Month: June 2012

Yale University Press will soon be releasing Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War. The author, R. M. Douglas, had an excerpt essay in last week’s Chronicles of Higher Education that is stunning:

Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians -the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16 -”were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in
the course of the operation.

Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies’ cynical formulation, “reparations in kind”) in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe – many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed “deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population” under the heading of “crimes against humanity.”

By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world’s most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself.

Douglas clearly states that the post-war German “expulsions are in no way to be compared to the genocidal Nazi campaign that preceded them.” But the crimes of the Third Reich did not absolve the post-war abuses by the Allied governments and East European regimes.

Jon Utley’s mother, Frida Utley, did some of the first and most piercing writing on the post-World War Two abuses in Germany. Her pathbreaking work is archived here.

I will write more on this subject in the coming months. [hat tip to Walter Grinder]

There is news today that Libya’s interim authorities have declared portions of western Libya a “militarized zone,” with what they have for a military ordered to use force against any scuffles in that area. In addition, As’ad AbuKhalil reports that “In libya, new law 37 makes it criminal to say anything positive about qadhafi and the old regime and law 38 gives amnesty for anybody who fought against the old regime of qadhafi for anything they did.”

Sounds like things are going swell there thanks to NATO’s humanitarian war. See more the chaos in Libya here.

There is a society-wide civic dogma which props up the warfare state, and its conspicuous dishonesty is on full, naked display.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that US soldiers home from the war in Afghanistan are killing themselves at a rate of one per day. According to Pentagon numbers, “154 military service members committed suicide during the first 155 days of this year.” And “During the same period,” the article continued, “136 U.S. troops died in combat in Afghanistan.”

This week, the 2,000th US soldier died in Afghanistan.

According to the dogma – often described as patriotism or nationalism – ordinary Americans across the country should be livid. The dogma doesn’t imply that any of them should care about the vastly more numerous Afghans that have been killed and suffer unimaginably as a result of Washington’s savage decade-long war. They are the un-people. But the civic dogma, which claims to support the troops, does indeed suggest that daily suicides by our valorous army men warrants attention and outrage.

Notably (yet unsurprisingly), such attention and outrage is absent. This indicates the central falsehood of the civic dogma. It is clear that, for most citizens, supporting the troops is only important on the way into war. When national security policy is questioned by the minority who see it for the abomination it is, that is when the civic dogma matters most – not when troops are killing themselves and continuously dying in a war that not even the war-mongers seem to think worthwhile.

Patriotism and nationalism, close relatives of our natural human tendencies, are now handed down to us from above. The powerful revel in its magic: citizens believe fervently that “America” does good abroad and that soldiers defend our freedoms, and the helpful corollary is that national security policy is insulated from any harsh criticism. Those lives that our brave men and women in uniform end mercilessly don’t get talked about too much. Hypocrisy on a global scale is papered over. This civic dogma is accentuated when it is empowering and bolstering the state and its sustenance, but is absent when those glorious ones who have committed themselves to killing on the orders of Washington are in bad shape.

(h/t Dafina Mulaj)

I just found out that my friend and familiar Antiwar.com byline (and radio guest) Gareth Porter, has just won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in London. This honor is for his outstanding research into the military’s targeted killing strategy in Afghanistan. Check out some of his work here. Porter freelances for InterPress News Service (IPS) but carries on his work independently, at his own cost, and cares not so much for the glory, but for the illuminating effect his reporting could have on the national discussion. A true journalist. I’m glad he is getting his due. Here’s the press release:
             

   TOP UK AWARD GOES TO JOURNALIST WHO EXPOSED

                        SECRETS OF AFGHANISTAN WAR

 

Gareth Porter, the Washington-based journalist, has won the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism for 2012 for his investigation of US ‘killing strategy’ in Afghanistan, including the targeting of people through their mobile phones.

The judges said: ‘In a series of extraordinary articles, Gareth Porter has torn away the facades of the Obama administration and disclosed a military strategy that amounts to a war against civilians.’

The Martha Gellhorn Prize is given in honour of one of the 20^th century’s greatest reporters and is awarded to a journalist ‘whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or “official drivel”, as Martha Gellhorn called it’.

Previous winners include Robert Fisk of the Independent, Nick Davies of the Guardian, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and the late Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times (special award).

Those short-listed for this year’s prize were Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian for her articles about Britain’s ‘forgotten people’, the elderly and young offenders, described by the judges as ‘unique and eloquent’ ; and Phil Hammond and Andrew Bousfield for their ‘stunning’ special investigation in Private Eye, ‘Shoot the messenger: How NHS whistleblowers are silenced and sacked’.

The Martha Gellhorn Trust judges are: Dr. Alexander Matthews, John Pilger, James Fox, Jeremy Harding, Cynthia Kee and Shirlee Matthews.

 

For information: Dr. Alexander Matthews sandyandshirlee@phonecoop.coop

According to Amnesty International, “arms and military equipment from the United States, France, China, Russia and others are contributing to grave human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including killings, rape, looting and abductions.”

The report, If You Resist, We’ll Shoot You, details how Congolese security forces and armed groups alike are able to commit serious human rights violations because of the ease with which weapons and ammunition are available.

“If we want to stop the killings, the mass rapes and the abductions in the DRC and in other countries, we must begin by stopping the unfettered firepower that fuels these and other human rights abuses,” said Suzanne Nossel, executive director, Amnesty International USA.  “The DRC is only one example, among many around the world, where the persistent transfer of weapons to security forces and armed groups drives human rights abuses…”

According to Amnesty International’s research, unregulated and irresponsible arms transfers contribute to the deaths of at least 500,000 people on average every year.  About 60 percent of the human rights violations documented in a study by the organization involved the use of small arms and light weapons.  The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – collectively account for 88 percent of the global arms trade.

Irresponsible arms transfers contribute to horrors all over the world, and the US is mentioned on a list of world powers that make up 88 percent of the global arms trade. But don’t let that fool you. The US is no small portion of that: some estimates say the US accounts for half of the global arms trade, and thus bears a disproportionate share of the responsibility for the deaths of some 500,000 people each year. In the case of the Congo, Washington gives about $230 million each year to the authorities and US arms go to security forces and armed groups which have committed “crimes under international law including unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, torture and sexual violence on a large scale” in a “conflict that has resulted in the suffering of millions of men, women and children.”