Hiroshima and Hope for the Future

August 6th was our annual From Hiroshima to Hope commemoration, and the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. It’s held on the lawn at Green Lake, just past the Bathhouse Theater, going counterclockwise around the lake path from the community center.

From Hiroshima to Hope

Native American storyteller & flutist Gene Tagaban told us the story of Raven bringing light to the world, followed by an appearance by Raven (with the accompaniment of a taiko drummer).

Gene Tagaban as Raven

The Seattle Kokon Taiko group was next.

Seattle Kokon Taiko

They were really impressive! Here’s a clip by lesvictor on YouTube of “Rites of Thundering”, which they performed at the commemoration as well:

There was also an interpretive dance piece of a Hiroshima widow and White Lightning. Video by subversivepeacemaker:

Mona Akmal, a young woman who created Dreamfly Projects, starting schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, spoke of how much the children inspired her.

Mona Akmal, Dreamfly Projects

We also had poetry from students in El Centro de la Raza‘s Hope for Youth Program.

Hope for Youth Poets

Gene Tagaban played some flute music as preparations were made.

Gene Tagaban

Then there was a Buddhist blessing (there was a Christian one earlier in the evening).

Buddhist Blessing

Lanterns were lit and a procession to the lake, starting with the monks and Hiroshima survivors.

Procession to Green Lake

Then the lanterns are floated on Green Lake, which is always beautiful.

Lantern Floating on Green Lake

According to the program the lantern floating ceremony “is an adaption of an ancient Japanese Buddhist ritual, the Toro Nagashi, in which lanterns representing the souls of the dead are floated out to sea and prayers offered that the souls may rest in peace.”

I hope one day soon the world bans all nuclear weapons.

Afghans & American Veterans Say No to War

While it came as no surprise when President Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan last night, it still, as a friend put it, felt like a punch in the gut.  It felt like betrayal.  I voted for this President, and to be fair, I still believe he’s the best we could have gotten in there at this point in American history.

Why do Democrats still feel they have to compete with Republicans on being macho, on how many we can kill to show we’re tough, whether it’s war or the death penalty? 

The people of Afghanistan have endured violence for decades. They’ve been confronted with occupation — by the Soviet Union, and then by foreign al Qaeda fighters who used Afghan land for their own purposes.  So tonight, I want the Afghan people to understand — America seeks an end to this era of war and suffering. 

So why are we sending more troops? Of course, theoretically, we’re sending more troops so we can get out of there.  Where have we heard all this before?

Ahh, yes.  Vietnam.  I’m old enough to remember a great deal of it, although I was a kid at the time.  I have many veteran friends who unfortunately were old enough to have been sent over and fought in it.

Bill Moyers ran this episode a couple weeks ago, detailing through audio tapes how then President Johnson took my friends and other young men and women into the quagmire that was Vietnam.  What’s amazing, or maybe not, is that nobody seemed to think it was a good idea, or even winable – neither the President nor his advisors.

Why did Johnson get us into it?

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Well, I opposed it in ’54. But we’re there now, and there’s only one of three things you can do. One is run and let the dominoes start falling over. And God Almighty, what they said about us leaving China would just be warming up, compared to what they’d say now. I see Nixon is raising hell about it today. Goldwater too. You can run or you can fight, as we are doing. Or you can sit down and agree to neutralize all of it.

So he gets the country deeper and deeper into the quicksand, even though he really on some level knows better.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: It’s damned easy to get in a war but it’s gonna be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in.

But you can’t appear to be weak!

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: But they say that, well a fellow like A.W. Moursund said to me last night, -damn, there’s not anything that’ll destroy you as quick as pulling out, pulling up stakes and running, that America wants by God, prestige and power. And they don’t want-I said, yeah, but I don’t want to-I don’t want to kill these folks. He said, I don’t give a damn. He said, I didn’t want to kill ’em in Korea, but said, if you don’t stand up for America, there’s nothing that a fellow in Johnson City-or Georgia or any other place-they’ll forgive you for everything except being weak.

RICHARD RUSSELL: Well there’s a lot in that. There’s a whole lot in that.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Goldwater and all of ’em raising hell about go on, let’s hot pursuit. Let’s go in and bomb them […]

RICHARD RUSSELL: It’d take a half million men. They’d be bogged down in there for ten years. And oh hell no.

Then the Gulf of Tonkin and an incident which later turns out to be overblown. . .

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: My fellow Americans–

BILL MOYERS: He announces that U.S. fighter jets, for the first time, have attacked naval and oil facilities in North Vietnam.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Our response for the present will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risk of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.

Sound familiar?  President Obama as well seeks no wider war. . .

Like President Obama, President Johnson worries about the young men (and now women, but we had women in the war as combat nurses even then):

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle. I have spoken to you today of the divisions and the forces and the battalions and the units. But I know them all, every one. I have seen them in thousand streets, of a hundred towns, in every state in this union – working and laughing and building, and filled with hope and life. I think that I know, too, how their mothers weep and how their families sorrow. This is the most agonizing and the most painful duty of your President.

This is no Vietnam, according to President Obama, or is it?

BILL MOYERS: Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we’re fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he’s got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.

And now, a week and a half later, President Obama is saying yes to a wider war in Afghanistan.  Of course, like Vietnam, it isn’t supposed to get wider. . .

So, is there a way to stop this now, or must we repeat history (ours and the Soviet Union’s – Afghanistan was their Vietnam)?

Brave New Foundation, in a coalition with Credo and True Majority, has a website called Rethink Afghanistan and a petition to Congress telling them to stop the escalation.

Watch the video and see what the Afghan people and some of our veterans think about escalating the war in Afghanistan.

Tell Congress to say no to the war in Afghanistan!

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/?f=25

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

On Thursday night I went to the annual Hiroshima to Hope memorial at Green Lake in Seattle.  It was August 6, the 64^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.  Today, August 9, is the anniversary of Nagasaki’s bombing.

I made it around the circle of Green Lake from community center to the gathering just past the the Bathhouse Theater as the sun was sinking low.  The path around Green Lake on a summer night is full of people – walking, running, bicycling, skating, some with baby strollers and/or dogs.  I can hear the Japanese taiko drumming from around the lake (though, as usual, I arrive too late to see them).

When I get there, I find the lanterns, then go to the calligraphy table to get a shade.  I choose “Peace” this year. (Photo from later in the evening.)

I got there in time to hear this year’s key note speaker, Pramila Jayapal, the Executive Director of One America (formerly Hate Free Zone). Hate Free Zone was formed shortly after the September 11 attacks, following the first incidents in Seattle of Muslim mosques being threatened and Sikhs attacked because they wore turbans.

Native American musicians and storytellers Gene Tagaban and Swil Kanim told us of raven and eagle working together to bring fire to all the people on earth and a very personal story of finding peace and redemption, accompanied by beautiful music.

Then we had a blessing by a Buddhist monk, honoring all the souls of the dead from all wars and our ancestors, who had been invited back to earth for the night and we were to send floating back on the water with our lanterns.

Then everyone heads to the lake, where children help place the lanterns out on the water for us.

Here is some video I shot of the lantern floating a couple years ago.

It was very beautiful, and this year I felt hope.  Hope, while it is discouraging to see the recent poll that 61% of Americans think bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right decision. As Pramila pointed out, those numbers are far smaller, and even run against the bombing with: younger people, women and especially non-whites.

I don’t think there has been enough discussion about the decision to drop the bombs nor the reality of what happened to the mostly civilian victims of the bombing.  Too many people want to see things as black and white, bringing up the terrible things the Japanese did such as Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking.  War crimes which were wrong too, and their victims are still seeking justice.

None of that justifies the unimaginable death toll, which Frida Berrigan notes in her article For the Sixty-Fourth Time: No More Nuclear War:

In Hiroshima, Little Boy’s huge fireball and explosion killed 70,000 to 80,000 people instantly. Another 70,000 were seriously injured. As Joseph Siracusa, author of Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction, writes: “In one terrible moment, 60% of Hiroshima… was destroyed. The blast temperature was estimated to reach over a million degrees Celsius, which ignited the surrounding air, forming a fireball some 840 feet in diameter.”

Three days later, Fat Man exploded 1,840 feet above Nagasaki, with the force of 22,000 tons of TNT. According to “Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered,” a web resource on the bombings developed for young people and educators, 286,000 people lived in Nagasaki before the bomb was dropped; 74,000 of them were killed instantly and another 75,000 were seriously injured.

Then the tens of thousands more who died of radiation sickness in the aftermath.

It’s always presented as a military necessity, sometimes with claims that a million were saved by ending the war sooner.  Yet when I read Gar Alperovitz’s book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, I was surprised to learn my father was not alone as a WWII veteran opposed to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  (My father was also a survivor of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Hickam Airfield, where he was stationed.)  I read names like Generals Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, and Admirals Leahy and Nimitz, who felt the bombings were unnecessary because Japan was about to surrender and the devastating loss of lives of civilians.

I don’t feel like we’ve ever had an honest discussion about this, as American citizens.  Yet, I don’t know how much of that was due to the cold war and how much the inability of most Americans (or citizens of any other country for that matter), to consider their country may have done something wrong.

More importantly, can we stop far nuclear weapons from being used in the future? As Frida Berrigan notes:

The nine nuclear powers — the United States, Russia, France, England, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea — have more than 27,000 operational nuclear weapons among them, enough to destroy several Earth-sized planets. And in May, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that the number of nuclear powers could double in a few years unless new disarmament is a priority.

The U.S. still maintains a nuclear arsenal and is spending $6 billion on their research and development.  Yes, this is still happening during the Obama administration.

Keep in mind as well that the bombs which annihilated two Japanese cities and ended so many lives 64 years ago this week were puny when compared to today’s typical nuclear weapon. Little Boy was a 15 kiloton warhead. Most of the warheads in the U.S. arsenal today are 100 or 300 kilotons — capable of taking out not a Japanese city of 1945 but a modern megalopolis. Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and a former launch-control officer in charge of Minutemen Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles armed with 170, 300, and 335 kiloton warheads, pointed out a few years ago that, within 12 minutes, the United States and Russia could launch the equivalent of 100,000 Hiroshimas.

I know some people are going to say why bring up Hiroshima and Nagasaki 64 years later, but we really need to say: Never again (and remember, these were 15 & 20 kiloton bombs, not the 100 – 300 kiloton modern bombs).

Seattle’s Winter Soldier Hearings

What struck me most about the testimony I heard last week’s Winter Soldier hearing at Town Hall was not so much that I’ve heard it before, but the sinking feeling of hearing it all again, with a younger generation of vets. 

I found it much more disturbing, and was surprised by that (and I actually missed much of the testimony, running late because my health was acting up again).  I think maybe it was the rawness of seeing young veterans and soldiers just back, talking about what’s still going on. 

Real Change published a good article on the hearings this week.  One of the young men describes how what was supposed to be a humanitarian mission of his first tour turned out to be mostly about harassing people.  Then shortly into his second deployment, a roadside bomb killed several officers in his platoon, and “the rules of engagement changed from disarming civilians to killing them.”

“Pretty much all we did was just go out on the town and search for people to shoot,” Kochergin said. “Later on, we had no rules of engagement at all. It was go out there and if you see something that you think is not right, take ‘em out.”

Another veteran described how “American soldiers rip Iraqi men from their homes and families, often based on a tip from a neighbor seeking a payoff from the U.S. military.”  Now think about that.  Imagine what it would be like if someone who didn’t like you could not only turn you in and have you put in detention and tortured, but could also get paid for it.

• Joshua Simpson: “People know that the U.S. has a military that will pay for people to give information to us, [but it’s] the names of people [that] don’t have anything to do with terrorist attacks or the insurgency. It’s people they dislike or something, a neighbor who had a feud with them – sometimes just random people. And this would be the basis of the raids that we would do.”

Nor are our troops or their families immune from the damage of this war:

About a third of those returning suffer from either PTSD or major depression, he said, with up to 20 percent struggling with the loss of function from a traumatic brain injury brought on by constant exposure to blasts in Iraq. At that rate, out of the 1.6 million military personnel deployed to Iraq, Kanter estimated a total of 300,000 to 400,000 “psychiatric casualties” will be coming home, out of which 18 veterans a day are already committing suicide – the highest rate ever recorded, he said.

The result for families, said Tracy Manzel, who spoke on the panel with her husband Seth, is domestic violence, broken marriages and, in one case she cited, a wife murdered by a husband in Seth’s unit. “The Bush Administration talks of family values and how much these values are attacked, but really what the administration is doing is splitting families apart,” she said.

Racism is, sadly, not dead in the U.S. military, as reported in the Seattle PI article on the hearings:

Many said they went to Iraq hoping to help civilians, but found that often wasn’t the case. U.S. troops frequently referred to all Iraqis and Middle Easterners as “hajji,” an ethnic slur. In medical units, they became “range balls,” meaning they were like the golf balls hit on driving ranges that are of low value and that you don’t mind losing.

Sexism isn’t either.  One of the people who testified at the hearing was the mother of a young woman still in Iraq (though it sounds like, at least, with a different unit now) who suffered from “command rape.”  It’s so common, there’s a name for it.  Her daughter told her that the prevalent attitude in the military is that women in uniform are all either “bitches, dykes or whores.,” and didn’t know what to do. 

There was a second panel on GI resistance (which is sprouting up, just as it did during the Vietnam War), including a film from those who have fled to Canada.

After the hearing, we all marched, down from Town Hall to Westlake, via Pike Place Market.  I just wished there were more of us, more of us marching.  There actually are more people against the war than when we held the biggest marches before it happened (I was remembering Seattle Center packed at the start of one of them as I walked through the grounds the other day).

 

 

 

Tags: Winter+Soldier, IVAW, Iraq+War, Veterans+for+Peace, Seattle

A Little More on Peace. . .

from someone who’s seen war:

http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DVcPTag6AteU

So, I clicked on the “Veterans for Peace” tag link and come up with a familar face — Mike Hastie, speaking at a peace rally last year in Seattle (March 16,2006).  I don’t know how I missed that one.  I’m not sure if I missed the whole rally, or just Mike. 

Nobody says it better about the true cost of war. What more is there to say? 

Then I saw another familiar name on the credits.  Who else, but Mike McCormick of Talking Stick TV and KEXP’s Mind over Matters?

PS:  I would have posted the video, but the direct link is no longer there, so I linked to the Technerati site.

End the War Rally

I was running late for the peace rally Saturday and missed the first rally before the march.   My timing was good for the march itself, however.  It was less than a block away and moving toward us as they rerouted the bus around the corner.  So, once I got off, I got my camera out, and after fumbling through changing my batteries when I didn’t have to (it was in display mode), got some great pictures. 

Well, maybe not so great (this is me), but, a lot of them!

One good video from the camera as well, if I can ever figure out how to convert and upload it again. . .

I got caught up with the energy, which was really inspiring.  It has been hard to maintain the momentum as this war drags on and the will of the people is ignored (whether the massive crowds at the start, in spite of the neo-cons trying to invoke Sept. 11 and claim anti-patriotism; or the overwhelming majority agains the war now).  Unfortunately, hard as well to maintain the momentum with our fractured peace movement.

Yet, there everyone was; and many from far away (while I wish there were more Seattlites out).  Kitsap, Bellingham, and, oh, yes, Portland! 

I started seeing familiar faces in the crowd.  Wait is that. . .?  It’s been a little over a decade, but recognition is dawning. . . (and it was the same for them, with me).  First a familiar face, other than George Hickey taking pictures (not that it isn’t good to see George).  Yes, with a good camera (now gone digital, though I’ll bet George is still a holdout) and wearing a green army shirt.  No, yes, that really has to be – Mike Hastie (from the Northwest Veterans for Peace in Portland)!

Lost sight of him in the crowd while taking my own pictures.  Then turning a corner, I see a white haired gentleman in a NW Veterans for Peace t-shirt and filming the march with  said, “Hey!”  No flicker of recognition (from either of us), and I was thinking this must be a more recent member, since I’ve been gone.  So I continue on. . .

I’m taking some photos of the Portland contingent when I see Mike again.  I tap him on the shoulder.  He looks real confused (“Who is this lady?”), then recognition, a big smile, and a hug.  We talk a bit, then split up and go back to taking pictures, planning to look for each other after the march.

So I’m at the rally at the end of the march, in Occidental Park in Pioneer Square, and I see the guy in the NW Vets for Peace shirt again.  I keep looking at him. . .  wait a minute, it’s Don Mills. . .  He looks at me, slightly puzzled. . . then sees it’s me!  Don’s up here with Carolyn (of course), and Ted Kiser.  So we find them and have a little reunion.  Great to see them!  Funny thing is, of all the people up from Portland, I don’t think I’ve seen any of them since I left (either up here at WTO etc., or my rare trips back to PDX).

They leave to head back to Portland.  I move closer to check out the rally, remembering I want to keep an eye open for Mike. 

We have someone speaking out for immigrant rights (Si, se peude!  Still echoes of Magdaleno, now rabble rousing in Miami.)  We’re surrounded by puppets – a grieving Iraqi mother, a man who wants to know why the U.S. is so afraid of the International Criminal Court, and, oh, yes, the Bush chain gang who were marching with us earlier (Bush, Cheney, Condi and Rummy).

Coming up next, the Bush bunch are on trial for their crimes against humanity.  Charges are read.  Congress is implicated, too – for inaction. They are found guilty and led away in chains. 

Now, the disturbing thing to me is that some people were yelling, “Torture them!” during the trial.  While I know it was the Bushies themselves who brought the whole subject of torture out in the open and have been trying to make it acceptable (while using Orwellian language to claim it isn’t really torture), it still troubles me.  I don’t expect to hear it from “our side”.  I like to think “we” are better (like I liked to think the U.S. was better, or at least our people, as we didn’t openly torture before this, and our government’s complicity with those who did was kept secret). 

That’s the trouble though.  Once the concept is out there, and discussion (and use) of it is considered to be possibly acceptable, even some of those on the other side of the debate can start to think, “Hey, let’s torture the torturers!”  Come to think of it, the whole concept behind capitol punishment. 

What I like about Amnesty International is that they have always been consisantly agains torture, and other human rights violations — in all cases.  No excuses being made for one side or the other.  Before yesterday, I thought we were mostly “preaching to the choir” in speaking out against torture in Seattle, as most people here are liberal, and “know better”.  Now, I think, maybe the choir needs preaching too, to.

Hungry Mob, a hip hop band from Portland came up to wind up the rally.  I was wandering around, wondering whether to head off, when I saw the AFSC banner at the edge of the square.  Then, the boots.  Rows of them.  Some with flowers.  Many with photos.

I took a lot of pictures.  I ran into Mike again, taking photos as well.  Then, I thought I’d go around to the backside of the display and take some more.  First I saw there were rows of names and dates on what looked like Tibetan prayer flags. Then I realized there were more shoes here as well, pouring out of bags.  Shoes to represent the Iraqi dead, which, of course, includes children.  Mike lined up a shot including the sign reading “1 shoe represents 3000 Iraqi deaths” over a bag of shoes, with the moving posters of a grieving Iraqi woman, and a smiling Iraqi girl, behind.

The cost of war.  A cost that’s been going on so long in Iraq.  I met Mike and our other Veterans for Peace buddies in Portland protesting the Gulf War. A war started by Bush I against a dictator his administration used to support, while Saddam was gassing and committing other human rights violations against his own people.  After the Gulf War, where we had destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure (water, sewer, electricty. . .), we continued to let their children starve to death as a tactic of war.  When pointed out, well, that was Saddam’s fault.  Really, we could enforce two “no fly” zones, but couldn’t make sure the food got to the children?  Why does a whole country have to suffer for one man?  Who’s gone now?  Now the country is so bitterly divided (Iraq, though to some extent the U.S.), there is little hope.  Having us stay as the occupier is doing nothing but cause yet more deaths.  Now Bush wants war with Iran and God knows who else.

Mike was in earnest discussion with an Iraq War veteran before I left.  The baton of leadership being passed on in a way to the next generation; the one who can speak fully to the truth of this war.

How many more generations does this need to go on?

 

  

Tags: peace, Iraq+War, Veterans+for+Peace