How to Achieve World Peace

Evidently you also favor banning religious schools of all kinds as well. And therefore favor significant new restrictions on freedom of religion - one of our key founding principles.

Amusingly you also require replacing elements of religious education with mandatory "classes on health and manners".

Has it occurred to you that you are in effect supporting the creation of a totalitarian state that would teach everyone how to behave and suppress all competing views in the education of children.

Your understanding of both human nature and human history is seriously deficient if you don't recognize that any government with that kind of power would immediately descend into the worst kind of tyranny.

However, we already know that about you. Even Plato knew that his philosopher kings don't exist.

Freedom of religion should "also" include children NOT being radicalized by it before they are free thinking adults.

You instead prefer that they instead be indoctrinated in "health and manners" by a government that assumes the authority to determine for itself just what that means. Most totalitarian governments put a lot of emphasis into the indoctrination of youth, and in the absence of independent institutions able to challenge them, most governments in human history have degenerated into such totalitarianism.

Your understanding of history is seriously deficient.

You seem to forget our "government" should be a reflection of the electorate's will. Remember, we the people?

It is really sad that being civilized to all people should not have to take an act of congress.

No you would rather private industry, like the music business, instead teach young people to call their spouses ho's and bitches...

And you talk about severely deficient understanding...

Fear our constitutional government but let unscrupulous industry have its way into children's minds.

Severely deficient George...

Civility is a civic duty...

Your understanding of history is seriously deficient.
//////////////

You're a riot, gob1.

RexRed: You seem to forget our "government" should be a reflection of the electorate's will. Remember, we the people?

---------------

Do you mean that "we the people" are the ones aiding and abetting their governments war crimes, terrorism & thievery, Rex?

I know you really miss Osama JTT...

I am not sure who has been voting your posts down but I see why now.

You sound like coldjoint, Rex.

Do you mean the guy who the USA created and funded?

They funded 9/11? You're an idiot.

They funded OBL and the Taliban. Gob1 was right; you don't know much about history. But that's the case for most USians who've been raised on propaganda.

Would you like sources, Rex?

I am very well aware of that.

You mean this?


and this?


Give some people and inch and they'll take a foot.

and this?



and this?



Saudi Ambassador to Australia Meets Prime Minister of Australia

Would you like more sources?

Get your own house in order JTT...

You're well aware that the USA commits horrendous war crimes, is the biggest terrorist group on the planet by light years, that the USA has been behaving like this since it's inception and you have the gall to tell others to get their house in order.

Deaths In Other Nations Since
WW II Due To Us Interventions


By James A. Lucas

24 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org

INTRODUCTION


After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated "war on terrorism."

But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable.

The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.

This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.

And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.

It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII “chose not to know.” We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” The answer is: possibly 10,000.

READ ON AT,

http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm

Let me ask you this: Did you ever make any effort to verify Lucas' claims, or did you accept his assertions and methodology on their face?

I didn't need to read much of the linked article before a recognizable pattern emerged in the development of estimates by the author: Hold the United States responsible for all the deaths in the world. This insistence on overkill is what makes the arguments of people like Lucas and you easy to dismiss.

Lucas has determined "The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan..."
(emphasis added).

On the face of it alone, this is an outlandish claim. The war was between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan; but the US is responsible for all of the deaths caused in that war (presumably including Soviet casualties). And how? By luring the Soviets into a conflict with the Mujahedeen which was supported by the US.

Lucas blithely dismisses any culpability on the part of the Soviets with this:



The Soviets had been engaged in influencing politics in Afghanistan since 1947 as Russia had been for many years prior to the Russian Revolution. In 1979 the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in the Soviet backed Saur Revolution. Lucas describes the PDPA as secular (which of course they were, in addition to being communist) and the relationship between the PDPA as simply "friendly" (which no doubt it was in the sense that the puppet is friendly with the puppeteer).

The PDPA seized power from Mohammad Daoud Khan who himself seized power from King Mohammed Zahir Shah through a military coup in 1973. A year later, Pakistan launched covert operations in Afghanistan; one of which was training the mujahedeen of Jamiat-e Islami to fight against Daoud's government. After the 1979 seizure of power by PDPA, Jamiat-e Islami, along with other Islamic insurgent groups (now trained and equipped by both Pakistan and the US), turned their attention and rifles on the Soviet puppet government; leading to Soviet military intervention and the wider war.

I've no doubt that an element of Soviet concern over the mujahedeen insurgency was the possibility that a hard-line Islamist government in its neighboring vassal state would result in a spillover of jihad into the Soviet Union, but I guess you and Lucas find this a perfectly legitimate reason for the Soviets to have invaded Afghanistan. All US actions with the ostensible purpose of national security were fraudulent and made it responsible for millions of deaths, but not so with the Soviet Union.

So Lucas' conclusion is that the US, not the Soviet Union, not PDPA forces, not the Mujahedeen and not Pakistan was responsible for all of the possibly 1.8 million deaths that were a result of the war, because the US followed Pakistan's lead in training and equipping the mujahedeen.

Lucas adds another 12,000 deaths to the US kill count by virtue of the direct military action it waged in Afghanistan after 9/11/2001. 1.8 million for "luring in" the Soviets but only 12,000 for firing American rifles and dropping American bombs.

That the pompous Zbigniew Brzezinski wished to claim credit for the fall of the Soviet Union and boasted to a magazine about the brilliance of the trap he set for the Soviets is apparently all Lucas needed to conclude the US is responsible for all the war's casualties.

This is only one nation specific claim of over 25 Lucas makes, and all of them contain specious arguments in varying degrees of outlandishness, and all blame the US for virtually every death that has occurred in every nation, no matter what other countries were involved.

Two more, in brief, are:

The US, not the Khmer Rouge, is responsible for the 2.5 million deaths of Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot and his brutal forces, because America bombed Cambodia and destabilized the country. Interestingly enough, while Lucas of course blames the US for the deaths caused by the bombings, he doesn't provide a count.

The US is responsible for the deaths of between 100,000 and 200,000 Israelis and Palestinians because the US has supported Israel.

Anyone not caring to read the entire article now gets the picture.

It would be foolish not to acknowledge that the US government has for a very long time now been involved in covert operations intended to topple and install governments in foreign nations, and willfully ignorant to consider America a global knight in shining armor fighting only Black Knights and never causing the deaths of innocents. There have been far too many devious, unconscionable and blatantly stupid actions taken by our government that have indeed resulted in thousands of deaths. These actions are not what Americans want their nation to be about and they have not all been celebrated or even ignored by us. It is not an excuse for inexcusable actions but the fact that these sorts of actions, and worse have been taken by nations throughout the history of mankind can't be ignored, and using absurd evaluations the likes of those made by Lucas to assert that the US is the #1 Terrorist Nation in history does nothing to expand awareness of the failings, dangers, and pure immorality of practices and policies in which our government has engaged and which it may yet undertake. It is far more likely that it has the opposite effect. It is not necessary to communicate the wrongness of US actions that caused 100,000 innocent deaths by inflating it to 2 million through tacking on the casualties directly caused by other actors.

Lucas concludes that the US is responsible for between 20 million and 30 million deaths around the world since WWII and 10,000 individual 9/11's. Aside from the fact that a reading of his methodology for arriving at these numbers is worse than simply flawed, it's absurd, he and you provide no context. No where do we ever see a JTT polemic about the 20 million Soviet citizens killed by Stalin or the 45 million Chinese killed by Mao, the 2 million Koreans killed by their government or even the 800,000 killed in Rwanda. In fact it's surprising that Lucas didn't come up with some rationale to blame the US for these deaths too.

Lucas claims that it is essential that Americans learn about the atrocities of the US so that we "can begin to understand the pain that others feel."

What does this even mean?

Americans are well acquainted with pain and not blind to the pain of others. The degree to which the American people respond charitably to the victims of disasters around the globe is certainly proof that we are not a nation of psychopaths who have no sense of empathy, or a country of callous xenophobes who care not one whit for the bloody wogs.

Lucas begins his article with



The only people I remember who were saying these things were doing so in the context of arguments that we had gotten what we deserved. Folks like Ward Churchill whose essay Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens was published on 9/12/01, one day after the towers fell, and in which he wrote



Just the kind of rhetoric that is likely to motivate Americans to begin to understand the pain that others feel or question the foreign policy practices of their government.

The hammer and the nail: Obama's diplomacy in full effect

WASHINGTON, June 10 (UPI) --Last Friday's meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin lasted 15 minutes at most. Yet the symbolic significance of that highly-anticipated face-to-face far exceeded the parameters of its informal nature.
After commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day in an address at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial overlooking Omaha Beach -- a cemetery containing the remains of 9,387 U.S. servicemen who gave their lives in one of the most epic military events in history -- Obama met with Putin on the sidelines of a lunch attended by 20 world leaders.

According to Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Obama stressed the significance of Ukraine's recent election of President Petro Poroshenko, with whom Putin also met while in France.

"If Russia does take this opportunity to recognize and work with the new government in Kiev, President Obama indicated that there could be openings to reduce tensions," Rhodes said.

What the world witnessed then wasn't merely a meeting between superpowers whose recent past is fraught with high drama -- necessary WWII allies turned unnecessary Cold War enemies, and renewed animosity over everything from the ongoing crisis in Ukraine to the Syrian civil war to Iran's nuclear program. Indeed, the luncheon was so tense French President Francois Hollande sat between Obama and Putin, along with queens of Britain and Denmark, and dined with each president separately the night before. But more than anything, the meeting was indicative of Obama's recent embrace of diplomacy.

When Obama addressed West Point graduates in late May, he called for a definitive shift in U.S. foreign policy toward "collective action" with allies throughout the world. Taking a non-interventionist stance, Obama said, "Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail."

America will not repeat the "costly mistakes" of the past, Obama claimed, which came from rushing (all-too-often at lightning speed) to unilateral military action. Instead, the president said, "We must broaden our tools to include diplomacy and development; sanctions and isolation; appeals to international law and -- if just, necessary, and effective -- multilateral military action."

The U.S. will work more with international institutions such as the United Nations and NATO, which Obama praised and has since recommitted to. He also announced the creation of a $5 billion "Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund," which will "train, build capacity, and facilitate partner countries on the front lines," ostensibly in order to combat terrorism in places like Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Mali, and elsewhere without the U.S. getting sucked into another decade-long, trillion-dollar war.

Of course, the Obama administration's track record belies such rhetoric. After all, this is the same administration that escalated the war in Afghanistan twice. The same administration that waged war on Libya without declaring it, and said it would close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay (and vowed to do so again during Obama's speech). The same administration whose overreliance on clandestine drone strikes, which -- despite Obama's West Point promise to provide greater transparency -- have killed countless innocent victims alongside targeted militants, undoubtedly perpetuating hatred toward the U.S.

Still, we're suddenly seeing the Obama administration commit to diplomacy like never before. On the heels of Obama's West Point speech, we witnessed the now controversial maneuver to exchange five Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. Forget the absurd politicking and public outcry that has followed. What's remarkable about Obama's decision to secure Bergdahl's freedom is that it required the U.S. to negotiate with terrorists -- something often verboten for U.S. presidents, except when it isn't.

And just Monday, U.S. officials met with the Iranian delegation for five hours in Geneva regarding Iran's nuclear program. The meeting was considered "positive and constructive," and comes as Iran is about to engage in a fifth round of nuclear talks with the P5+1 -- the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (U.S., U.K., France, Russia, and China) plus Germany.

Perhaps it's easy to get swept up in Obama's ambitious West Point goals. However, the administration is starting to prove that tough sanctions followed by bi-, tri-, and multi-lateral diplomacy could dissuade Iran from pursuing its nuclear agenda. That diplomatic efforts could help ease Russia from the brink of war with Ukraine, and bring home America's only POW from Afghanistan.

As Obama told West Point grads, "We must not create more enemies than we take off the battlefield."

But time is running out for Obama to fulfill such diplomatic promises. Because chances are, his successor will be far more hawkish.

We will have enemies as long as envy and greed remain human motivations. We will have those who welcome our misfortunes as long as we are relatively rich and powerful.

Obama's successor will face a much more threatening world because of Obama's misguided hostility towards his own country and his indifference and incompetence in leading it.

A little while back, Obama sent Kerry to Iran to give them the go-ahead to keep building nuke reactors.
Was that a good move?

Z.P. Heller,the author of your linked article, was formerly the editorial director of Brave New Films ( a producer of progressive documentaries) and the Editor-in-Chief of The InterDependent (an on-line "news magazine" produced by the United Nations. More propaganda arm then news magazine) and is currently the editor for UPI.com.

UPI.com is what remains of the once proud and prestigious new service that couldn't compete with the AP and has twice gone through bankruptcy proceedings. It is currently owned by News World Communications which in turn is owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

Interestingly enough Mr. Heller (just like The InterDependent) hasn't generated enough interest or buzz to have his own Wikipedia profile, and in fact he is not even referenced in the Wikipedia articles on Brave New Films or UPI.

A real A-Lister.

Heller is one of many who think diplomacy can and should be the only response to international problems, especially ones of crisis proportions.



Hooray! Obama negotiated with terrorists! This is momentous, of course, because it opens the door for further negotiations with terrorists, further recognition of their legitimacy as an actor on the world stage, further opportunity for them to reap rewards from their foul deeds. It's the dawning of the Age of Aquarius!

And Obama stressed the importance of Ukraine President Poroshenko! If Putin recognizes and "works" with Poroshenko it will provide a new opportunity for...more diplomacy to "reduce tensions." Let's see, Putin seized territory from a sovereign nation and is fomenting rebellion in the Eastern part of that nation which by all indications is a precursor to seizing even more territory from the Ukraine. That sure sounds like a guy who is awake at night worrying about tensions with the US and Europe.

And what was the big diplomatic breakthrough in Normandy? If Putin recognizes the freely elected president of the country he is raiding,we'll give him another chance to talk with us and get lectured on what 21st Century nations do and don't do. Another off ramp for this run-away Russian truck, who really, really wants to stop taking over pieces of his neighbors, and maybe will if we can just get him to sit down and talk.

Sure he'll sit down and talk, after he takes what he wants from the Ukraine.Then things can settle back down, and Obama and Kerry of Vietnam can try and take credit for averting an international crisis through diplomacy. "See,"President Obama will tell adoring crowds at a NAACP or AFLCIO convention, "Those imaginary Republicans who think all solutions reside in the barrel of a gun, and who wanted me to declare war on Russia were wrong. Tough sanctions and diplomacy worked. Putin is not going to invade Poland!"

Oh and look, US Officials spent 5 whole hours with the Iranian delegation in Geneva! 5 hours! Can you imagine that? The Iranians must be on the verge of giving up their development of nuclear weapons! They must be, the State Department said the 5 hours of talks were "positive and constructive! You know they only use those terms when something really big is going to be accomplished.

And diplomacy is working with Iran! They are about to enter the 5th round (there's that magic 5 again. It's uncanny. It has to be a sign) of talks with the P5+1 (5 again!). That's what's also great about international diplomacy, you get to keep coming up with these cool names for the parties! Gosh a 5th round has gotta do the trick, look how much the first four rounds accomplished...we have a timetable now!

Only a little more than a month to go before the deadline is up, so we should be able to get in a couple more rounds before the end of July, but they can be used to celebrate how great diplomacy is because the 5th set of talks is gonna work. I just know it.

And so what if there isn't a resolution by the deadline? Iraq can ask for a 6 month (maybe they should ask for 5 months) extension and we can get the rounds of diplomatic talks up to double digits. Man, it's a good thing Obama has decided that diplomacy is the way to go, just like he promised he would.

He better too, because the next SOB who sits in the Oval Office (whether Hillary or, ugh, a Republican) is not going to get how effective diplomatic efforts are. Just look at how much they resolved so far!

I actually wasn't bowled over by the article either, just thought it went with the thread.

Personally, I think Obama has let it wait almost too long to start being the president I thought he was going to be, so if he does do more talks, international coalition solutions, sanctions and rewards rather than war, drones or threats all the time, I will be happy he is finally living up to what I thought he was going to do all along. Moreover, to really get your goat, I think he should go over congress's head and shut gitmo down.

Give Peace A Chance

This made me cry
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152360936503717

Footage has been released of one of the food-drops to the Yezidi population under siege by the Islamic State (ISIS/Daesh).

Broadcast by CNN, it included the rescue of whoever could climb onboard the low-flying chopper.