With aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, ever new act-of-war sanctions being put in place, and calls to bomb Iran crescendoing in Washington, some of us had foolishly thought that this year’s King birthday observances might see a few prominent clerics calling attention to King’s condemnation of US wars, long taboo in mainstream military-oriented America.

Organized religion in America has, for forty-five years, cooperated with the  understanding that no one shall mention that the great civil rights leader and national hero had denounced his government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

The buildup to war on Iran, the daily toll of human lives from military action in many Muslim nations, the invasions of Afghanistan , Iraq, Panama, Dominican Republic, etc., the CIA criminal and anti-democratic civil war creating activities, the continuation of the Vietnam war for eight years after King’s murder, all needed the silent cooperation of clergy that King condemned as betrayal.

King’s betrayers also betray those millions of innocents, who, in their own beloved countries, fall in harms way of heavily armed Americans and remain undefended by a US clergy busy praising and expressing love and gratitude for what King did for them, while it blackballs the King who worked to do the same for his equally loved brothers and sisters in countries under US attack.

Do all these many thousands of clergy imagine that no one significant will ever notice these betrayals? Do any of the elderly ministers, who knew King personally, not feel some bites of conscience?

It’s hard to believe that Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Andrew Young, who had held the dying King in their arms and went on to high political office within the establishment, did not have to grit their teeth to be able to hold themselves back from speaking of King’s condemnation of US wars at the unveiling of the King Monument last year.

Sincere antiwar scholars have long accepted that clergy adheres to a strictly conformist role in a society ruled covertly and overtly by the investment community consensus on Wall Street and the military-industrial complex through their control of all three branches of the government, of all important sources of information with power to disinform, of the Pentagon and of the vast secret functions of the CIA.

The sudden tempestuous 1967 King caused problems for religious leaders, implicating them in complicity for having never challenged pathetic lies justifying mass murder that King was exposing. Ensconced in the national body politic, they have stonewalled on. Even today, to our knowledge, not a single congregation in the nation endorses King’s condemnation of US wars.

Antiwar activists are always searching for clergy who have followed in the footsteps of King during his last year that provoked a national controversy long since carefully blacked out of public awareness. This writer feels fortunate to know Father Paul Mayer, who worked with King, endorses the King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and was recently in Occupy Wall Street’s Freedom Park making sure people knew of King’s condemnation of US wars and predatory investments.

I am also lucky to have had the chance to chat briefly with Rev. Jeremiah Wright before hearing him speak at the Monthly Review 50th Anniversary, where he eloquently expounded on reasons solidly based on history and King’s teaching, why every sensitive person aware of the violent death of millions should want to consider what Wright was repeatedly shown crying out in video, “God damn America for its crimes against humanity.”

But the most educating King learning experience was spending an hour-and-a- half with Riverside Church Head Minister William Sloan Coffin in 1982, while working under his guidance in the church tower’s International Liaison Office in support of the UN 2nd Special Session on Disarmament.

Rev. Coffin’s life had been intertwined with King’s, and his trip to Hanoi as invited negotiator for the release of US POWs had antedated King’s own involvement. Rev. Coffin had been jailed many times and finally convicted of conspiracy to counsel, aid, and abet resistance to the draft.

Coffin was a musician and former CIA officer in its Russian Department. I had performed on the first cultural exchange with the Soviet Union and shared his passion for the language. He was interested that I had been in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis and on two other State Department run tours in Latin America during CIA and Pentagon actions in a half dozen countries in turmoil. I remember being struck by his insight as he reviewed the history of organized religion as so often being on the side of repression and automatic opposition to revolution, noting that the revolutions of France, Mexico, Russia, Spain, and China had been anti-clerical for the people’s memory of the church having been hand maiden to conquering empires who produced the suffering that was the fertile ground for revolution in the first place.

So impressive to hear this from a minster famous for physically interfering with government crime in the name of Jesus, who never doubted the role of the  Christian church in caring for society, but was keenly aware that modern empires had used and perverted the church into materialism and as accessory to domination by powerful criminal elements.

I never saw him again, as I as spent most of the next  twenty years in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand (and returned a Buddhist).

During six years in Korea, I applied King’s teaching and discovered things were not as I had been led to believe by President Truman and from conversation in church courtyards.  Koreans, including Korean Christians, all know that American business interests had had President Theodore Roosevelt snub Koreans and recognize the Japanese occupation of Korea; that President Wilson had formally recognized Korea as Japanese territory (in all, making possible a brutal 40 year occupation); that Americans had not fought the Japanese in Korea, coming in rather when Koreans had already accomplished their own politically democratic free Korea; that after unconscionably cutting the nation in two, had brought Singman Rhee in from Washington, who would set up a hated government, whose police and special forces would massacre (now fully UN documented) a couple of hundred thousand unionists, socialists, communists often along with their families in the South in the years before the army of the Northern government invaded and with little opposition overran all of the South, uniting Korea in the five weeks before the US invaded, bringing death to three million and flattening every city but one in the North and South; that a severely militaristic North Korea is the result of it having been bombed so mercilessly, threatened with the atom bomb, and strangled with tight international sanctions and economic blockades for nearly 60 years, while under continual barrage of anti-communist propaganda in Western media; that Rhee fled for his life after the war, and a series of military dictatorships prevailed under a heavy US Army presence until the mid 1980s; that in spite of all this deadly result, many Korean Christians and their clergy feel the need to accept the international media version of American righteous protection of Koreans from communism.

Working as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra (founded by Ho Chi Minh) in Hanoi, during most of the 1990s, I  learned something of the human side of what the Vietnamese call the American war after the French war of recolonization paid for by US taxpayers.

All the musicians had lost family. “Killed by the Americans” they would smile in Buddhist equanimity when asked. Between preparing Beethoven and Brahms I got to know the most soft spoken, heroic, charming and fun to be with people in the world. If many of Americans recognize their complicity, why should not clergy, who turned their back on King’s revelations.

I cringe when I think of the Grimm fairy tale nature of the anti-Vietnamese propaganda heard over so many years. Do clerical stomachs not turn like ours do as candidates for public office are acclaimed as heroes for having “served” in Vietnam?

On the opening day of the US bombing of Baghdad in 2003, I marched in a London street protest. The next day as our flight on the way to India detoured well away from Iraq, we could see flashes on the horizon — Iraqis being killed and maimed supposedly to depose a Saddam Hussein who had been supported by the CIA for two decades. Had to ask myself is bull being sold as to why the US is bombing or invading this or that small country because clergy leaders deny the necessity to study history carefully, as King came to do to help his people.

This idea of clergy not properly protecting us from deception even of the crudest historically ass-backwards kind was still fresh in my mind as I read the three Calcutta English language newspapers, and watched BBC Asia, which interestingly is quite a bit to the left of BBC London or New York, because it has to compete with local channels serving a citizenry less gullible after suffering a century of racist colonialism. (The British, including clergy, back in England feed on the same outlandish nonsense excusing and justifying the colonial behavior of their armies abroad just as America’s clergy accepts absurd excuses for American neocolonial wars abroad).

At a dinner party thrown for the patrons of the concert series, I was introduced to an Anglican minister stationed in India. Revved up as I was from watching floods of videos and photos of piles of bodies of civilians, headless children, body parts and clothing strewn everywhere, (images not being seen in America), I thought to comment inquisitively, how the war, with British pilots bombing, must be weighing heavily on him, as one responsible for moral leadership. He looked at me puzzled, a little annoyed, and answered to the effect that a minister’s job had absolutely nothing to do with war or preventing it, that church and politics don’t mix. Altercation proceeded:

“Church and its government’s homicide surely don’t mix either – you bless the troops shipping out to kill.”

“Its the job of a priest, rabbi or minister.”

“It’s a political act of acquiescence or complicity in homicide .”

I thought to myself, yes, of course, Western establishment-entrenched religious leaders must be the same throughout the world. Wasn’t I in India, where pastors took tea with wealthy faithful, both well acclimatized to a multitude of the landless being starved so that a profit might be turned from what would have been their land to cultivate (predatory investments King spoke of). Charity, rather putting an end to the legalized starving of the poor, is the usual clergy-led Christian response.

When I was a kid, I tired of listening to sermons about the hem length of ladies skirts and such, when the headlines of the newspapers I delivered were about millions of people starving to death. It caused me to visit my schoolmates houses of worship looking in vain for better Christianity.

As an adult, I have, on many occasions,  confessed feeling as an American drenched in the blood of millions only to hear my minister or priest trying to help me be at peace with it.

Official clergy enjoy prestige as the guardians of morality, family and community values but unlike King are careful not to answer why Americans and Christians from other nominally white nations, are killing Afghanis in Afghanistan, for ten years designating Taliban as the enemy as were the Vietcong in King’s day.

The average cleric would most likely talk no differently than the average American, either in some agreement with an outrageous lie justifying war on Afghanis, or fielding a disarming remark to deflect such an uncomfortably serious and aggressive question, “Look, nobody likes war’ or the more fundamental oxymoron, “War is war’ and “God will receive the victims.’

By praising exceptional clergy King cut at the majority, “surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.”

Even on King’s birthday  the whole Baptist community leadership and the NAACP focused solely on domestic injustice, while the wars that King condemned as perpetuating domestic injustice rage on, unspoken of. Is this not an obvious repudiation of King’s guidance?

Do all these pastors and church officials think King was wrong when he taught, in the maturity of the increased awareness of his final year, the futility of trying to improve America while America is destroying other nations, using up social and material resources to conquer abroad for accumulation of capital by investors?

A prominent New York church, where King once denounced his government for crimes against humanity, held a special King birthday event in which the personable minister opening the service, though having on other occasions decried today’s wars, spoke of “that awful war” (in Vietnam) as if that is what King had spoken against and not described it as being a part of the bloody wars and calculated violence presently still going on for financial interests. Misleadingly listed in the program was hearing a recording of “Beyond Vietnam” (in which King had detailed US crimes.) We heard only a carefully selected few minutes long snippet calling for improving society along general principles of social well being that would not have offended supporters of today’s wars or even war criminals or war profiteers.

King had told us, “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady.”  We have seen  a pattern of suppression,  the presence of U.S. military advisers in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. “Look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the country. This is not just.”

If antiwar activists would relentlessly quote from King’s Beyond Vietnam sermon nonstop, it would make it difficult for majority clergy to go on ignoring King’s condemnation of US wars. According to Howard Zinn clergy opposition would make it difficult for US wars to be continued and would make network entertainment/news hailing Vietnam and Iraq military ventures as glorious prosecutable as hate crimes.

King would have loudly repeated the U.S. media suppressed arrogant and bragging 1989 confession of David Rockefeller cohort Zbignieu Bzrezinski¹, appointed Presidential Advisor to President Carter:

Brzezinski:  ”According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid [funding, arming and training] to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

Questioning Interviewer: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Bzrezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?

Interviewer: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Bzrezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? … the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems … ?

(Actually, according to eminent Middle East journalist Robert Fisk, what Bzrezinski called a “pro-Soviet regime in Kabul” was an overwhelmingly popular women liberating and educating government. And the hill tribe war-lords backed and led by the CIA and US allied secret services of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were executing teachers of girls. CIA backed war-lord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was known for spraying acid on women dressed in Western fashion.)

King might have even gone back further to describe the British and French murderous military occupation and colonial exploitation of all Arabian lands after World War II, long since replaced by armed American economic and political hegemony.

Commenting on 9/11 in 2001, Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermonized, “The American chickens have come home to roost.” King might well have pointed out that the Vietnamese suffered the equivalent of a 9/11 from American bombing every month for fifteen years, and never spoke of vengeful justice for their millions of victims.

As Americans continue to mourn their own innocent victims, the world is watching for some sign of equal compassion for the immeasurably more numerous innocent victims of America’s wars in poor nations since end of WW II.

Martin Luther King Jr. not only had such compassion but awoke to a determination to speak out against this massive destruction of lives caused by powerful investor conspiracies of war to protect what King called “unjust overseas predatory investments in vulnerable poorer nations all around the world.”

Public awareness of a dynamic Gandhi-like leader King’s reminding the world of its capability to make war unacceptable has been suppressed in investor owned media for 43 years.  In 1967, that conglomerate media, led by the NY Times, denounced King as unpatriotic. King was soon assassinated and the war in Vietnam went on for another ten bloody years.

There is now an International Campaign for Awareness of King’s Condemnation of U.S. Wars and the “unjust overseas predatory investments they are meant to maintain” at this website.

1. Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998

Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone. By the way, should you happen to attend one of those militarized Memorial Day observances with parades, uniforms, flags flying and speeches about wonderful patriotic sacrificing of ones life, during the requested moment of silence, exclude my six basic training bunk mates buried somewhere in North Korea. They would be really pissed if anyone thanked them for dying while forced to participate in killing dirt poor people in their own country because of some phony radio and newspaper praise how we were protecting Koreans from themselves.

Four of those six buddies were draftees — in the army because didn’t want to go to jail. The fifth one had been persuaded to join and get off a jail sentence for petty thievery. The youngest one was glad to be drafted out of doing nothing at home in the jobless Ozark Mountains. He was wearing the first and only pair of shoes (boots) he ever owned when he died in a country in which no one spoke English.

In the sea of destruction, death and bleeding all around them, the occasional glimpse of wild eyed mothers in rags desperately trying to care for and save there little children, my friends learned that we had all been had by the rich bosses of the America they had naively believed in. Somehow, incredulously, these bastards must have been making money from this hell they had arranged by convincing enough stupid people that it was necessary.

If they (what was left of the them) could arise from the hole in the ground they must have been thrown in hurriedly, rise up through the green grass and bushes growing over their cadavers somewhere in the now again beautiful mountains up near the Chinese border, they would have loved to ghost in from the spirit world and bust up a Memorial Day service that praised the war that ended their young lives in an idiotic hail of flying metal.

If they could have lived, while raising families and getting to be 80 like their fellow draftee writing this, they would have seen other guys suckered into dying while openly murdering in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, in the Dominican Republic, Panama, in Iran, Lebanon, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and as of a month ago, Libya. Killing people to protect them from their own people was the principle laid down.

During all these decades of U.S. military butchering millions of men, women and children, they would have read from time to time in investigative journalism or released CIA files, of their presidents secretly ordering the funding of destabilization, civil war creation, even assassination of popular leaders of the third world that had led to to the death of many more millions of men, women and children in Greece, Guatemala, Congo, Sudan, Cuba, Haiti, in Indonesia, Angola, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Many more died in these covertly warred upon countries than when and where U.S planes and American troops on the ground were doing their thing.

This incomprehensible total of uncountable billions of years of life cut from innocent human beings, just so millionaires could make money on top of the impossible to spend millions they already had. The United States of America, once the beacon of light for the oppressed all around the world, has now surpassed, in number of lives taken, the worse horrors of insane mass murder throughout the history of Mankind. And that is not counting the millions that die every year of starvation among the half of mankind that lives on less than two dollars a day, so business people can fill the world with weapons of mass destruction.

How has it been accomplished?

We see the attractive news telecasters with their calculated friendly charm. We don’t see the pentagon and CIA people in the board rooms of the media conglomerates which now have unprecedented power, owning press and television, book publishing, film production and databases, and flooding schools with war promoting, military idolizing magazines like Time, US Report, and Newsweek.

Sometimes their incredible mass deception is easy. “North Korea attacked a peaceful South Korea!” On that simple slogan, all U.S. atrocities become their fault. Simply never let the sheep know about the now well documented more than a hundred thousand massacred in the South by the U.S. sponsored government of hated Syngman Rhee during the years BEFORE the troops from the North came south – or that before the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force attacked in force the short Korean civil war had been already over after five weeks – that the South Korean Army had defected or gone home – that South Koreans either welcomed their brothers from the North or at least were glad to be rescued from the American implanted murderous dictator Rhee. (Of course never let Americans be ashamed that the U.S. had divided Korea in two after W.W.II and that after WW I, President Wilson had Okayed what would be a 35 year long terrible Japanese occupation of Korea.)

Explaining why Obama had to order the destruction of Libya has been a little more hairy. The media had to lie that peaceful protesters were being targeted. There were no peaceful protesters. Wealthy Socialist Libya, with free health care and free education, had, according to UN assessment last year, a standard of living higher than nine European countries including Russia, better longevity and lower infant mortality. Most everyone owns a car, personal income level is high. Anderson Cooper has never mentioned this envious economy of Libya. There were no “peaceful demonstrations.”

Feb. 15 and 16: mobs of a hundred or so are setting fire to traffic police stations. During the week before, workers at Chinese and Korean building projects were being beaten and robbed and chased (they would soon all be brought home.) Feb. 17 saw a co-opting from overseas of the anniversary demonstration commemorating the 2006 wild demonstrations happening around the world which in Benghazi some protesters had died trying to burn down the Italian Consulate. In 2006, there were cries that Gaddafi was insufficiently enraged by the Danish cartoons.

American funded Libyan exile organizations in London had cleverly called for a “day of rage” against Gaddafi on that Danish cartoon anniversary. CNN filmed a crowd of people jumping up and down railing against Gaddafi. The next day, all the news agencies reported the same figure of about 26 dead, including policemen who had died. That was all CNN needed to proclaim, “Gaddafi is targeting peaceful protesters who only want democracy,” even though the only video footage shown was of a scattering of people running with the sound of shots from where or whom not visible.

CIA, with M16, Mossad and French intelligence, using a good amount of al Qaida manpower micromanages a successful armed attack, heavy weapons appearing almost immediately. In all the subsequent weeks of attacking cities and towns, these tough guys in pickup trucks will never be reported by CNN as having killed anyone. A civil war is whipped up taking advantage of the nine thousand year old tribal rivalry between Tripolitana and Cyrenaica.

The are horrific reports from German Reuters agency journalists in insurgent captured Benghazi, but CNN telecast reporters never report from the streets of Benghazi or any other rebel governed captured towns. CNN continues to report only from Tripoli where no effort is spared to portray the Libyan army as murderers and rapists. However BBC and Reuters reported rebels executed 50 black Libyan soldiers, during the very first days, some hanged in the street, one beheaded, all beaten.

Check out the background of the stooges the CIA has groomed to lead the Libyan insurgency and new American style democracy to come, thanks to U.S.NATO air strikes and increased funding and enhanced CIA leadership behind the scenes.

With all the decades of the conglomerate networks portraying Libya’s oil nationalizing Gaddafi a monster, CNN’s amazing announcement that “Gaddafi was going to kill everybody” immediately became such an disputable fact that Obama was able to cite it in explaining his order for air strikes.

That Gaddafi was for sure going to kill the Libyans he had lead so well for forty years was sold to the gullible US and European public as Obama’s and NATO leaders’ sole reason to bomb the Libyan government – bomb on the pretext of creating a no fly zone. A no fly zone call created by anti-Gaddafi’s Libya Western media. There had been videos of a couple planes shot down but none of planes attacking civilian population, only verbal accusations by telereporters Nic Robertson and Anderson Cooper, who for days pointed to the same bomb crater outside of town but admitting no one was hurt. Libya’s small air force did finally play a part in turning around the pickup trucks mounted with large anti-air craft and antitank guns headed for Tripoli.

Within less than a couple of weeks, awesome billions of dollars were stolen by Obama with all U.S controlled international finance institutions collaborating. Then U.S. NATO air strikes came to be ordered by a U.S. controlled UN Security Council in which China and Russia didn’t dare interfere. (Though China lost billions of dollars worth of construction projects and being the prime purchaser of Libya’s oil.)

U.S. and EU investors see opportunities as oil rich Libya will be stopped from selling oil to China and will be stopped from minting gold dinars to replace the the dollar and euro and stopped from pushing for African Unity to halt continued white world investor exploitation.

Gaddafi, Chairman of the African Union, another great leader of African Unity, will be removed as were Nkruma and Patrice Lumumba before him.
¹ (An imperative more basic than keeping US backed dictators in power and eliminating non-capitalist regimes is at work in Libya and the Middle East. An imperative that has created all wars. It is imperative for private investment financial capital to accumulate, and to accumulate at an ever increasing rate, pushing the wealthy owners of capital into ever new variations of same ancient conspiracy of the rich against the poor.)

“When Britain lost control of Egypt in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden said he wanted the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser “destroyed” murdered “I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt”. Those insolent Arabs, Winston Churchill had urged in 1951, should be driven “into the gutter from which they should never have emerged”.

The language of colonialism may have been modified; the spirit and the hypocrisy are unchanged. A new imperial phase is unfolding in direct response to the Arab uprising that began in January and has shocked Washington and Europe, causing an Eden-style panic. The loss of the Egyptian tyrant Mubarak was grievous, though not irretrievable; an American-backed counter-revolution is under way as the military regime in Cairo is seduced with new bribes and power shifting from the street to political groups that did not initiate the revolution. The western aim, as ever, is to stop authentic democracy and reclaim control.

The assault on Libya, a crime under the Nuremberg standard, is Britain’s 46th military “intervention” in the Middle East since 1945. Like its imperial partners, Britain’s goal is to control Africa’s oil.”²

General Wesley Clark says he was told years years ago in a briefing that the plan was to take out seven countries in five years. After Afghanistan and Iraq would come Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia and then Iran.

Ordinary Americans have been reduced from good common folk to commercial TV mesmerized dolts slap happily putting themselves on the side of the military of “an American government owned by a conspiracy of the strongest financiers of the wealthy’ (Franklin Delano Roosevelt writing confidentially in 1932). This amoral human machine has been intent on producing war after war for profit since the war of 1812, the wars against Native Americans, and the war of independence from England.

Enjoy the holiday weekend. What the hell, that’s why we mourn. We mourn all the enjoyments the war dead missed out on.

1. Documentation for the above section on Libya’s suffering was provided in a previously published comprehensive history from Feb. 15 through April 26 see copious footnotes in “Capitalism’s Warplanes: CIA & al Qaida Destroy Socialist Libya’s 53rd Highest Living Standard.”
2. From “Welcome to the Violent World of President Obama” by John Pilger.

As the beautiful sleek looking but deadly French Mirage fighter bombers fire missiles to impose an innocuous sounding “No-fly zone” Arabs remember the French use of murderous aircraft against the civilian population of French ‘Protectorate’ of Arab Syria,

As the French proudly bombard ‘protectively’ in a North Africa it once owned and exploited, we remember the triple genocide in French Indochina. First, during the brutal racist occupation of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; second, as the Vichy French Colonial Army running its colonies for the Japanese Imperial Army aided the confiscation of rice for export to Japan while a million Vietnamese starved to death; third, as fresh French troops, brought back into Vietnam in U.S. ships, murdered Vietnamese for eight years, beginning almost immediately after the joyous street celebrations in Paris as it was liberated from Nazi occupation.

We can also appreciate the past inhumanity of France thinking of the sad history of French genocide in Haiti five times over. Firstly, by the enslavement of Africans; secondly, by working them to death in Haiti to make France rich; thirdly, for the genocidal punishment of the Haitian slave revolution; fourthly, for the cruel life-costing reparations forced on Haiti; lastly, for French refusal to return that huge sum of extorted money even now as Haitians suffer earthquake devastation, poverty, U.S. exploitation and foreign occupation

Opportunist France, CNN and CIA have encouraged and aided rebellion in  eastern Libya, which, until 1951, had a separate history as Cyrenaica*, France has led other paragons of virtuous political hegemony in hailing democracy as the right of those  rebelling in Libya.

But democracy and even more important, freedom, was for centuries denied the non-white population of the world.

The once colonially occupied and still neo-colonially exploited billions of non-white human beings remember that while French and English people proudly practiced parliamentary democracy they denied freedom and democracy to all their millions of colonial subjects at gun point.

It is obvious to just about everyone that It is the petroleum deposits in Libya which are crying for freedom from African control. To free Africa of its wealth has always brought military intervention from  industrialized and dehumanized nations.

Having control of their own oil wealth has enabled Libyans, along with neighboring Algerians, to enjoy the highest standard of living in Africa (South Africa has a wealthier but unevenly available standard),

Few are fooled by the French or any other of today’s now neocolonialist powers (which just happen to be basically white).

It is the oil in Libya which must be free — free from African control. Ergo the pretext of humanitarian goals.

*  In 1934, Italy adopted the name “Libya” (used by the ancient Greeks for all of North Africa, except Egypt) for its colonies of Italian Cyrenaica and Italian Tripolitania, both having been run separately by Italian governors. Italy had conquered both from the Ottoman Turks in 1911. From 1943 to 1951, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were under British administration, while the French controlled Fezzan and the United States maintained the large Wheelus Air Base.

It has been more than six decades since America fought a defensive war. Peace organizations going along with honoring veterans of previous wars in poor countries after WW II appear NOT to be against war in principle, rather only against the current wars we are losing. Calling for peace while permitting our now permanent war military establishment to turn all national holidays into celebrations hailing all U.S. wars, past and present, is contradictory.

What does it take? Peace activists are weary of quoting Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, General Smedley Butler, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Zinn, and the voices of today’s dissenters who are wise to the homicide for lies and money that has be going down for the last sixty-five years.

Tired of calling attention to Mohammed Ali having led the country in an inspiring way by refusing to eventually become a veteran of mass murder.

Tired of gritting our teeth watching militarized Network News promoting war to our children and gullible citizens.

Tired of the hypocrisy of religious leaders backing present wars. Evangelists on TV carefully avoiding the theme of Jesus’ nonviolence teachings because they conflict with the mainstream ‘patriotic’ mindset of permanent self-righteous counter-terror on terror. In the United States there is a separation of Jesus and state; of Moses’ Fifth Commandment and state; separation of Buddhist meditation and war; separation of the teachings in the Qur’an and what is going on in America.

How can any knowledgeable veteran march in parades that in reality are like an ‘Honor Warriors of Immoral and Illegal Wars Day’, ‘Honor the Pentagon Day’, ‘Honor the CIA Led Assassins Day’, ‘Honor Lying Presidents Day,’ ‘Honor War Mongering Media Day’ ’Honor Clergy Who Blessed War Day?’

How can antiwar groups allow themselves to be intimidated by traditions that are now long used to support foreign policies of war on the Third World.

Cannot every citizen of antiwar persuasion have the courage to honor Americans who fled to Canada, rather than those who dishonored themselves and became veterans of crimes against humanity?

How can a veteran like this writer be a traitor to our deceived dead buddies, disgracing them by honoring on Veterans Day their having been suckered into dying while killing innocent foreign brothers and sisters in their very own homes.

Enough! Away with our hypocrisy and shaming ourselves in embarrassment, unable to confront ignorance, fear and manipulation by media for the amoral and homicidal bankers who own the government.

Citizens against war! Don’t show indiscriminate respect for all veterans. We veterans know that many of us even followed criminal orders on top of participating in unjust wars in places like Vietnam.

Veteran! Denounce your veteranship if you know you ‘served’ killing innocent people in a dishonorable, illegal, undeclared war. Be determined to know, to learn, how you were duped, tricked, hyped into ‘service’ in dishonorable wars costing the lives of millions of innocent human beings.

And if you think there was anything moral in the particular war you fought in after World War Two, study encyclopedia Britannica articles and read CIA files released under the Freedom of Information Act. Read Pentagon published material. Read only what is documented to order to unlearn what the TV networks, radio and tabloid newspapers sold you on.

On Veterans Day, remember the informed and strong willed who cried “Hell no, I won’t go!”  Be conscious of our own ‘Damn, I shouldn’t have gone!’ regret.

Speaking out against the glorifying of war intention of Pentagon-fed corporate media programming on Veterans Day should come easy for veterans who have had the courage to brave death in the confusion of unjustified imperialist wars.

Am I, as a veteran, going to march unwanted in another egotistical display of honor for ourselves while phony wars go on? Wars of killing anyone designated a suspected insurgent against our occupation of his country – labeling him or her a terrorist just like we used to label a targeted person communist?

We did our ‘service’ in helping put the equivalent of thousands of 9/11s on the heads of people in poor countries that never attacked the U.S. None of these poor countries ever got back at us until 2001. If the Vietnamese and all the other small nations we invaded since World War Two can forgo justice and getting revenge, why can’t our big deal exceptionally great America?

Politically awakened veterans must teach our pro-war fellow veterans some history, not to mention morality, ethics, humanity and true patriotism. Not the patriotism of scheming bankers and their Military Industrial Complex, their media and their secret CIA, but defense of the nation from war profiteers’ patriotism.

No! No Veterans Day for me. Instead, a day for veterans to mourn participation in killing, maiming and damage done invading the lands and lives of others.

Let knowledgeable, compassion-motivated veterans turn the tables on the war industry and recreate Veterans Day into VETERANS MOURN KILLING DAY.

If anyone cannot see at least the logic in the all the above, we seven would like to know. The seven being Jay Janson and his six bunk-mates buried in North Korea, who would be pissed if someone tried to ‘honor’ their being tricked into dying trying to kill Koreans in Korea.

Before they died, they knew they had been suckered. All six did not want to kill Koreans, even go to Korea, which they knew nothing about. Nothing about our dictatorship in the South’s massacre of tens of thousands of men, women and even their children during the years BEFORE the Koreans of their northern government swept the South, welcomed by many, the southern government conscripts deserting or refusing to fight.

My six buddies would understand why today there is a unrelentingly severe military dictatorship in the northern part of Korea, knowing what we did in both northern Korea and southern Korea, flattening almost every city, town and village from the air, threatening to drop the Atomic bomb on Koreans still fighting us, more than a million of them dying north of the line dividing the Korea nation, and all this happening AFTER Korea had already been unified in six quick weeks.

Would that my six bunk-mates could know of Communist (capitalist) China today and the nearly peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. Know it was not necessary for them and two-and-a-half million Koreans to die for a political Cold War confrontation with a USSR that would cease to exist anyway.

For them and others to have died fighting millions of so called communists in small countries that were former Japanese or French colonies is sad. That my buddies and many millions of good people could be alive today but for successful lies spread in media. Were they alive, I would tell them of how Korea was divided by the U.S. and how, after the First World War, President Wilson officially recognized the Japanese claim that Korea was Japanese territory by the right of conquest.

We seven were veterans of what exactly? Veterans of blind service to those who invest in and promote wars for profit? Of an undeclared war on a poor country?

Forget it! Better VETERANS MOURN KILLING DAY! And I have some friends who are veterans of the only legal war, World War II, that would be glad to join in because they know Rockefeller, Ford, du Pont, and just about every big U.S. industrialist invested heavily into building up Nazi Germany (while my dad sold apples on a street corner in depressed and jobless America.)

Come on, Americans, especially fellow veterans! It’s normal to mourn any death, isn’t it? We can have a day to mourn violent death instead of praising those who brought it overseas in our name.

And Jack Benny, so beloved for his hilarious routine of pretending to be what he wasn’t, would not disappoint them. He would make his entrance on stage with the nonchalant aplomb of the great artist he was pretending to be. When the thunderous applause died down and the orchestra began the violin concerto’s introduction the audience would roar with laughter when Benny noticed his having forgotten his violin bow.

But at this moment all attention was riveted on Missouri’s own favorite son who had become President of the country. I, along with my musician colleagues, were thinking, “We are about to be conducted by the guy who dropped the Atomic bomb on women and children.”

Truman seemed transfixed, nervous, embarrassed, for having forgotten what to do next, looking as if trying to remember what he had been shown to do in the rehearsal an hour before. (“Mr. President, just make a downward motion with the baton, the orchestra will start and play by itself.”)

Harry Truman was in his late seventies, a silver-haired, elderly man. Though looking healthy and fit, he began to tremble and shake pathetically.

At one of his more pronounced tremors, I suddenly heard my trumpet spontaneously sounding loudly the first note, the orchestra joining in instantly. It was an involuntary and instinctive reaction to save Truman in his embarrassment and us in our predicament. The former Commander-in-Chief, relieved, began to wave his arms to the music, smiling broadly.

I remember thinking “this guy who had had the nerve to drop Atom bombs was self-conscious and afraid just like anybody would have been with so many watching. Where was this normal, common fear of doing the wrong thing, making a mistake, being criticized, losing the approbation of one’s peers, that Truman was showing this evening, when he gave the order that would incinerate, in two seconds, thousands of ordinary folks in Hiroshima feeding their children breakfast.”

He is forever notorious for having been the first and only man to vaporize human beings, yet, at that concert forty years ago, Harry Truman appeared to be an ordinary guy. Actually, Truman, once a hat salesman, was always perceived as a kind of ordinary Joe sitting in the big chair of the Presidency.

If it was an ordinary Joe, who, one morning, overrode his conscience and gave the order to nuclear bomb a large city, couldn’t most any American have given the go ahead? Maybe any one of us could have been capable of his atrocity. What would make one of us in his position lose the sense of shame, of right and wrong, the conscience everyone carries around all the time inside?

Well, most anyone could have rationalized that the Japanese had started the war and had killed a lot of people. Add to that, the strong racism in the States at that time and the result was little public concern for the victims of the Atomic bombings.

Even more importantly, a sitting U.S. president is under enormous pressure from all sides and especially binding pressure, though media and folklore would have it otherwise, from the people who arranged his gaining office. A president will feel forced to swallow his own conscience once those exerting the overwhelming pressure have discounted theirs as impracticable and counterproductive.

Meanwhile, the Japanese pilots and their families back home, were assured it was right thing to bomb the Asian military base of the most powerful of the White race nations that had brutally invaded, occupied and exploited most of Asia for centuries.

That’s how it has always been. Those with controlling power convincing the crowd cowed in fear to do what those in control want done, and to put morality and kindness aside for that time being. In the case of a complex financial empire doing the controlling, one of the crowd can be elevated up to appear to be the one in charge, and take the heat and blame for whatever becomes regrettable.

Harry Truman is one of those to have been elevated and taken the heat and blame for a horribly regrettable inexpressibly violent and homicidal U.S. foreign policy.

The Hiroshima Atomic bombing was not to be the most significant horror, even taken together with the second nuclear devise dropped on Nagasaki. The two bombs together killed a fraction of the millions burnt up in the bombing of sixty Japanese cities with incendiary devices – also ordered by this normal average American made into a commander of millions.

What was to be of greater portent for the world was Truman being President during the U.S. reneging on Roosevelt’s promise of freedom and independence for people under European colonial rule and exploitation. This included blocking peaceable and just postwar arrangements in Korea, Vietnam, Laos and elsewhere seen as unfavorable to U.S. investment opportunities. In what would ultimately cost millions of lives, Truman had the French Army, which had turned its colony over to the Japanese, brought back in force on U.S. ships. He was to sign on to the U.S. massive military invasion of Korea though the civil war there was already over, and was therefore so unpopular with the American public that his candidacy for a second term was made unthinkable.

But most of all, Truman’s name is associated with the founding of the Cold War and the National Security State in a postwar world in which America held all the cards necessary to arrange the peace suffering humanity longed for.

Truman’s term in office was a time of atrocities only second to those of the Second World War (which had been prepared by the elite of American industrialists and investment bankers funding and investing in Nazi Germany).

Just as the trees are not capable of understanding that their energy and effort is unproductive, just so are Progressives incapable of understanding the uselessness of trying to implant human growth in a political economy based on, and controlled by and for, unyielding sterile private capital accumulation.

Just as that unyieldingly hard, life-ignoring concrete was originally made from breathing earth and sand made rigid by cement, just so were the impenetrable minds of hedge-fund managers, investment bankers, mega-dimension investors, their purchased politicians and their hired and beholden commercial conglomerate media personnel were once wonderful ordinary, normal children before being captivated, captured and lobotomized by expensively dressed desperate, insecure, greedy and mentally challenged conquerors. (A hundred years ago, America’s own Thorstein Veblen saw the modern business leader as essentially a latter-day predatory warrior — transformed, armed, and clothed in a fashion that enables him to dominate modern society.)

If trees had eyes, they could look down on their dying seedlings. Progressives “have eyes but cannot see” Afghanis, Iraqis, Somali, Yemeni physically dying, as uncountable as leaves on trees, cannot see the mentally challenged dying here, crushed by money worries and antisocial depression, the now billions dying spiritually for the commodification, commercialization and loss of life’s naturalness — all promoted by the human sacrifice and materialism embedded in the capitalist mode of production for profit, not use.

But Progressives can see clearly the wealth created by Americans working under management of America’s already wealthy. They can hear the admiration and praise from cooperative capitalist elite in nearly every nation on Earth.

Just as we can have a modicum of hope for the pollen where the earth appears between cracks and buckling in the concrete, progressives point to social reforms within the normally unrelentingly cruel wage labor system, reforms that grant human beings some bare necessities, and force a recognition beyond that of their usefulness as hired labor.

However, just as those cracks and buckles in the street and sidewalk are constantly worked on to close up and seal, capitalist governance seeks to roll back Social Security, Unemployment Benefits, Set Wage Minimums.

The reforms were necessary to concede for the threat of revolution during the Great (capitalist) Depression. A corresponding example is power elite granting the construction of parks and nature reserves to protect themselves from revolt and punishment by powerful Mother Nature, which provides the needed fresh air to breathe for the owners of society as well as those that labor for them.

This begrudging and self-protecting relenting to give their natural resources a chance to survive, gave the insane planetary plunderers a literal “breather” before going on to cement over more than ever before with cataclysmic foreshadowing. Just so, the social reforms of the thirties saved American capitalism to enable it to create inexpressible horror for humanity.

On to the super tremendous profits from WWII, that raised the U.S. capitalist leadership high above those of all the other capitalist economies, wrecked by the mother of all profitable wars with a Nazi Germany built up to be the world dominant military power of the day by U.S. financiers and the industrial and investment banks led by Henry Ford, Dupont, Rockefeller and the cream of the scions of American business families.

If the sidewalk trees could think, they might rationalize that the natural release of pollen is not controllable and is necessary for the trees’ health. Progressives don’t have such an excuse for continuing with their impossible task, but cannot imagine doing otherwise, being at root base Capitalism’s rearguard. Progressives pose as Leftists intellectuals championing a capitalism progressively less homicidal as a model for the increasingly politically aware citizenry to work toward.

Progressives decry imperialism’s past crimes as well intentioned mistakes. Mistakes like approving Japan’s claim to Korea; like investing heavily in Hitler; like bringing the French colonial armed forces back in to Vietnam; like overthrowing a few dozen governments seeking independence from U.S. corporate exploitation; like invading too many countries at the same time; like giving mogul bankers most of the nation’s current wealth.

Progressives condemn these mistakes, the present wars, and the war games preparing for future wars, but shy away from revolutionary socialism and associating with the communists who have consistently led a real fight against imperialist wars.

There is not a world renown philosopher, writer, poet, composer, artist, clergyman, scientist or inventor, who has had a good word for capitalism. And to find those who have been dedicated to condemning it, one need not look to the likes of Albert Einstein, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., or Peoples’ Historian Howard Zinn. No, just quote one of a number of capitalism’s most famous luminaries in their candid moments:

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” John Maynard Keynes — the economist credited with solving the dilemma of how to keep capitalism going when the stimulus of WW II was gone — also predicted:

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease …

Which sounds like something Che Guevara said, but then Keynes astounds us with a mysterious justification for the continuance of what he has just described as criminal insanity:

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

So, as if Einstein, Gandhi, MLKjr and Zinn were as irrelevant as corporate controlled U.S. media has made them, Progressives (Progressive Capitalists), go on trying to reform a system of exploitation of the many by the few. (Which reminds me of trees in the middle of a city pollinating onto concrete.)

It really hurts that we are killing so many of our Muslim brothers and sisters and their kids right in their homes, in their streets, in their own countries. I’ve been reading about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, wondering why it doesn’t apply to people like me. I’m mentally and emotionally upset about us killing a vast amount of people in their own residences in cities, towns, and the countryside across six Muslim countries (as I put down these words, I notice I’m breathing short, feel a light press of anxiety on the left side of my chest).

For more than fifty years I’ve been reading about, and listening to, news of body counts and bombings (I’m seventy-nine) — fifty years of trying to protect my mind and the bottom of my stomach.

I wonder how many people in the world understand what I have had on my mind and in my stomach off and on for years — I mean, outside of people in the couple of dozen countries actually bombed by us?

How many other Americans feel as bad as I do about it? All this bombing, invading, occupying? It’s always done in our name. Am I oversensitive?

I have always tended to take my responsibilities seriously. As a school boy, when I saw newspaper headlines about death by starvation in China, it would bring to mind the nun who had prepared me, as a seven year old, for my First Holy Communion. Her instruction really stuck in my serious child’s mind, especially the story of  Cain fluffing off God with, “Hey, am I my brother’s keeper?”

I never really recovered from the post traumatic stress from fifteen years of us slaughtering millions of poor Vietnamese in Vietnam and bombing the living hell out of Laos and Cambodia.

A long time before this present decade of anguish over our killing Muslims in a half dozen countries (but not in Saudi Arabia where the 9/11 highjackers came from), my peace of mind had been radically disturbed for having learned the reason for all this mass butchery going on for a half-century, starting with our taking the lives of a couple of million Koreans in Korea.

Each psychological upset led me to do a little research. Confusing reports of why Eisenhower was bombing Laos started me off. Slowly it became a habit to research every news bite explaining why we had to go somewhere on the other side of the world and kill to stamp out communism in little countries, but not the two big ones already governed by communist parties.

It didn’t make me feel any better in my heart to learn that our unimaginably horrible taking of innocent peoples’ lives in smaller countries overseas was in every case brought about by lies that made it acceptable to the American people. Hard working decent people, busy with their personal lives, careers, and families, who simply trusted what each president told them since it was backed up and well explained as being right and necessary on their television, which they trusted even more.

But that knowledge did give me strength, made me angry, and motivated me to tell my family and friends how this enormous death toll was made possible by naively believing astonishing or bewildering news we should have suspected all along. Blatant lies, so easily disproved using the government’s own publications, readily available encyclopedia articles, and just plain common sense.

So for a few years, thinking that if a stupid guy like me could uncover all these pretty obvious lies, I could help spread an opposition to these wars by passing the simple truth around to people more intelligent than me and capable of doing something about this vicious mass murder.

What astounded me was the reaction from colleagues and friends. “Not interested in politics.” “What are you talking about?” “Have my own problems.” Only a few were willing to at least listen, maybe a couple answering, “Well, maybe we make mistakes sometimes, but we’re trying to do the right thing over there.”

My brother stopped corresponding for three years, angry that I was “duped by communist propaganda” about the Vietnam war. (After the war, he apologized, agreeing that I was right, but I’m afraid he still goes on believing most of what is said on the networks’ evening news.) Last year my loving sister asked me to take her off my mailing list — I was outraging her and her Texas fundamentalist husband.

Apart from two very politically aware sons, and a politically concerned nephew, it was  only my 9th-grade educated immigrant Mom who understood, was upset, and would complain on her own about “the terrible things the government was doing.” Seems the more government-sponsored education we get, the more we are purposely misinformed and made to accept our government’s homicidal violence. (A perception, by the way, that logically leads to the awareness that our government is not of, for, or by the people.)

People at work (in the orchestra) did not want to hear about “US foreign policy.” If pressed regarding our responsibility as citizens, many would answer, “Look! I vote in elections.” My unrecognized PTSD over a war on the other side of the world was widely regarded as a sign of mental unbalance, a personality problem.

The next most important sensitizing influence after that nun was a junior high Afro-American civics teacher, “If you have free speech and you don’t speak up, you are guilty of complicity in the crimes of your government, and ignorance is no excuse in a court of law.” So off and on I took graduate level history courses at four universities and an institute in Germany.

Music was miraculous, and performing was a wonderful way to make a living, but awaiting the downbeat at the Mostly Mozart Summer Festival, looking out at an audience of professionals, I would be thinking that right about this time, 8 PM, 8 AM morning in Asia, the planes were taking off in Guam for high-altitude bombing over Vietnam while we listened to Mozart just the way the Nazis had listened to Wagner.  I would get a burning feeling beneath my feet to stand up and say, “Hey, could we take a break? The planes are taking off to bomb right now and Mozart didn’t have that in mind as he composed this music.”

But I didn’t stand up, and when Martin Luther King said “Silence is treason,” it was me he was talking about.

I’m sure Mozart would have approved of the “let’s stop and consider what we are doing” tone of the articles Jay Janson, historian, has been composing. I figure it’s my therapy for my present Muslim killing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD initially was called “Shell Shock’. It got broadened to apply to people listening to the awful explosions from afar. Perhaps the medical profession, itself, will come to diagnose people like me, wincing for imagining the agony in death throes of fellow human beings, (reported in daily AP Press reports from the Middle East as a ”success”), as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress.

Would psychologists and mental health experts deny that millions of kind and compassionate Germans experienced a type of PTSD as their German armies invaded dozens of nations? Or was it only the many millions of Russians having their families and homes blown to bits who experienced PTSD?

Treating sensitivity to the pain of others as a serious malady would lead to considering how to prescribe cures.  It would require society to halt the dropping of explosives on people or perform some sort of lobotomy on those suffering from PTSD that would permit the patients to adjust to exploding human beings.

Since society in the self-proclaimed “greatest country in the world” has not yet evolved to being able to control its criminally insane, and since lobotomies (except those done painlessly over many years by commercial mass media) are a drastic procedure no longer much in use, therapy must be the answer

In some cases just talking about what’s bothering you can work as therapy. It didn’t work for me in America because it was too difficult to find anyone who would listen. So I began to write.

My first therapy was to become enlightened as to why the killing that was causing my distress was happening. Advanced therapy has become doing everything possible to stop the killing that is bothering me.

Therapy can wind up turning PTS into something useful. The PTS disorder becomes only a relatively easy way to deal with the symptoms of the serious mental illness — War-For-Profit Criminal Insanity (which is probably caused by a prolonged exaggerated life-style of institutionalized greed.)

Therapeutic activism goes beyond being an exercise for the protection of one’s own sanity. It bolsters one’s personal integrity, citizen responsibility and accentuates love of life.

Consider how the “Shell Shocked” people in America feel when looking at the eye-repelling photos of the Holocaust. The obvious reaction is to just punish Germans. But the logical therapy would be to go after the owners of the majority of U.S. banks and industries which backed and invested in turning an initially prostrate Nazi Germany into the world’s foremost military power, fully aware of Hitler’s hatred of Jews and communists and plans for expansion eastward with his armies. All this investment was done right out in the open and is fully recorded for anyone suffering PTSD from remembering the Holocaust to read and identify: Rockefeller, Henry Ford, DuPont, etc.

Had such a course in therapy been completed, and the profiting banking industrialists who backed Hitler punished, this same group of scions of banking might not have been able to pull off a second Holocaust in Vietnam.

Holocaust PTSD therapy for me is to tell all the young folks of the virulent anti-Semitism in the United States before WWII, when I was a child. One didn’t have to be actually Jewish oneself to have been acutely aware of it all around you. Therapy is knowing that Henry Ford’s published writings were required reading for the Hitler Youth organization.

The therapy would have been, and still is, the same for the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the bombing of Lebanon, and the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Cuba invasions.  Identify the bankers and powerful business leaders who required these wars for their balance sheets of profit, and accumulation of capital and resources of the invaded countries to control, and if they are too powerful to imprison, try to prevent them, and the media they own, from promoting future wars.

If you don’t have PTSD, and enjoy your mornings with no disturbing thoughts of some lovable Asian child who had all its mornings suddenly obliterated along with his or her life on earth, by some American operating a weapon of mass destruction thinking he was doing duty in your name, it’s odd that you have continued to read this article.

Maybe even “well adjusted” citizens of the empire have some PTSD lurking in the corners of their minds. Maybe many will someday have an outbreak of PTSD if they happen to do some reading and overcome the severe American disability to put oneself in the shoes of our designated enemies (but not the shoes of their children too small to fit in) or if they happen to think of some lovable Asian child, one of millions, who never got to see a single morning as a grown up, the apple of some mom and dad’s eye, a promise to nation and community, and imagine his or her pathetic cadaver or body parts buried lovingly by parents (if they, themselves, be not exterminated as well by fellow Americans using weapons of mass destruction.)

If the reader has read this far, it is more probable he or she is suffering from the continual Post Traumatic Stress of being a citizen of the blood soaked American empire, or at least uneasy that there is no real secure immunity from a future attack of PTSD — not as long as the sun never sets on the nation’s network of military bases.

1. Cluster Bombs And Civilian Lives: Efficient Killing, Profits And Human Rights, by Ramzy Baroud, Dissident Voice, July 8, 2010.

Some American veterans of wars call for a return to the healthy purpose for Memorial Day, which in Columbus, Mississippi, April 25, 1866, was to bind its town and the nation together in mourning the million-and-half soldiers who died killing each other during our tragic Civil War. A day for mourning the dead of both sides, civilian as well as military, in national fellowship intended to put an end to hatred for the other side, end lust for war to settle differences and see a United States of America restored.

Americans, who want war stopped and no new ones planned, can join veterans observing Memorial Day as it was observed in a small southern town a century and a half ago. A day of mourning one’s own made stronger for remembering the suffering of families of soldiers and citizens of the other side. A Memorial Day that recognized the unity of all Humanity, a century and a half ago.

Back then it was to cure a painful division in America. Today’s Memorial Day should be about curing a painful division in the World, by remembering the other side’s suffering. Presently, there is yet another world wide civil war within Mankind. Human beings killing fellow human beings in desperation.

Forbearance and forgiveness on Memorial Day will lead to a search to understand what is causing the violence and anger, this in turn, to condemning and outlawing war propaganda as a crime.

Many veterans cannot forget being trained to kill and our having fallen in love with the people we were killing. We, who have known the agony of killing, ask for reconciliation politics instead of attempted final solutions through never ending horrific homicidal violence, as Obama calls for today.

We, who were taught to kill, call for Memorial Day 2010 to be observed mourning the dead on both sides in all America’s wars. now it is the World that needs binding together in mourning.

We U.S. veterans, who fought for our country, more often than not mistakenly, for disinformation, war propaganda and corporate profit, will observe a space age Memorial Day 2010.

We will no longer participate in selective mourning only America’s war dead. We will mourn all victims of war, the millions of civilians, the hundreds of thousands of our designated enemies fallen in their motherlands, and then, having put others first, as in common humility, will we mourn the tens of thousands of our very own fellow citizens who sacrificed their lives for, or thinking it was for, the good of our nation.

Thus, we call for an end to hatred for the soldiers of the other side who were taught to kill us just as we U.S. veterans were taught to kill them even when they were defending against our invasion! We call for an end to all divisive self-righteousness! We call for a replacing of useless puffed up pride with happiness creating love and mutual appreciation!

We call to get real on Memorial Day! Denounce lies demonizing others and misrepresenting America as angelic. Get to the bottom of who killed and why? Who always promotes war and why? Don’t trust our war justifying corporate bought politicians! Don’t trust their appointed generals! Don’t trust corporate conglomerate owned commercial media! Do all this, and stop these wars for profit.

And enjoy a positive Memorial Day holiday weekend that is honest about the past, and forward looking to a world without war in the name of all war’s millions of victims!

April 30, 1975 brought independence thirty years after President Truman cruelly went back on Roosevelt’s promise that colonies freed from Japanese occupation would not be given back to European powers, and treacherously turned against Ho Chi Minh, America’s decorated ally during the Second World War.

Truman used Nationalist Chinese, British and even Japanese troops to thwart the independent nation Ho had proclaimed from the balcony of the Hanoi Opera House with high American and British Officers standing alongside him. Then Truman brought back the French colonial army in U.S. ships.

The same heartless capitalist-imperialists who convinced Truman to frighten the Soviet Union by atom bombing Japan twice wanted to help the capitalist parties of France improve their position with voters by regaining its Indochinese colonies. The Communist party in France was extremely popular for its war time heroics against the Nazi occupation.

During the administrations of six presidents America and Americans crucified Laos, Vietnam and finally Cambodia. Nevertheless, Vietnamese, except for complaining about U.S. failure to care for Agent Orange victims including massive amount of children still being born with crippling deformities, appear to have little resentment towards America.

No point in going over the napalm, the heavy high altitude carpet bombing, biological warfare and the atrocities committed on the ground in villages all over South Vietnam. What is not so well known is the even greater suffering during the post 1975 monstrous economic warfare practiced viciously with the same disregard that it bombed and butchered before 1975.

Today, too many Americans still hail anyone who willingly went to Vietnam and followed orders to kill Vietnamese as Communists. The Communists are still there but the U.S. is now a “friend’ in keeping with its money making investments.

One day the American capitalist empire, so brutal in economic dominance and so homicidal in its wild and internationally unhindered use of a devastating ever more high tech military, will fall. (As do all empires.)

When that happens the Vietnamese will not have to hold their tongue in deference to their trading relationship with a United States able to punish it again at will.

Sweet and pleasant-natured destiny accepting Buddhist though they be, the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians will be able to freely express their holding the capitalist society of Americans accountable for its many years of senseless, ignorant and merciless horrific and beastly insanity toward a people on the other side of the world which had expected quite the opposite behavior.

And out of this sick body-count nation of an America asleep to the most minimum decency toward its mass media designated enemies, will be born a nation of much kinder Americans feeling similarly awakened as did Germans when forced to realize their nation’s holocaust guilt.

But Americans might go deeper to the source of such widespread insanity; namely, a pathetically desperate capitalist, controlling media to maximize accumulation of private wealth with absolutely no moral impediment permitted.

Think how many Americans were never on the United States side during the U.S. war in Vietnam? How many of us were completely on the side of the Vietnamese just as Jane Fonda dramatized? How many of us are informed enough to see that the roots of imperialist wars are in the capitalist political economy all around us?

We will appreciate the Vietnamese not letting the rest of us forget what was done to them in the name of anti-Communism. or to put it positively, in the name, and for the urgencies, of Capitalists.

As in the past, they bring a certain amount of world reaction in concern and condemnation with the more intense pain and outrage reserved for the children’s lives taken. The president of Afghanistan, elected under US military occupation, after years complaining and protesting uselessly, warns of his own possible defection over the “indiscriminate killing by foreign armed forces” among other issues.

How many Americans have been involved in the collateral slaying of children in America’s wars and bombings within defenseless populations of the so called underdeveloped world since the end of World War Two?

How much effort, by how many Americans, has gone into producing each child’s violent death during undeclared wars in Third World nations? Some innocent child made poor and disadvantaged for its country’s history of brutal colonial occupation and plunder by industrial powers that continue to exploit through neocolonialist financial oppression, killed by foreign invaders of American nationality.

The question might equally be asked regarding each dead Korean child or each Laotian, Vietnamese, Cambodian child, of each child who was killed in its own various Latin American or African country, and since 9/11, each Pakistani, Afghani, Iraqi, Somali, Sudanese, Yemeni, and Lebanese child, all so precious and lovely while they were alive during the time allotted to them by destiny and the military necessities of Americans.

Below are seven multiple answers to the question – how many Americans does it take to collaterally slaughter¹ a child during an undeclared American war on some of each child’s countrymen?

1. Today, it can be said to take only one American sitting in a facility somewhere in the U.S. Mid-West or a pilot or gunner in a plane or helicopter looking at an electronic screen map of coordinates pressing the release button that fires a missile. Takes only one American finger to press a button on an American weapon of mass destruction to end a child’s life. During earlier wars, and even now, the finger might be on the trigger of a machine gun or bomb-sight.

2. It takes two Americans – one on the ground to call in the coordinates for a strike, the other in the air, or half a world away, to fix the cross hairs on the area where the child was – or is — before pressing the release button. Or in earlier wars, one to give the order and another to fire the shot to take down a child while aiming at one of his countrymen.

3. It takes hundreds of collaborating American servicemen and officers involved in a military presence or maneuver at some particular place and time that sets the stage for the calling in of a missile strike — in earlier times, to set the stage for the opening of a bombardment in which a child shall perish. Few will ever see the actually pitiful remains of each child that is no more. Often there is nothing but body parts only its family can recognize.

4. It takes hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas and at home engaged in the manufacture, transport and maintenance of weapons, some realizing their part in making the killing of children possible, but others shutting this out of mind, grateful for the money earned. Without these horrific high-tech devices, each child’s death would not be made possible or a reality by the military.

5. It takes a minimum of tens of millions of Americans openly supporting the killing in which each child’s slaughter is a part, convincing or intimidating hundreds of other millions to accept each child’s death as necessary to the preservation of American safety or to the maintenance of their own prerogatives, privileges and level of consumption. Without their cooperation, the war on each child’s countrymen would not be feasible.

6. It take generations of Americans frightened into silently accepting the dispatching of each child by command of mentally disadvantaged political leaders and the all-wars-promoting conglomerates of the information media cartel under the ownership of, and controlled by, the criminally insane power elite of the Financial-Military-Industrial-Complex . If the war on each child’s countrymen were, or had been, unacceptable to enough Americans, it could not have been waged and no dear child would have been destroyed over all these decades nor in this past week.

7. It has taken, and continues to take, a rather limited number of Americans in the entertainment and information industry working hard over half a century as network anchors, commentators, station managers, talk-show hosts, editors and reporters to bring about the activity of Americans described in each of the foregoing six answers to the query – how many Americans does it take to collaterally slaughter a child in a third world country? (Collaterally, of course, for what American is his or her right mind would go overseas for the sole purpose or intention of killing a child?).

Maybe consider turning off Network TV, Radio, and stop reading corporate owned newspapers and magazines, or better yet notice, and get angry about, their promotion of all past and every single possible future war in some way or another.

It is a rare occasion when a child’s death is begrudgingly reported on our privately licensed public air wave frequencies, for our American monopolized “free’ press and electronic media has prime criminal responsibility for each wonderful child’s brutal passing, and their employees are in some discomfort increasingly aware of their murderous roles.

1. “Slaughter,” as in “manslaughter,” defined as “the unlawful killing of a person, without malice or premeditation, there being no specific word for ‘woman or child slaughter’ as they are understood within “manslaughter.’”

In Dancing With Wolves, Kevin Costner, as Lieutenant John Dunbar, then living as a Dakota, is demanded an answer to a question from an American soldier who has just beat him up. Kostner (Dunbar) answers in the Dakota language after spitting out some blood “You  are not worth talking to.” That he speaks in a language the soldiers can’t understand (translated for the movie goers in a subtitle below the film footage) as if emphasizing in his own mind that these American soldiers are not worth being talked to.

People that are incapable of caring about right from wrong and massive senseless violent death are beyond communication.

Whether for their self-indulgent, materialist, egotistical lifestyle having been taught to them from birth by commercial advertising, controlled corporate media, or for some other collective fear and insanity, onlookers who are compassionate know it’s not their fault. Americans, in general, seem to have become mentally disadvantaged and simply require medical attention.

And the Vietnamese are vastly compassionate in their gentle Buddhist cause and effect no-fault belief.

Americans, long known and feared for bombing, napalming, torturing, invading, destroying and occupying nations weaker than their own, are also known by billions watching conglomerate-network, satellite-network news videos for praising military personnel with disregard for the millions fallen in harm’s way of U.S. armed forces. This frightening ‘why us worry’ indifference to foreign death at U.S. hands has now become legendary. A national complicity in criminal insanity and praising it would seem to  require some expert mass psychoanalysis.

Your writer, and Veterans For Peace member, will not make any attempt here at curing the heartlessness of what has been going on for so many many years of military madness. Albert Einstein tried for years to no avail. Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace are supremely aware of the horror of suffering they were made to put on the largely peasant population of what were three colonies of Indochina, and keep trying with scant success.

Evolution or revolution, but not by talking or writing, nor showing the photos of My Lai massacres, or of napalmed children, or of soldiers torching humble homes with cigarette lighters, nor the sight of tons upon tons of bombs being dropped at high altitude from planes painted with the American flag have any effect. Americans are familiar with all these photos. They still put up with official praise for the duped young men, many of whom lost limbs and saw their buddies die.

Are Americans as a nation hopeless — to put up with such disgusting hype praising the very young men fooled into thinking they were defending their folks back home in killing poor Vietnamese fighting the occupiers of their nation, after having already fought the French and Japanese occupations.

Damn! It was never an officially declared war. Congress fudged, never called it a war on Vietnam, or North Vietnam or South Vietnam where Kennedy authorized the first bombing and napalming in the Delta. Why the official praise? For the ears of the next group of Americans to be suckered into killing and dying unconstitutionally but honored to the hilt afterwards.

How about a ‘My Lai Day‘ for the men, women and children machine-gunned at point blank range in ditches just that one afternoon during an American thirty year admittedly mistaken war by six American presidents and more Congresses?

Will Media and Congress some day proclaim an ‘Afghan War Veterans Day’, an ‘Iraq War Veterans Day’? (Those were also military actions against a population without Congressional constitutional authority.)  How about an official day praising America’s NATO allies?¹

‘Dominican Republic Invasion Veterans Day’, ‘Lebanon Shelling Veterans Day’, a ‘Somalia Veterans Day’, a ‘Grenada Veterans Day’? Why not be more democratic and even-handed in praise?. Why do state governments proclaim a Day selectively for those of us who were had in Vietnam?

If conglomerate media could have an honest moment, they could push for a ‘Praise War Day’, and include all veteran victims of propaganda in carrying out illegal orders.

Better yet, a ‘War Promotion Media Day’ or still better a ‘David Rockefeller Bilderberg, Council on Foreign Relations Tri-lateral Commission Day’. That would be fundamental.

When network-attractive, empty-minded, script-reading anchors say how thankful all Americans are for the dead soldiers “giving their lives for us and their country” in a war that Obama once called a “dumb war” or Sec. McNamara called an “miscalculation”, some us don’t feel American.

In any case, if the world sees Americans are not worth taking to, it must be because Americans, themselves, are not talking, not even much about their country having been taken away from them by bankers, media and military.

1. NATO Killed School Children and Pregnant Women Tries to Silence a Truth-Teller by Derrick Crowe – Warning — This video contains disturbing images.

Cronkite reported on location during the Vietnam War, and of course for years made no waves, and was no more trustworthy than other reporters who managed to stomach what was being done to that beautiful Buddhist society of ancient cultural roots.

Following Cronkite’s editorial report during the Tet Offensive that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Johnson’s whimper reminds us that Cronkite was for years not reporting the real conditions in South Vietnam, not reporting the deceptions that led to the creation of the puppet government, not reporting Eisenhower’s and the South’s refusal to hold promised elections, not reporting that Ike confessed that U.S. WWII ally Ho Chi Minh would have won by 80% had the pan-Vietnam election not been blocked, the rampant corruption at every level, the brutal French colonial history, the carnage from years of bombing the delta. Cronkite and CBS acted like servants and sycophants of our government, dutifully trumpeting almost every lie and distortion passed to them by the Pentagon and White House.

During the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Cronkite was anchoring the CBS network coverage as violence and protests occurred outside the convention, as well as scuffles inside the convention hall. When Dan Rather was punched to the floor (on camera) by security personnel, Cronkite commented, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan.”

Cronkite would have never in thousand years have called the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, crucifying the agrarian French colonial population of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, “a bunch of thugs.”

Now, as in Walter Cronkite’s lifetime, major humanity is still in a fight for a billion lives against the military and banks of the Anglo-American Empire, with the EU, NATO and Japan in tow, China and Russia going along for now, the Third World watchful and apprehensive. Conglomerate owned satellite powered media is not on the side of major humanity, but the tool and protection of its capitalist governance.

But Walter Cronkite’s death should not be an occasion of our criticizing him for what he was not. Nor for propaganda to make media be seen as trustworthy. Walter worked in corporate media, a regular guy, pretty much in mainstream. He was no Gandhi, no Nelson Mandela, no Martin Luther King Jr. or Albert Einstein, who were trustworthy and always honest about imperialist foreign policy, but Cronkite did have a few moments of realization that U.S. use of military in foreign policy was less than sane.

The deceased deserve their rest in peace, with some respect for their contributions. Commercial media hype to distract us from conglomerate owned media’s mission of war-mongering, support for empire and predatory global financial hegemony is obvious, insensitive and inappropriate to our mourning the passing of a fellow human being.

Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968 recently wrote in Bomber Pilot McCain: War Heroism or War Crimes? published by Institute for Public Accuracy, October 15, 2008, writes,

I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals — and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.

Richter notes that

McCain has repeatedly invoked his record in the Vietnam War during the campaign, but that the effect of bomber pilots like McCain and of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign has not been sufficiently scrutinized.

An ardent opponent of the Vietnam conflict, Taylor spoke with me in the fall of 1966 when I was looking into producing a documentary on this controversy for CBS News, where I was their National Political Editor. While he did not mention any pilot’s name, then U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain, who was captured a year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to prosecute. …

Taylor’s argument was that their actions were in violation of the Geneva conventions that specifically forbid indiscriminate bombing that could cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects. Adding to the Geneva code, he noted, was the decision at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two: military personnel cannot defend themselves against such a charge with a claim that they were simply following orders.

The charge that U.S. pilots also had bombed hospitals and other civilian targets, turned out to be correct and was confirmed by the New York Times‘ chief foreign correspondent, Harrison Salisbury.

In late 1966 Salisbury described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs: ‘Bomb damage … extends over an area of probably a mile or so on both sides of the highway … small villages and hamlets along the route [were] almost obliterated’. …

In one of his autobiographies McCain wrote that he was going to bomb a power station in ‘a heavily populated part of Hanoi’ when he was shot down. …

Don’t expect the Vietnam government to release any records of how many men, women and children were killed or maimed during the twenty-three bombing sorties of pilot John McCain. The Vietnamese have put the generations of war behind them now and look to the future and the enjoyment of their lives, after suffering under years punishing economic sanctions by a vengeful U.S. government and its allies.

It is up to decent Americans to use their imaginations as to the results of McCain’s bombings, and also to consider that McCain presently runs in an election for the presidency of his nation; his aerial attacks were meant to assure that Ho Chi Minh would never have such an opportunity. Four years before young pilot McCain began what would be his 23 bombing of Hanoi, Eisenhower had confessed in his Mandate for Change that Ho, the hero of his country would have won 80%+ of an all Vietnam election, had Ike not had it blocked.

Media sponsored adulation of McCain, the bomber pilot, makes this lover of the Vietnamese people and their culture want to vomit.

Yours truly, whose near one hundred Vietnamese students in Hanoi all lost family – “killed by the Americans,” they would admit with unaccusing Buddhist equanimity — finds it difficult to stomach conglomerate media’s incessant hailing as presidential candidate John McCain as a hero along with any and every politician who ‘served’ in what Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. condemned as a crime against humanity and a most shameful stain on America’s history.

This author currently lives in a neighborhood where people hold champion Muhammad Ali in their hearts for his refusal to dishonor his country. Ali refused compulsory military service during the genocidal war in Asia though he had his title of World Champion taken away from him as punishment.

What to make of the contradiction of public opinion that, on the one hand, respects Ali for his now honored moral uprightness in being against the U.S. war on Vietnam, and on the other hand. is intimidated into going along with the establishment’s need to honor a Senator who was shot down while following orders that constituted a war crime in the eyes of so many of his fellow citizens; citizens who know that “only following orders” does not excuse manslaughter as described in treaty obligations that automatically become an extension of the law of the land and the constitution.

Principle IV of the United Nations adopted Seven Nuremberg Principles reads,

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

P.S. One might suspect that former-pilot John McCain, having the memory of he himself confessing to war criminality, has been feeling some apprehension over the past seven years regarding the almost daily reported killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, then in Somalia and recently in Pakistan by U.S. air-strikes.

With a famed bomber pilot as its candidate, Republicans, especially, have avoided this topic. During their nominating convention, the Afghan government was insisting that 90 of their civilians were killed the week before in a single strike, as many as 60 of them children — the deaths verified by U.N. investigators.

Civilian death is a non-issue for the candidates, though it just goes on and on — yesterday, Associated Press reported eighteen Afghan women and children killed. Neither candidate can afford to be seen as critical of America’s military.

That Senator McCain and the ghost of Nuremberg Trial Chief Prosecutor Gen. Telford Taylor could have been sitting beside this writer as he watched, on the eve of the Republican convention, the August 31st 60 Minutes program “Bombing Afghanistan“:

The president of Afghanistan demands that the U.S. military curtail its use of air strikes against insurgents in his country because they are killing too many civilians.”

“There’s this macabre kind of calculus that the military goes through on every air strike, where they try to figure out how many dead civilians is dead bad guy worth,” says Marc Garlasco, who knows the calculus of civilian casualties as well as anyone.

At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He told 60 Minutes how many civilians he was allowed to kill around each high-value target.

[Glarlasco speaking on camera in his high-tech studio of control panel screens showing coordinates of targets and air craft in a number of countries:]

“Our number was 30. So, for example … If you’re gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike …, that’s not a problem,” Garlasco explains. “But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.”

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets — Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, ‘a couple of hundred civilians at least’ were killed.”

Americans have long become inured to the discomfort of that slightly squeamish feeling that accompanies the frequent and lightly unsettling report of the day’s toll of civilians killed in such an such small country by a U.S. air force strike.

Anyone else confused about the plausible innocence of Marc Garlasco and his team of controllers and pilots as they continue to ‘take out’ their permissible toll of 30 or less men, women and children per air attack within those victims’ own country — all ordered by each officer in the chain of command reaching up to the Vice President and President?

Is it possible that today’s multi tiered slayers of Afghanis, Iraqis, Somalis, and Pakistanis from the air, as well as pilot McCain, yesteryear’s air-born slayer of Vietnamese, are all unaware of Principle IV of the United Nations Seven Nuremberg Principles? Let’s read it again:

Adopted

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

To pose the question: “how many dead civilians is dead bad guy [or knocked out power station] worth” is in itself already self-incriminating.

For all the exoneration of the military from sinning against the Fifth Commandment provided by the cooperating clergy of organized religion with devilishly convoluted theories of ‘Just Wars’, those who would intentionally kill civilians just to have a chance at scoring a spectacular hit, still have to contend with those of us who know the common secular laws which apply equally to all, including those of skewered conscience, lacking in mercy and insensitive to “do not do unto others what you would not have done unto yourself.”

We must add, that those who bomb innocent men and who themselves have brothers and fathers, those who bomb women and who themselves have wives and sisters, and those who bomb children and have children of their own, are truly to be pitied.

For be the innocent men, women and children they bombed Vietnamese, Afghani, Iraqi, Somali or Pakistani (To mention other nationalities bombed might disturb the focus of this article), the bombers, who, whether wantonly, dutifully or cavalierly abandoned morality and discounted lives of others as collateral damage, failed their families and their countrymen, and in failing their victims, failed themselves as human beings made in the image of God.

Swallow hard, and pity him most, however, who, though having reached his maturity in age, still pretends to believe himself to have acted as a good soldier who followed orders under extenuating circumstances and therefore was and remains above the law and above criticism and prosecution. He might just be elected President of the United States of America.

By the way, General Telford Taylor, Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi War Criminals passed from our ever more lawless world on May 23, 1998.

World Champion Muhammad Ali is an honest American hero of the “Vietnam War,” correctly called “The American War” by the Vietnamese who managed to survived it.

Ali had the courage to stand up for an upright America even though it did not exist (except maybe in the minds of still segregated Afro-Americans). Ali inspired thousands to resist being drafted, and the 125,000 who fled to Canada rather than be invaders and killers of innocent foreigners in their very own country, they too, are in a sense veterans and Americans we can be truly proud of.

Tears of joy come to one’s eyes when one sees a newsreel of young Ali firmly saying that he would not participate in an unjust war against the Vietnamese. Ali is as much a veteran of that war as those who did participate in that violence of genocidal terrorism against a nation of people who had been an ally of America against the Japanese and Vichy French who occupying its homeland.

How many veterans knew anything about the country they were willingly going to bomb and shoot people in? Ignorance has never been an excuse before the law.

Shall they be honored in 2007 for their ignorance then, and for the killing they managed to get done in a war now euphemistically explained away as ‘a mistake’? Oops? Any thought to the millions that were high altitude carpet bombed, napalmed, ‘searched and destroyed’, massacred?

A ‘mistake’? For sure! Because America lost, and was eventually thrown out. But not an honest ‘mistake’, and of course, no reparations paid out to the victims of America’s ‘mistake’, nor even public apologies given.

Sure, Americans can blame the insidious, relentless and deceptively inclusive anti-communist war propaganda by media, naively thought to be free and uncontrolled by the military-industrial conglomerate complex.

But lets remember, boxer Ali, actress Jane Fonda, minister Martin Luther King Jr., professors like MIT’s Noam Chomsky, and millions people across the United States and the world were not fooled in the least.

Millions beautiful Vietnamese men, women and children — every one of them is worth remembering on Veterans Day as well. Maybe even more so, because they died in their own country, most in their own towns, many in their very own homes because the veterans honored on Veterans Day came to their country, armed and uninvited.

Vietnam veterans should most certainly be remembered, but remembered and respected as home-side victims of an illegal, monstrous and pitiless American war upon an Asian colonial population.

Members of the Veterans For Peace and Vietnam Vets Against the War organizations hold the Vietnamese they were ordered to fight in high esteem with painful feelings of regret and compassion. And they have deep compassion for themselves and their fellow veterans who were made to follow immoral orders, and usually didn’t have the presence of mind, education or courage to refuse to follow such orders. They were not able to serve their country well, nor any humanitarian cause of freedom, and certainly not their own human conscience.

Veteran, now Senator, McCain who flew 23 bombing missions knowing that Eisenhower had written in his book that if there had been an all Vietnam election (blocked by Ike himself), that Ho Chi Minh would have won by a plurality of more than 80%. McCain just followed military orders, as an unthinking automaton?

Veteran and presidential candidate, John Kerry, who said he killed a South Vietnamese before realizing it was wrong during his reenlisted tour of duty. He then went before Congress to denounce U.S. war crimes. But his nomination ceremony thirty years later Vietnam Vets paraded to thunderous applause — the “Vietnam War” had become heroic again.

Muhammad Ali did not need to go to Vietnam to know it was wrong, and he has never changed his mind.

Former Governor, Senator, now President of New School University, Bob Kerrey, who on “60 Minutes” was exposed by his own point man of having had his Seals gun down 19 young women and children, after seeing to the throat cutting of an elderly man and his family, accepted a medal for doing it, under a report of “enemy successfully killed.” It never occurred to this now highly placed educator to pull the media into the dock it had placed him in, decades after originally teaching him merciless and indiscriminate anti-communism.

Did these three now highly placed American veterans serve their country and countrymen when they killed Vietnamese in Vietnam? They all had a good college education, which must have included a history of colonialism, especially the brutality of French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. They must have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours against the Japanese and Vichy French. They must have known that Truman, against Roosevelt’s promise, had brought a new French army back in US ships to fight an 8-year war against our former allies, the Vietnamese. All this, because Ho Chi Minh was a communist? Not so likely. A top cabinet minister of the French government in Paris was also a communist, but that was OK.

Veterans who loved their country enough to know what the fighting was about is one thing. Veterans who risked their lives fighting for injustice and against human respect, blindly following leaders pretending to be what they were not, is quite another.

How do the Viet vets react to the recent U.S. sponsorship for World Trade Organization membership for the very same Communist Government of Vietnam they fought to destroy with a resultant loss of life second only to the Holocaust?

The world has become increasingly complicated and yet the U.S. cartel of a conglomerate mass entertainment media is increasingly reductive, simplistic and self-righteous, hypocritically praising democracy it does not practice. We must become intolerant of those who work to make war acceptable, even attractive to their audiences.

Torture or not to torture has been a news item recently. Americans seem to have lost their sense of right and wrong, as they did during the Viet war when they had difficulty in judging Lieutenant Calley of Mai Lai Massacre fame

Shuttering anguish is what veterans feel for leaders who knowingly sent them to kill (and die, though dying is less tragic than wrongly killing), for a wrong cause. Especially galling, when veterans have to listen to praise for any of the six presidents who oversaw the killing in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (and other places). These presidents betrayed the trust both the military and their country placed in them, yet even after CIA files released incriminates them, commercial media goes on praising these presidents as fine and likeable fellows.

Fully awakened Americans would like to help rehabilitate veterans who “served” in “mistaken” wars by turning this nation around toward morality and historical honesty, and forgoing pompous and ridiculous attempts to praise themselves indiscriminately, announce our intention to arrange at least some compensation to Vietnamese for our now admitted “MISTAKE”!

Put ourselves in their shoes. The shoes of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and now Iraqi, Afghan bereaved families. Could we even imagine such bombings upon US towns and countryside? We can improve the whole world and ourselves with such imagination.

What happiness such a moral awakening would occasion. Is this not perhaps still possible, even under capitalism, despite its nature for expansion and world domination? How wonderful if America could take a time out and recognize the suffering of the non-American victims of its many wars and CIA crimes in third world nations while Champion Muhammad Ali is still alive and with us as a continuing American inspiration.

Let our remembrance and compassion not be limited to our own. In our space age of instant communication, there is a growing awareness of one planetary humanity sharing our single world and its resources.

Let us remember that the non-American families and friends of non-Americans who have died in American wars have the exact same painful feelings of loss and bewilderment.

The millions of Indochinese killed by our fellow Veterans also bring tears to my eyes.

A million Koreans, thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghan women and children — every one of them is worth remembering on Memorial Day as well. Maybe even more so, because they died in their own country, most in their own towns, and many in their very own homes.

I surely want to remember those fellow veterans who gave their lives. But I believe the sincere American will want to remember everyone who died in these many foreign wars,including the ‘foreigners’.

Life has taught this seventy-year-old veteran to reserve my deepest compassion for those of us veterans who followed immoral orders, and didn’t have the presence of mind or education to refuse to follow those orders. Like the poor pilot who dropped an atomic bomb incinerating almost a million civilians in Hiroshima, and went half-crazy afterward. He did not serve his country well, nor the cause of freedom, and certainly not his own human conscience.

I have compassion for Veteran, now Senator, McCain who flew 29 bombing missions knowing that Eisenhower had written in his book that if there were an all Vietnam election (blocked by the US) that Ho Chi Minh would have won by a plurality of more than 80%. But McCain was
just following military orders like an unthinking automaton.

Compassion for a Veteran and presidential candidate, John Kerry, who said he killed South Vietnamese before realizing it was wrong.

Compassion for former Governor, Senator, now President of New School University, Bob Kerrey, who on “60 Minutes” was exposed by his own point man of having had his Seals gun down 19 young women and children, after seeing to the throat cutting of an elderly man and his family, compassion for his having accepted a medal for doing it, under the report of ‘enemy’ successfully killed.

Did these three now highly placed Americans serve us when they killed? They all had a college education, which must have included a history of colonialism, especially the brutality of French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. They must have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours against the Japanese and Vichy French. They must have known that Truman, against Roosevelt’s promise, had brought the French army back in US ships to fight an 8-year war against our former allies, the Vietnamese. All this, because Ho Chi Minh was a communist? I don’t think so. A top cabinet minister of our ally, the French government was also a communist, but that was OK.

My heart goes out more to these famous American fellow Veterans more than for those Indochinese peasants they killed. The dead — especially those who died innocently– they must be free now. They are honored by their relatives, and any compassion from us for the
Vietnamese comes horribly late and is even suspect.

Six of my bunkmates in basic training are buried in North Korea. I can shed tears for them, they were young men — they wanted to live just as all the Korean relatives of my Korean students would have rather lived than die in a war over the economic confrontation of our country with the Soviet Union.

Veterans who loved their country enough to know what the fighting was about are one thing. Veterans who gave their lives fighting for injustice and against human respect, blindly following a leader are quite another.

The world has become increasingly complicated and yet our corporate conglomerate cartel of a mass entertainment media has become increasingly reductive, simplistic and antidemocratic, and I have compassion for those who work to make war acceptable, even attractive to their audiences.

Right now the news is filled with people who will someday become veterans like Lieutenant Calley of Mai Lai fame. They tortured in the name of freedom, of democracy maybe, of truth, or even God.

Or maybe they were just having fun. Now when they are discharged and officially become veterans, I will shed some tears for them, for the Karma they have put on their souls and the danger they have put us all in as retribution is sought in the name of their victims.

I once asked the guard in the rotunda of the Russian Veterans Monument in Berlin if there was anywhere a monument to the fallen German soldiers who fought the Russians and Americans. “No”, he answered, “they were fighting for the wrong reason.”

My tears go out to those of all countries who fought for the wrong reason and for the flags which they dishonored.

Shuttering anguish is what I feel for the leaders who knowingly sent them to kill (and die, though dying is less tragic than wrongly killing) for a wrong cause.

Actually, tears of joy come to my eyes quite easily when I see the newsreel of Mohammed Ali proudly saying that he would not participate in an unjust war against the Vietnamese. History will show that Ali is a veteran of that war as much as those who participated in the violence of genocidal terrorism. Ali had the courage to stand up for an honest America.

On a positive and humane Memorial suggestion:

Nothing could be better to honor our fellow veterans’ having given their lives, than to turn this nation around into morality and honesty, and forgoing pompous and ridiculous attempts to praise
ourselves indiscriminately, announce our intention to arrange compensation to Vietnam War survivors of our now admitted ‘MISTAKE’!

That would impress the whole world, and gain the next president some moral high ground for leadership of this nation.

The current compensation ‘sympathy payment’ for wrongful death of innocent Iraqis who file complaints with the US led Coalition Government is about US $6,000, according to a report published in the Christian Science Monitor in March, 2006.

Put ourselves in their shoes. The shoes of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Iraqi and Afghan bereaved families. Could we even imagine such bombings upon US towns and countryside? We can improve the whole world and ourselves with such imagination.