In 2007, all day for two weeks running, the major networks telecasted sound bites of Obama's pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright shouting "God damn America for her crimes against humanity!" followed by ridiculing smirks and indulgent smiles from news commentators. To this archival research peoples-historian's knowledge there was no noticeable echo of Wright's damning America's crimes and if one googles "God damn America for her crimes against humanity", then the entries that pop up first are many articles by yours truly Jay Janson. Apparently, anti-imperialist authors had zero interest in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's passionate call for "God to damn America for her crimes against humanity". Could it have been the Rev. Jeremiah's use of the word crimes that was a turn off?
In alternate antiwar media, these seemingly crime-less bombings and invasions are the government's fault and the fault of corporate media deceiving its viewing, listening and reading audience. Alternate media, made up of anti-imperialists, peace and justice church ministries, war resisters, socialist historians, and eminent progressive journalists are either in fact or in effect pro-American. Without exception, they consider Americans as mere victims of lies and propaganda by their own often reelected government and the corporate commercial media Americans are addicted to. Some find Americans to be just as much victims as the people overseas being killed or maimed, their homes destroyed, by Americans.
If the vocal and active US dissenters weren't pro American, they would call for the prosecution of Americans, and by the way, not just token prosecutions of US presidents, government officials and generals, but all Americans who follow criminal orders to bomb and invade someone else's country. These Americans should be tried and punished under Nuremberg Principles of International Law numbers One through Four. They have also violated US Armed Forces Law by following illegal commands instead of reporting them. [see Every GI Who Invaded Vietnam, Iraq, etc. Was a Criminal By International Law & US Army's Own Law, Minority Perspective, May 28, 2017, click here].
Peace Without Justice
When the USA withdrew its armed forces from Indochina and gave up killing communists (because it couldn't kill enough of them), there was little or no interest in protesting the crippling international sanctions the USA put on Vietnam that brought intense suffering to a war ravaged nation, and there was no interest in demanding the reparations Martin Luther King had said we must make when he said in his speech Beyond Vietnam a Time to Break the Silence:
"Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary."
All those mighty street protests were not meant to do as Martin Luther King did, namely, give voice to the voiceless Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians. The great anti-Vietnam protests organized were something entirely between Americans.
After a lifetime of sinking feelings in the stomach at each new genocide perpetrated by fellow Americans, this archival researcher and peoples' historian has come to the conclusion, or better said belated awareness, that to be against the flow of Wall Street generated genocide, but not against the Americans doing and supporting the killing, is illogical, horrifically lacking in merciful compassion, contrary to what is right and just, and empty of any will to stop the murder and maiming of millions of one's own planetary brothers and sisters and their children, who are our children as well.
It is just plain incorrect and wrong to assign responsibility for unlawful death and destruction to one's government or even the corporations and investment banks which set the policies of government.
Let us consider the words of Judge Robert Jackson, in his opening statement at the Nuremberg Trail of Nazi war criminals:
"Of course, the idea that a state, any more than a corporation, commits crimes, is a fiction. Crimes always are committed only by persons. While it is quite proper to employ the fiction of responsibility of a state or corporation for the purpose of imposing a collective liability, it is quite intolerable to let such a legalism become the basis of personal immunity. The Charter recognizes that one who has committed criminal acts may not take refuge in superior orders nor in the doctrine that his crimes were acts of states. These twin principles working together have heretofore resulted in immunity for practically everyone concerned in the really great crimes against peace and mankind. Those in lower ranks were protected against liability by the orders of their superiors. The superiors were protected because their orders were called acts of state. Under the Charter, no defense based on either of these doctrines can be entertained. Modern civilization puts unlimited weapons of destruction in the hands of men. It cannot tolerate so vast an area of legal irresponsibility." [Robert H. Jackson, The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America.]
Albert Einstein put it in a more personal and intrinsically moral manner, "The Nuremberg Trial of the German war criminals was tacitly based on the recognition of the principle: criminal actions cannot be excused if committed on government orders; conscience supersedes the authority of the law of the state." [Address to Chicago Decalogue Society, 2/20/1954.]
Martin Luther King in his world shaking blistering New York sermon Beyond Vietnam - a Time to Break Silence in 1967 held all Americans including himself responsible for the war atrocities and illegal covert violence since 1945, and that all the death and destruction by the US military is meant to protect "unjust predatory investments", but activist anti-war journalists keep pointing a finger at the government and away from themselves and their American readers, who perhaps bask in an aura of innocence for their applauding of the protesting and denouncing of each new genocide they read about.
Your author, when chatting with members of his Korean and Vietnamese families, friends, colleagues and students, has had the embarrassing experience of making the mistake of mentioning that many Americans were against what was being done to their countries. Sudden dead silence! Everyone looking at the ceiling, wall or floor, a real conversation stopper. I would realize they must be truthfully thinking, "Our people were being mass murdered and these good Americans only protested and think they did us a favor".
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