C-Span interview, it’ll be rife with the same red baiting rhetoric the GOP employs as his mission is to further erode support for the antiwar movement and invigorate support for “staying the course” in Iraq and moving beyond to “spread freedom and democracy” to the Arab world. I expect an endless diatribe against the “soft” underbelly of American liberalism that has “no alternative model for how they would create a more just world if America were to retreat,” one that ignores the very people and organisations more eminently qualified and willing to argue the case than Michael Moore and MoveOn.org. ever did or claimed to have an interest in doing, strawmen for his propagandist endeavour.
Instead of demanding Rove’s resignation for exercising the First Amendment antiwar Democrats should be demanding to know why their party continually sets them up to look the fools. These parasitic, money-grubbing campaigns free Rove and “stay the course” Democrats from addressing real issues. Why was “an Iraqi reporter working for an American news organization..shot and killed in Baghdad by U.S. troops after he apparently did not respond to a shouted signal from a military convoy” and AP cameraman Amer Ali arrested in Fallujah?