U.S. hostility, injury, insult: Middle East to the Americas

Create international crisis, patch it, castigate patch ─ U.S. global relations model

Editing and commentary by Carolyn Bennett

U.S. officials execute and provoke war and conflict, destroy lives and place, displace millions and insult them with lectures, condescension and handouts. And if immigrants land on U.S. soil, they are met with xenophobia and more violence.

U.S. in Middle East  

The death toll in Syria continues to rise. During Ramadan this year, the numbers exceeded 4,400.

Syrians’ needs are so great, the Obama government’s Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees and Migration, Kelly Clements, admits, “…We cannot keep up”  with the need for “humanitarian” assistance. 

Of course, most same people know that arming groups to overthrow a nation’s government or to depose a head of state or sending drones onto a country is not “humanitarian” and is not helping the people of Syria or anywhere else.

Deep and lasting injury: U.S. foreign relations model in violence throughout Middle East

3.5 million people are estimated to become Syrian refugees by year’s end and will be in neighboring countries of Jordan (now hosting 454,000 registered Syrian refugees), Lebanon (now hosting 564,000 registered Syrian refugees), Turkey, Iraq and Egypt

 

…1.9 million are projected to be in desperate need of assistance by year’s end

…6.8 million Syrians are currently in need of humanitarian assistance

 

U.S. insult tops injury

In the face of another enormous tragedy the United States helped create in and around Syria, the Obama government is reportedly promising to make refugees jump through hoops well into next year and to consider and maybe accept “2,000” out of millions of them.

“Responding to the rapidly deteriorating conditions,” RT is reporting, the Obama government has agreed “to take in 2,000 Syrian war victims who will be given permanent residence status ─ “a fraction of a percent of Syrian refugees in need of assistance.”

U.S. State Department representative Kelly Clements is reported saying, “Referrals will come within the next four months (and) we will need to interview people and perform security and medical checks.” The U.S. application process involves “extensive background screenings” and takes months to complete.

U.S. in the Americas

Immigrants greeted with U.S. hostility

Virulent anti-immigrant acts not seen in nearly 100 years

The U.S.-based Southern Poverty Law Center reports U.S. “anti-immigrant hate groups have proliferated since the late 1990s ─ when anti-immigration xenophobia (irrational fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything different or that is perceived ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’, when strange and foreign and different are themselves deemed bad or deviant) began to rise to levels not seen in the United States since the 1920s.”

The “anti-immigrant” haters, SPLC says, “are the most extreme of the hundreds of nativist and vigilante groups.…

 

Although many groups criticize high levels of immigration and some (categorized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as ‘nativist extremist’ groups) typically confront or harass individual immigrants and their supporters, anti-immigrant hate groups generally go further by pushing racist propaganda.

Ignorance powers fear, bigotry, hatred

Neighbors, fellow human beings become and create enemies

 In the case of “Americans,’” one salient article reads, “the distinction between Latin America and Anglo-America is a convention based on predominant languages in the Americas by which Romance-language and English-speaking cultures are distinguished.

“Neither area is culturally or linguistically homogeneous. …

Though the SPLC’s frame of U.S. anti’s has mainly focused on anti-Latin Americans, the United States has a hostile, xenophobic attitude toward the world’s peoples.

And considering the United States’ depressed educational and health systems, its corrupt government and inept governing, its neglect of the public good as it drains the country’s energy and wealth in one after foreign war and manufactured crisis ─ the rational course of action would be to recall the current governors and to throw out the entrenched U.S. foreign relations model. Take care of home and stop engaging in and provoking violence around the world.

Sources and notes

“U.S. ready to accept thousands of Syrian refugees,” August 9, 2013,

http://rt.com/usa/usa-syria-refugees-thousands-309/

“U.S. to let in 2,000 Syrian refugees ─ The United States has for the first time decided to let nearly 2,000 Syrian refugees for permanent resettlement in America, a report says,” August 10, 2013  http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/10/318081/us-to-let-it-2000-syrian-refugees/

“Anti-Immigrant,” http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/anti-immigrant

“Essay: The Anti-Immigrant Movement” by Heidi Beirich, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/anti-immigrant/the-anti-immigrant-movement

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society.

Founded by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. in 1971, the SPLC is internationally known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is based in Montgomery, Alabama, the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement, and has offices in Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami, Florida and Jackson, Mississippi. http://www.splcenter.org/who-we-are

LATIN AMERICA 

Argentina	Bolivia	Brazil	Chile
Colombia	Costa Rica	Cuba	Dominican Republic
Ecuador	El Salvador	Guatemala	Haiti
Honduras	Mexico	Nicaragua	Panama
Paraguay	Peru	Uruguay	Venezuela

“The distinction between Latin America and Anglo-America is a convention based on the predominant languages in the Americas by which Romance-language and English-speaking cultures are distinguished. Neither area is culturally or linguistically homogeneous. …

In contemporary usage, “Latin America refers to territories in America where the Spanish or Portuguese languages prevail: Mexico, most of Central and South America, and in the Caribbean, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico – in summary, Hispanic America and Brazil.…

“In a more literal definition, which remains faithful to the original usage, Latin America designates all of those countries and territories in the Americas where a Romance language (i.e., languages derived from Latin, and hence the name of the region) is spoken:

Spanish, Portuguese, and French, and the creole languages based upon these. Considering this definition, Quebec, in Canada, is technically part of Latin America as well. But this region is rarely considered so, since its history, distinctive culture, economy, geographical location and British-inspired political institutions are generally deemed too closely intertwined with the rest of Canada.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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68 years still flexing might, killing innocents: Far to Near East, Hiroshima to Syria

When will poverty eradication trump nuclear proliferation?

Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett 

Mass destruction some can never forget

A thousand people set out in early May on three-month peace march that would take them from Tokyo to Hiroshima. ETA two days ago. Among the thousand was 74-year-old Yasuo Shiose, orphaned at age 7 when he lost his parents and two older brothers in the bombing of Hiroshima (Japan Times).

The peace marchers called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation. Banners and stickers read:

‘Let’s abolish nuclear weapons’

YES PEACE’

‘We don’t need nuclear weapons’

‘We don’t need nuclear power’

Yasuo Shiose was quoted saying, ‘I will walk with the aim achieving a peaceful world free of nuclear weapons and wars.’

 

Mass destruction some must always remember 

I

n the United States we too must remember. Remember the suffering we caused and still cause. Work together to correct the character and ethos; end the destruction. 

1945: Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima: “On this day in 1945, the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The blast killed more than 70,000 people and destroyed most of the city.” [Britannica]

 

Today in London Hundreds of protesters gathered in Tavistock Square to remember those killed and otherwise affected in the U.S. nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War.

E

ast Asian Studies Professor Christine J. Hong spoke with Press TV and this is some of what she said about U.S. hostilities against the Far East then and now.

“The bombings of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) were not justified by any military necessity even though Secretary of State Henry Stimson retroactively tried to impute a military rationality to these actions.

They were just an act of terror.

In fact, the propaganda value of the United States’ being the first user decimating a civilian population has served the United States’ purposes in terms of terrorizing the rest of the world, and especially its historic foes.

“When you have the United States flexing its nuclear might and when it has a history of creating massive civilian causalities, keep in mind that North Korea sustained an estimated 3.5 million deaths at the hands of a U.S. bombing holocaust and the United States has threatened North Korea ─ more than nine times ─ with a nuclear first-strike.

“Against that kind of record, as well as U.S. opposition to conditions of the armistice agreement, nuclear weapons in South Korea from the late 1950’s until the 1990’s ─ North Korea has seen very little other alternative than to develop nuclear self-defense as a means of guaranteeing its sovereignty.

“…You see the same thing in Iran and other places around the world that … stand as targets of a possible U.S. intervention.”

Professor Hong concludes

Indicated in today’s remembrance of Hiroshima is the message that “in the interest of responsible, rational and sane coexistence,” the people of the United States must “have a very vivid and very embodied sense of what it means to be on the devastating receiving end of U.S. foreign policy.”

C

ampaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) General Secretary Kate Hudson told the press that documents recently declassified by the United States National Archives and Records Administration show that “London played a key role in Washington’s decision to carry out the nuclear attacks” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in whose wake more than “340,000 people have died.”

CTBTO: Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO Preparatory Commission or CTBTO Prep Com) is an international organization based in Vienna, Austria, that is tasked with preparing the activities of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) is a multilateral treaty by which states agree to ban all nuclear explosions in all environments, for military or civilian purposes. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on September 10, 1996; but it has not entered into force due to the non-ratification of eight specific states.

UN remembers, urges disarmament

CTBTO Executive Secretary Lassina Zerbo said the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remind us “of what horrors nuclear weapons can inflict.”

However, key states have failed to ratify the treaty. Of 195 UN General Assembly Member States: 183 have signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, 159 have ratified it.

Standing in the way of the treaty’s entry into force are “Annex 2 States,” which have failed to ratify: 

China 

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Egypt

India 

Iran 

Israel 

Pakistan 

United States of America

UN General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic, speaking at the Peace Memorial Ceremony in Hiroshima, said he hoped for “a significant step forward in fulfilling our goal to excise atomic weapons so that the suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of sixty-eight years ago may never repeat.”

In his message to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reminded the gathering of the obvious: that disarmament means life; it frees up resources better channeled to address world poverty, hunger, disease. Nuclear disarmament, he said, “can contribute to our efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 and support the realization of a sustainable future for all humankind.”

 

A Requiem

Those days in August all those years ago, “I felt very sad,” author and broadcaster Allen L Roland writes. “A deep soul-connected part of me innately knew that the world would never be the same,” he said.

I also sensed at that exact moment the collective loss of thousands of Japanese children ─ children like myself ─ who were incinerated, maimed and left homeless by these unnecessary, barbaric attacks. 

“I … had a profound feeling that something very ominous for humanity had just happened ─ and I was right!  We now had the means to completely destroy humankind ─ particularly, evidently, yellow and brown races.”

In constant acts of carnage down to contemporary times, from the U. S. war on Vietnam through its war on Afghanistan (and other countries), “tens of thousands of innocent children have been killed and maimed and left homeless,” Roland observes; and “now drone (unmanned aerial vehicles or UAV) attacks are the preferred American method of killing and maiming the innocent ─ without having to shoulder the ‘moral’ responsibility for these unnecessary deaths.” Carnage endlessly executed “under the same, now badly frayed American imperialistic flag of freedom, liberty and democracy.”

Sources and notes 

“U.S. nuclear weapons lead to global nuclear competition: Hong” (Press TV has conducted an interview with UC Santa Cruz assistant professor Christine J. Hong to discuss the issue of United States’ use of the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians during the World War II. August 6, 2013, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/06/317455/us-nukes-lead-to-nuclear-rivalry/

Christine J. Hong is University of California-Santa Cruz Assistant Professor in the Division Humanities Division, Department Literature Department. Her affiliations are East Asian Studies, History of Art/Visual Culture; her research Interests: Asian American literature and cultural criticism; African American literature and black freedom studies; Korean diasporic cultural production; Pacific Rim studies; postcolonial theory; comparative critical race studies; human rights; law and literature; narrative theory; film and visual studies, http://literature.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=cjhong

“A Statement of Peace, or an Epitaph” (Robert Scheer’s Columns) August 6, 2013,

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_statement_of_peace_or_an_epitaph_20130806/

“100s will rally in London to remember victims of U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan, August 6, 2013,

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/06/317448/antinukes-activists-to-rally-in-london/

“Requiem for The Children of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan” (Allen L Roland), August 6, 2013, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/08/06/requiem-for-the-children-of-hiroshima-nagasaki-vietnam-iraq-and-afghanistan/

Allen L Roland is a Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist. He is also a practicing psychotherapist and author and lecturer who also shares political and social commentary on his website: AllenRoland.com. He guest hosts Truthtalk, a national radio show that airs monthly.

“Three-month peace march sets out for Hiroshima” (Kyodo), May 7, 2013, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/05/07/national/three-month-peace-march-sets-out-for-hiroshima/#.UgFI32zD-1s

  

CTBTO: Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization

CTBTO Preparatory Commission or CTBTO Prep Com: an international organization based in Vienna, Austria, that is tasked with preparing the activities of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).

The organization was established by the states that signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996 and will cease to exist upon the entry into force of the CTBT. It builds, certifies and operates the infrastructure for detection of Nuclear Tests, prepares regulations for the CTBTO and stimulates entry into force of the CTBT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTBTO

CTBT: The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) is a multilateral treaty by which states agree to ban all nuclear explosions in all environments, for military or civilian purposes. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on September 10, 1996; but it has not entered into force due to the non-ratification of eight specific states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty

  

“On anniversary of Hiroshima atomic bombing,” UN officials urge nuclear disarmament, August 6, 2013, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=45574&Cr=nuclear&Cr1=#.UgFd4mzD-1s

Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first city in the world to be struck by an atomic bomb, which was dropped by a B-29 bomber of the U.S. Air Forces.

Most of the city was destroyed, and estimates of the number killed outright or shortly after the blast have ranged upward from 70,000. Deaths from radiation injury have mounted through the years.

Nagasaki

In the early 20th century the Nagasaki became a major shipbuilding center and it was this industry that led to U.S. targeting for the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan. The bomb was dropped on August 9, 1945. It destroyed the innermost portion of Nagasaki; between 60,000 and 80,000 people were killed. Exact figures are difficult to come by because many records were destroyed by the bomb and the overall devastation of the area made accurate accounting for casualties impossible.

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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