Palestinian civilians and medics run to safety during an Israeli strike using phosphorus shells at a UN school in 2009. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP
Harper's line:
"I think what we have been seeing over the past several months is the Syrian government, which finds itself in a stalemate, believes that it can win... the civil war in Syria through the use of chemical weapons. And they have been step-by-step ratcheting up that usage to see if anyone is going to challenge it."
"I fear that if no one does challenge it, they will use chemical weapons on a scale way beyond anything we have seen to date to win that war. And if that ever happens, I believe, as I told the leaders that last night, that is a precedent that humanity will regret for generations to come."
"... And so obviously we are very supportive of those of our allies who want to take action to try and prevent this development from going further, trying to dissuade the Syrian regime from this course of action."
Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper speaking at the G20 Summit
Reality check:
Imperialism’s “disgust” at the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syria is utterly hypocritical, given that it has been the main violator of international covenants banning the use of chemical and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
In addition to the use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan during the Second World War, there is credible evidence of its use of biological weapons during the Korean War, its widespread use of napalm and other chemical agents during the Vietnam War, and its use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium weapons in Iraq.
US imperialism also ‘looked the other way’ when Iraq used chemical weapons in 1988 during the Iraq-Iran conflict because it was anxious to weaken and defeat the Iranian regime for its own imperialist interests.
The use of chemical or other WMDs is a heinous war crime. Back in May, UN Human Rights investigator Carla del Ponte concluded that "According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas."
A Cuban poster for peace on display at the
17th World Festival of Youth and Students
The World Federation of Democratic Youth would like to extend its solidarity with victims of use of Nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on this sad commemoration of 66th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Day. On this sad occasion we remember that the first festival of WFDY, held in a village near Prague, highlighted two issues where there were devastated consequences of Nazi war.
The first issue was how fascism and its alliances did its barbaric acts to the people of weaker nations, different ideology and races; the second issue was on the use of nuclear bomb by the United States against the civilian people of Japan.
No logic can justify such use of nuclear weapons in the cities, or any moral war, and there is no reason such as safety and retaliation to any aggression that can justify the use of nuclear weapon against any civilians and, in the case in which the bomb was used by the USA against Japan, it is worth underlining that the country had, in fact, already surrendered and stopped hostilities.
Because of dropping these nuclear weapons in August 6th and August 11, 1945, 90000- 160000 people in Hiroshima and 60 to 80 thousand people in Nagasaki died, of which 60 percent were killed at the first flash burns. WFDY has always held a clear stance and condemned the imperialist war policy of Japan that inflicted great suffering to the people of Korea, China, and Indo-China and making an alliance with fascism; people’s resisting for their liberation and freedom in their countries always deserve victory. In fact, the war policy of Japan pushed and misused the peace loving, dedicated and patriotic common people of Japan for war and aggression against neighbours.
At the same time, we have our all respect and solidarity to the common people of Japan that they are great opponents of nuclear weapons, and defenders for any violation against their constitution of non-aggression and for the promotion of peace and harmony in the world. The third and fourth festival of WFDY highlighted the issue of nuclear weapons and their need to be abolished from the world; many times we took up serious campaigns against disarmament.
The world is stepping into the 21st century and our tragic sadness of using nuclear weapons has matured by 66 years. However, the accumulation of nuclear weapons in this world (with the capacity to destroy this world many times in every corner) is hidden, demonstrating the idiotic spending of billions of dollars while people in other world are dying from hunger, starvation and the AIDS pandemic.
Finally, we express our commitment to fight against the accumulation of nuclear weapons on this planet and to fight for the cause of disarmament in which the imperialist world order is first and foremost responsible, pushing the whole humanity into the brink of disaster. The world needs full denuclearization and disarmament, not the hypocritical measures that the USA (the only country that has actually ever used the bomb) and its imperialist allies demand from other countries (Iran, DPRK, etc.) while they keep developing aggressions and occupations and more higher technological and precise nuclear weapons. Further, we express our solidarity with the struggles carried out by our member organizations in Japan JLSY, KYLJ, DYLJ, as well as all other members of WFDY, in those fronts.
WFDY CC, Headquarters
Budapest, Hungary August 6, 2011
By Darrell Rankin People's Voice Newspaper, August 1st, 2006
HUMANITY WILL FOREVER remember how hostilities ended in the Asia-Pacific theatre of the Second World War, because on August 6, 1945 the United States used an atomic bomb to kill more than 80,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan, a number that increased to 200,000 by 1950 because of the continuing effects of radiation.
Rivalries between the U.S., Japan and European empires were the cause of the "Asia-Pacific" war, which broke out when Japan attacked Hawaii, a U.S. possession, in December 1941. Japan's government, a military dictatorship nominally headed by an emperor, had banned the Japanese Communist Party since its formation in 1922, crushed democratic dissent and pursued an aggressive foreign policy. (Canada's Conservative government banned the Communist Party here in 1931, preceding Hitler's ban on the German Communist Party in 1933.)
By 1941 Japan had occupied and committed serious war crimes in much of coastal China, Korea, French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), and Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Rival imperialist powers were guilty of similar atrocities. Despite early victories, Japan was a defeated empire in 1945. Japan's oil stocks were gone and its naval fleet was destroyed. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan's greatest ally, had surrendered in May.
Japan's government communicated its desire for peace in June, 1945 to Sweden, Switzerland and the Soviet Union, requesting only that the emperor be kept as head of state, a condition allowed after Japan's surrender.
Despite these facts, many people still believe U.S. President Harry Truman's lie for using the atomic weapon. On August 9, 1945, Truman said "We have used (the atomic bomb) to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans." But when Truman first heard that an atom bomb had destroyed Hiroshima City, he had no noble aim. He simply said "This is the greatest thing in history."
Instead of avoiding further casualties, U.S. political leaders used Hiroshima to signal their aim to achieve world domination. Three days later they repeated this barbaric and racist crime on Nagasaki City, Japan. Rather than trying the bomb on a less-populated area of Japan, Truman killed over 300,000 people, mainly civilians.
Since 1945, U.S. imperialism has led the nuclear arms race, imposing a terrible danger on humanity and all life on earth. It has consistently opposed proposals to ban nuclear weapons. For example, the 1946 U.S. "Baruch plan" set out unacceptable conditions for achieving nuclear disarmament, such as a seven-year monopoly on U.S. possession of the weapon and removing veto power from the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
The United States used nuclear weapons after the War as a strategic threat to dominate world politics and to crush revolutionary and democratic movements. The terrifying threat of nuclear weapons and other U.S. military inventions such as intercontinental missiles created a burdensome arms race with the Soviet Union for much of the post-War period.
Despite the fact that a new capitalist class has overthrown socialism in the former Soviet Union in the largest act of robbery and privatization in world history, the U.S. is still creating deadlier ways to dominate the earth. The far-right Bush administration's latest creation is the so-called "war on terror," wrongly used to justify endless aggressions around the world - a permanent state of war where it is only a matter of time before the U.S. actually uses a nuclear weapon.
Nuclear weapons are still at the core of U.S. imperialism's political strategy and military doctrine. The U.S. has a nuclear weapons "first strike" doctrine, a doctrine shared by Canada and other U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. By contrast, the Soviet Union had pledged never to be the first in a conflict to use nuclear weapons.
The U.S. leads all other imperialist countries in arming itself, carrying out foreign aggressions and occupations, and preparing for a world-scale war against Russia and China. The U.S.-India nuclear pact and U.S. military bases in Central Asia all bring the military threat closer to China and Russia. The U.S. military budget of over $455 billion is more than the combined total of the next 32 largest military spenders.
The dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed a vital block to imperialism's use of military might to impose global domination. The Soviet Union's leading role in the defeat of fascism in the Second World War and its popular and principled foreign policy led to great achievements in arms control and disarmament and restrictions on war as a tool of foreign policy.
Imperialism is ignoring virtually all these achievements, including a ban on space weapons, non-proliferation of nuclear weapons to new countries, test bans for nuclear weapons, and the obligation of countries with nuclear weapons to disarm.
Most alarmingly, the U.S. is acting in open defiance of the United Nations Charter which bans war as an unrestricted tool of foreign policy, the most important progressive and democratic legacy of the Second World War. The U.N. Security Council authorized few recent U.S.-led wars, and all violated the Charter - Panama (1989), Iraq (1991, 2003), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and Haiti (2004).
This list suggests that imperialism is at the stage of using war to impose corporate globalisation by violent means. It is using war to crush so-called "failed" governments and people's movements that resist global corporate rule, promoting the plunder of oil and other resources in weaker countries.
But U.S. imperialism is preparing to use far more of its huge military potential, making plans to weaponize space, adopting the doctrine of "preventive war" and lowering thresholds for the use of nuclear weapons. All these developments signal that the U.S. is preparing for far greater wars than those already underway.
Catastrophes like Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti will continue to mount in number and severity unless imperialism is blocked. Imperialism has caused enough recent death and destruction to justify its replacement by a socialist society many times over. But for the moment imperialism has the historic initiative, especially since the setbacks to socialism in the 1990s.
Our main effort today must be to unite people and nations against imperialist aggressions and militarism as a whole. This can be accomplished through the mobilization of the world's peoples against imperialism with the aim of preventing war, ending occupations, and achieving general disarmament, especially abolishing nuclear weapons.
(Darrell Rankin is the chair of the Communist Party of Canada's Peace and Disarmament Commission.)
The bomb that started the Cold War and cost people dearly
August 6th is the 64th anniversary of the dropping of the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
On August 9th, this Sunday will mark the anniversary of the dropping of the Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki.
This is the first in a series of videos related to all things nuclear and cold war. We start of course with the bombing of Japan.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1946)
Graphically shows the destructive force of the bomb. Much about radiation sickness has been learned since, so the "black rain" was indeed harmful. Carefully chosen words that rationalize use of the A-bomb make this a propaganda film.
AN AUDIO BOOK OF THE OFFICIAL REPORT PUBLISHED 11 MONTHS FOLLOWING THE ATTACKS
Parts 1 through 8. Part 8 contains an eyewitness account-"The appendix is an eyewitness account, contrasting vividly with the dispassionate sang-froid of the report itself, written by a German Jesuit priest who survived the blast at Hiroshima, and whose order assisted in rescue efforts following the catastrophic attack."
Below: HARRY TRUMAN'S RADIO ADDRESS AFTER THE HIROSHIMA BOMBING note that the "atomic bomb shortened the war and saved countless lives" argument first appears here. Speculation that Truman used the bombing mainly to scare the Soviet Union and to secure imperialist hegemony is another argument.
On August 6th 2007, a documentary movie titled White Light, Black Rain deals with the occurances of 62 years before.
