Concrete Umbrella Records Blog

Following the Israeli siege, Alice Walker visited Gaza in March 2009 along with a 60-member international delegation led by Code Pink. Walking among the ruins, she spoke to Democracy Now! producer Anjali Kamat. [...]

Scholar Tariq Ramadan was banned from the United States for six years. He’s just been allowed back in and arrived in New York on Wednesday night. Tune in to Democracy Now! Friday for an extended interview with Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford in the UK. He’s speaking at Cooper Union, New York Thursday night on Secularism, Islam, and Democracy: Muslims in Europe and the West [...]

We speak with two journalists who have covered Gaza extensively about the dangers and difficulties of reporting from the Occupied Territories. Mohammed Omer, an award-winning Palestinian journalist was interrogated and beaten by armed Israeli security guards on his way back home to Gaza after receiving the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in London in July of 2008, and Ayman Mohyeldin, the Gaza correspondent for Al Jazeera English, who was one of the only international journalists reporting from inside Gaza during the 22-day Israeli assault last year. Watch Part I of this conversation here . [...]

Part II of our conversation with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. He speaks on the under-reported leaked memos of US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, US Policy on Iran, and more. In 1971, the then-RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of US involvement in Vietnam. He’s calling for a new whistleblower to come forward today. Watch Part I HERE [...]

Norman Finkelstein is author of several books on the Israel Palestine conflict. His latest is This Time We Went Too Far: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. It’s available only at OrBooks.com . In Part II of our conversation, Finkelstein discusses lessons he learned from Gandhi, the role of public opinion in politics, and more. Watch Part I of the conversation here [...]

Tune in on Friday for a special report from investigative journalist Allan Nairn on the White House’s proposal to lift a ban on U.S. training of a controversial elite Indonesian military unit known as Kopassus. The special forces unit has been linked to scores of human rights abuses in East Timor, Aceh, Papua, and Java since its formation in the 1950s. We reached Allan in Indonesia on Thursday afternoon. The entire interview can be heard online here. Transcript: ALLAN NAIRN: President Obama wants to restore military aid to the Indonesian armed forces, including Kopassus, the Red Berets. I’ve just come out with a piece that shows that the Indonesian army and Kopassus have been involved in a series of recent assassinations of civilian political activists. The piece names the names of the officers involved, including a Kopassus general named Sunarko. These assassinations were carried out in the region of Aceh in late 2009.

They targeted activists for the Aceh—the Partai Aceh, which is pro-independence. In one case, the case of a man named Tumijan, he was abducted, tortured to death. His body was dumped in a sewage ditch near an army post. In another, a man was sitting in his car outside his house. An assassin walked up, put two bullets in his head through the window.

According to a senior Indonesian official with detailed information on these murders, they’re part of a program of political murder being carried out by TNI, the Indonesian armed forces, and Kopassus and by military intelligence. And so, these killings are still going on today. And Obama is about to give them new aid on the pretense that the Indonesian army has reformed and has stopped killing civilians, which is false. AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this, Allan? ALLAN NAIRN: From people inside the Indonesian government, who gave the names of some of the killers and the officers they work for. And just a few hours ago, I spoke on the phone with General Aditya, who is the head of the police in Aceh, and he confirmed that his forces had in fact detained some of the assassins who were working for the army. They’d been holding them for months, but they never announced this, because they were afraid to do it. The police are afraid of the army. But when I asked him about it directly, he admitted it publicly for the first time. The Indonesian police have confirmed this. They know about it, but they’re afraid to act. The Indonesian army and Kopassus are running a program of killing civilians, and it’s active right now. And Obama wants to give them new US weapons, training and money. AMY GOODMAN: Why does President Obama want to give them this money? I think we’re hearing a lot about the war on terror. ALLAN NAIRN: Well, first the White House makes the argument that the atrocities are a thing of the past. The Indonesian military has killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps close to a million, civilians. But the White House argues, well, that’s in the past. But as I’ve just described, that’s a lie, that’s not true. Secondly, the White House claims that they want to use the Indonesian army to fight Islamist terror groups in Indonesia. They want to use them and a special anti-terrorist unit called Densus 88. AMY GOODMAN: And Densus 88 is what? ALLAN NAIRN: Densus 88 is a police SWAT-style task force that was originally created by US intelligence under the initiative of Cofer Black, formerly of the CIA, now with Blackwater. Two nights ago, I met with the Densus people, who described how were they—were trained in Jakarta and elsewhere by a CIA personnel in tactics including surveillance, how to pursue and snatch people, and interrogation. AMY GOODMAN: But this issue of terrorism, of Islamist terror, can you expand on that more? ALLAN NAIRN: In Indonesia, there are currently Islamist terror groups that have killed several hundred people. They bombed luxury hotels in Jakarta. They bombed a night club. They bombed two night clubs in Bali. They’ve killed several hundred in recent years.

The Indonesian military and police, on the other hand, have killed many hundreds of thousands. And for years, the Indonesian military and police have been sponsoring Islamist terror groups. They’ve been using them for their own purposes. They sent them into Poso and the Malukus. Indonesian generals back them. They went on Indonesian military transports. They use them to attack Christian villagers, while other elements of the army and police back the Christian villagers. The idea was to create chaos to try to destabilize the government of then Indonesian president Gus Dur. And it succeeded.

On another occasion, the Indonesian army sent a group called Laskar Jihad, an Islamist terror group, into Aceh to try to wean people away from supporting the pro-independence movement in Aceh. They were immediately driven out by the Acehnese. The Indonesian police have backed a group called the FPI, the Islamic Defenders Front, which goes around Jakarta in Islamic dress busting up bars which don’t give sufficient payoffs—payoffs to the police. Then the presidential intelligence agency, which reports now directly to General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the president of Indonesia, they have in the past made payments to Laskar Jihad and sent them into Papua.

Papua is a region in the eastern part of Indonesia, which is under de facto occupation by the Indonesian armed forces and Kopassus. They’re conducting terror operations there, sometimes using these Islamist forces, sometimes using Kopassus men directly. There have been abductions, assassinations. And in one case, the Densus 88 antiterrorist force went into Papua and arrested a man because he had been sending SMS text messages that were critical of President Susilo. So here you have the CIA-trained supposed anti-terror unit arresting a peaceful civilian because he uses his cell phone to send out messages criticizing the President. This particular unit, Densus, is expected to be one of the groups that is focused on in Obama’s visit, and he’s expected to highlight their work with the US and perhaps even announce new aid for them.

So what they’ve been doing, what the TNI and POLRI, the Indonesian armed forces and police, have been doing, with these various Islamist terror groups is they’ve been setting them up, funding them, using them for their convenience. But also, when it is sometimes convenient, they’ve been killing them. And that’s what they’re doing right now.

In the run-up to Obama’s visit over the past two weeks, they’ve done a series of raids on these various Islamist groups. They’ve killed a number of them. They’ve arrested many others. They’ve arrested people from mosques, who they claim are linked to them. And as one police general privately put it the other day, they’re putting on a show for Obama. They want to get new helicopters, new transport planes, new interrogation equipment and training, more computers to spy on more cell phones, more surveillance equipment. They want more of everything from the United States. And by killing people from the Islamist movement that they’ve been sponsoring for years, they cynically hope that that will sell America.

It’s actually similar, in some respects, to the situation in Pakistan with ISI, the military Inter-Services Intelligence agency. That’s the outfit that worked with the US in helping to create the bin Laden forces that the US used against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the group, the ISI, that later went on to help launch the Afghan Taliban. Now the ISI is a close ally of Obama and General McChrystal and Richard Holbrook and the others who are running US-Afghan-Pakistan policy. So, with the one hand, the ISI is taking US money, the US weapons, and they’re, at Obama’s insistence, launching these offensive offensives on the border regions, which are causing extensive civilian death and retaliatory bombings in the cities of Pakistan. But with the other hand, as military people in the region have said just in recent weeks, all evidence is that that same ISI is continuing to sponsor the Afghan Taliban. So the Indonesian military is playing a similar double game.

The bigger picture, though, is that the Islamist terror groups in Indonesia are relatively small-time killers. They’ve killed a couple of hundred. It’s the Indonesian army and police who are the bigger-time killers. They’ve killed many hundreds of thousands. And, of course, it’s the US government itself, represented by President Obama, that is the bigger killer still, since the kind of operation the US has run in Indonesia, arming, training and financing forces like the TNI/POLRI, which systematically murders civilians, the US is doing that in dozens upon dozens of countries around the world.

It says something about the state of US politics now that this push to renew aid or increase aid to the Indonesian military is coming under a liberal Democratic President Obama. It’s coming while Obama has as his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights a man named Michael Posner, who used to be one of the leading human rights advocates in the US. He ran a group in New York called the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, later renamed Human Rights First. They did very good work, for example, on pushing for justice in the case of Munir, the top Indonesian human rights lawyer who was assassinated by BIN, the presidential intelligence agency, by General Muchdi and General Hendro Priyono, who was a CIA asset. But now Posner is in the State Department. He’s running the Human Rights Bureau. And he and Obama and others are, by all reports, getting ready to circumvent congressional restrictions and push through, restore aid to—restore training aid to Kopassus, the most notorious of the killer forces and the one of the forces that, as I’m reporting today, have been involved in this recent wave of assassinations against political activists in Aceh. AMY GOODMAN: What would the effect, Allan Nairn, of full restoration of military aid to Indonesia have? ALLAN NAIRN: It would mean more killing, more killing of civilians, because it would make the Indonesian armed forces and police more confident. It would send the message to the Indonesian public that they have more reason to be afraid of the army and police, because now they will be able to see that those forces have the full might of America behind them. So it’ll mean more death and more terror on the popular level.

On the other hand, it’s also the case that the situation is now different than it was in the 1990s. In the 1990s, after the Dili massacre in occupied East Timor, the massacre that we survived, a grassroots movement grew up in the United States, including the East Timor Action Network, and we were all able to pressure the US Congress to cut off a lot of the military aid to Indonesia. That was under the dictatorship of General Suharto. And that cutoff had a huge effect within Indonesia. It actually contributed to the downfall of Suharto. That’s what Suharto’s former security chief, Admiral Sudomo, told me. The cutoff was very damaging to them. It helped to bring down Suharto.

Then, over the years after that, the aid has—much of the aid has gradually been restored. But Indonesia is not now in a moment where the army’s power is in the balance. Popular movements are very weak. Much of the middle class, including many middle-class NGO people, have been essentially bought off by the regime. They have very comfortable lives. Foreign expatriates have very comfortable lives. They’re making the claim that Indonesia is the new model of democracy, even though the poor, who are the vast majority in the country, are being terrorized by the police on a daily basis and, in key areas like Papua, terrorized by the army.

So, at this moment, it’s not as if, if the US withheld the military aid, that could bring down the army as earlier withholding helped to bring down Suharto, but it will have a marginal effect of definitely increasing the killing and torture that Indonesians suffer. So if Obama does that, he should be held to account.

You know, if we lived in a civilized world, which we don’t, when Obama showed up in Indonesia, the Indonesians should be ready to arrest him. Under international law, they would have the right to arrest him and put him on trial for the civilian killings that his forces are carrying out, by drone, for example, in Pakistan or Afghanistan. And likewise, when Indonesian generals come to visit the US, US police should be willing to arrest them and have courts put them on trial for the atrocities they have committed in Aceh, Papua, occupied Timor, Jakarta and elsewhere. But that doesn’t happen, because the murder laws don’t get enforced, international law doesn’t function, and we’re living in a world order where major states like Indonesia and the US are still governed by killers. But we often try to pretend otherwise, so we end up having these empty discussions about pressing for human rights, when what’s actually happening is giving guns to assassins. AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, can you talk more about how the Indonesians are preparing for President Obama’s visit? Of course, it’s a big deal on both sides. For them, this is the first president who spent a part of his life in their country, growing up, going to school. And, of course, for President Obama, it will be an emotional return to a place where he lived with his mother and his step-father. ALLAN NAIRN: Well, you know, the Indonesian reaction to Obama, from the time he was first elected, is very interesting. When it happened, I was—that day, I was talking to some people in a kampung, a very important neighborhood. It’s people that I know very well. And one of the women who gets up at 4:00 a.m. to work in the market said that the neighborhood women had just been discussing Obama’s election, and they had concluded that it was a very good thing, because, they said, for so long, the black-skinned people in America have suffered, and now maybe Obama will put a stop to that. That was the way—and that was impressive, because these were people who live on a couple of dollars per day, whose children often face hunger and brain stunting, and here they were thinking about the poor and oppressed people in the United States, who materially live on a much higher level than they do.

But in Jakarta, among the elite, among the army, the police, the policy circles around them, the expatriate community, they viewed Obama differently. They viewed him as their meal ticket, their thinking being, well, he’s got personal ties to Indonesia, so now we’ll be able to use that to get him to restore our full military aid from Washington. And I guess they were right in their prediction, because, by all accounts, that’s what Obama is planning to do this coming—this coming Tuesday.

It’s especially outrageous on his part, because Obama is a US president who actually understands Indonesia. He was a young boy when he lived there, but in his books he makes it clear that he knew about the massacres that were going on in the 1960s, the massacres that brought the current regime to power. The army ousted Sukarno, the founding president. The US backed the terror in which more than 400,000 rural peasants, many of them members of the Communist party, were executed. The CIA gave a list of 5,000 dissidents, who they called Communists. Also they were also shot and strangled and slashed to death. And Obama knew about all this. He lived there afterwards. He wrote about it in his book. And he’s a smart guy. I’m sure he knows the story of the invasion of East Timor, which was authorized by President Ford and Henry Kissinger; about the very recent terror in Aceh; about the ongoing de facto occupation of Papua. And yet, on the really transparently ridiculous excuse that the TNI is the agency to fight a small Islamist terror group which is in Indonesia, he’s about to supposedly restore, increase US weapons and training to this army.

And, you know, the case is sometimes made, well, if the US trains them more, they’ll respect human rights more. Well, what did the US train them in before? US trained Kopassus and the other Indonesian commando forces in—and this is according to Pentagon documents—in topics such as psychological operations, urban warfare, advanced sniper technique. They trained them in air assault. They trained them in ground assault. They trained them in interrogation. The Defense Intelligence Agency, operating through an officer named Colonel McFetridge, actually had a close liaison with Kopassus at the time, in 1998, when Suharto was about to fall, when Kopassus was going around Jakarta systematically kidnapping activists. Kopassus, the most notorious of those many hated Indonesian army units, the Red Berets, they are the unit that has been most intensively trained over the years by the United States. Their leaders have gone to Fort Benning and Fort Bragg for training. American Green Berets have come over to Indonesia to train them. They’re the ones who’ve gotten the most exposure. In fact, General Prabowo, their former commander, probably the single most notorious general in Indonesia, he once told me that Kopassus was the single unit of the Indonesian armed forces that was most closely identified with the United States and with US military doctrine. So it’s US military doctrine and training and weapons that they have—that the Indonesian forces have applied as, in recent decades, they’ve carried out massacres that have made them among the world’s most lethal armies, lethal in terms of killing civilians. So the notion that more US aid and weapons will make them kill fewer people is completely contrary—is completely contrary to all history up to now. The way it really works is this— AMY GOODMAN: And General Prabowo was the son-in-law of Suharto, isn’t that right? ALLAN NAIRN: Yes, he was the son-in-law of Suharto. He was a close protégé of the United States. He was America’s man for many years. In fact, in testimony before the US Congress, the former US ambassador to Indonesia cited Prabowo as an example of the beneficial effects of US training. And Prabowo is legendary in Indonesia, not just for commanding massacres and assassinations and abductions in occupied Timor, and even in Jakarta itself, but also for personally participating in torture. He likes to get his hands dirty. I’ve talked to some of his victims. And he was, for years, one of the main US protégés.

The point is that it’s the mission that matters. So if you have a force that has a bad mission, the repression of civilians, like the Indonesian armed forces, the more you train them, the worse it is. The more you train them, the more competent they get, the more technically proficient they become, the better they are at using technology, the better they are at tactics and strategy. And that means they are still more effective in carrying out their mission, which is the mission of repression. So when you have a force like that, the more incompetent they are, the better. The more you professionalize them, the more you advance their level, the more dangerous you make it for the people. AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, do you think the US military and CIA could ever help improve Indonesia’s human rights record? ALLAN NAIRN: Well, they could make a first contribution by completely cutting off this regime. You know, it’s called a democracy because General Susilo, the current president, was in fact elected. But he was elected in a process under which, as all the election observers in Jakarta acknowledged, the army first had to effectively vet the candidates, as did the top local oligarchs. And two of the main opponents of Susilo in that election were General Prabowo himself, who was running as vice president, although—as a vice-presidential candidate, although he really wouldn’t have been in charge, and General Wiranto, another one of the most notorious generals, another former US protégé. Wiranto was the guy who ran the terror in East Timor in 1999 after the Timorese voted in the UN-supervised referendum for independence. Wiranto was also the man who got the green light from Admiral Dennis Blair to continue with the massacres that slaughtered numerous churches in East Timor. And Blair, by the way, is now President Obama’s national security adviser.

So what the US could do is first completely cut them off. Then the US could start to heal itself, not just for the benefit of Indonesians, but for people everywhere. You know, in the Indonesian press and in political circles and in the legislature, you know, there are a lot of corrupt politicians. These politicians in Indonesia are legendary for their corruption and their ties to this military. But some of them have made some pretty good points in recent days, saying, “Who is the US to criticize us about torture? Who is the US to criticize us about abduction? The US is doing that in Afghanistan, in Pakistan. The US is now openly doing that around the world.” And they’re right. When the US claims that Indonesia shouldn’t do that, while with another hand handing Indonesia the weapons, handing them the interrogation and surveillance technique, handing them the political cover, it’s—it’s farcical. It’s not human rights activity; it’s better described as criminal activity. AMY GOODMAN: Allan, President Obama has just announced he’s postponing his trip to Indonesia until June. ALLAN NAIRN: Oh, really? Just announced that? AMY GOODMAN: Yes. ALLAN NAIRN: Huh, well, that’s very interesting. Did he make any announcement about the cooperation pact with Indonesia? Because they were supposed to unveil a new comprehensive deal that would include this increased military training. Did the White House make any statement about that? AMY GOODMAN: I’m just taking a look right now. It says, “President Obama has postponed his trip to Asia until June so” that—let me see, I’m turning the page—so that “he can work on health care reform and guide the bill toward a possible vote [on] Sunday.

“White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday [that] Obama, who already postponed his trip to Indonesia and Australia once and was expected to leave Sunday, called up the leaders of those countries to inform them of the change in plans,” saying, “The president greatly regrets the delay," Robert Gibbs said. He said, "But passage of health insurance reform is of paramount importance, and the president is determined to see this battle through.” ALLAN NAIRN: OK, well, I think the key point now is, for those concerned about terror in Indonesia, is that even though Obama himself is not coming, I think it is still possible that the deal they were making with the Indonesian army may still go forward, because for the past few days, other top US officials, including Kurt Campbell, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, have been in Indonesia. US generals have been in Indonesia. In fact, Kopassus general—Kopassus generals even went to Washington and were welcomed by the Obama people with open arms. They were working out the details of this new pact. And it is possible that even though Obama himself won’t visit, they will still try to push this deal through. So that means specifically that they may go ahead with their already announced plans to circumvent the US congressional Leahy Amendment, which bans training for units involved in atrocities, and boost their training for Kopassus.

I think, however, politically, practically speaking, that it may be possible to at least defeat politically that aspect of the deal. There are various reasons to think that’s possible. The East Timor Action Network is running a campaign to stop it. Just in the past few hours, human rights groups and survivors of army terror in Aceh have come out, and Indonesian national human rights groups have come out, with a statement asking Obama to not increase the training for Kopassus. So I think that deal perhaps could be stopped, and people should contact Congress and the White House, demand that the US cut off all military aid to Indonesia. And they can to go to the East Timor Action website and get details about the Kopassus aspect of the problem. AMY GOODMAN: Allan, what about the role of US corporations in Indonesia? ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the gold and the copper of Indonesia, concentrated in Papua, are controlled and extracted by Freeport-McMoRan. It’s one of the most profitable massive mining operations in the world. They essentially run Papua like—that part of Papua like a plantation. And for years, they’ve been making payoffs through the Indonesian army to what they call provide security for their facility. What that means is to keep the local population in line. A few years ago, there was an ambush of Americans who were working as teachers for the children of Freeport-McMoRan employees. And the FBI tried to blame the local West Papua independence movement, which is very poorly armed and militarily extremely weak—this was an assault with automatic weapons—when all the good and specific evidence pointed to this being a Kopassus operation apparently aimed at pressuring Freeport-McMoRan to increase their payments to the Indonesian army, because they had recently cut back on those payments since they were getting heat for potentially violating the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. There were also other US and foreign multinationals like Newmont Mining, like Citigroup, like JPMorgan. These companies are real mainstays of the regime.

And this is in a country where the rich are extremely rich. If you go around Jakarta, you actually see people living on a level higher, fancier, more spectacular, than the level which the—you know, most people with money live in, say, the United States, but where the majority, many of them, are suffering hunger, particularly in the eastern part of the country. In the area known as East Nusa Tenggara, Timor, there are constant reports of actual starvation deaths of babies due to malnutrition. Yet the enormous wealth that lies beneath the earth of Indonesia and is being taken out by these US corporations does not find its way back to these hungry children. And that’s the fault of both the US corporations and the Indonesian government that cuts the deal with them.

Greenpeace just came out with a very important report showing that the Nestlé corporation draws much of their palm oil—palm oil which is used in all sorts of foods and also cosmetics and so on—from an Indonesian company called Sinar Mas, which has massive, in effect, deforestation operations, where they cut down the forests, the natural forests, where they destroy the peat, the natural peat, areas in order to grow, in plantation style, the kelapa sawit , the palm that’s used for making the palm oil. And this has terrible environmental consequences. It leads to a massive increase in the emission of methane gases, which contribute to the atmospheric problems. It also helps destroy the groundwater. And they also frequently do burning to clear the lands so they can put up their palm oil plantations. And this clearing by burning, especially on the island of Sumatra, creates these incredible black toxic clouds, which often drift over the Straits of Malacca into neighboring Malaysia, Burma and southern Thailand. And if you’ve ever breathed the air when one of these burning clouds has settled, it’s one of the most frightening breathing experiences you can have, I mean, worse than you’ll find in—worse than you will feel in the worst industrial city. And this, again, traces back to Nestlé.

Indonesia actually ranks behind only the US and China as a source of these kinds of harmful emissions because of the vast destruction of their forests. This destruction is illegal under Indonesian law. They call it “illegal logging.” They actually use the English—in Indonesian speak, they actually use the English phrase of “illegal logging.” Much of it is done through the army and police. The army and policemen go out and cut with the corporations, both local and international. They just take over sections of forest. They’re supposed to be national forest or protected areas. And they chop them down. They mow them to put up these plantations. And even though Indonesia is hardly heavily industrialized—it’s still mainly a vastly rural country—they end up making it the third worst polluter of this kind in the world. AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Allan Nairn. Allan, you’ve also traveled through Burma and Thailand. Can you talk about the latest in the rebellion that’s taking place right now, the protests that are taking place in Thailand? ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it’s very interesting what’s happening in Thailand. There’s a protest movement called the Red Shirts. Their members come from the north and the northeast of Thailand, a lot of them rural rice farmers, poor people, working-class people. And they’ve come into Bangkok on their tractors to demand that an election be called.

Thailand is another country that is described as a democracy. They have a prime minister, Prime Minister Abhisit, who’s very smooth. He’s Oxford-educated. He’s a darling of the international press. He’s often described as a liberal figure. But he came into office as the result of, first, a military coup, and then a series of decisions by the Thai courts, which are closely aligned with the Thai army and oligarchy and the Thai royal family, which legally abolished the political party that these now-protesting Red Shirt poor people sympathized with.

And at one point, the courts actually removed a recent Thai prime minister, charging him with corruption, because he went on a TV cooking show. He likes to cook, and he got out his wok, and he made some Thai dishes. They paid him $500. The court charged him with corruption and threw him out of office. That’s because he was aligned with what is now this Red Shirt movement, the movement of the poor.

And finally, after the coup, these judicial maneuvers and also a series of protests by a pro-army, pro-royalist movement called the Yellow Shirts, which was sometimes violent and which—they took over the Thai—the main Bangkok airport, after all that, finally, an unelected pro-army, pro-oligarchy government was installed, the current government of Abhisit, an unelected government. So these protesters are calling for a real election. And everyone, you know, in Bangkok says, if they call an election, Abhisit’s and the army’s and the palace’s forces will probably be voted out of office.

However, there’s a twist to this, an ironic twist that also says something about the current state of world politics. The party that these poor people, the Red Shirts, are supporting, the party that they feel has helped them, is headed by a man named Thaksin Shinawatra, a former high-ranking police officer who in earlier years was elected prime minister and was transparently corrupt. He stole, obviously, several billion dollars using his office as prime minister of Thailand. He was also a killer. He killed a couple of—he sent out the security forces to kill a couple of thousand people in a matter of weeks as part of a supposed war on drugs. He aggravated the already oppressive situation in the south of Thailand, where the army and police had been abusing ethnic Malay Muslims, and he sparked a full-blown rebellion there, which is extremely vicious and continues to this day. This man, Thaksin, did all those things.

But he also was the one who was seen by the poor as the first in Thailand in many years who paid attention to their needs. He actually set up a national health program, which, in some respects, is better for the poor than that which exists in the United States today. It’s the 30-baht program. Thirty baht equals a little less than one dollar. And for that amount, you can go into any clinic or hospital in the country and get treatment, even if you don’t have money. And through this and other measures, Thaksin became very popular with the poor, thus this movement.

But he is also a killer, who, you know, in a civilized order, would be in jail, as his opponents would be. So that’s what the poor—that’s the choice the poor thinks they have to choose between: one killer who helped them and another group of killers—the army and the royalists—who have not helped them at all.

Another twist to the situation in Thailand, which gets no international publicity, is that they have these amazingly oppressive laws which make it a serious crime to utter any kind of statement to anyone anywhere which can be interpreted as critical of the king. And these laws can be used against any political opponent, and they are routinely. For example, there’s a woman known as “Da Torpedo,” who’s a very famous orator, who spoke at some of the earlier Red Shirt pro-poor people, pro-democracy rallies, and she made an innocuous statement about the nature of the regime. The palace and the army and the police said that she had insulted the king. So she was promptly arrested and thrown in prison. She’s still in prison now. And the local press recently reported that she’s now using her rhetorical skills to announce the sports matches that the female prisoners have. And people are routinely threatened or hauled away in Thailand if they speak, so no one dares to say anything that could even be vaguely construed as critical of the king. And this is called a democracy.

And this is, by the way, yet another US military client. Thailand has had an intimate military relationship with the US since the Vietnam War, when they basically acted as a US base as the US was attacking Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In recent years, they’ve been very close to US intelligence. You know, the famous torture video, the video of the CIA interrogation involving waterboarding and other torture, the video that was then destroyed by the CIA, that was shot in Thailand in one of the US secret prisons. And, in fact, the Thai intelligence man who helped facilitate the setting up of those secret prisons, who was a frequent visitor to Langley, the CIA, who had direct meetings with President Bush and with CIA anti-terrorism center people under Bush—who now work for Obama, people like Brennan—this Thai intelligence man, who talked to me about how the security forces routinely torture, he has now been promoted to head of the secret police. And he got that promotion, he told me a number of months ago when he was having political problems, because of the support he got from the CIA and the Israeli Mossad.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Allan Nairn, the latest news from Burma, the military junta imposing a new law that says their opponents cannot run in national elections if they have a criminal record, and of course Aung San Suu Kyi has been convicted by the military junta. Can you talk about the latest in Burma? ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the military are trying to hold onto power. The Burmese military are in an unusual position. They aspire to be a totalitarian regime. They don’t really have the economy or the technology to exert that full control, although in parts of the countryside, especially in the east, where the Karen people and the Shan people and other, what they refer to as, ethnic groups in Burma, where they live, there in the countryside the military exerts very close control. They frequently come into villages in the middle of the night. They drag away women to work as what they call porters. They have to do the bidding of the army, carrying their rice bags, carrying their weapons, servicing them sexually if they demand it. Sometimes they kill them after they’re done with them. The army strives to control Burma.

But unlike most repressive regimes, which always have some kind of popular base—you know, you can’t rule usually without a popular base—the Burmese regime has almost no popular base by now. They’ve been running the country since the early 1960s. In the early days, they called themselves communist socialists. Now they call themselves capitalist capitalists. What they are is just military thieves. And there’s almost no one at the popular level who backs them. So they are in fact very brittle. What they’re trying to—and vulnerable.

What they’re trying to do is stage a sham election in hope of getting international support. And in fact, when they first announced that they were going to hold that election this year, some international powers, including the US, made some noises indicating that, well, you know, maybe if they pull this off, we will then give them the stamp of legitimacy. But the rules for the election that the army just published are so ridiculously unfair that now even the US and Europe and others have said, well—and the UN—this will be a sham election.

But I think the most important development in Burma is not the elections; it’s what’s happening on the streets. There’s been a movement of wildcat—a series of wildcat strikes at factories in the Rangoon area, now possibly spreading to Bagan. And in these strikes, it’s mainly young women who work in factories for about a dollar a day. They make slippers. They make brassieres, blouses. And they’ve just been sitting down and striking, to many people’s astonishment. They’ve been demanding basically 50 percent raises, raises from about a dollar to a dollar-fifty. They’ve been asking to have one day off per week. They’ve been asking for a few more pennies when they work overtime. And this is the interesting thing: so far in this wave of strikes, which has gotten almost no publicity either inside or outside Burma, they have—the workers have largely won. The army has largely conceded to their demands.

When the first strike happened, they came in, and they snatched away the leader, the strike leader. Everyone expected that they would get, say, an eighty-five-year sentence. That’s the kind of term one routinely gets for speaking in Burma. But instead, they let the strike leader go within just a couple of weeks. And they went and told the corporation that ran the factory, “Yeah, give them the little raise they’re asking for.” And this has been happening in one plant after another.

And to me it suggests that the military is now feeling vulnerable, because they’re starting to really fear the people. As everyone knows, there’s a powerful grassroots movement among poor monks, younger monks who took to the streets in September of 2007. And they’re still trying to resist the regime. The army has arrested hundreds of them. They send them off to chain gangs, to quarries, where they crack rocks, some until they die. Some of them have been executed. The political party around Aung San Suu Kyi, the NLD, has a lot of corruption. Many people are disillusioned with it. But things like these strikes of the young women workers, the movements of the young poor monks, who are extremely close to the people—you know, they have to go out and seek alms, beg for their food every morning, beg for their rice, which keeps them very close to the people—I think these have real political potential in Burma. And the regime knows that, and they’re fearful.

One thing that should be noted, the US is technically an adversary of the Burmese regime. Former President Bush and his wife Laura relentlessly, publicly criticized the Burmese military. It was—I think it was their way of getting some balance, since they were being assailed world—justly assailed worldwide as enemies of human rights and human freedom. They wanted to find some place where they could, at least on paper, stand up for human rights, and the Bushes chose Burma as their personal project. And rhetorically they just, you know, slapped the regime up one side and down the other. Obama, coming in, has changed that approach. He’s now trying to negotiate with the regime. But all that’s irrelevant.

What’s relevant is the material support that that army, the Burmese army, gets. Their main support comes from China. China is their main sponsor. They also get important support from Russia, from India, from neighboring Thailand, from Malaysia and also France. But although the US is supposedly an adversary of Burma—of the Burmese military, the US, in fact, first, allows Unocal, the US oil and gas company, to keep on operating. They have a massive operation in Burma, which was found by a US court to have used slave labor there. And that is the number one—in recent years has been the number-one dollar source for the regime. Yet, although the US has imposed sanction on other lesser businesses, like gems, for example, and various kinds of normal commerce and some kinds of banking, they’ve let Unocal continue to operate, the number-one dollar source for the regime.

In addition, the main banker for the Burmese regime is the city-state of Singapore. That’s where the generals go to hide lots of their cash, and a lot of it US dollars. And Singapore is very close to the United States. It’s close to being a US protectorate. And if the US told Singapore to shut that banking down, they could do it, but they haven’t told them that.

And then, additionally, Burmese intelligence, the people who run the prisons that are currently holding more than 2,000 dissidents, the people who run the torture, that Burmese intelligence operation was for years trained by Israeli intelligence. Burmese intelligence men go over to Israel for training. Israelis would come there. That relationship continues, although at a lower level now. Now the Russians have stepped in, the Russian government, to run a lot of the telephone-tapping systems that the Israelis first set up for the Burmese government. But Israel is still there, and they’re still doing intelligence and police training. And of course the US could also shut that down, if they wanted to.

You know, the US can’t tell China what to do, but they can tell Singapore and Israel and Unocal what to do. But they’ve chosen not to. Now, if the US took these actions, it would not bring the regime down, because China is still their main support. But it would at least give some heart to the very oppressed Burmese people and take some of the hypocrisy out of the US claims that they’re backing human rights in Burma.

Another thing about Burma that’s interesting in context is that, you know, Burma is one of the world’s few pariah states. There aren’t that many. There’s North Korea. There’s Burma. There’s Zimbabwe. There are a few others that are subject to sanctions by the West. They’re routinely denounced as beyond the pale, so on and so forth. They are a somewhat closed economy. They’re not the kind of economy that the US and the World Bank and the IMF are pushing, one that’s fully integrated with world markets. Yet if you look at the standard of living of the Burmese poor, which is desperate, which involves a lot of hunger, it is horrible, but it is still basically the same as that of Bangladesh in the same region.

If you go into Bangladesh, Dhaka, the capital, looks a lot like Rangoon in Burma. The wages of the workers in Bangladesh are comparable to those of Burma. The level of hunger in Bangladesh, as is the level of hunger in rural India, is comparable to that of Burma. Yet Bangladesh and India are both free market democracies. They are not pariah states. They’ve completely opened up to the international—or they’ve extensively, not as much as the West wants, but they’ve extensively opened up to the international markets. In India, that opening has destroyed much rural agriculture and touched off a wave of farmer suicides. In Bangladesh, if you go into the sweatshops by the river in Dhaka, you can find that they are mainly staffed—I did this a number of months ago—you can see that they are mainly staffed by fourteen-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds. The senior people, the foremen who honcho the operation, they’re about seventeen. They’re boys and girls. They don’t go to school. Yet, when you talk to these kids, they say, “Well, I’m here because I send money back home, and without that, the family will go hungry.”

In fact, in one of these sweatshops, which was producing denim jeans for export, I took a video of the children working there, you know, working twelve hours a day, six-and-a-half—more than twelve hours a day, six-and-a-half days a week, for—in that factory it was approaching two dollars per day. You know, Dickensian sweatshop conditions. I then went and showed it to local Bangladesh labor union activists, and their reaction on seeing this video was, “Oh, my god! It looks like you got tricked. It looks like someone brought you into a model factory.” Because, in fact, they said, in most factories the conditions are much worse. The children are not paid wages as high as these kids, and the physical condition of the kids is even worse than the ones I saw in those factories. You know, one of the labor activists said, as he looked at the video, “Boy, these kids look clean. They look like they’ve had the chance to bathe. That’s unusual.”

This is the level at which people are living in this free market democracy plugged into the international market. That’s in Bangladesh. Same story in rural India. And it is basically the same as people are living in the closed pariah dictatorship of Burma, which—and also if you look at the statistical indications—I mean, it’s hard to get into North Korea—North Korea is obviously politically more repressive than any of these other countries. But it seems, for many people in North Korea, poor people in North Korea, the level of hunger is horrible, but it’s not that different from the level of hunger experienced by people in the free market democracies of Bangladesh and India. So the point is that if you go country by country around the world and look at places where people are starving, where people don’t get enough calories to keep their brains functioning alertly, especially the kids—and for the kids, it can make permanent damage—you find that there’s almost no correlation between that kind of misery and whether they happen to live in a democracy or a dictatorship, whether they happen to live in a country that calls itself capitalist or in a country that calls itself socialist or communist.

It all depends on whether a regime, under pressure from its own people and the various international forces that surrounds it, makes a commitment or not to trying to feed its own people. You know, North Korea is a communist dictatorship where people are starving. Cuba is also a communist dictatorship, but they have a better record on nutrition, on medical care, than all the US client so-called democracies throughout Latin America. Colombia, a famous right-wing government, which is militarily close to the US, which assassinates its own labor leaders, Colombia routinely imports Cuban doctors. They bring them in from communist Cuba to help treat the poor in Colombia. So it’s not a matter of whether you’re communist, non-communist, even whether dictatorship or democracy.

The concept of democracy in the lives of the poor is very overrated in this world. You can have democracies where elections are held, where votes are taken, even where the ballots are fairly counted, but if there’s an unequal distribution of wealth, the rich people will almost always win those elections. And unless the poor are able to organize and pressure the rich with—threaten the rich with uprising, with withholding their labor, with other kinds of mass power, unless that happens, even in democracies, people can still be left to starve. AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, I want to thank you very much for being with us. ALLAN NAIRN: You’re welcome. [...]

After our broadcast interview with legal scholar and civil rights advocate, Michelle Alexander, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez continued the conversation. Be the first to watch it here. [...]

Diane Ravitch is a former Assistant Secretary of Education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush and was appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton. She is the author of over twenty books, is research professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She’s long been known as an advocate of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, standardized testing, and using the free market to improve schools. But she’s had a radical change of heart, as chronicled in her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch says, “The evidence says No Child Left Behind was a failure, and charter schools aren’t going to be any better.” [...]

On Thursday the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) awarded Juan Gonzalez, Co-Host of Democracy Now! and Staff Columnist at the New York Daily News with the 2010 Justice in Action Award. Amy Goodman presented the Award at AALDEF’s Annual Lunar New Year Gala. [...]

Howard Zinn is an American historian, social critic, and activist. He is best known as author of the best-seller A People’s History of the United States . He spoke at Boston University on November 11, on the subject of American “Holy Wars.” Thanks to Robbie Leppzer for filming this event. TRANSCRIPT: Three Holy Wars

HOWARD ZINN: Three Holy Wars. I only started recently talking about this. You know, very often, if you’re a speaker, there’s a topic you’ve been speaking on for twenty or thirty years, you know. And there are topics that I’ve been speaking on for twenty or thirty years, but it’s only in the past year that I decided I would speak on “Three Holy Wars.” And when I tell people the title, very often they’re a little puzzled, because they think I’m going to speak about religious wars. No. I’m speaking about three wars in American history that are sacrosanct, three wars that are untouchable, three wars that are uncriticizable.

And I think you’ll probably agree with me. I’m not always sure that people will agree with me, but I think you will agree with me that nobody criticizes the Revolutionary War. Right? Especially here in Boston. No, not at all. The Revolutionary War is holy. The war against England, here in Boston, wow! Paul Revere and Lexington and Concord and Sam Adams and all the Adamses. And all of that. No, the Revolutionary War, the great war, win independence from England, heroic battles, Bunker Hill. Oh, yeah, brings tears to my eyes. No, not only in Boston, but elsewhere. The Revolutionary War, you don’t criticize that. If you did, you’d be a Tory; they’d deport you to Canada. Which might be good.

And then there’s the Civil War. Notice the quiet? You don’t criticize the Civil War. And it’s understandable. Why would you criticize the Civil War? Slavery? Freedom? No. Civil War, slaves are freed. Abraham Lincoln! You can’t criticize the Civil War. It’s a good war, a just war. Emancipation.

And then there’s World War II. Again, “the Good War,” except if you read Studs Terkel’s oral history called “The Good War” , in which he interviews all sorts of people who participated in World War II—military, civilians. When he adopted the title of this oral history, “The Good War” , his wife suggested, after reading the book—reading the manuscript, reading the interviews—suggested he put quotation marks around “The Good War” , suggesting that, well, maybe there’s a little doubt about how good that war is. But very few people have doubt about “the Good War.” You turn on the History Channel, what is it all about? “The Good War.” World War II. Heroism. Iwo Jima. D-Day. The Greatest Generation. No, World War II is—it’s the best, the best of wars, you know. I was in it.

And now I’m going to subject all three of those “good wars” to a kind of examination, which is intended—yeah, I’ll tell you frankly what my intention is—to make us reexamine the idea of a good war, to make us reexamine the idea that there’s any such thing as a good war. Even the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II, no. It’s not easy to do, because, as I said, these three wars are holy. And all three wars accomplished something. No one would doubt that. I mean, that’s why they’re considered holy. They all accomplished something: independence from England, freedom for the slaves, the end of fascism in Europe, right? So, so to criticize them is to—is to undertake a heroic task. I only undertake heroic tasks.

But the reason I think it’s important to subject them to criticism is that this idea of “good wars” helps justify other wars which are obviously awful, obviously evil. And though they’re obviously awful—I’m talking about Vietnam, I’m talking about Iraq, I’m talking about Afghanistan, I’m talking about Panama, I’m talking about Grenada, one of our most heroic of wars—the fact that you can have the historic experience of “good wars” creates a basis for believing, well, you know, there’s such a thing as a good war. And maybe you can find, oh, parallels between the good wars and this war, even though you don’t understand this war, but, oh, yeah, the parallels. Saddam Hussein is Hitler. Well, that makes it clear. We have to fight against him, because he—right? To not fight in the war means surrender, like Munich. There are all the analogies. I remember Lyndon Johnson. World War II is a perfect setup for analogies. You compare something to World War II, you immediately infuse it with goodness. And so, during the Vietnam War, I remember at one time Lyndon Johnson referred to the—to the head of South Vietnam, Ngo Dình Diem, whom we had set up in power of South Vietnam, so independent was he—but Lyndon Johnson referred to Diem as “the Winston Churchill of Asia.” I really like that. So, yes, I think we ought to examine these wars.

Let’s start with the Revolutionary War. Let’s do it in chronological order, because, after all, I’m a historian. We do everything in chronological order. I eat in chronological order. All-Bran. We’ll start with All-Bran. We’ll end with Wheatena.

Anyway, the Revolutionary War. Balance sheet. I don’t want to make it too mathematical, you know, I’ll be falling in line with all these mathematical social scientists. You know, everything has become mathematical—political science and anthropology and even social work. You know, mathematical—no, I don’t want to get that strict. But a rough moral balance sheet, let’s say. Well, what’s good about the Revolutionary War? And—oh, there’s another side? Yes, there’s another side to the balance sheet. What’s dubious about the Revolutionary War? And let’s—yeah, and let’s look at both sides, because if you only look at, “Oh, we won independence from England,” well, that’s not enough to do that. You have to look at other things.

Well, let’s first look at the cost of the war, on one side of the balance sheet. The cost of the war. In lives, I mean. Twenty-five thousand. Hey, that’s nothing, right? Twenty-five thousand? We lost 58,000 in Vietnam. That’s—25,000—did you even know how many lives were lost in the Revolutionary War? It’s hardly worth talking about. In proportion to population—in proportion to the Revolutionary War population of the colonies, 25,000 would be equivalent today to two-and-a-half million. Two-and-a-half million. Let’s fight a war. We’re being oppressed by England. Let’s fight for independence. Two-and-a-half million people will die, but we’ll have independence. Would you have second thoughts? You might. In other words, I want to make that 25,000, which seems like an insignificant figure, I want to make it palpable and real and not to be minimized as a cost of the Revolutionary War, and to keep that in mind in the balance sheet as we look at whatever other factors there are. So, yes, we win independence against England. Great. And it only cost two-and-a-half million. OK?

Who did the Revolutionary War benefit? Who benefited from independence? It’s interesting that we just assume that everybody benefited from independence. No. Not everybody in the colonies benefited from independence. And there were people right from the outset who knew they wouldn’t benefit from independence. There were people from the outset who thought, you know, “I’m just a working stiff. I’m just a poor farmer. Am I going to benefit? What is it—what difference will it make to me if I’m oppressed by the English or oppressed by my local landlord?” You know, maybe one-third of the colonists—nobody knows, because they didn’t take Gallup polls in those days. Maybe one—various estimates, one-third of the colonists were opposed to the Revolutionary War. And only about maybe about one-third supported the Revolutionary War against England. And maybe one-third were neutral. I don’t know. I’m going by an estimate that John Adams once made. Just a very rough.

But there obviously were lots of people who were not for the Revolution. And that’s why they had a tough time recruiting people for the Revolution. It wasn’t that people rushed—“Wow! It’s a great crusade, independence against—from England. Join!” No, they had a tough time getting people. In the South, you know, they couldn’t find people to join the army. George Washington had to send a general and his troops down south to threaten people in order to get them into the military, into the war.

And in fact, in the war itself, the poor people, the working people, the farmers, the artisans, who were in the army, maybe some of them were there for patriotic reasons, independence against England, even if they weren’t sure what it meant for them. But some of them were there for that reason. Others were there—you know, some of them had actually listened to the Declaration of Independence, read from the town hall. And inspiring. You know, liberty, equality, equality. We all have an equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You know, it can make people—some people were inspired, and they joined.

Other people joined because they were promised land at—you know, they were promised at the end of the Revolution—you know, they were promised, you might say, a little GI Bill of Rights, just as today recruiting offices make promises to young guys that they want into the Army. They give them bonuses, and they promise them maybe a free education afterward. No, people don’t naturally rush to war. You have to seduce them. You have to bribe them or coerce them. Some people think it’s natural for people to go to war. Not at all. No.

Nations have to work hard to mobilize the citizens to go to war. And they had to work in the Revolutionary War, especially, well, when they found out that, although there was a draft, there was a kind of conscription that the rich could get out of the conscription by paying a certain amount of money. But the young, the farmers who went into the Revolutionary Army and who fought and who died and who were wounded in the war, they found that they, the privates, the ordinary soldier in the war, that they weren’t treated as well as the officers who came from the upper classes. The officers were given splendid uniforms and good food and were paid well. And the privates very often did not have shoes and clothes and were not paid. And when their time was supposed to be up, they were told, no, they had to stay. There was a class difference in the Revolutionary War.

You know, in this country, we’re not accustomed to the idea of class differences, because we’re all supposed to be one big, happy family. One nation, indivisible. We’re very divisible. No, we’re not one nation. No, there are working people, and there are rich people, and in between, yes, there are nervous people. So, yeah, the conditions of the ordinary farmer who went into the Revolution, the private, the conditions were such that they mutinied—mutinied against the officers, against George Washington and the other officers. And when I say “mutinied,” I mean thousands of them. Ever hear about this in your classrooms when you discuss—when you learn about the Revolutionary War? When you learn about Bunker Hill and Concord and the first shot heard around the world—right?—do you ever hear about the mutinies? I doubt it. I never learned about it. I didn’t learn about it in elementary school or high school or college or graduate school. You find very often that what you learn in graduate school is what you learned in elementary school, only with footnotes. You see. No, I never learned about the mutinies.

But there were mutinies. Thousands of soldiers mutinied, so many of them that George Washington was worried, you know, that he couldn’t put it down. He had to make concessions, make concessions to what was called the Pennsylvania Line, the thousands of mutineers. However, when shortly after he made those concessions and quieted down the mutiny by saying—promising them things, promising them he’d get them out of the army soon and give them pay and so on, soon after that, there was another mutiny in the New Jersey Line, which was smaller. And there, Washington put his foot down. He couldn’t handle the thousands in the Pennsylvania Line, but he could handle the hundreds in the New Jersey Line, and he said, “Find the leaders and execute them.” You hear about this in your classrooms about the Revolutionary War? You hear about the executions of mutineers? I doubt it. If I’m wrong in the question period, correct me. I’m willing to stand corrected. I don’t like to stand corrected, but I’m will to be stand corrected. And yeah, so they executed a number of the mutineers. Their fellow soldiers were ordered to execute the mutineers. So the Revolution—you know, not everybody was treated the same way in the Revolution.

And, in fact, when the Revolution was won, independence was won, and the soldiers came back to their homes—and some of them did get bits of land that were promised to them, so, yeah, many of them became small farmers again. And then they found that they were being taxed heavily by the rich, who controlled the legislatures. They couldn’t pay their taxes, and so their farms and their homes were being taken away from them, auctioned off. “Foreclosures” they call them today, right? It’s an old phenomenon.

So, there were rebellions. I think everybody learns about Shays’ Rebellion. They don’t learn much about Shays’ Rebellion, but they learn it enough to recognize it on a multiple choice test. Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts. Thousands of farmers gathered around courthouses in Springfield and Northampton and Amherst and Great Barrington around those courthouses. And they stopped the auctions from going on. They prevent the foreclosures. It’s a real rebellion that has to be put down by an army, paid for by the merchants of Boston. It’s put down. But it puts a scare into the Founding Fathers.

Now, there’s an interesting chronology there. Shays’ Rebellion takes place in 1786. The Founding Fathers get together in 1787, for the Constitutional Convention. Is there a connection between the two? I don’t remember ever learning that there was a connection between Shays’ Rebellion and the Constitution. What I learned is that, oh, they got together with the Constitution because the Articles of Confederation created a weak central government, that we need a strong central government. And everybody likes the idea of a strong central government, so it was a great thing to have a Constitutional Convention and draft the Constitution.

What you were not told, I don’t think—I wasn’t told—was that the Founding Fathers on the eve of the Constitutional Convention were writing to one another before the Constitutional Convention and saying, “Hey, this rebellion in western Massachusetts, we better do something about that. We better create a government strong enough to deal with rebellions like this.” That’s why we need a strong central government.

There was a general, General Henry Knox of Massachusetts, who had been in the army with George Washington, and he wrote to Washington at one point. And I don’t have his letter with me. I do have it somewhere, you know. I’ll paraphrase it. It won’t be as eloquent as him. You know, they were eloquent in those days. Take a look at the language used by the political leaders of that day and the language of the political leaders in our day. I mean, really, it’s, you know—yeah. So when Knox writes to Washington, it says something like this. It says, “You know, these people who fought in the Revolution, these people who are rebelling, who have rebelled in west Massachusetts”—and other states, too, not just in Massachusetts—

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Maine.

HOWARD ZINN: In Maine, too. Yeah, you know that, Roger. You were among the rebels, I’m sure. You were there, I know.

Knox says to Washington, says, “These people who have rebelled, you know, they think that because they fought in the Revolution, they fought in the war against England, that they deserve an equal share of the wealth of this country.” No. Those were the kinds of letters that went back and forth. “We’ve got to set up a government that will be strong enough to put down the rebellions of the poor, slave revolts, the Indians, who may resent our going into their territory.” That’s what a strong central government is for, not just because, oh, it’s nice to have a strong central government. The reason’s for that. The Constitution was a class document written to protect the interests of bondholders and slave owners and land expansionists. So the outcome of the Revolution was not exactly good for everybody, and it created all sorts of problems.

What about black people, the slaves? Did they benefit from the winning of the Revolution? Not at all. There was slavery before the Revolution; there was slavery after the Revolution. In fact, Washington would not enlist black people into his army. The South, Southern slave owners, they were the first with the—for the British, doing it for the British. The British enlisted blacks before Washington did. No, blacks didn’t benefit.

Hey, what about Indians? Should we even count the Indians? Should we even consider the Indians? Who are they? Well, they lived here. They owned all this land. We moved them out of here. Well, they should be considered. What was the outcome for them when we won the Revolution? It was bad, because the British had set a line called the Proclamation of 1763. They had set a line at the Appalachians, where they said, no, the colonists should not go beyond this line into Indian territory. I mean, they didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They just didn’t want trouble. They set a line. The British are now gone, and the line is gone, and now you can move westward into Indian territory. And you’re going to move across the continent. And you’re going to create massacres. And you’re going to take that enormous land in the West away from the Indians who live there.

These are some of the consequences of the Revolution. But we did win independence from England. All I’m trying to suggest, that to simply leave it that way, that we won independence from England, doesn’t do justice to the complexity of this victory. And, you know, was it good that we—to be independent of England? Yes, it’s always good to be independent. But at what cost? And how real is the independence? And is it possible that we would have won independence without a war?

Hey, how about Canada? Canada is independent of England. They don’t have a bad society, Canada. There are some very attractive things about Canada. They’re independent of England. They did not fight a bloody war. It took longer. You know, sometimes it takes longer if you don’t want to kill. Violence is fast. War is fast. And that’s attractive—right?—when you do something fast. And if you don’t want killing, you may have to take more time in order to achieve your objective. And actually, when you achieve your objective, it might be achieved in a better way and with better results, and with a Canadian health system instead of American health system. You know, you know.

OK, all of this—I won’t say anything about the Revolutionary War. I just wanted to throw a few doubts in about it. That’s all. I don’t want to say anything revolutionary or radical. I don’t want to make trouble. You know, I just want to—no, I certainly don’t want to make trouble at BU. No. So—yet I just want to—I just want to think about these things. That’s all I’m trying to do, have us think again about things that we took for granted. “Oh, yes, Revolutionary War, great!” No. Let’s think about it.

And the Civil War. OK, well, Civil War is—Civil War is even tougher, even tougher to critically examine the Civil War. Slavery. Slavery, nothing worse. Slavery. And at the end of the Civil War, there’s no slavery. You can’t deny that. So, yeah, you have to put that on one side of the ledger, the end of slavery. On the other side, you have to put the human cost of the Civil War in lives: 600,000. I don’t know how many people know or learn or remember how many lives were lost in the Civil War, which was the bloodiest, most brutal, ugliest war in our history, from the point of view of dead and wounded and mutilated and blinded and crippled. Six hundred thousand dead in a country of 830 million. Think about that in relation today’s population; it’s as if we fought a civil war today, and five or six million people died in this civil war. Well, you might say, well, maybe that’s worth it, to end slavery. Maybe. Well, OK, I won’t argue that. Maybe. But at least you know what the cost is.

One of the great things about the book by the president of Harvard, which she—you know, recently a book she wrote about the Civil War, she brings home, in very graphic detail—Drew Gilpin Faust, President Faust of Harvard, wrote a remarkable book about the Civil War. And what she concentrates on is the human consequences of the Civil War, the dead, the wounded. I mean, you know, that was a war in which enormous number of amputations took place, without anesthetic. You know, I mean, so it’s not just the 600,000 dead; it was all those who came home without a leg or an arm.

I’m trying to make the cost of the war more than a statistic, because we have gotten used to just dealing with statistics. And the statistics are dead. The statistics are—you know, become meaningless. They’re just numbers. Six hundred thousand—just read it and go quickly past it. But no, I don’t want to go past the cost of these wars. I want to consider them very, very, very closely and rack it up and don’t forget about it, even as you consider the benefits of the war, the freedom of the slaves.

But you also have to think, the slaves were freed, and what happened after that? Were they really freed? Well, they were, actually—there was no more slavery—but the slaves, who had been given promises—you know, forty acres and a mule—they were promised, you know, a little land and some wherewithal so they could be independent, so they needn’t be slaves anymore. Well, they weren’t given anything. They were left without resources. And the result was they were still in the thrall, still under the control of the plantation owner. They were free, but they were not free. There have been a number of studies made of that, you know, in the last decade. Free, but not free. They were not slaves now. They were serfs. They were like serfs on a feudal estate. They were tenant farmers. They were sharecroppers. They couldn’t go anywhere. They didn’t have control of their lives. And they were in the thrall of the white plantation owners. The same white plantation owners who had been their masters when they were slaves were now their masters when they were serfs.

OK, I don’t want to minimize the fact that it’s still not slavery in the old sense. No, it’s not. It’s better. It’s a better situation. So, I want to be cautious about what I say about that, and I want to be clear. But I want to say it’s more complicated than simply “Oh, the slaves were freed.” They were freed, and they were betrayed. Promises made to them were betrayed, as promises made during wartime are always betrayed. The veterans are betrayed. The civilians are betrayed. The people who expected war to produce great results and freedom and liberty, they are betrayed after every war.

So I just want us, you know, to consider that and to ask the question, which is a very difficult question to answer, but it’s worth asking: is it possible that slavery might have ended without 600,000 dead? Without a nation of amputees and blinded people? Is it possible? Because, after all, we do want to end slavery. It’s not that we’re saying, well, we shouldn’t have a bloody war because—“Just let people remain slaves.” No, we want to end slavery, but is it possible to end slavery without a bloody civil war?

After all, when the war started, it wasn’t Lincoln’s intention to free the slaves. You know that. That was not his purpose in fighting the war. His purpose in fighting the war was to keep Southern territory within the grasp of the central government. You could almost say it was an imperial aim. It was a terrible thing to say, I know. But yeah, I mean, that’s what the war was fought for. Oh, it’s put in a nice way. We say we fought for the Union. You know, we don’t want anybody to secede. Yeah. Why no? What if they want to secede? We’re not going to let them secede. No, we want all that territory.

No, Lincoln’s objective was not to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation came. And by the way, it didn’t free slaves where they were enslaved. It freed the slaves that the national government was not able to free. It declared free the slaves who were in the states—in the Confederate states that were still fighting against the Union. In other words, it declared free the slaves that we couldn’t free, and it left as slaves the slaves that were in the states that were fighting with the Union. In other words, if you fought—if you were a state that was a slave state, but you were fighting on the side of the Union, “We’ll let you keep your slaves.” That was the Emancipation Proclamation. I never learned that when I learned it. I thought, “Oh, the Emancipation Proclamation is great!”

But then, yes—no, slavery was—and, yes, Congress passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendments. Thirteenth Amendment ends slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment declares equal rights, you can’t deny people equal protection of the law. Fifteenth Amendment, you can’t prevent people from voting because of their color, their race, no. These are—however, these promises of equality in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—the promise, a right to vote—they were honored for a few years when there were federal troops in the South who enforced them, and then they were set aside. And black people in the South were left at the mercy of the white plantation owners. So there was a great betrayal that took place, a betrayal that lasted a hundred years, those hundred years of segregation and the lynching and of the national government looking the other way as the Constitution was violated a thousand times by the white power structure in the South.

And, you know, it took a hundred—and, you know, the Congress passed those amendments. Why? Not because Lincoln or Congress itself initiated them. They passed those amendments because a great movement against slavery had grown up in the country from the 1830s to the 1860s, powerful anti-slavery movement which pushed Congress into the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Very important thing to keep in mind, that when justice comes and when injustices are remedied, they’re not remedied by the initiative of the national government or the politicians. They only respond to the power of social movements. And that’s what happened with the relationship between anti-slavery movement and the passage of those amendments.

And, of course, then those amendments, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, had no meaning for the next hundred years. The blacks were not allowed to vote in the South. Blacks did not get an equal protection of the laws. Every president of the United States for a hundred years, every president, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, every president violated his oath of office. Every president, because the oath of office says you will see to it that the laws are faithfully executed. And every president did not enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, collaborated with Southern racism and segregation and lynching and all that happened.

So, the Civil War and its aftermath, you know, have to be looked at in a longer perspective. And yes, the question needs to be asked also: yeah, is it possible if slavery could have been ended without 600,000 dead? We don’t know for sure. And when I mention these possibilities, you know, it’s very hard to imagine how it might have ended, except that we do know that slavery was ended in every other country in the western hemisphere. Slavery was ended in all these others places in the western hemisphere without a bloody civil war. Well, that doesn’t prove that it could have been ended, and, you know, every situation is different, but it makes you think. If you begin to think, “Oh, the only way it could have been done is with a bloody civil war,” maybe not. I mean, maybe it would have taken longer. You know, maybe there could have been slave rebellions which hammered away at the Southern slave structure, hammered away at them in a war of attrition, not a big bloody mass war, but a war of attrition and guerrilla warfare, and John Brown-type raids.

Remember John Brown, who wanted to organize raids and a slave rebellion? Yeah, a little guerrilla action, not totally peaceful, no. But not massive slaughter. Well, John Brown was executed by the state of Virginia and the national government. He was executed in 1859 for wanting to lead slave revolts. And the next year, the government goes to war in a war that cost 600,000 lives and then, presumably, as people came to believe, to end slavery. There’s a kind of tragic irony in that juxtaposition of facts. So it’s worth thinking about, about the Civil War, and not to simply say, “Well, Civil War ended slavery, therefore whatever the human cost was, it was worth it.” It’s worth rethinking.

Now we come to World War II. Looking at my watch, I don’t mean it.

TIME KEEPER: You’re on a roll tonight. You’re good.

HOWARD ZINN: No, I don’t mean it.

Well, World War II, “the Good War,” the best. Fascism. I mean, that’s why I enlisted in the Air Force: fight against fascism. It’s a good war, it’s a just war. What could be, you know, more obvious? They are evil; we are good.

And so, I became a bombardier in the Air Force. I dropped bombs on Germany, on Hungary, on Czechoslovakia—even on a little town in France three weeks before the war was to end, when everybody knew the war was to end and we didn’t need to drop any more bombs, but we dropped bombs. On a little town in France, we were trying out napalm, the first use of napalm in the European theater. I think by now you all know what napalm is. One of the ugliest little weapons. But trying it out, and adding metals. And who knows what reason, what complex of reasons, led us to bomb a little town in France, when everybody knew the war was ending? And yes, there were German soldiers there, hanging around. They weren’t doing anything, weren’t bothering anybody, but they’re there, and gives us a good excuse to bomb. We’ll kill the Germans, we’ll kill some Frenchmen, too. What does it matter? It’s a good war. We’re the good guys.

One thing—and I didn’t think about any of this while I was bombing. I didn’t examine: oh, who are we bombing, and why are we bombing, and what’s going on here, and who is dying? I didn’t know who was dying, because when you bomb from 30,000 feet, well, this is modern warfare; you do things at a distance. It’s very impersonal. You just press a button, you know, and somebody dies. But you don’t see them. So I dropped bombs from 30,000 feet. I didn’t see any human beings. I didn’t see what’s happening below. I didn’t hear children screaming. I didn’t see arms being ripped off people. No, just dropped bombs. You see little flashes of light down below as the bombs hit. That’s it. And you don’t think. It’s hard to think when you’re in the military. Really, it’s hard to sit back and examine, ask what you’re doing. No, you’ve been trained to do a job, and you do your job.

So I didn’t think about any of this until after the war, when I began to think about that raid on France. And then I began to think about the raid on Dresden, where 100,000 people were killed in one night, day of bombing. Read Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse Five . He was there. He was a prisoner of war and there in the basement, you know, a kind of meat locker, a slaughterhouse. And then I became aware of the other bombings that had taken place. But, you know, when you’re in a war, you don’t see the big picture, and you don’t—you really don’t—I didn’t know until afterward, 600,000 German civilians were killed by our bombing. They weren’t Nazis. Well, yeah, you might say they were passive supporters and that they didn’t rebel. Well, a few rebelled. But how many Americans rebel against American wars? Are we all complicit for what we did in Vietnam, killing several million people? Well, maybe we are, but there was a kind of stupid, ignorant innocence about us. And the same thing was true of the Germans. And we killed 600,000. If some great power, while we were dropping bombs on Vietnam, had come over here and dropped bombs on American cities in retaliation, it would’ve been—and they say, “Well, these are imperialists, we’ll kill them all"—no, the American people were not themselves imperialists, but they were passive bystanders, until they woke up, yeah.

So I began to think about it, as I began to think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I had welcomed the bombing of Hiroshima when it took place, because I didn’t know. I didn’t know what it really meant. We had finished our bombing missions in Europe, we had won the war in Europe, and my crew and I, we flew our plane, the same plane we had flown missions on, we flew that same plane back across the Atlantic, and we were given a thirty-day furlough. And then the idea was we were going to go on to the Pacific, because the war against Japan was still going on. And during this thirty-day furlough in early August, my wife and I decided, because we had been married just before I went overseas—my wife and I decided we’d take a little vacation in the country. And we took a bus to go into the country. And at the bus stop, there was a newsstand, and there was a newspaper and the big headline “Atomic Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima.” Well, oh, great! Didn’t really know what an atomic bomb was, but it was sort of obvious from the headlines, oh, and it was a big bomb. Well, I had dropped bombs. This was just a bigger bomb.

But I had no idea what it meant until I read John Hersey’s book on Hiroshima. John Hersey had gone into Hiroshima after the bombing, and he had talked to survivors. Survivors? You can imagine what those survivors looked like. They were kids and old people and women and all sorts of Japanese people. And they were without arms or legs, or they were blinded, or their skin could not be looked at. John Hersey interviewed them and got some idea and reported—he was a great journalist—he reported what the bombing of Hiroshima was like to the people who were there. And when I read his account, for the first time, I understood. This is what bombing does to human beings. This is what my bombs had done to people.

And I began to rethink the idea of a “good war,” of our world war against fascism. “Oh, well, it’s OK, because we did defeat Hitler.” That’s just it, just like we did get independence from England, we did end slavery. But wait a while. A lot of other—it’s not that simple. And World War II is not that simple. “Oh, we defeated Hitler, therefore eveything is OK. We were the good guys; they were the bad guys.” But what I realized then was that once you decide—and this is what we decided at the beginning of the war, this is what, you know, I decided—they were the bad guys, we were the good guys, what I didn’t realize was that in the course of the war, the good guys become the bad guys. War poisons everybody. War corrupts everybody. And so, the so-called good guys begin behaving like the bad guys. The Nazis dropped bombs and killed civilians in Coventry, in London, in Rotterdam. And we drop bombs and kill civilians, and we commit atrocities, and we go over Tokyo several months before Hiroshima.

And I’ll bet you 90 percent of the American people do not know about the raid of Tokyo. Everybody has heard about Hiroshima. I’ll bet 90 percent of the American people—I don’t you know if you have—know that several months before Hiroshima, we sent planes over Tokyo to set Tokyo afire with firebombs, and 100,000 people died in one night of bombing in Tokyo. Altogether we killed over half a million people in Japan, civilians. And some people said, “Well, they bombed Pearl Harbor.” That’s really something. These people did not bomb Pearl Harbor. Those children did not bomb Pearl Harbor. But this notion of violent revenge and retaliation is something we’ve got to get rid of.

So I began, yeah, reconsidering all of that, rethinking all of that, investigated the bombing of Hiroshima, investigated the excuse that was made—“Oh, you know, if we don’t bomb Hiroshima, well, we have to invade Japan, and a million people will die.” And I investigated all of that, found it was all nonsense. We didn’t have to invade Japan in order for Japan to surrender. Our own official investigative team, the Strategic Bombing Survey, which went into Japan right after the war, interviewed all the high Japanese military, civilian officials, and their conclusion was Japan was ready to end the war. Maybe not the next week, maybe in two months, maybe in three months. “Oh, no, we can’t wait. We don’t want to wait. We’ve got these bombs. We’ve got to see what they look like.” Do you know how many people die because of experimentation with weapons? We were experimenting. We were experimenting on the children of Hiroshima. “Let’s see what this does. Hey, and also, let’s show the Russians. Let’s show the Russians we have this bomb.” A British Scientist who was an adviser to Churchill called the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima “the first step of the Cold War.” Soviet Union was in the mind of the people around Harry Truman—James Burns, Forrestal and others.

So, yes, I began thinking about “the good war” and how it corrupts and poisons. And then I looked at the world after the war. Oh, yeah, what were the results? Yeah, I said bad things about the war. I’m sorry, all those casualties, but it ended—it stopped fascism. Now wait a while. Let’s look closely at that. Yeah, it got rid of Hitler, got rid of Mussolini. Did it get rid of fascism in the world? Did it get rid of racism in the world? Did it get rid of militarism in the world? No, you had two superpowers now arming themselves with nuclear weapons, enough nuclear weapons that if they were used, they would make Hitler’s Holocaust look puny. And there were times, in fact, in the decades that followed when we came very, very close to using those nuclear weapons.

So the world after World War II—and this is so important—you don’t just look at, “Oh, we won.” No, what happens after that? What happens five years after that? What happens ten years after that? What happens to the GIs who came back alive, five or ten years later? And maybe one of them will go berserk at Fort Hood. Think about that. Think about all the superficial comments made of “Oh, let’s examine this guy psychologically and his religious [inaudible], and let’s not go deeper into that and say these are war casualties.” Those people he killed were war casualties; he was a war casualty. That’s what war does. War poisons people’s minds. So we got rid of Hitler. But what was the world like?

When I was discharged from the Army, from the Air Force, I got a letter from General Marshall. He was the general of generals. He was sending a letter, not a personal letter to me—“Dear Howie…” No. A letter that was sent to 16 million men who had served in the Armed Forces, some women, too. And the letter was something like this: “We’ve won the war. Congratulations for your service. It will be a new world.” It wasn’t a new world. And we know it hasn’t been a new world since World War II. War after war after war after war, and 50 million people were dead in that war to end all wars, to end fascism and dictatorship and militarism. No.

So, yes, I came to a conclusion that war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we’re told. And if we think that there are good wars and that, therefore, well, maybe this is a good war, I wanted to examine the so-called good wars, the holy wars, and—yeah, and take a good look at them and think again about the phenomenon of war and come to the conclusion, well, yes, war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we’re told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place. It’s not that we’re going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we’ll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably—inevitably—the indiscriminant massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.

So it’s not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this—all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we’re at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we’re sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.

We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that’s how movements start. That’s how the movement against the Vietnam War started. It started with handfuls of people who thought they were helpless, thought they were powerless. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power. When workers go on strike, huge corporations lose their power. When consumers boycott, huge business establishments have to give in. When soldiers refuse to fight, as so many soldiers did in Vietnam, so many deserters, so many fraggings, acts of violence by enlisted men against officers in Vietnam, B-52 pilots refusing to fly bombing missions anymore, war can’t go on. When enough soldiers refuse, the government has to decide we can’t continue. So, yes, people have the power. If they begin to organize, if they protest, if they create a strong enough movement, they can change things.

That’s all I want to say. Thank you. [...]