NOTHING TO SAY

Deapair, despair, despair.

WHAT GOOD THINGS $52,000,000,000 A YEAR COULD DO


First, thank yowould long ago have been pushed off the world at the South Pole.u, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, for the brave and immensely valuable service to the world which you have provided.

Second,  rhank you, Washington Post, for printing stories about our disastrous country.

Third, what could the United States government do with $52,000,000,000 a year to make the United States a better, safer place?  Or to relieve poverty and despair in the "third world"?

It occurs to me that the United States is perhaps the first "fourth world" country.  We are the biggest negative influence on the world, the most dangerous country in the world, and the largest debtor nation--the biggest bankrupt--in human history.

If it weren't that the United States has thousands of nuclear weapons and a unique record of having used them, the United States.

I have absolutely no faith that the United States can ever be a decent nation, and sometimes I have little hope that the rest of the world can survive in a world which includes the United States.  But individuals like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden give me some hope, and nations like Germany make me believe that civilisation is possible.  And lots of young people, all over the world, help me to think beyond the dangerous disaster that the United States has become in my lifetime.

                                                                   Bert G. Hornback

Emeritus Professor of Engllish, University of Michigan
Captain, United States Marine Corps (resigned)

WHEN CRIMINALS IMPOSE THE LAW

WHEN CRIMINALS IMPOSE THE LAW

            The United States has been violating international law for years now, invading Vietnam, running its proxy war against Nicaragua, trying repeatedly to assassinate Fidel Castro, invading Grenada, bombing Libya.

            Chelsea Manning revealed American war crimes in Afghanista, and instead of prosecuting the murderers the United States tried—and convicted—Manning.  In fact, he was convicted before he was even brought to trial, before his months and months of torture at Quantico began:  President Obama declared that Manning had “broken the law.”  The American news media reported this statement—and the President didn’t even bother to deny he had said it.

            For the past month, the United States has been trying to trap William Snowden, who has revealed more American crimes:  this time, egregious electronic spying.  Does the United States apologise?  Of course not.  Instead, it bullies everybody in the world to try to get its hands on Snowden.

            “We won’t execute him,” the United States government officials promise.  No, but they might send him to their illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo, and torture him for the rest of his life.

            And now the United States is threatening Syria.  According to the Americans, the Syrians  may have used poison gas on dissidents—whom the United States supports.

            The United States has used nuclear weapons (twice), and napalm (for five years) in Vietnam.  Lieutenant William Calley ordered his platoon to kill all the people in the Vietnamese village of My Lai—and led his troops in doing it; and though he was court-martialed and convicted of mass murder, he was released and allowed to go home.  Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon did a month’s saturation bombing of Cambodia  for Christmas of 1972.  In 1992 the United States buried hundreds of Iraqi soldiers alive in the desert sand (General Colin Powell ordered that).  And in the Americans’ current (and continuing) war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they use drones to kill people—who are always reported to have been “enemy combatants.”

            Sure.  The whole world is America’s enemy.  The line runs straight from  Athens to Rome to the United States.  Gengis Kahn, Napoleon, Hitler, Hirohito—they were all minor megalomaniacs.  But  Athens and Rome—at their worst—are the only rivals to the United States.

            And President Obama wants to attack Syria. 

WAR AGAINST WAR

What does it mean?  Mr. Obama is engaged in wars and  wars against somebody--he doesn''k know whom--in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and he threatens to go to war, now, against Syria.

His predecessors in the last fifty bloody years have gone to war against Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Libya, and Grenada.  They tried (1958) to have a war in Lebanon, and they tried more than thirty times to assassinate Fidel Castro.  They would love to go to war against Venezuela.  They have been engaged in wars in former Yugoslavia,and  in Somalia.

My whole life has been America-at-War.  World War II, the Korean War, the invasion of Lebanon (I participated in that one--but nobody would fight with us), Cuba |(constantly against  Fidel Castro's Cuba).. Vietnam, then Laos and Cambodia.  Nicaragua.  Carter tried to invade Iran, to rescue 40 or so CIA agents; we couldn't identify them, or how many of them they were, because they were all CIA agents using multiple passports.

I had a big-mouthed, intelligent, stupid friend at CIA in the 60s and 70s.  He was proud of his work, and--vanitas vanitatus--loved to talk about what he was doing.  When, as the agent assigned to the Vatican desk (???) ; he recommended that the US take Berlin by force, for this,  he was promoted--to the Vietnam desk. |He claimed that the CIA started training CIA infiltrators in Vietnam in 1962.

Vietnam.  (Does anybody remember Lt. Calley?  He was convictged of mass murder, but then released..)
Napalm?  (Dow Chemical Company--the Napalm people--gave the University of Michigan a very fancy chemistry building once Robben Fleming had retired as presidennt of the university.  Mr. Fleming would not have accepted their money--but when President Fleming retired, Harold Shapiro--his craven successor-- accepted Dow's gift!)

Continuing the violence, the aggression:  the Christmas saturation bombing of Cambodia--and Gerald Ford's incursion into North Vietnam.

If you have thousands and thousands oif nuclear bombs, and a record of having used them--twice--people are scared of you.

Once the USA got out of Vietnam, it got interested in Central America.  Nicarasgua.  Ollie North, Kissinger, Nixon.  The funding of the "Contras," a nurderous revolutionary army dedicated to the overthrow of democracy..

Oil in Iraq.. According to Americans, "demooracy" means capitalism.  And  in the United States, wanting more oil justifies a war.  So after George I's war for Iraq;'s oil, and since then  Clinton's bombing of Basra, and then Somalia, and  his  stupid bombings of poor civilians in the Balkans--we comr back to Iraq  with idiot George II ("Saddam Hussein tried to kill my daddy!") and the war that Obama inherited, and expanded, and expanded, and expanded, and expanded.

And now Obama wants to attack Syria.

Not since Rome, or Athens, has the world known such vicious, brutal, stupid,, mean,  murderousness as America.leads us with today.

God bless America?

                                                              Bert Hornback .

TRAVON MARTIN

Mr. Obama "could have been Travon Martin"--or so he says, as an afterthought, his first response having been that justice had been served in the Zimmerman case.

May I have an afterthought of my own,  please?  I could have been one of the perfectly innocent men, women, or children killed by one of Mr. Obama's drones.  After the fact of these heinous murders, Mr. Obama and his stooges always label anyone killed as "al Qaida."    Of course. Just as all the people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were enemy combatants.  Just like that little eight-year old girl burning with napalm in Vietnam was an enemy combatant--photographed by a professional American voyeur.

What perversity.  What arrogance.  What an insult to our intelligence.  The US only kills "enemy combatants," not innocent men, women, and children.  Mr. Obama's drones are politically smart:  they sort out the militants from the innocent people hiding from U.S. violence.  Once people are dead, they are automatically "enemy combatants."

But maybe we aren't intelligent.  Maybe American history--from the Native American genocide to our war against Fidel Castro's Cuba to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the murder of Trevon Martin--and the way we understand that history are simply the shameless, disgusting proof of our self-serving stupidity.

Maybe Obama's disgusting second-thought duplicity about the murder of Travon Martin is what we want as well as what we deserve.

But let me be fair to Mr. Obama.  He probably doesn't have second thoughts about the innocent people his drones kill.  He is the president, and he can kill anybody.

Why can't we be civilised?

sweet georgia brown

     I'm sorry.  "Sweet Georgia Brown" is just a come-on.  I'm looking for something pleasant to think about.  Something that's not horrible or disgusting, shameful or just simply bad.  A nice old song might help.

     How much worse can things get?  It's so bad in the USA that Fox News boldly suggests that Henry Kissinger was a good man.  Is that possible?  I know, he won the Nobel Peace Prize--and then fire-bombed everybody in Cambodia for thirty days.  But Barack Obama followed his Nobel Peace Prize with so many wars that we can't even keep track of them!  And now he is tapping everybody's phones.  Next he'll be using drones instead of postmen.

     Has anybody bothered to look back at the Nuremberg Trials?  The US ran those.  And the US punished "war criminals."   For the last eleven years the US has run a concentration camp at Guantanamo, and has tortured prisoners and made no attempt to bring them anywhere near what might be called "justice."  The US has covered up war crimes committed by US military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US government commits war crimes daily with its attacks on civilians.  And Obama's drones--smart things, they are, that can identify electronically people who don't like America.

     War crimes?  And now Mr. Obama is bugging everybody's phones.  Why doesn't he bug his own phone, and record himself giving illegal orders.  Then he can turn the tapes over to the World Court.

     "Sweet Georgia Brown."  Not "God Bless America."

Dear Mr. Law-Abiding President,

It has taken you five years to remember that you promised to close the Guantanamo concentration camp and torture facility.  And you still won't close it.  The Nazis had about the same amount of time to close their camps--and we tried them at Nuremberg for what they did.  Will you and yours be willing to go there?  It is now restored, and ready for you.

The Athenians of the 5th century B.C. believed in "might makes right."  They were forced, in defeat,  to tear down their city walls.  The Roman empire collapsed.  The British empire--determinedly arrogant to the bitter end--no longer exists, except in Northern Ireland and in the minds of stupid Tories.

The United States is bankrupt financially and morally.  Like North Korea--the only other fourth-world country on earth--it threatens the rest of the world with brutal suicide.  In this, the US--and North Korea--are unlike their predecessors:  Athens, Rome, the Brits, the Nazis weren't capable of  setting off or causing complete world  destruction.  The United States and North Korea are both capable of such.

And you, Mr. Obama, preach..  Preach what?  Patience?  Let the US continue its criminally inhumane acts until it is ready to play at civilization?

SHIT!  The US fought Nazi Germany, while hating its own Jews.  After the US-managed Nuremberg Trials, the US still had--for another ten yeats-- racist laws that denied black Americans basic human rights.  The US accused the Japanese of atrocities, while busily inoculating black prison inmates in Georgia with syphilis in trying to develop a syphilis-weapon.  The US dropped not one but two nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians:  on cities, not military targets.  And it fire-bombed Dresden.

(One of my former friends keeps reminding me of the Marshall Plan, and Chiquita Banana with her "message grave/about a million children that we want to save."  But that was sixty years ago--and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden.)

As president, Mr. Obama, you could close your multiply-illegal concentration camp and torture facility at Guantanamo.  You could do it today--or tomorrow.  You need only issue the order.  You could also apologise for five years of illegal, immoral torture.  You could ask for forgiveness, from the men you have tortured and illegally imprisoned, from the civilized world you have affronted, from the decent US citizens whom you have betrayed.  And maybe then you could resign, and thereby perhaps redeem yourself--partially--from your disgrace.

 Maybe you could offer, in your self-defense, that the US has never actually apologized for the enslavement of your ancestors.  But that excuse won't excuse your own crime:  your crime against humanity.