Author: mickeyz

Wake-up call?

1. Sooner or later, the Democratic Party is gonna wake up and help us “take back” the country
2. No matter what we think of war, we must always support the troops because sooner or later, the men and women in uniform are gonna wake up and help us “take back” the country
3. There’s a mysterious mass of Americans out there–just sitting on the fence watching “American Idol” as they wait for us to convince them that we are right so they can wake up and help us “take back” the country
4. There was once a time when the people actually “had” the country

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

A sure-fire plan to end all war…

1. Hold it on a weekend day so it doesn’t interfere with most work and school schedules
2. Be sure to properly request your permit
3. Don’t invite the anarchists
4. Ask Jesse Jackson, Susan Sarandon, and Cindy Sheehan to speak
5. Costumes!
6. Agree in advance with authorities as to how many protestors are willing to be arrested
7. Invite a broad multi-culti mix to present the illusion of a coalition
8. Bring lots of “Support the Troops” signs
9. Puppets!
10. Contact United for Peace & Justice and/or International ANSWER and follow their orders…I mean, advice

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

The world doesn’t need any more “heroes” like Tillman…
The American football hero may be gone but details of his mysterious death in Afghanistan just won’t go away. Most recently, as reported by Time Magazine, “Nine officers, including up to four generals, should be held accountable for missteps in the aftermath of the friendly fire death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.”

This is as good a time as any to contemplate how and why Pat Tillman ended up in position to be killed by his fellow soldiers. Here’s how the New York Times described Tillman at the time of his death: “A graduate of Arizona State University, Tillman, a safety, played for four seasons with the Arizona Cardinals. But as an unrestricted free agent in 2002, he turned town a three-year, $3.6 million contract offer from the Cardinals and enlisted in the Army.”

Accordingly, when Tillman was killed, the predictable platitudes followed:

*Defensive tackle Corey Sears of the Houston Texans, who played with Tillman on the Cardinals from 1999 to 2000, said: “All the guys that complain about it being too hot or they don’t have enough money, that’s not real life. A real life thing is he died for what he believed in.”

I wonder if Sears views Iraqis dying for what they believe in to be “a real life thing” or is that reserved exclusively for Americans? If Tillman were still alive, I’d like to ask him what exactly it was that he “believed in” enough to die for. Was it, say, for-profit health care for the few or pre-emptive wars or corporate welfare or maybe the death penalty? How about strip malls, Reality TV, SUVs, or cell phones? Maybe the right to vote for the next American Idol? I’d just like some clarification.

*Former Cardinals head coach Dave McGinnis said Tillman who “represented all that was good in sports…proudly walked away from a career in football to a greater calling.”

Definition of “greater calling”: An ex-NFL player ruthlessly hunting CIA-created Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in a misguided, myopic attempt to avenge 9/11.

*”Pat Tillman personified all the best values of his country and the NFL,” declared commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

What values, Mr. Tagliabue? The values outlined in our history texts or the values of militarism and greed this nation has lived by for over 200 years? (Did Tagliabue or Tillman ever read, say, Zinn’s People’s History or Blum’s Killing Hope?) Can someone do me a favor and list the “best values” of both America and the NFL?

*”Where do we get such men as these? Where to we find these people willing to stand up for America?” asked Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Arizona.

Which America was Tillman standing up for-the bosses at Halliburton or the homeless guy I see every day on the subway steps? Do you know anyone who needed Tillman to “stand up” for them by bringing indiscriminate death and destruction upon Iraq and Afghanistan? Are we so numb to the clichés that we’ll let them pass without comment or contemplation?

*More Rep. Hayworth: “He chose action rather than words. He just wanted to serve his country.”

Again, what country was Tillman serving? The country personified by war criminals like Bush, Clinton, etc.? The country defined by corporate pirates? Indeed, Tillman wasn’t serving the two million behind bars or the two million locked in nursing homes against their will. The action he chose over words didn’t make our air or water cleaner or stop the suburban sprawl. Tillman could have chosen to serve his country by challenging the corporate-mandated status quo…but that’s not how things work around here, is it?

*Even more from Hayworth: “He was a remarkable person. He lived the American dream, and he fought to preserve the American dream and our way of life.”

What American dream? The dreams of Wal-Mart, Nike, and The Gap? Whose way of life-Wall Street speculators, professional athletes, and digitally- or surgically-enhanced celebrities? I certainly didn’t ask him to kill anyone and he sure wasn’t protecting anything I hold dear. Pat Tillman, to me, seemed like a pre-programmed American male…the spawn of decades of corporate conditioning and State-sponsored patriotism.

When Rich Tillman showed up at the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden memorial for his big brother Pat, he “wore a rumpled white T-shirt, no jacket, no tie, no collar,” and “asked mourners to hold their spiritual bromides.” He later stated: “Pat isn’t with God. He’s fucking dead. He wasn’t religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he’s fucking dead.”

Pat Tillman walking away from millions to “fight for his country” does not impress me…but I am awed by the ability to manipulate humans into consistently acting against their interests and the interests of the entire planet.

“People often are conscripted into armies, but sometimes they enlist with gusto,” explains Steven Pinker, director of the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  “Jingoism,” Pinker declares, “is alarmingly easy to evoke.”

“War itself is venal, dirty, confusing and perhaps the most potent narcotic invented by humankind,” says New York Times columnist Chris Hedges. “It allows us to suspend individual conscience, maybe even consciousness, for the cause. And few of us are immune… The contagion of war, of the siren call of the nation, is so strong that most cannot resist.”

But resist we must…and unless we in America create new, powerful-and urgent-ways to resist, we cannot expect the victims of our indifference and ineptitude to not hold each of us accountable. As Ward Churchill explains, it’s not acceptable or realistic to believe that the “brown-skinned folks dying in the millions in order to maintain this way of life…can wait forever for those who purport to be the opposition here to find some personally comfortable and pure manner of affecting the kind of transformation that brings not just lethal but genocidal processes to a halt.”

As yourself this: Who gave up a life of luxury and turned his back on millions to fight in the mountains and caves of Afghanistan for what he believed in and, as a result, is revered by millions as a “hero”?

Depending on who you are and where you live, you might answer “Pat Tillman” or you might answer: “Osama bin Laden.”

The world doesn’t need any more “heroes” like Tillman or Osama. One of the first things it needs is for the American people to snap out of their propaganda-induced fog ASAP and seek a “greater calling” in the truest sense.

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

Out of the nearly 40 million U.S. cattle slaughtered annually, only about 1000 are tested for mad cow disease.
The March 21, 2007 edition of the New York Times featured an article called “Prevalence of Alzheimer’s Rises 10% in 5 Years.” It began: “More than five million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, a 10 percent increase from the last official tally five years ago, and a number expected to more than triple by 2050.” Alzheimer’s disease, it seems, now afflicts 13% of people 65 and over, and 42% of those past 85.

The piece also reported “the startling finding that 200,000 to 500,000 people younger than 65 have some form of early onset form of dementia, including a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease that strikes people in their 30s and 40s.” The Times adds: “Apart from early onset cases, the primary risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease is age.”

But, dear reader, there’s a cow-shaped risk factor sitting in the corner-ignored by the newspaper of record (and essentially all major media outlets). And it’s a very mad cow.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has earned the pithy nickname “mad cow disease” thanks to the invidious symptoms presented in affected cattle, i.e. staggering, tremors, involuntary muscle spasms, bewilderment, hypersensitivity to auditory and tactile stimuli, and other examples of seemingly “mad” behavior.

Like BSE, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) is also a transmissible, invariably fatal spongiform encephalopathy with a prolonged incubation period that leaves sponge-like holes in a victim’s brain. CJD, however, is the human version and this includes a newly identified variant of CJD, linked to BSE in British cattle.

“In humans,” says author and environmentalist, Peter Montague, “the BSE-like disease is called ‘new variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease,’ or nvCJD for short. CJD has been recognized for a long time as a rare disease of the elderly–very similar to Alzheimer’s disease–but nvCJD is different. It has somewhat different symptoms, a different pattern of disintegration in the brain, and it strikes young people, even teenagers. Between 1995 and early 1998, at least 23 people died of nvCJD in Britain and at least one in France, the oldest of them age 42 and the youngest 15.” (Yet the Times is “startled” by the rise in dementia in younger and younger people.)

 “CJD robs victims of lucidity, control and life over a period ranging from six months to three years from the onset of symptoms, which can take from 10 to 40 years to manifest,” writes journalist Gabe Kirchheimer. According to Nobel Prize winner Stanley B. Prusiner, fatal neurodegenerative diseases of animals and humans (like BSE and CJD) are thought to be caused by infectious proteins called “prions.” Perhaps what is most disquieting about this hypothesis is that, unlike viruses and bacteria, prions remain infectious even after being baked at 680° F for on hour (enough to melt lead), bombarded with radiation, and/or soaked in formaldehyde, bleach, and boiling water.

“CJD is 100 percent fatal,” adds Kirchheimer. “There is no treatment or cure. As no blood test for the living is available, CJD has been definitively diagnosed only through brain biopsy.”

Studies cited by Kirchheimer indicate it is likely that “tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are dying right now of undiagnosed or misdiagnosed CJD.” Government figures estimate approximately 200 to 300 cases of CJD have been diagnosed in the U.S. Before you take comfort in that modest figure, bear in mind the findings of John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. The authors of Mad Cow USA learned that while some four million Americans (at the time) had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, autopsies revealed roughly 25% of alleged Alzheimer’s deaths were caused instead by other forms of dementia. One percent of these misdiagnosed deaths have been ultimately attributed to CJD. If this trend is extrapolated and one percent of the now five million Americans with Alzheimer’s actually have CJD (or nvCJD), the nationwide estimate rises dramatically from 200 to 50,000 cases.

“It would be rather straightforward to design and execute significant studies to answer the urgent questions of which dementia diseases people have, and in what numbers, but to my knowledge no one in the scientific, medical or public health communities are even proposing this,” says Stauber. “Especially now that we have found mad cow disease in the U.S., along with mad deer, mad elk, and mad sheep disease, we should be launching ongoing studies nation-wide to aggressively search for cases of CJD in the human population. We should be testing our human population for CJD; CJD should be made a carefully reported disease nationwide.”

How safe are Americans from being exposed to the human variant of mad cow disease? In France, a nation with only 5.7 million cows, 20,000 are tested each week with 153 found infected in the year 2000. Out of the nearly 40 million U.S. cattle slaughtered annually, only about 1000 are tested. You do the math.

Kirchheimer concludes: “The growing number of British victims of ‘new variant’ CJD, mostly young people in their prime who contracted the brain sickness from tainted meat, is a grim precursor to an uncertain future.”

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

As tragic as the animal deaths caused by the tainted “food” are, a small number of contaminated cans is not really the issue when it comes to pet food.
Detecting corporate media bias often requires us to discern omissions. For example, consider how the recent pet food recall was reported. Los Angeles Times staff writer Kimi Yoshino penned an article (“Recall of pet food alarms owners”) on March 19, 2007 that was widely syndicated. In the piece (which was consistent with almost all corporate media accounts), readers learned what brands were in question, how many animals had been affected, and (of course) that the company’s stock has plummeted. Yoshino also interviewed a handful of pet owners (sic), including Victoria Levy, who declared: “That’s so disturbing. When they put food on the shelves, you trust that it’s safe.”

When they put food on the shelves, you trust that it’s safe.

This is where the concept of “omissions” kicks in because what the Los Angeles Times and its ilk opted to ignore is this: As tragic as the animal deaths caused by the tainted “food” are, a small number of contaminated cans is not really the issue when it comes to pet food. In an industry dominated by multi-nationals like Nestlé, Heinz, Colgate-Palmolive, and Procter & Gamble, repulsiveness should come as no surprise.

“What most consumers don’t know is that the pet food industry is an extension of the human food and agriculture industries,” explains the Animal Protection Institute. “Pet food provides a market for slaughterhouse offal, grains considered ‘unfit for human consumption,’ and similar waste products to be turned into profit. This waste includes intestines, udders, esophagi, and possibly diseased and cancerous animal parts.”

If you question the motives an animal “protection” group, here’s what the Pet Food Institute (the trade association of pet food manufacturers) has to say: “The growth of the pet food industry not only provided pet owners with better foods for their pets, but also created profitable additional markets for American farm products and for the byproducts of the meat packing, poultry, and other food industries which prepare food for human consumption.

In a particularly ugly twist, euthanized pets are often themselves boiled and used to make cosmetics, fertilizer, gelatin, pharmaceuticals, and yes, pet food (with traces of sodium pentobarbital for added flavor). “When you read pet-food labels and it says meat or bone meal, that’s what it is: cooked and converted animals, including some dogs and cats,” explains Eileen Layne of the California Veterinary Medical Association.

One more time…and this time with feeling: “When they put food on the shelves, you trust that it’s safe.”

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

We’re spoon-fed lines like “Give me liberty or give me death” and “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” but we’ve become a passive population of easily duped drones
Let’s say you’re a passenger on a 737. You paid the ever-increasing price to jam your ever-widening butt into an ever-shrinking seat. Yep, you whipped out the plastic to willingly endure zero leg room, artificial air, phony friendliness, something loosely resembling food (sic), edited-for-mass-consumption movies, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re seated near the left wing or the right wing…the pilot calls the shots. If you choose to speak up, you can guarantee there’ll be a uniformed, armed servant of the State waiting for you when the plane lands.

Can anyone say “microcosm”?

However, on the topic of plane rides, there is one type of rebellion that’s always welcome in the home of the brave…and the more violent it is, the better. Rise up against official U.S. enemies and they’ll make movies about you, build statues, write speeches, and all that good stuff. The powers-that-be in the land of the free may pretend to admire pacifism but never forget: Genuine hero worship is reserved for those ready, willing, and able to shed blood even if it may cost them their our lives.

Case in point: The random group of strangers that boarded United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 were forced to weigh options they likely never previously considered in any serious manner. Sure, at first, most of them probably imagined that going along quietly was the best choice, the safest path to resolution. Don’t anger anyone, stay calm, and hope/pray for the best. Eventually, when the situation passed the proverbial point of no return, it became crystal clear that drastic measures were called for. The criminals had to be stopped…by any means necessary.

Which brings us smoothly back to the concept of microcosm. “Going along” is never the best choice. There is no “safe path to resolution.” You can hope and pray all you want but it’s action that alters scenarios. We’re spoon-fed lines like “Give me liberty or give me death” and “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” but we’ve become a passive population of easily duped drones. Still, as the story of United 93 demonstrates, a couch potato can quickly morph into a resourceful fighter…and it all started with two tiny words: “Let’s roll.”

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

Last month, I touched on a fraction of February’s forgotten history vis-à-vis America’s long history of global brutality. Here’s a small taste of March’s madness:
March 1945
In WWII’s Pacific theater–cheered on by the likes of Time magazine, which explained that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves”–U.S. General Curtis LeMay’s Twenty-first Bomber Command, laid siege on the poorer areas of Japan’s large cities. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, the target was Tokyo, where tightly packed wooden buildings took the brunt of 1,665 tons of incendiaries. LeMay later recalled that a few explosives had been mixed in with the incendiaries to demoralize firefighters (96 fire engines burned to ashes and 88 firemen died). The attack area was 87.4 percent residential. By May 1945, 75 percent of the bombs being dropped on Japan were incendiaries and LeMay’s campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives. In a confidential memo of June 1945, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, an aide to General MacArthur, called the raids, “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings on non-combatants in all history.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson declared it was “appalling that there had been no protest over the air strikes we were conducting against Japan which led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life.” Stimson added that he “did not want to have the United States get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” After the “good war,” LeMay admitted: “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”

March 1946
After learning of the horrors his bomb had wrought on Japan, atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer began to harbor second thoughts, and he resigned in October 1945. In March of the following year, Oppenheimer told President Truman: “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.” Good ol’ Harry replied, “It’ll come out in the wash.” Later, the president told an aide, “Don’t bring that fellow around again.”

March 1968
“In all my years in the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings,” said U.S. Lieutenant William Calley. “We were there to kill ideology carried by-I don’t know-pawns, blobs of flesh. I was there to destroy communism. We never conceived of people, men, women, children, babies.”

The date was March 16, 1968. “Under the command of Lieutenant William L. Calley, Charlie Company of the Americal Division’s Eleventh Infantry had ‘nebulous orders’ from its company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, to ‘clean the village out’,” explains historian Kenneth Davis. All they found at My Lai were women, children, and old men…no weapons, no signs of enemy soldiers. Calley ordered villagers to be killed and their huts destroyed. Women and girls were raped before they were machine-gunned. By the end of the massacre, hundreds of villagers were dead.

When the truth about My Lai was eventually revealed by reporter Seymour Hersh, Henry Kissinger sent a note to White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman: “Now that the cat is out of the bag, I recommend keeping the President and the White House out of the matter entirely.” Nixon, for his part, blamed the New York Times, what he called “dirty rotten Jews from New York,” for covering the story. Perhaps what had the White House on edge was best articulated by Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with covering up the My Lai killings, who explained in 1971: “Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.”

March 1988
While it was subsequently cited as one of the many spurious pretexts for the second Gulf War, the U.S. and Britain did not call for a military strike after Iraq’s gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March 1988. “When Saddam bombed Kurdish rebels and civilians with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and VX in 1988, the Reagan administration first blamed Iran, before acknowledging that the culprits were Saddam’s own forces,” explained reporters Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas. “There was only token official protest at the time. Saddam’s men were unfazed. An Iraqi audiotape, later captured by the Kurds, records Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid talking to his fellow officers about gassing the Kurds.” On that tape, al-Majid, a.k.a. Chemical Ali, asks: “Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!” Right on cue, Washington stepped up arms supplies to and diplomatic activity with Iraq.

March 2003
March 17: President George W. Bush declares, “The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat, but we will do everything to defeat it.”

March 18: On Good Morning America the president’s mother asks: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

March 20: The day mistakenly considered the “beginning” of the Iraq War. This “war” began when the Security Council imposed comprehensive sanctions against Iraq on August 6, 1990, four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait…and has continued unabated (via bombings, sanctions, invasion, and occupation) since then.

Postscript: Some of the reactions to my February article demonstrated shameful ignorance of and/or tacit support for transparent crimes against humanity. Many chose to fall back on excuses along the lines of “every country has such episodes in its history” and/or “you have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” For example: “What modern nation state isn’t like this? If a nation has power, it abuses it. Why would we be any different?” It seems the decency bar has been lowered (to say the least). Also, since no other nation claims moral superiority with more frequency than the U.S., to nonchalantly absolve America of its myriad transgressions is to conveniently disregard such reprehensible rhetoric and arrogance.

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

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.

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

What are we talking about here? Is freedom just an issue of bigger cages and longer chains? Is it merely a commodity sold to the highest bidder?
Freedom is an old song by Richie Havens.

When you write books, articles, and essays that typically fall into the “radical” category, you take hits from the full range of the political spectrum. Right, left, or anywhere in-between, beliefs run deep and viewpoints die hard. Often, however, irate critics of all stripes lazily fall back on empty rebuttals. For example, when I posted an essay called “Why I Hate America” at the liberal blog, Daily Kos, it provoked this timeless classic:

“America is a terrible country,” he/she snarked. “After all, how many other countries give you the RIGHT to write what you just wrote?”

Let’s put aside the unintentional (?) tongue twister (“the right to write what you just wrote”) and the fact that the obvious answer to his/her question–plenty of other countries do–destroys this line of reasoning (sic). The larger issue, as I see it, is how we each choose to evaluate our freedom.

Freedom is a new song by George Michael.

Hey, I’m not living in Pinochet’s Chile or Duvalier’s Haiti or Hussein’s Iraq or Suharto’s Indonesia (insert your favorite U.S. client-state). I know. But what are we talking about here? Is freedom just an issue of bigger cages and longer chains? Is it merely a commodity sold to the highest bidder? Must the majority of us sit by and drool while freedom fries on the grill of capitalist avarice?

Freedom was a professional tennis team from Philadelphia.

Speaking of grills, I was once eating lunch in a Virginia Beach diner when I heard a loud roar. “What was that?” I bellowed. The waitress smiled and replied: “That’s an F-14…the sound of freedom.”

Freedom is a taxpayer-subsidized killing machine.

To have more freedom than, say, a woman living under Taliban repression is not the same as being free. But it is the same as settling for less subjugation instead of demanding more liberty (or at least as much liberty currently guaranteed by virtue of the Constitution).

Being an American dissident usually results in marginalization and financial instability but rarely gets one jailed or disappeared. Still, the “it could be worse” excuse is no way to judge the quality and/or quantity of anything.

Freedom is, according to Rosa Luxemburg, “always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world,” adds Gore Vidal. “No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity–much less dissent.”

In the Vietnam War protest song, “Five to One,” Jim Morrison of The Doors sings:

The old get old/And the young get stronger
May take a week/And it may take longer
They got the guns/But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah/We’re takin’ over

In my youth, I took solace in the whole “we got the numbers” thing. The very idea filled with me hope…but little did I know, the ones with the guns have had it all figured out for a very, very long time. Philosopher David Hume–in 1758–explained it this way: “As force is always on side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular.”

“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world,” adds Gore Vidal. “No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity–much less dissent.”

This potent combination of muscle and misinformation manifested itself in the events leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. On February 15 of that year, tens of millions of earthlings marched and carried signs to declare their unambiguous disapproval of America’s plan to drastically ratchet up what had essentially been a 12-plus year war against the people of Iraq.

The massive global protests were barely noticed.
The shock-and-awe invasion went on as planned.
The repulsive occupation continues to this day.
Doesn’t say a whole lot for “having the numbers,” huh?

“We” also had the numbers last summer when it came to who did and didn’t support Israel’s assault on the Lebanese populace. Outside of a select few in Israel, Great Britain, and the United States, the vast majority of our planet’s human population were vociferously against the actions of the Israeli government and its U.S.-funded armed forces. But once again, the numbers just didn’t add up. As long as America’s ruling elite avoided any mention of a ceasefire, Lebanon remained doomed to its fate…no matter how many of us didn’t like it.

In these and countless other cases, “we” have had the numbers. “We” still have the numbers. Morrison’s “they,” however, give no indication they’ll be surrendering their guns any time soon. As a result, dissent in America is pretty much limited to marches, protests, boycotts, petitions, candlelight vigils, Michael Moore documentaries, the occasional vote for a third party candidate, and articles like this one. All of these methods (at least in their safe-for-mass-consumption versions) are deemed “legal” by those with the guns and, in their own way, legitimize the power held by those with the guns. Thus, all such tactics are ultimately impotent in terms of provoking systemic, long term change. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why you haven’t taken your rebellion beyond the methods listed above. Your answer is likely the same as mine: “We’ve got the numbers, but they’ve got the guns.”

Maybe author Derrick Jensen had it right when he said: “We still think we have something to lose. That’s what’s stopping us. As soon as we realize we have nothing left to lose we’ll be dangerous.” After all, as Jim Morrison sang: “No one here gets out alive.”

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.