Affichage des articles dont le libellé est US imperalism. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est US imperalism. Afficher tous les articles

06/08/2025

JORGE MAJFUD
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 80th anniversary of the largest terrorist attack in history


Jorge Majfud, 08/06/2025

Translated by Tlaxcala

The August 13, 1945 issue of Time magazine quotes Truman: “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare. .. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. [...] We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.... If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already aware.” [full statement here].


 In London, Winston Churchill also referred to these feats of science: “We must indeed pray that this awe-striking technology will be made to accomplish peace among the nations, and that instead of wreaking havoc upon the entire globe, it may lead to world prosperity.”


On its August 20 cover, the same magazine greeted readers with a large red disc on a white background with an X crossing it out. It was not the first atomic bomb in history dropped on a population of human beings, but the sun or the flag of Japan. On page 29, in an article entitled “Awful Responsibility,” President Truman outlined what would later become the past. As a good man of faith whenever placed in power by God, Truman acknowledged: "We thank God that this has come upon us rather than upon our enemies. And we pray that He will guide us to use this in His way and for His purposes”.

 In the semantic inversion of subject and object, ‘this’ refers to the atomic bomb that ”has come upon us“; ”our enemies“ obviously refers to Hitler and Hirohito; ”us" refers to us, God’s protégés.

In reality, the barbarity of fire had begun much earlier. General LeMay had been the mastermind who planned the bombing of several Japanese cities, including Nagoya, Osaka, Yokohama, and Kobe, between February and May 1945, three months before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On the night of March 10, LeMay ordered 1,500 tons of explosives to be dropped on Tokyo from 300 B-29 bombers. 500,000 bombs rained down from 1:30 to 3:00 in the morning. 100,000 men, women, and children died in a few hours, and a million others were seriously injured. A precursor to napalm bombs, a gelatinous fire that stuck to houses and human flesh, was successfully tested. “Women ran with their babies like torches on their backs,” recalled Nihei, a survivor.

When the war was decided and over, a week after the atomic bombs, hundreds of US planes dropped tens of thousands of bombs on different cities in Japan, leaving another trail of thousands of victims ready to be forgotten.

General Carl Spaatz, euphoric, proposed dropping a third atomic bomb on Tokyo. The proposal did not go ahead because Tokyo had already been reduced to rubble long ago and only remained on the maps as an important city. Imperial Japan had also killed tens of thousands of Chinese in air raids, but it was not the Chinese who mattered at the time.

In fact, they never mattered and were even banned from entering the US by the 1882 law. The same General Curtis LeMay would repeat this strategy of indiscriminate massacre at a convenient distance on North Korea and Vietnam, leaving millions of civilians dead as if they were ants. All for a good cause (freedom, democracy, and human rights).

Shortly after the countless bombings of innocent and defenceless civilians, the heroic General LeMay would admit: “If we had lost the war, I would have been convicted as a war criminal.” On the contrary, like King Leopold II of Belgium and other Hitler Nazis promoted to high positions in NATO, LeMay was also decorated multiple times for his services to civilization, including the Légion d’honneur, awarded by France.


Nothing new. The narrative of events is not just for domestic consumption. It is exported. In the port of Shimoda, a bust of Commodore Matthew Perry commemorates and will continue to commemorate, for centuries to come, the place and date when the USAmerican captain liberated Japan’s trade in the 19th century by force of cannon and made possible the will of the god of those very particular Christians. A century later, in 1964, the same Japanese government awarded the Order of the Rising Sun to General Curtis LeMay for his services to civilization. What was his contribution? General LeMay innovated military tactics during World War II by indiscriminately bombing half a dozen large Japanese cities in 1945. Months before the famous atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 100,000 civilians died in Tokyo in a single night under a rain of other American bombs. LeMay acknowledged: “I don’t mind killing Japanese.”

Of course, not everything went his way. Years later, he recommended to the young and inexperienced President Kennedy that he drop a few atomic bombs on Havana as a way to prevent a greater evil. Kennedy disagreed. A couple of decades later, in one of the first conversations on the subject of Cuba, Alexander Haig, the new Secretary of State, told President Ronald Reagan: “Just give me the order and I’ll turn that shitty island into an empty parking lot.”

In 1968, General Curtis LeMay was the vice-presidential candidate for the racist and segregationist Independent Party of the United States. For a third party, it received a respectable 13.5 percent of the vote. In 2024, it could easily have won within the Democratic-Republican Party.

After the greatest act of terrorism in history, the governments of Japan will not spare any apologies for the crime of having been bombed in every possible way and without mercy.



06/10/2022

SERGIO RODRIGUEZ GELFENSTEIN
The conflict in Ukraine as an expression of the change of epoch

Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein, 6/10/2022
Translated by
Fausto Giudice, Tlaxcala  

During my recent visit to Argentina and Uruguay, the sponsoring institutions of my trip organized a tour in which there were 14 presentations of the book "NATO vs. the world" that we wrote together with Jorge Elbaum. Likewise, 7 talks and conferences were held on the subject. In not a few of them, attendees reiterated the query about why the book has the subtitle that I now use for this article: "The conflict in Ukraine as an expression of the change of era", and asked for more on the subject.

 

1º edición
Páginas: 160
Tamaño: 16 x 23 cm.
Precio: AR$2400.00.- / U$S15.00.
Comprar libro (papel/ebook)

Precisely, for Jorge and for me, it was a priority to make known in the book some remarks that explained why we had come to the conclusion that beyond the results obtained from the war development of the conflict, in reality the most important thing was that the main consequence of this was the confirmation of the beginning of that change of era the former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa was talking about a few years ago.

In the same way, we assumed that this consequence was what gave global character to the confrontation, since its aftermath was going to impact the entire planet. Thus, the clash was much more than a confrontation of Ukraine against Russia and even of the United States and NATO against Russia.

In this sense, unlike the Second World War when the United States waited until the end for a debacle of the Soviet Union in front of the Nazi army before bursting in mid-1944 when the final result of the conflict after the Soviet victory in Stalingrad in February 1943 was indisputable and categorical, now the “new Normandy Landing” expressed in support of the coup d 'état in Ukraine in 2014, was the detonator of a war of expansion that already lasted 8 years.

In the course of the process, the United States not only supported the extermination of the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine, but also cooperated in the dismantling of the armed forces of that country to transform it into an executing body under the mandate of the Nazi organizations that, with the support of the government of that country, began the “otanization” of that armed component to turn it into a ram of the expansion of NATO, a terrorist military structure that threatens all of humanity.

The obligatory Russian response to safeguard the physical integrity of the inhabitants of the oppressed territories also added as objectives the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine, thus emulating the objectives agreed by the triumphant powers in the Second World War with regard to Germany, when they met in the German city of Potsdam between 17 July and 2 August 1945.

At the end of the meeting, the president of the United States rushed back to Washington to - just a few days later - order the launch of atomic bombs on the harmless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Japan had already surrendered. In this way, it subordinated - through the most horrible event in the history of mankind - the surrendered and disarmed Japanese empire, which until today has remained attached to the military and political device of the United States.

With Europe, the United States was more subtle: it resorted to buying the wills of the European elites by creating the so-called Marshall Plan, an instrument more susceptible than the atomic bomb to be disclosed by Hollywood as an expression of USAmerican "cooperative values". But the purpose was the same, so Europe became a useful tool of Washington's eagerness to dominate the world.