Hiroshima & Nagasaki Vigil Aug. 6 & 7 - Ashland, Oregon

Women's International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF), 05.08.2010 00:00

Annual Hiroshima & Nagasaki Vigil in Ashland to Feature "Nuclear Maze"
Friday August 6, 2010, 8:00 AM to Saturday August 7, 7:00 PM Ashland Plaza

On the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) invites the public to a series of programs commemorating that event. The theme of this year's vigil is "Citizen Action for a Nuclear Free World," reflecting the importance of citizen involvement on nuclear issues. Vital background information on these issues will be presented at 7 PM on Thursday August 5 at the Ashland Library. Speakers include Jay Mullen, Hanford Downwinder and Professor of History at Southern Oregon University, Danny Wahpepah of Red Earth Descendants, and Herb Rothschild, organizer of the Rogue Valley Campaign for Nuclear Abolition.

The vigil itself will begin on Friday, August 6 at 8 AM on the Plaza in downtown Ashland with the lighting of a memorial candle in remembrance of the victims of the bombings. Bells will be rung at 8:15 to mark the exact time the bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. Mayor John Stromberg will read Ashland's proclamation designating the city as a nuclear-free zone; this will be followed by performances by the Rogue Valley Peace Choir and members of Ashland Taiko. At 6 PM on Friday, additional music will be provided by Whistling Elk Drum.

After the morning ceremony, the public will be invited to explore a "Nuclear Maze" until 7
PM Saturday, August 7. The maze is a large canvas and wood structure with photos and text that was created to teach the history of nuclear weapons and their impact on communities in the past and in the present day.

On Monday, August 9, the date of the bombing of Nagasaki, the vigil will close with a ceremony at the Japanese Garden in Lithia Park at 7 PM. The public is invited to float sunflowers, the symbol of the nuclear-free movement, down the park stream.

Local sponsors of the vigil include Ashland WILPF, Veterans for Peace (Rogue Valley), Peace House, the Rogue Valley Peace Choir, Rogue Valley Campaign for Nuclear Abolition, Red Earth Descendants, Citizens for Peace and Justice of Medford, Collateral Repair Project, the United Nations Association of Southern Oregon, One Sunny Day Initiatives, United Church of Christ Congregational of Ashland, and the Social Justice Action Committee of the Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

International organizations sponsoring the event are Mayors for Peace, WILPF Disarm, Peace Action, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

Founded in 1915, WILPF is the oldest peace organization in the United States and has branches in 37 countries. WILPF acts to promote peace, social justice, racial equality, and women's rights. Previous members include Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Jane Addams, Dr. Linus Pauling, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

For more information, contact Jill Mackie  jmackie@mind.net (541) 488-9286 or Nancy Spencer  nanspen@mind.net (541) 488-1561

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The Bomb, a new book from Howard Zinn 05.08.2010 - 19:42 - - - A NEW BOOK - - - In his lifetime, Howard Zinn wrote and edited nearly two dozen books, and altered radically the way Americans view their own history with his best selling A Peoples’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. He was compassionate, dynamic, and an unrelenting seeker after justice, and when he died in January 2010, he was mourned by friends and family, students and activists, fellow historians and makers of history like himself. Zinn seemed to do it all: think, act, organize, and agitate for more than half a century. A G.I., he was also a professor and an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as a critic of the Vietnam War. In The Bomb, a new book forthcoming from City Lights, he tells the little-known story of his own experience as a bomber in the U. S. Air Force and his role in dropping bombs on Germany during World War II. Zinn also explains that he initially applauded the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “So I wouldn’t be going to the Pacific, and might soon be coming home for good,” he thought when he saw a headline that read “Atom Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima.” Part history, part memoir, part sermon, The Bomb is meant to wake up citizens, to rouse them to reject “the abstractions of duty and obedience” and to refuse to heed the call of war. It’s as though Zinn speaks from the dead one last time -- to plead for individual responsibility. Perhaps in writing the book, which he finished just before his own death, he also laid to rest ghosts in his own life. The publication of the book coincides with the 65th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are two parts to The Bomb. One of them has to do with Zinn’s own experiences bombing -- and destroying -- the French town of Royen in April 1945 three weeks before the end of the war in Europe, that resulted in the deaths of more than one thousand people. Zinn was a bombardier with the 490th Bomb Group and flying in a B-17 with the crew. “I remember distinctly seeing, from our great height, the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches stuck in fog,” he writes. “I was completely unaware of the human chaos below.” Twenty-one years later, Zinn returned to Royen to do research about the destruction of the seaside French town. And in 2010, 65 years later he was still haunted by the bombing, and his own role as a bombardier. What Zinn learned from his research was that in the bombing of Royan, napalm or “liquid fire” was used for the first time. He concludes that it was “an unnecessary military operation” and that Royan was bombed to fulfill “pride, military ambition, glory and honor.” He also argues that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary to win the war against the Japanese. He presents evidence to show that the war was already won, and that the argument that the bombs saved hundreds of thousands of American lives was misleading at best. For Zinn, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of terrorism, which he defines as “the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose.” The Japanese cities were bombed, he says, because the United States wanted to “show the world -- especially the Soviet Union -- its atomic weaponry.” Zinn has collected an array of powerful quotations from U.S. presidents and generals that explode like bombshells in the pages of this book. “This is the greatest thing in history,” Truman boasted of the A bomb. General Curtis LeMay said during World War II, “There is no such thing as an innocent civilian.” During the Vietnam War, and speaking of the Vietnamese he said, “We will bomb them back to the Stone Age.” Zinn has also included stories from Americans who were involved in the bombings of Japan, either directly or indirectly. Father George Zabelka, the chaplain to the crews that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said, years later, “I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians…I was brainwashed.” The Bomb is Zinn’s last confession. It’s his last sermon, and an account of the ways that he too was brainwashed during World War II. It’s a horrific story that he tells. He brings out the little known fact that American prisoners in Japan also died in the bombing of Hiroshima. A Japanese doctor saw their bodies a day later and said, “They had no faces! Their eyes, noses, and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted.” The City Lights editor for this book, Greg Ruggiero, says that Zinn “loved small acts of rebellion.” The Bomb is his final act of rebellion. Zinn observes in The Bomb that, “rebellion is a rare phenomenon.” But he doesn’t leave it at that. He urges citizens “to interfere” both with the war machine and the “odd perversion of the natural that we call society” and to save human lives. [Jonah Raskin is a professor at Sonoma State University and the author of The Mythology of Imperialism and Field Days.] The Rag Blog  http://theragblog.blogspot.com Review by Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog> Homepage:: http:// PLANET HIROSHIMA 2010 06.08.2010 - 00:15 T O T A L * I N S A N I T Y  http://harrismagazine.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/planet-hiroshima-2010/ PLANET HIROSHIMA 2010 By MARK T. HARRIS When the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, two-year-old Sadako Sasaki was at home with her family. Unlike tens of thousands of others, she was fortunate enough to survive the immediate blast of the 15-kiloton Uranium-235 bomb. But the young, athletic girl who liked to run could not escape the grim reality of what it meant to live through an atomic blast. Nine years later Sadako would contract leukemia, dying a year later in a Hiroshima hospital at the age of 12. In death she joined the legions of the hibakusha, the Japanese term for the victims of radiation poisoning. An estimated 140,000 people died as a result of the Hiroshima blast, tens of thousands of them instantly or within the next few months and almost all of them noncombatants and children. Three days later at Nagasaki, another bomb was dropped, killing thousands more. Eventually over 200,000 people would die as a result of the attacks, either during the bombings or later from illness. By any objective measure the nuclear attacks by the U.S. military constitute the largest acts of mass murder in the history of the world. They also constitute acts shrouded in lies. At the time President Truman told Americans the targets were military sites. It was necessary to use the bombs to force Japan's surrender, he declared. The public was also told-falsely-that leaflets were dropped prior to the bombings warning people to leave. Later, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson claimed that the atom bomb saved the United States from an invasion of Japan that might have cost a million American casualties. But U.S. official McGeorge Brundy came up with the million figure, based on nothing, as he later acknowledged. Consider only the assessment of Admiral William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1945, who years later wrote: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan." The admiral compared the use of the bombs to adoption of "an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages." The Age of 'Collateral Damage'Š Truman indeed knew Japan's surrender was imminent, according to now declassified records. But if nuclear weapons were unnecessary to end the war, they did send a forceful global message about which country would dominate the post-war era. Truman did not intend for it to be the Soviet Union. Thus, the dead and victimized of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only the last casualties of World War II, but also the first casualties of the Cold War. Dark ages, indeed. In our world the deliberate slaughter of civilians in war is very much the norm. The atrocities of the Nazis and Japanese militarists are well-known, but less so was the intentional targeting by Britain's air force of the concentrated worker housing of Hamburg, Germany. Ignoring the factories and U-boat construction yards south of the Elbe, British bombers under the command of extreme reactionary Arthur Harris instead spent months dropping incendiaries and high explosives on Hamburg's civilians. Some British military leaders did not support this policy, but it prevailed and was driven not only by strategic war aims, but also by what science historian David Bodanis in "Electric Universe" (Crown, 2005) describes as Harris' acute hatred of the working classes. More evidence. In the Errol Morris documentary, "Fog of War," former Secretary of State Robert McNamara admits a reasonable case could have been made to have tried as war criminals the group of Americans who organized the mass death firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. It's a significant admission since McNamara was part of that group. McNamara also acknowledges that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed by Congress, giving President Johnson the authority to unleash war in Vietnam, was based on a lie. The alleged torpedo attack by North Vietnam on the U.S.S. Maddox in 1964 never happened. Fast forward 40 years. Other than the venerated thinkers at Fox News and their ilk, the whole world now knows the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on an equally fabricated justification: Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. They didn't exist. Nor does the shining "democracy" whose exportation became the fallback rationale to justify Iraq's ongoing occupation. As the public policy group Just Foreign Policy reports, what does exist is as many as 1,366,350 Iraqis dead as a result of consequences directly tied to the 2003 U.S. military invasion, "A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi," said one member of the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, as reported to The Nation's investigative reporters Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian in 2007. The GI was describing his impression of the general attitude among U.S. troops who operate the patrols and supply convoys, man checkpoints, and conduct raids and arrests. Š And Also Madness and Irony What also exists is a Democratic president who declares he will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that support the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Formally, that's a change from his Republican predecessor. But like his Republican predecessor President Obama also insists on retaining the American threat to use nuclear weapons first. Nor in its recent arms talks with Russia would the administration explicitly adopt language threatening nuclear attack only against nuclear threats. Meanwhile, the White House employs favorable rhetoric for the idea of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East-as long as Israel (and itself, for that matter) is exempted. Actually, at the moment "nuclear-weapons-free zone" just means no nukes for Iran. The latter remains a country within striking distance of U.S. nuclear-armed submarines. Tellingly, during the 2008 primary race Obama briefly flirted with the notion of opposing use of nuclear weapons as a foreign policy option. Now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sharply criticized her then primary rival. "I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons," Clinton said. Actually, yes they can. They can at minimum adopt a no-first strike policy. They can also work vigorously to eliminate nuclear weapons from their own and the world's arsenals, instead of quietly reconstituting their nuclear stockpiles while talking "disarmament." They can question why the United States arms itself with a military force whose budget equals almost half of all world military spending. Most important, they can repudiate a foreign policy tradition that takes as a given the American right to send troops and establish military bases anywhere in the world. In 2008, Obama quickly scratched his electioneering inspired anti-nuclear thought, but kept the one about possibly invading Pakistan in pursuit of Al-Qaeda (and this is key), regardless of whether Pakistan approved. He has also since being elected proved-as he said all along he would-that his opposition to the Iraq war was more tactical than principled. Despite the high hopes of Move-On and other liberal voices that a "peace candidate" would occupy the White House, Obama wanted only to redirect the juggernaut of American military power toward Afghanistan. It's a sad, imperial state of affairs when foreign policy fundamentals change so little from one administration to the next. Sad, and also dangerous. Because 65 years after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world remains perilously trapped in conflict. "In the year 2007 the average yield of a nuclear weapon is about 10 times greater than the 15-kton Hiroshima bomb," wrote Raymond G. Wilson, professor emeritus of physics at Illinois Wesleyan University, for the Peace and Conflict Monitor. "Throughout the 50 years following 1945, the average rate of creation of nuclear weapons in world arsenals was the equivalent of about 70 Hiroshima bombs per day, every one of those 18,250 days." The threat of nuclear annihilation remains real. Yet the irony of our age is that for the first time in human history the science, technology, manufacturing and agriculture exist to eliminate all want. But in the context of a world also driven by the acquisition of corporate profits and entrenched class and nationalist divisions, the world's people instead face an increasingly uncertain and violent future. Or even the possibility of no future. When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the famous physicist Albert Einstein publicly protested. The U.S. government responded by adding Einstein's protests to his FBI file. Now U.S. Secretary of State Clinton leads the international campaign for tough U.N. sanctions on Iran for failing to prove it's nuclear program is peaceful. Yet, no such campaign by the western powers has ever targeted Israel, which the Federation of American Scientists reports may possess roughly between 75 and 130 nuclear weapons or more. No doubt there is plenty of reason to despair. But then there is also the story of young Sadako Sasaki, who did not deserve to die at age 12. Sadako's story is only one among countless millions of tragic accounts of "man's inhumanity to man," of the innocents whose lives over the last century have been cheap fodder for the killing machines of state power, whether of the democratic, fascist, or other variety. During her months of hospitalization, Sadako undertook a project to fold a thousand paper cranes in the hope that, according to Japanese legend, her prayer for life would be granted. It was perhaps just the wish of a child. But Sadako never gave up and folded the cranes up until the day of her death. In Japan, after her death young people inspired by her story organized to collect money to build a statue of Sadako, which was unveiled in Hiroshima Peace Park in 1958. There is also a statue of Sadako in Seattle's Peace Park. At the bottom of the statue in Japan of Sadako holding a golden crane is the inscription, "This is our cry, This is our prayer, Peace in the world." Sixty-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, they remain words to remember and live by in this mad age. By MARK T. HARRIS> Homepage:: http://