World War II

The Language We Use To Describe Japanese American Incarceration During World War II Matters

January 16, 2024 Tamiko Nimura, Smithsonian Magazine. Educate! Concentration Camps, Criminal Justice and Prisons, History, Human Rights, Internment Camps, Japan, Pearl Harbor, Racism, Trauma, World War II, WWII

Out the front windows of our bus, we could see acres of sun-dried grasses during a hot and arid Northern California summer. On either side of the road stood barbed-wire fences, like the ones many of our family members spent years behind, surrounded by armed guards and guard towers, living in crowded tar-paper barracks with little to no privacy. “How many of you have been here before or were here during World War II?” our tour guide asked. A few Japanese Americans—in their 70s and 80s, or even older—raised their hands. Many of us were stunned by what the tour guide said next, almost in passing: “Welcome back.”

Israel’s Genocide Betrays The Holocaust

January 1, 2024 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Educate! Genocide, History, Holocaust, Israel, Palestine, Wars and Militarism, World War II

Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland.

The Fatal Post World War II Contradiction

December 6, 2023 Lawrence Davidson, Consortium News. Educate! colonization, De-colonization, History, International Law, Israel, Palestine, Wars and Militarism, World War II

Human Beings are not showing off their best abilities of late. They appear to have mostly failed when it comes to climate change. For instance, “By 2100, average temperatures in the U.S. are expected to increase by approximately 8°F or more (4.4°C)” if the current high rate of greenhouse gas emissions is maintained. If “immediate and rapid greenhouse gas reductions” are achieved we can keep the warming down to “approximately 2.5°F (1.4°C).” Given our lack of international institutions with the capability of enforcing agreements and treaties, which do you think is more likely? Actually, we have been coming up short like this for a while.

How Thousands Of Ukrainian Nazis Were Smuggled Into Canada

September 29, 2023 Mnar Adley, Mintpress News. Resistance Report Anti-Communist, Canada, Nazis, Ukraine, World War II

The Canadian parliament made headlines around the world after it gave a standing ovation to a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian Nazi soldier. Yaroslav Hunka, a volunteer member of the Nazi battalion Waffen-SS Galicia Division – a unit infamous for its role in massacring civilians during World War Two – was also afforded a private meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The backlash this week led to the resignation of the speaker of the Canadian House of Commons and an apology from Trudeau. Yet, in his mea culpa, Trudeau insisted that this was just another reason to push back against Russian propaganda.

Atomic Bombing Of Japan Was Not Necessary To End WWII

August 8, 2023 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. Resistance Report Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Hiroshima, History, Japan, Nagasaki, Nuclear Weapons, Oppenheimer, Soviet Union, USSR, World War II

It is very common for Western governments and media outlets to tell the rest of the world to be very afraid of North Korea and its nuclear weapons, or to fear the possibility that Iran could one day soon have nukes. But the reality is that there is only one country in human history that has used nuclear weapons against a civilian population – and not once, but twice: the United States. On the 6th and 9th of August, 1945, the US military dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 200,000 civilians were killed. Today, nearly 80 years later, it is still very common to hear US government officials, journalists, and educators claim that Washington had no choice but to nuke Japan.

African American Resistance In The Rural South

February 24, 2023 Abayomi Azikiwe, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Black Farmers, Great Depression, History, Solidarity, World War II

As Wall Street collapsed the United States was faced with the threat of yet another social and political crisis which could have prompted a national uprising against capitalism. During October 1929, the United States economic system was plunged into an unprecedented depression where tens of millions were thrown out of work and their homes. In the South, the African American people living in major cities, small towns and rural areas were impacted more than any other demographic inside the country. The Great Depression began under the leadership of Republican President Herbert Hoover who refused to initiate any major policy reforms to seriously mitigate the rising tide of joblessness, foreclosures, evictions and food deficits.

Exposed: The Most Polluted Place In The United States

December 27, 2022 Tara Lohan, EcoWatch. Educate! Book Review, History, Nuclear Waste, Nuclear Weapons, Wars and Militarism, Washington, World War II

Benton County, Washington - The most polluted place in the United States — perhaps the world — is one most people don’t even know. Hanford Nuclear Site sits in the flat lands of eastern Washington. The facility — one of three sites that made up the government’s covert Manhattan Project — produced plutonium for Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II. And it continued producing plutonium for weapons for decades after the war, helping to fuel the Cold War nuclear arms race. Today Hanford — home to 56 million gallons of nuclear waste, leaking storage tanks, and contaminated soil — is an environmental disaster and a catastrophe-in-waiting. It’s “the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet,” writes journalist Joshua Frank in the new book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.

After Nuking Japan, US Government Lied About Radioactive Fallout

August 17, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. Resistance Report Nuclear War, Wars and Militarism, World War II

After dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, top US government officials lied to the media and Congress, claiming there was “no radioactive residue” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that Japanese reports of deaths due to radiation were “propaganda.” The US general overseeing the nuclear program told Congress that Japanese civilians did not face “undue suffering,” insisting that it was in fact “a very pleasant way to die.” This information was revealed by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. On August 8, the archive published declassified documents exposing this shocking history. The archive wrote: the head of the [Manhattan] project, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, was so worried about public revulsion over the terrible effects of the new weapon – which a Navy report later in 1945 called “the most terrible agent of destruction known to man” – that he cut off early discussion within the MED of the problem. Later, he misleadingly told Congress there was “no radioactive residue” in the two devastated cities.

Hiroshima-Nagasaki: The Story They Want Us To Forget

August 5, 2021 Bruce K. Gagnon, Organizing Notes. Educate! Atomic Bombs, Hiroshima, Japan, Wars and Militarism, World War II

The world's first nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945, when a plutonium implosion device was tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the barren plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, known as the Jornada del Muerto (day of the dead). US President Harry Truman ordered the first atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Days later (August 9) Washington dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. Official figures of those killed by the atomic bombs is well over 150,000 from the two cities. More than 100,000 were injured with most likely dying. Then over the years many thousands have died from the initial radiation poisoning.

The US Did Not Defeat Fascism In WWII

October 17, 2020 Gabriel Rockhill, Counterpunch. Educate! CIA, Fascism, Nazis, World War II

One of the founding myths of the contemporary Western European and American world is that fascism was defeated in WWII by liberal democracies, and particularly by the United States. With the subsequent Nuremburg trials and the patient construction of a liberal world order, a bulwark was erected—in fits and starts, and with the constant threat of regression—against fascism and its evil twin in the East. American culture industries have rehearsed this narrative ad nauseum, brewing it into a saccharine ideological Kool-Aid and piping it into every household, shack and street corner with a TV or smartphone, tirelessly juxtaposing the supreme evil of Nazism to the freedom and prosperity of liberal democracy.

What Does WWII Have To Do With Military Spending

September 18, 2020 David Swanson, Let's Try Democracy. Educate! Congress, Pentagon Budget, Wars and Militarism, World War II

“I’m going to perform a magic trick by reading your mind,” I tell a class of students or an auditorium or video call full of people. I write something down. “Name a war that was justified,” I say. Someone says “World War Two.” I show them what I wrote: “WWII.” Magic![i] If I insist on additional answers, they’re almost always wars even further in the past than WWII.[ii] If I ask why WWII is the answer, the response is virtually always “Hitler” or “Holocaust” or words to that effect. This predictable exchange, in which I get to pretend to have magical powers, is part of a lecture or workshop that I typically begin by asking for a show of hands in response to a pair of questions.

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