Just in case anyone needs reminding that "USA" has always stood for "United States of Aggression," here are a forgotten few from February's Files:
February 1898 In 1897, Teddy Roosevelt stated bluntly, "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." His wait lasted less than a year.
February 15, 1898 was a muggy Tuesday night in Havana Harbor. Some 350 crew and officers settled in on board the Maine. "At 9:40 p.m., the ship's forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water," writes author Tom Miller. "Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption-this one deafening and massive-splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn't battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air."
The Maine was in Havana Harbor in 1898 on a purportedly friendly mission. "At a certain point in that spring, (President) McKinley and the business community began to see that their object, to get Spain out of Cuba, could not be accomplished without war," writes Howard Zinn, "and that their accompanying object, the securing of American military and economic influence in Cuba, could not be left to the Cuban rebels, but could be ensured only by U.S. intervention."
American newspapers, especially those run by Hearst (New York Journal) and Pulitzer (New York World), jumped on the Maine explosion as the ideal justification to drum up public support for a war of imperialism. "Tabloid headlines depicting Spanish atrocities against Cubans became commonplace, and the influential papers of both men were outdoing each other in the sensationalized screaming for war," says historian Kenneth C. Davis. When Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to supply pictures, he reported that he could not find a war. "You furnish the pictures," Hearst famously replied, "and I'll furnish the war."
(In 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted an investigation of the Maine disaster. Rickover and his team of experts concluded that the explosion was probably caused by "spontaneous combustion inside the ship's coal bins," a problem common to ships of that era.)
February 1901 In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the U.S. fought a brutal war of conquest in the Pacific. By 1900, more than 75,000 American troops-three-quarters of the entire U.S. Army-were sent to the Philippines. In the face of this overwhelming show of force, the Filipinos turned to guerrilla warfare. The February 5, 1901 edition of the New York World shed some light on the U.S. response to guerilla tactics: "Our soldiers here and there resort to terrible measures with the natives. Captains and lieutenants are sometimes judges, sheriffs and executioners. 'I don't want any more prisoners sent into Manila' was the verbal order from the Governor-General three months ago. It is now the custom to avenge the death of an American soldier by burning to the ground all the houses, and killing right and left the natives who are only suspects."
February 1939 Imagine a rally that involved plenty of marching and arms raised in a Nazi salute to their leader. Somewhere near Nuremberg, perhaps? Guess again. The venue was Madison Square Garden where frenzied members of the German-American Bund cheered Fritz Kuhn as he stood before a 30-foot high portrait of George Washington flanked by black swastikas, leading them in a chant of "Free Amerika!" (a rallying cry which had just recently replaced "Sieg Heil!"), while thirteen hundred New York City policemen stood guard outside the building.
A U.S. citizen who served in the German Army during the First World War, Kuhn's loyalty to Adolf Hitler was surpassed only by his hatred of Jews (like Henry Ford, he went as far as blaming the Jews for Benedict Arnold's treason). When asked if there were any good Jews, Kuhn replied, "If a mosquito is on your arm, you don't ask is it a good or a bad mosquito. You just brush it off." Before you dismiss Kuhn as a fringe character, consider this: The February 20, 1939 rally described above drew 22,000 avid followers.
February 1942 Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 giving the army the unrestricted power to arrest-without warrants or indictments or hearings-every Japanese-American on a 150-mile strip along the West Coast (roughly 110,000 men, women, and children) and transport them to internment camps in Colorado, Utah, Arkansas, and other interior states to be kept under prison conditions. The Supreme Court upheld this order and the Japanese-Americans remained in custody for over three years. A Los Angeles Times writer defended the forced relocations by explaining to his readers that "a viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched-so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an American."
Life in the internment camps entailed cramped living spaces with communal meals and bathrooms. The one-room apartments measured twenty by twenty feet and none had running water. The internees were allowed to take along "essential personal effects" from home but were prohibited from bringing razors, scissors, or radios. Outside the shared wards were barbed wire, guard towers with machine guns, and searchlights.
The dislocated Japanese-Americans incurred an estimated loss of $400 million in forced property sales during the internment years, and therein may lie a more Machiavellian motivation than sheer race hatred. "A large engine for the Japanese-American incarcerations was agri-business," says Michio Kaku, a noted nuclear physicist and political activist whose parents were interned from 1942 to 1946. "Agri-businesses in California coveted much of the land owned by Japanese-Americans."
A formal apology came to the 60,000 survivors of internment camps in 1990. The U.S. government paid them each $20,000. While Yale Law Professor Eugene V. Rostow later called the internment camps "our worst wartime mistake," Zinn pointedly asks: "Was it a 'mistake'-or was it an action to be expected from a nation with a long history of racism and which was fighting a war, not to end racism, but to retain the fundamentals of the American system?"
February 1945 With the Russians advancing rapidly towards Berlin, tens of thousands of German civilians fled into Dresden, believing it to be safe from attack. As a result, the city's population swelled from its usual 600,000 to at least one million. Beside the stream of refugees, Dresden was also known for its china and its Baroque and Rococo architecture. Its galleries housed works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Botticelli. On the evening of February 13, none of this would matter.
Using the Dresden soccer stadium as a reference point, over 2000 British Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs every 50 square yards out from this marker. The enormous flame that resulted was eight square miles wide, shooting smoke three miles high. For the next eighteen hours, regular bombs were dropped on top of this strange brew. Twenty-five minutes after the bombing, winds reaching 150 miles-per-hour sucked everything into the heart of the storm. Because the air became superheated and rushed upward, the fire lost most of its oxygen, creating tornadoes of flame that can suck the air right out of human lungs.
Seventy percent of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases that turned their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some bodies into the pavement like bubblegum, or shrunk them into three-foot long charred carcasses. Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through the "human soup" found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air propelled victims skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as fifteen miles outside Dresden. "The flames ate everything organic, everything that would burn," wrote journalist Phillip Knightley. "People died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or suffocated. Then American planes came the next day to machine-gun survivors as they struggled to the banks of the Elbe."
The Allied firebombing did more than shock and awe. The bombing campaign murdered more than 100,000 people-mostly civilians...but the exact number may never be known due to the high number of refugees in the area.
February 1946 Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: "What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."
February 1966 David Lawrence, editor of US News & World Report, wrote: "What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times." When challenged with stories of American atrocities in Vietnam, Lawrence explained, "Primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence."
February 1968 An unnamed U.S. major, quoted by Associated Press on February 8, 1968, was asked about the American assault on the Vietnamese town of Bentre. The major explained: "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it."
February 1991 High above a swamp, over 60 miles of coastal Highway 8 from Kuwait to Iraq, a division of the Iraq's Republican Guard withdrew on February 26-27,1991. Baghdad radio had just announced Iraq's acceptance of a cease-fire proposal and, in compliance with UN Resolution 660, Iraqi troops were ordered to withdraw to positions held before August 2, 1990. President George H.W. Bush derisively called the announcement "an outrage" and "a cruel hoax."
"U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours," says Joyce Chediac, a Lebanese-American journalist. "It was like shooting fish in a barrel," one U.S. pilot said. "Many of those massacred fleeing Kuwait were not Iraqi soldiers at all," says Ramsey Clark, "but Palestinians, Sudanese, Egyptians, and other foreign workers."
Randall Richard of the Providence Journal filed this dispatch from the deck of the U.S.S. Ranger: "Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck. The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often passed up the projectile of choice...because it took too long to load."
"Every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments," Chediac reported after visiting the scene. "No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it's impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel."
"At one spot," Bob Drogin reported in the Los Angeles Times, "snarling wild dogs (had) reduced two corpses to bare ribs. Giant carrion birds pick(ed) at another; only a bootclad foot and eyeless skull are recognizable."
Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer, said: "Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic."
Correction: When you're talking about America, it's not pathetic...it's policy.
Thanks for some great points. I really think US history has to be rewritten and the chauvinism and jingoism needs to be take out. I have some notes on the subject myself:
A THUMBNAIL HISTORY OF AMERICA’S DARK SIDE
The War of Independence. From the earliest days of the Republic, Revolutionary fighters were put in prison for debt. Congress suppressed uprisings by force. Slave states, like Missouri, remained. Explorations were made for conquest. Killing of Indians continued unabated. The colonization of Texas was part of the westward movement of empire. The idea of "Manifest Destiny" was used by American expansionists to justify U.S. annexation of Texas, Oregon, New Mexico and California, and later U.S. involvement in Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines. The U.S. was also bent on acquiring Cuba, and drew up the manifesto saying that if Spain refused to sell Cuba, the United States would be justified in taking it by force. At the same time, massive anti-Irish, and antiimmigrant sentiment ocurred in the wake of Irish immigration into the country. William Walker, with a small army, invaded Nicaragua, legalizing slavery. The westward movement fueled the desire for land, leading to a long series of evictions of Plains Indians from their lands onto less desirable reservations. Mining rushes elsewhere in the years of the war resulted in the forcible takeover of the territories of Arizona (1863), Idaho (1863), and Montana (1864) and Wyoming.
The economy. Robber barons used deception, violence, kidnappings and extraordinary dishonesty to gain economic power and industrial supremacy. Their capitalist heart only beat when the market went up or down’ otherwise they were indifferent to human suffering. In the same way when capitalists spoke of discipline or “being responsible,” they meant coercion, which is lacking in moral content. The most rapacious of the money makers, who are prepared to indulge in any roguery, deception and crime, amassed enormous fortunes. At the same time there is a depression and numerous wage reductions. Lack of safety in the workplace was illustrated in the shirt factory fire when forty-seven young women, mostly immigrants, leaped to their deaths, while another 99 died in the flames. To keep working people under control, Jim Crow laws were introduced, leading to a segregated society. This inspired record lynchings of African Americans.
In Bisbee, Arizona, local officials rounded up over 1,000 striking miners, one-third of them Mexican Americans, and about 50 recent members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and shipped them into the desert of New Mexico without food or water. Sacco and Vanzetti were falsely accused of robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. The trial lasted seven years and represented the culmination of widespread attacks on persons of foreign birth.
Expansion outside the U.S. 1898, the U.S.S. Maine was blown up by Hearst in Habana harbor, to create a strong feeling against Spain in the United States. In 1916 the U.S. began its occupation. U.S. military rule encouraged the dislodging of small landowners and favored the interests of large corporations. The CIA launched “Operation Success” to overthrow the Arbenz government in Guatemala. The U.S. Navy bombarded San Juan de Puerto Rico and invaded the island. U.S. troops entered Panama City to put down striking workers who were calling for lower rents. Numerous workers were killed in the incident. U.S. Marines are landed in Honduras. Somoza, under U.S. instructions ordered Sandino's execution. In the following weeks scores of Sandino's followers were rounded up and executed. The U.S. gained control of customs in El Salvador, in in the event of default on loans, and accelerated its emergence as the dominant investor. The U.S. Marines occupied Haiti seized $500,000 in gold coin from the National Bankand took over banks and customs houses and broke up small-scale peasant holdings to protect and expand U.S.-owned enterprises. U.S. administrators devastate traditional landholders. Hostilities in the Phillipines broke out, and for the next three years an American army of 60,000 fought guerrilla warfare, with all its attendant horrors.
The Stock Market Crash was the culmination of the boom market and unrestrained speculation of the Coolidge era. It ushered in a prolonged depression that gradually settled upon the country with increasing unemployment, bank failures, and business disasters. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed to weaken the trade unions, restrict political rights of unions, outlaw the closed shop, and empower the president to defer strikes indefinitely. Unemployment and underemployment became an increasingly serious problem and was aggravated by the shift from high-wage manufacturing to lower-paying jobs in various service industries.
Assassinations. President Kennedy in Dallas, Tex., Martin Luther King was killed by an assassin. American cities become the scene of pitched battles between Blacks aroused by government terrorism and police reinforced by army units. Malcolm X, former Black Muslim leader, in New York City was assassinated. Students were shot at Kent state. Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was mudered in a Chicago police raid.
Further foreign adventures. The invasion of Korea was described as a “police action,” The mercenary invasion of Cuba, coded “Operation Pluto”, was made up of 1,500 men who landed at the Bay of Pigs. From Nicaragua, 8 B-26 bombers attacked 3 Cuban airports. The U.S. announced that its troops would join South Vietnamese forces in an invasion of Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong bases near the border of South Vietnam. In Chile, President Allende is overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup.
National deterioration. A serious accident occurred at the Three Mile Island reactor in 1979 in Pennsylvania. The U.S. experienced the painful transition from a creditor to a debtor nation, with the world's largest foreign debt and a rising foreign trade deficit that peaked at $171 billion in 1987. The The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization union (PATCO) struck to protest a two-tier pay system and overly stressful working conditions. Pres. Reagan fired the more than 10,000 striking members of PATCO, about three-quarters of the nation's air traffic controllers. Reagan's get-tough policy began an era of business anti-unionism. The Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran, which was at war with Iraq, hoping to gain Iran's cooperation in freeing American hostages. The first of several mines in Nicaraguan harbors, planted by U.S. agents, was detonated. The nation's “thrifts,” as the Savings &Loans are called, were deregulated in the early 1980s to allow them to invest in commercial real estate and business. However, the thrifts became unstable because many of their investments reflected the growth in the 1980s of high-risk “junk bonds,” which were speculative or fraudulent. In 1987, the instability of these investments became apparent as stock prices plummeted and with them the solvency of the thrifts. The losses were great. Close to 12.8 percent of all Americans, about 31.5 million people, were classified as poor by federal standards; that is, they sustained an income of $12,675 or less for a family of four. The Persian Gulf War was led by the United States. Black motorist Rodney King is arrested and brutally beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. A civilian video of the arrest and beating led to criminal charges against the A U.S. Department of Defense report revealed that at least 117 naval officers could face disciplinary action growing out of sexual assaults on some 90 people at a 1991 Las Vegas convention of the Tailhook aviators group.More than 300 Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives met outside the Capitol building in Washington, DC, and signed what they called a “Contract with America,” a 10-point plan of conservative reforms designed to reverse expenditures for social welfare, “get tough on crime,” and add a balanced budget amendment to the constitution, among other objectives. Pres. Clinton signed NAFTA into law, creating unemployment and hunger in Latin American countries. A huge car bomb exploded in Oklahoma City killing more than two hundred people, including approximately 24 children. The government began to disclose information about radiation experiments it conducted from the 1940s through the 70s on people who has no knowledge of them. The U.S. launched missile attacks on Iraqi military sites.A U.S. House ethics subcommittee found that Speaker Newt Gingrich violated House ethics rules by accepting tax-exempt donations and using the funds for political purposes.The tobacco industry reached an agreement with dozens of claimants in lawsuits against the industry. Production rose while purchases stagnated, a sure sign of overproduction.The IMF slashed living standards, strongly resisted by Brazilian workers. U.S. unemployment rose, compounded by the reduction of anti-poverty measures and elimination of affirmative action. The invasion of Iraq cost that country more than 120 billion in oil revenues, left a million Iraqi children malnourished and 700,000 dead. The objective was to force privatization of Iraq’s oil reserves to benefit American oil giants. The U.S. destroyed a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Khartoum falsely accused of making chemical weapons. A retaliatory strike for U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the United States forces played a key role in NATO bombing missions against the Serb government in Yugoslavia.The Kansas Board of Education removed Darwin's Theory of Evolution from the state's science curriculum. The U.S. Senate rejected ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would bar nuclear weapons testing in any form. Microsoft Corp. went on trial for two antitrust lawsuits. US.-bombed other countries like Iraq and Yugoslavia; tried to starve countries as in sanctioning Cuba and Iraq; aiding and abetting massacres in Timor and Turkey, and with increasing danger, Colombia; propelled IMF and World Bank income inequality and ecological devastation; advanced domestic police and prison violence that turned communities into occupied battle zones; imposed welfare havoc that further impoverished the already poor; facilitated generalized corporate rapaciousness that materially and socially diminished workers’ lives; legislated the collapse of health care that allowed people to drop dead instead of being cared for and restored; entrenched citizen and worker disempowerment from all sides of economic and political decision-making; abetted media madness that robed culture of content; enabled dis-education of the youth that they might fit awaiting social slots needing them to obey authority and endure boredom; partaking of the alienation of most sides of life by elevating profits over people; procuring weapons without limit; and battering and bashing the poor, the homeless, the gay, the female, the black or latino…with minimal outcry and reply. A whispering campaign of lies in the South Carolina Presidential Primary to destroy Republican John McCain.
The Bush regime saw the largest and most miserable failures of corporate accountability in modern history: Enron, Worldcom, and Fannie Mae. The 2004 budget set the record for the largest deficit in history: either $477 billion or $521 billion (CBO and OMB numbers, respectively). The value of the dollar collapsed 30% during his term. Bush fired anyone critical or objecting of his policies, while he rewarded those who spoke welcome lies. He held 660 prisoners in Guantanamo, Cuba for over two years without trial or formal charge. His prisoners, several of whom were between the ages of 13 and 16, were never formally charged. They were kept in steel cages, subjected to ongoing torture, and denied access to legal counsel in opposition to Supreme Court rulings (Rasul v. Bush). His Secretary of Defense was the first in US history to have acknowledged ordering an intentional violation of the Geneva Conventions, in which Abu Ghraib prisoners are held "off the books" and hidden from the Red Cross. The United States unilaterally delivered an ultimatum demanding that Saddam Hussein leave Iraq within 48 hours. Hans Blix compared the selling of the Iraq war to the selling of a refrigerator. The Bush administration falsely claimed that Iraq had ties to al Qaida, that it was building nuclear weapons. The invasion of Iraq was a violation of international law because it was not passed by the UN, giving rein to massive protests worldwide. US forces illegally used white phosphorous in Fallujah, burning women and children to death. Iraq rapidly hurtled to disintegration under the weight of Abu Ghraib torture and abuse, the Haditha muder of 24 women and children, the Ishaqi muder of civilians, the Hamadiyah incident, the kidnaping and murder of a civilian, the Malmudihay incident, the gang rape and murder of a 14 year old girl and her parents and sister, and Mukaradeeb, the bombing and killing of 42 civilians.
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Guajolotl (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 132 comments)
on Monday, February 5, 2007 at 9:42:42 PM
