[PEN-L:4595] Japan Bombs New Mexico (fwd); I Ain't Marching Anymore

[Michael Eisenscher <meisenscher@xxxxxxx>]

Date:Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:56:47 -0600 (CST)
From:"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To:lbo-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:Japan bombs New Mexico
Reply-To:lbo-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



The following is a translation of last night's speech by the Prime
Minister of Japan, explaining why the Japanese air force bombed military
bases and command-and-control installations in the American Southwest:



"My fellow citizens:
               Today our armed forces joined our
allies in the Pacific Rim Organization for National Treaty Observance in
air strikes against American forces responsible for the brutality in New
Mexico. We have acted with resolve for several reasons. We act to
protect thousands of innocent people in New Mexico from a mounting
military offensive by the `border patrol.´ We act to defuse a powder
keg at the heart of North America that has exploded twice before in the
last century and a half with catastrophic results, when the US invaded
Mexico in 1846 and 1916. We act to stand united with our allies for
peace. By acting now, we are upholding our values, protecting our
interests, and advancing the cause of peace.



               Tonight I want to speak with you
about the tragedy in New Mexico and why it matters to Japan that we work
with our allies to end it. First, let me explain what it is we are
responding to. New Mexico is a state of the United States, in the middle
of southwestern North America, about 1500 miles west of Cuba -- that's
less than the distance from Hokkaido to Okinawa -- and only about 1000
miles north of Mexico City. Its people are mostly ethnic Latino and
mostly Catholic. In recent years America's leader, Bill Clinton, the
same leader who started the wars in Iraq and Colombia and attacked Sudan
and Afghanistan in the last decade, increased the authority of the
federal secret police, the `INS´; Mexicans are denied their right to
speak their language, run their schools, shape their daily lives. For
years, Latinos struggled peacefully to get their rights back. When
President Clinton sent his troops and police to crush them, the struggle
grew violent. The American leaders refuse even to discuss key elements
of the Japanese peace proposal.


  America has stationed Marines along the border in preparation for a
major offensive. We've seen innocent people taken from their homes,
forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed with bullets; Mexican men
dragged from their families, fathers and sons together lined up and shot
in cold blood. This is not war in the traditional sense. It is an attack
by armored vehicles and high-tech weapons on a largely defenseless
people whose leaders speak only of peace.
               Ending this tragedy is a moral
imperative. It is also important to Japan's national interests. Take a
look at the map. New Mexico is a small place, but it sits on a major
fault line between North America, Latin America, and the Pacific, at the
meeting place of Catholicism and both the liberal and evangelical
branches of Protestantism. To the South are our allies, Peru (whose
president is of Japanese descent) and Venezuela (which produces oil); to
the north our increasingly important trading partner, Canada.



               And all around New Mexico there are
other states struggling with their own economic and political
challenges, states that could be overwhelmed by a large new wave of
refugees from New Mexico -- California, Texas, Arizona. All the
ingredients for a major war are there: Ancient grievances, struggling
democracies, and in the center of it all, a president in America of
highly questionable personal character who has done nothing since the
Cold War ended but start new wars and pour gasoline on the flames of
ethnic and religious division.
              In neighboring Guatemala
  President Clinton recently acknowledged that American support for
torture and murder cost 200,000 lives. Earlier, World War II engulfed
the Pacific. In both wars, the world was slow to recognize the dangers,
and Japan held back from entering these conflicts. Just imagine if
leaders back then had acted wisely and early enough. How many lives
could have been saved? How many Japanese would not have had to die?



              We learned some of the same lessons
in Nicaragua and El Salvador a decade ago. The world did not act early
enough to stop those wars, either. And let's not forget what happened:
Innocent people herded into concentration camps; children gunned down by
snipers on their way to school; soccer fields and parks turned into
cemeteries; a quarter of a million people killed not because of anything
they had done but because of who they were. Two million Central
Americans became refugees. This was genocide in the heart of the
Americas, not in 1945 but in 1985, not in some grainy newsreel from our
parents' and grandparents' time, but in our own time, testing our
humanity and our resolve. At the time, many people believed nothing
could be done to end the bloodshed in Central America, They said, `Well,
that´s just the way those people in the Americas are.´ But when we
and our allies in the UN joined with courageous Central Americans to
stand up to the aggressors, we helped end the wars. We learned that in
the Americas inaction in the face of brutality simply invites more
brutality, but firmness can stop armies and save lives. We must apply
that lesson in New Mexico, before what happened in Central America
happens there too.



               Today we and our PRONTO allies
agreed to do what we must do to restore the peace. Our mission is clear:
to demonstrate the seriousness of PRONTO's purpose so that the American
leaders understand the imperative of reversing course; to deter an even
bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in New Mexico; and if
necessary, to seriously damage the American military's capacity to harm
the people of New Mexico. In short, if President Clinton will not make
peace, we will limit his ability to make war.
               Now, I want to be clear with you,
there are risks in this military action -- risk to our pilots and the
people on the ground. America's air defenses are strong. It could decide
to intensify its assault on New Mexico or to seek to harm us or our
allies elsewhere. If it does, we will deliver a forceful response.
Hopefully Mr. Clinton will realize his present course is
self-destructive and unsustainable.



               If he decides to accept our peace
proposal and demilitarize New Mexico, PRONTO has agreed to help to
implement it with a peacekeeping force. If PRONTO is invited to do so,
our troops should take part in that mission to keep the peace. But I do
not intend to put our troops in New Mexico to fight a war.
               Do our interests in New Mexico
justify the dangers to our armed forces? I thought long and hard about
that question. I am convinced that the dangers of acting are far
outweighed by the dangers of not acting -- dangers to defenseless people
and to our national interests. If we and our allies were to allow this
war to continue with no response, President Clinton would read our
hesitation as a license to kill. There would be many more massacres --
tens of thousands more refugees, more victims crying out for revenge.
Right now our firmness is the only hope the people of New Mexico have to
be able to live in their own country without having to fear for their
own lives.



               Imagine what would happen if we and
our allies decided just to look the other way as these people were
massacred on PRONTO's doorstep.
That would discredit PRONTO, the cornerstone on which our Pacific
security rests.
               We must also remember that this is
a conflict with no natural national boundaries. Let me ask you to look
again at a map. The arrows show the movement of refugees -- north, east,
and west. Already this movement is threatening the unstable democracy in
Texas, which has its own Mexican minority and an Indian minority.
Already American forces have made forays into Mexico, from which New
Mexicans have drawn support. Mexico has a Mayan minority. Let a fire
burn here in this area, and the flames will spread. Eventually key
Japanese allies could be drawn into a wider conflict, which we would be
forced to confront later only at far greater risk and greater cost.



               I have a responsibility as Prime
Minister to deal with problems such as this before they do permanent
harm to out national interests. Japan has a responsibility to stand with
our allies when they are trying to save innocent lives and preserve
peace, freedom, and stability in North America. That is what we are
doing in New Mexico.
               If we have learned anything form
the century drawing to a close, it is that if Japan is going to be
prosperous and secure we need a North America that is prosperous,
secure, united, and free. We need a North America that is coming
together, not falling apart, a North America that shares our values and
shares the burdens of leadership. That is the foundation on which the
security or our children will depend. That is why I have supported NAFTA
and the economic unification of North America. Now, what are the
challenges to that vision of a peaceful, secure, united, stable North
America? The challenge of strengthening a three-way partnership with the
EU, that despite our disagreements is a constructive partner in the work
of building peace. The challenge of resolving the tension between Latin
and indigenous peoples, and building bridges with the Christian world.
And finally the challenge of ending instability in the United States so
that these bitter ethnic problems are resolved by the force of argument,
not the force of arms, so that future generations of Japanese do not
have to cross the Pacific to fight another terrible war. It is this
challenge that we and our allies are facing in New Mexico. That is why
we have acted now, because we care about saving innocent lives, because
we have an interest in avoiding an even crueler and costlier war, and
because our children need and deserve a peaceful, stable, free North
America.



               Our thoughts and prayers tonight
must be with the men and women of our armed forces who are undertaking
this mission for the sake of our values and our children's future. May
God bless them, and may God bless Japan."

  --30--
===========================================

From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: [PEN-L:4589] Re: Germany sheds its pacifism
Reply-To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I AIN'T MARCHING ANYMORE
by John Lacny

There must be some people in Belgrade old enough to remember the
last time the bombs fell there. In 1941, they bore the Swastika; now most
of them bare the Stars and Stripes. A better illustration of the
direction world politics has taken since the end of the Second World War
would be hard to find.
Is this hyperbole? Perhaps, but it is no more so than Bill
Clinton's comparison between Milosevic's Serbia and Nazi Germany. It
seems almost too easy to point out that these denunciations of Serb
atrocities come from the head of an Administration which acknowledges that
its own Iraq policy alone has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths,
yet still notoriously maintains that "the price is worth it."
Serbian nationalists are convinced that the entire world is
against them. It's always best to take their claims with a grain of salt,
especially considering that these people lay claim to Kosovo on the
grounds that the Serbs fought a battle there six hundred years ago. Yet
the fact that a group of people is paranoid does not mean that everybody
is *not* out to get them. The Serbs have reason to wonder why *their*
atrocities are a source of outrage in the West, while those of everyone
else are ignored.
Consider the case of Franjo Tudjman, the man who more or less
constitutes the current government of Croatia. Tudjman is the author of a
book which claimed that "only" 900,000 Jews died in the Holocaust (the
real number is 6 million) and that 70,000 Serbs died under the
collaborationist regime of the Croatian Ustashe in the same period (the
real number is at least 750,000).
This same individual was invited to the opening of the Holocaust
Museum in Washington in 1993. There, at the height of the war in Bosnia,
Clinton denounced the Serbs as the heirs of Hitler. And Tudjman-- the
West's neo-Nazi client-- was soon to become responsible for the single
greatest act of ethnic cleansing during the last Balkan War: the expulsion
of hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia.
Every variety of ethnic nationalism in the former Yugoslavia bears
its part of the blame for the bloody dismemberment of the country. (This
includes the Bosnian Muslims, whose regime was once hailed in the West as
an embattled haven of pluralistic tolerance, event though it was headed by
the Islamic fundamentalist Alija Izetbegovic.)
With this noted, it is still difficult not to sympathize with the
Kosovar Albanians. If anything, their nationalism is mostly a reaction to
the Serb chauvinism which made them the first victims of Yugoslavia's
impending disintegration as far back as 1989. The Milosevic regime's
crackdown is the latest in a long line of outrages.
However, it is necessary to realize that irridentism, while a
contagious bacillus, is also a deadly one. The ascendancy of the Kosovar
Liberation Army-- encouraged, it is true, by the regime's repression--
cannot but bode ill for all ethnic minorities (not only Serbs!) in Kosovo.
This is not even to mention the uneasy communal truce which reigns in
neighboring Macedonia, a country with a large Albanian minority which is
the only former Yugoslav Republic thus far to have avoided direct
involvement in this ongoing series of wars.
To side with one flavor of ethnic nationalism or the other in this
region is merely to heighten communal violence. Furthermore, to embrace
Balkan nationalist agitation of one kind or the other is to ignore the
very real fact of Great Power manipulation.
In the case of Kosovo, the Clinton Administration has used
Albanian grievances as a vehicle for legitimizing NATO violence and
militarism generally. This is part of a long-term strategy aimed at the
isolation of Russia and the eventual crystallization of a European power
bloc under US hegemony. Needless to say, the prospect is not a good one
for any kind of lasting European peace.
In the meantime, people on the ground in Serbia and Montenegro--
as in Iraq-- are paying the price. For US citizens of conscience, it is
ironically Clinton himself who has said it best: "If you don't stand up to
brutality and the killing of innocent civilians, you invite them to do
more."
John Lacny dreamt he saw Tito last night, alive as you and me.
(Lacny is an activist at the University of Pittsburgh)
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)