WW News Service Digest #283
1) Class Truth about Pearl Harbor
by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
2) 23 Dead in Turkey's Hellholes
by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
3) In Deep Water & Over his Head
by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
4) Let Korean Voices be Heard!
by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 21, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
DEBUNKING MOVIE MYTHS: SOME CLASS TRUTH ABOUT
PEARL HARBOR
By Greg Butterfield
A young couple's romance is disrupted by a foreign enemy's
unprovoked attack on a peaceful Pacific isle.
That's the mythical tale depicted in "Pearl Harbor," the
blockbuster film produced by the Walt Disney Co., chock full
of Hollywood stars and state-of-the-art special effects.
"Pearl Harbor" opened Memorial Day weekend to unprecedented
commercial and political hype. It claims to tell the story
of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese air attack on the U.S. Navy
station in Hawaii. The film depicts a reluctant United
States being dragged into World War II by Japanese
aggression.
With the Pentagon's blessing, the producers shot much of the
film aboard Navy vessels at the real Pearl Harbor.
Ironically, the film's release coincides with the U.S.
government's behind-the-scenes effort to bolster resurgent
militarist forces in Japan with the aim of building an
imperialist military alliance against the People's Republic
of China. Untold millions of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and
other Asian peasants and workers died fighting Japan's
brutal colonial occupation of their countries during the
1930s and 1940s.
A film like "Pearl Harbor" has the potential to mislead
millions of workers and young people about the real nature
of World War II and the U.S. role in it.
Japanese American and other Asian American groups say it
could also spark a new wave of racist violence against Asian
people in this country. They note that all of the Asian
people in the film are depicted as enemies.
At a Los Angeles rally calling for a boycott of "Pearl
Harbor," Floyd Mori, president of the Japanese American
Citizens League, said, "No matter what we achieve ... how
far we've come in this country, when the topic of Pearl
Harbor comes up, we're always dragged back to the event."
(Reuters, May 21)
Other speakers noted that there's no mention of the U.S.
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the war's end,
nor of the round-up of Japanese American civilians into
prison camps.
WHAT WORKERS NEED TO KNOW
So what is it that Disney, the Pentagon and crew are trying
to hide behind the love story and multi-million-dollar
special effects?
First of all, for the U.S. government, big business and the
military, World War II wasn't a "war against fascism." It
was a war among the imperialist powers to redivide the
world's riches.
In the Pacific, that meant a war with Japan for control of
the natural resources, labor and markets of Asia. Wall
Street and Washington were itching for a fight.
"Pearl Harbor, in a military-political sense, was very much
like the beginning of the Spanish-American War," wrote Vince
Copeland, the founding editor of Workers World, in his 1968
pamphlet "Expanding Empire."
"The Battleship Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor in 1898, and
Washington used it as an excuse to declare war on Spain. But
Spain needed the sinking of the Maine like it needed the
proverbial hole in the head. And U.S. big business needed a
war with Spain.
"This is not to say that the Dec. 7, 1941, attack was in
itself a hoax or that the Japanese did not really kill over
3,000 U.S. sailors by sending them to the bottom of Pearl
Harbor," Copeland continued.
"They did. But some thoughtful people later considered it
strange that the Japanese imperialists should have done
something so 'stupid' as to bring the U.S. into the war
against them just when they had their hands full in China
and had taken over Indochina from the French imperialists.
... Why on earth would the Japanese want the powerful U.S.
to make war on them at just such a time, when they needed
U.S. neutrality more than anything else?" he asked.
"The fact is that the Japan-U.S. war was inevitable, given
the U.S.-Japanese antagonisms over markets, possessions and
economic colonies in Asia. But the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor was not at all inevitable. It was not the inevitable
beginning of the war.
"On the contrary," Copeland asserted, "this attack was
deliberately maneuvered by the politicians of big business,
led at that time by Franklin D. Roosevelt."
BLOOD FOR OIL
It must be remembered that Japan wasn't the only brutal
colonial power in Asia. Britain ruled India and Hong Kong
with an iron fist. France dominated Southeast Asia.
The United States had taken possession of the Philippines,
Guam and other Pacific islands during the Spanish-American
War. From 1900 onward, Washington bloodily suppressed
continual uprisings by the Filipino people.
And then there was Hawaii itself, the site of Pearl Harbor-
robbed from its Indigenous inhabitants by U.S. gunboat
diplomacy.
Although Pearl Harbor is best remembered, Japan also
targeted U.S. military bases throughout the Pacific on Dec.
7, 1941.
The war between Japan and the United States had its roots in
the imperialist redivision of the world that took place
after World War I ended. At that time Washington became the
senior partner in the U.S.-British-Japanese alliance that
dominated China.
In the book "A Political History of Japanese Capitalism,"
Jon Halliday writes about the agreement signed at a 1921
Washington conference on China:
"The imperialist powers who gathered at Washington all
agreed on one thing: that they should continue to plunder
China and exploit the Chinese people. In [Japanese Premier]
Saito's words, the arrangement 'which emerged from the
Washington Conference could be said to be based on a new
form of suppressing China.'"
But Japan's ruling class and military caste chafed in the
role of "junior partner" assigned to them by the Western
imperialists-especially after the Great Depression took
hold. Following the capitalist law of "expand or die," Japan
came into open conflict with U.S.-British domination of the
region and of China in particular.
As Japanese exports grew to the detriment of the Western
powers, and as the Japanese army clashed with the U.S.-
backed Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek in China,
Washington hit back with tariffs and racist laws banning
Asian immigration and property ownership.
"Although most of Southeast Asia was in the hands of
European powers, Japan's key negotiations were with the
United States," wrote Halliday. "This was not primarily
because of America's colonial possession in Asia, the
Philippines, but because of America's key role in Japan's
trade, particularly in strategic raw materials.
"The United States began seriously to squeeze Japan in July
1940 when it introduced a licensing system for certain U.S.
exports to that country. The two crucial items, crude oil
and scrap iron, were added to the list after Japan occupied
Northern Indochina in September 1940. A full embargo
followed on July 26, 1941.
"The American embargo, particularly on oil, severely limited
Japan's ability to maneuver," Halliday explained. "Much of
Japanese diplomacy prior to December 1941 was taken up with
trying to secure supplies of oil. ... Prior to Pearl Harbor,
Japan had only about 18 months' supply.
"In November 1941, when the talks with Washington were
already well advanced, Japan proposed universal non-
discrimination in commercial relations in the Pacific area,
including China, if this principle were adopted throughout
the world. To the United States ... this was 'unthinkable.'
Japan was, on the whole, eager to reach a settlement and
offered considerable concessions to this end."
Halliday concludes that "America could certainly have
reached a temporary settlement within the framework of an
imperialist carve-up which gave Japan slightly more than it
had been granted in Washington in 1921-22. It was America
which turned down the Japanese proposal for a summit meeting
between Premier Konoe and Roosevelt in autumn 1941. And it
was Secretary of State Cordell Hull's outright rejection of
Japan's proposals of Nov. 7, 1941, which brought
negotiations to a halt."
'WE WERE LIKELY TO BE ATTACKED'
U.S. imperialism, Copeland writes in "Expanding Empire,"
maneuvered Japan into "firing the first shot" so that
Washington would appear to be waging a defensive war. This
was vital, since anti-war sentiment remained strong at home.
Copeland refers to a revealing document first published in
the 1947 book "President Roosevelt and the Coming of the
War" by historian Charles A. Beard. It's an excerpt from the
diary of Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson,
dated Nov. 25, 1941-about two weeks before the Pearl Harbor
attack.
"Then at 12 o'clock we went to the White House, where we
were until nearly half past one," Stimson wrote. "At the
meeting were Hull, Knox, Marshall, Stark and myself. There
the President ... brought up entirely the relations with the
Japanese. He brought up the event that we were likely to be
attacked perhaps next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious
for making an attack without warning, and the question was
what should we do.
"The question was how much we should maneuver them into the
position of firing the first shot without allowing too much
danger to ourselves."
So the political and military leaders in Washington,
especially after they moved to choke off Japan's lifeline of
oil, knew an attack was coming. It was, after all, the
pretext they were hoping for to extend U.S. military and
economic control in Asia.
But no warning was given to the sailors at Pearl Harbor.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: torstai 14. kes�kuu 2001 11:29
Subject: [WW] 23 Dead in Turkey's Hellholes
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 21, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
23 DEAD IN TURKEY'S HELLHOLES: HEROIC POLITICAL
PRISONERS STARVE RATHER THAN SUBMIT
By Cemile Cakir
Behind iron bars, a heroic battle is going on in Turkey,
deep in the hellholes of the prisons.
Beginning last Oct. 20, about 1,000 Turkish political
prisoners went on a hunger strike. They are resisting the
imposition of a new, brutal, super-isolation prison system
known as the F-type system.
The F-type system isolates all prisoners and puts them in
tiny cells. It is modeled on U.S. super-maximum behavior-
modification/isolation prisons.
The new system is aimed at breaking down the high level of
solidarity and organization among Turkish prisoners, who
have always been housed in large prison wards.
The prisoners have been resisting with the only weapon they
have--their lives. As of the second week in June, they have
been on hunger strike for over 236 days. It is without doubt
the longest resistance hunger strike ever.
Twenty-three hunger strikers have already died. Fifty have
lost their memory and mental faculties due to the hunger-
associated Vernickle-Korsakoff syndrome.
Of the 23 who died, four are prisoners' relatives who joined
the hunger strike on the outside.
In addition, 31 prisoners were killed in a bloody massacre
when the Turkish army attacked 21 prisons with bombs and
chemical weapons on Dec. 19.
At the beginning most of the hunger strikers were from three
leftist groups: DHKP-C--the Revolutionary People's
Liberation Party-Front; TKP-ML--the Communist Party of
Turkey Marxist-Leninist; and TIKB--the Communist Workers
Party. As the strike progressed, members of some other
groups joined in.
MASSACRE INSTEAD OF MEDIATION
At first no one was able to hear their voices.
By the time the hunger strike reached its 40th day, some
organizations and progressive people began to take an
interest in it. Outside support became very strong.
Some writers, journalists, actors and other prominent people
began to support the strike.
There were demonstrations in cities around Turkey and
throughout Europe.
A group of famous progressive people--including the writer
Yasar Kemal and the journalist Oral Calislar--tried to
mediate between the political prisoners and the Turkish
government.
But even while negotiating, the Turkish government had a
different plan. This plan--to attack the prisoners--had
reportedly been in preparation for more than a year.
By December, it was thought that a settlement was imminent
and the hunger strike would end. Instead, on Dec. 19,
soldiers and prison guards attacked 21 prisons with
bulldozers, drills, bombs and chemical weapons.
Thirty-one political prisoners and two soldiers died in this
bloody massacre.
After the massacre, all the surviving political prisoners
were brought to F-type prisons. They were tortured. Most
were wounded.
Instead of being hospitalized, the wounded were put in tiny
cells.
After this bloody assault, the number of hunger strikers
rose to 2,000. The strike continues to this day.
WAR AGAINST LEFT AND KURDS
Why all of these bloody massacres and deaths?
The Turkish government has been waging a war against
leftists and Kurdish people, whom it sees as its biggest
enemies.
While resistance has been very strong, so has oppression.
There has been a succession of military takeovers. Each time
the army took over the government, it put many leftists and
Kurdish people in jail.
But the prisoners learned to turn the jail into a school for
struggle. Because of this, the prisons have been a big
problem for the Turkish government. Whenever they wanted to
break down the socialist resistance, they first attacked the
prisons.
Turkey has been known for its prisons' bad conditions,
torture and killings of prisoners by prison guards and
soldiers.
For instance, in 1996, prison guards and soldiers attacked
Kurdish political prisoners and killed 11 of them in
Diyarbakir prison.
Prison guards and soldiers attacked political prisoners and
killed 10 of them in Ulucanlar prison last year.
After prison guards and soldiers attacked political
prisoners in Burdur prison this year, one prisoner's arm was
cut off. It was later found in a dog's mouth.
These are only a few examples of the government's bloody
tactics.
This isn't the first mass hunger strike in Turkish prisons.
Political prisoners went on a hunger strike in Metris prison
in Istanbul in 1984. Four died of starvation. The strike
ended after 72 days.
Their demands were to end torture in prison and not to have
to wear prison uniforms. Before this hunger strike, prisons
were torture centers. After the hunger strike the situation
changed little.
Another mass hunger strike took place in 1996. At that time,
almost all the political prisoners in all the prisons went
on hunger strike for the same demands. Twelve people died;
most of the survivors became ill. That hunger strike ended
on the 79th day.
GOVERNMENT REPRESSES SUPPORT
The State Security Court has made it a crime to write about
the hunger strike. The organizations that had supported it
were put under investigation.
For instance, the Turkish Human Rights Association (IHD),
the Turkish Doctor's Union (TTB), and the Istanbul lawyers'
organization Barosu were targeted for investigation.
The government closed six branches of the IHD. The state
prosecutor sued the TTB and Istanbul Barosu because they
showed interest in the hunger strike.
To make people forget the massacre in the Turkish prisons,
the Turkish government passed an amnesty law. But this law
didn't cover the political prisoners. It was only for non-
political prisoners.
Before the amnesty went into effect there were 72,000
prisoners in Turkey. Some 12,000 were political prisoners,
including leftists, Kurds, writers, journalists and members
of fervent Muslim organizations.
After the amnesty law, only the political prisoners remained
in the prisons. Most ordinary prisoners were released.
Now there is a big economic crisis in Turkey. Public
interest has turned in a different direction, and the
political prisoners' hunger strike has receded to the
background. But the prisoners' struggle has far from ended.
International support and solidarity are needed now more
than ever. The group Justice for Turkish Political Prisoners
is asking people to write to Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit
demanding an end to the F-system and attacks on the
prisoners.
Forward letters to: JTPP, c/o International Action Center,
31 Germania St., Jamaica Plain, MA 02130.
The IAC and Justice for Turkish Political Prisoners are
holding a solidarity meeting with Turkish political
prisoners on June 17 at 2 p.m. at the Community Church of
Boston, 565 Boylston St. in Boston's Copley Square.
Who knows how many more people will die or how many may
survive without any memory? But world history will never
forget this struggle, which has been written in blood and
torture.
[Cakir is a former Turkish political
prisoner.]
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: torstai 14. kes�kuu 2001 11:29
Subject: [WW] In Deep Water & Over his Head
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 21, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
EDITORIAL: IN DEEP WATER AND OVER HIS HEAD
While Texans in Houston were digging the mud out of their
living rooms after a devastating hurricane and flood that
killed at least 22 people and cost over a billion dollars in
damage, one former Texan, George Bush, was on his way to an
angry Europe to explain why his administration has torpedoed
the Kyoto Accord on global warming.
Global warming comes from a blanket of carbon dioxide around
the earth, which has been growing because of human
combustion of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.
The Kyoto Accord would impose limits on greenhouse gas
emissions. It took 10 years of difficult debate and
undeniable evidence that the world's climate has already
begun to change--producing storms, floods and droughts--
before this agreement was reached.
Bush went to Europe with a propaganda offensive, blaming
China and India for the U.S. refusal to honor the accord.
"The world's second largest emitter of greenhouse gases is
China," said Bush. "Yet China was entirely exempted from the
requirements of the Kyoto protocol. ... India was also
exempt from Kyoto."
Here are the facts, according to the Environmental
Protection Agency, Census Bureau International Data Base.
The United States, with just 4 percent of the world's
population, in 1997 produced 6,504 million metric tons of
carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide--about 25 percent
of the world's total. China emitted 4,965 metric tons of
these gases.
But the picture changes when you look at per capita figures.
The U.S. emits 24.3 metric tons per person. China emits only
4 metric tons per capita--one sixth the rate of the U.S.
India was third in total emissions--2,082 million metric
tons--but had only 2.2 metric tons per person. Of the top 10
producers of greenhouse gases, China and India were at the
bottom of the list of tons per person, after the U.S.,
Canada, South Africa, Russia, Germany, Britain, Japan and
Brazil.
Moreover, according to the June 12 New York Times, China
"has managed to reduce its emissions significantly in the
last few years." This is in spite of the fact that it was
not yet required to do so under the Kyoto Accord.
The Kyoto Accord takes into consideration that less
developed countries need time to develop the technology to
reduce their emissions. They are striving to modernize
antiquated industries and have little capital to spare.
It is entirely another matter with the U.S. and other
industrialized imperialist giants. There is no lack of
capital to restructure industry. The problem is rather that
the huge corporations which dominate production don't want
to lose one nickel in profits and have the political clout
to obstruct any agreement. Bush is as tight as any
politician can be with the oil, gas and coal industries--the
main fossil fuels. His "energy plan," announced earlier with
great fanfare, is nothing more than a monumental giveaway to
these corporate interests.
What Bush is demanding is that for every SUV manufacturer in
the U.S. who might be forced to produce vehicles with
greater fuel efficiency, China and India would have to close
down older factories making vital products without the means
to replace them or compensation of any kind.
He has another gimmick, too. U.S. corporations want to be
able to buy the rights to emit greenhouse gases from poorer
countries, rather than lower their own emissions.
The countries around the world that have been looted and
oppressed by capitalist colonialism and imperialism carry a
heavy burden of underdevelopment. People's China went
through years of revolutionary struggle to get to the point
where the imperialists could no longer walk through an "open
door" and take what they pleased.
Bush can't be allowed to use China and India or any other
Third World country as an excuse for his brutal disregard of
the environment. From Houston to Paris to Beijing, the
demand should be clear: Stop the corporate polluters!
Washington must honor the Kyoto Accords!
This administration's failure to do so will educate many
millions about what really needs to be done: build a
movement for a people's takeover of the energy industry.
Bush's other mission in Europe is to beat down opposition to
his costly and strategically offensive National Missile
Defense, which would completely demolish the 1972 Anti-
Ballistic Missile Treaty and the architecture of nuclear
arms control. This group of right-wing militarists now
running Washington wants to spend hundreds of billions of
dollars on a new space-based weapons system--at the same
time that U.S. climate science is falling far behind the
rest of the world.
An article in the June 11 New York Times reported that Japan
is building a $400 million Earth Simulator using
supercomputers capable of processing 1,000 times as much
information as "the typical computer array used for climate
modeling in the United States." While Europe holds the lead
in this field so important for understanding what the future
will bring, Washington is using its supercomputers to try
and put lasers in space.
The U.S. ruling class for decades has relied on military
spending to put it on top of the world and pull the economy
out of recessions. But the cost of this gargantuan drain on
the economy can now be felt throughout the scientific-
technological infrastructure of this country. While Bush is
fiddling, the air traffic control system is crumbling for
lack of decent computers and the waters are invading
Houston's research institutions.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: torstai 14. kes�kuu 2001 11:29
Subject: [WW] Let Korean Voices be Heard!
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 21, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
LET KOREAN VOICES BE HEARD!
The U.S. State Department has informed the Korea Truth
Commission that it is "unlikely to issue visas" to North
Korean witnesses "at this time." A delegation of 10 citizens
of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has been
scheduled to attend the Korea International War Crimes
Tribunal in New York on June 23.
Washington is trying to suppress the truth about U.S. war
crimes in Korea before, during and after the 1950-53 war.
Phone calls and letters demanding that the U.S. reverse its
position and grant visas to the North Koreans should be sent
to Secretary of State Colin Powell, telephone (202) 647-6878
and fax (202) 647-7388.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to:
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