I have a great respect for people who devote much of their life, and especially their golden years, to social justice, planning for a better world for future generations rather than just soaking up sun on a Floridian beach in winter or dancing the evenings away on colossal cruise ships. Now in his eighties, Jay Janson is one of these people desiring an improvement in the human condition for everyone.
In his bio, Janson describes himself as an archival research peoples’ historian activist, musician, and writer. His foray into writing began with a series of articles published in Hong Kong’s Window magazine in 1993 on cultural pollution caused by Western corporate media. He has since been published in many other venues, including Dissident Voice. Janson also branched out founding and coordinating the King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign: (King Condemned US Wars) and as well as Prosecute US Crimes against Humanity Now Campaign, the latter featuring a country by country history of US crimes.
I interviewed Jay Janson by email on prosecuting US war crimes.
Kim Petersen: You are unrelenting in your opposition to American crimes even though you are now in your eighties. At what point in your life did your opposition to US imperialism take place?
Jay Janson: I would never say I am opposed to American crimes, because until recently, I had assumed that everyone, unless a criminal, was opposed to homicidal crime, regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators. Same applies to saying I oppose something that has already become universally condemned, like imperialism. As a schoolboy, I was taught to hate and scorn Germans for their Nazi Reich, and the Japanese and Italians for their empires, which were invading neighboring nations and killing people. Kids didn’t hear about imperialism. Looking back, I find it an example of our purposeful dis-education, that British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese and early American invading, enslaving and colonizing of non white peoples was not taught to be hated or scorned as despicable, but rather accepted as just a part of the history of European and American accomplishments of ‘manifest destiny’ that were of course not always entirely laudable.
Perhaps, it is more accurate to ask, at what point did I become ashamed of being an American and bitter that mass murder was being done in my name and everyone else treasonously. I became aware embarrassingly late, I confess. Oh, I had learned while still very young from overhearing talk on the street and in stores, that a capitalist was a dangerous person who would trick you out of your money. In history courses I had learned about communists wanted to stop the wealthy from stealing and controlling society, but I remember saying, let them steal as much as they want as long as they don’t kill people. I have my music. I like what the stride pianist Fats Waller had quipped, “Only music is real – everything else is seeming.”
At aged twenty, my mind filled with music and women, I had allowed myself to be drafted during the Korean war. I now look back and find it incredible that while having fun learning to fire dozens of different types of weapons, I never once had the thought that they could kill someone. Four of my basic training bunk-mates got themselves buried somewhere in North Korea, while I toured Europe with the US Army’s only symphony orchestra. Fate.
In the last year of the Eisenhower administration and the first of the Kennedy’s, wife and I are having a wonderful time with our two little kids in sunny San Juan, Puerto Rico, working under one the greatest musicians of all time, Pablo Casals, enjoying the warm Latin culture, the sea and breezy air, when I happened to notice something contradictory in the news reports about how the US was bombing in Laos to ‘help” protect a government, which the French were no longer able to keep from being overthrown. I had happened to notice the beginning of our mercilessly dropping of more bombs on the tiny defenseless nation of Laos, than all the bombs dropped during the whole of World War Two. Once, interested, the whole disgusting US betraying of its WW II Vietnamese allies against the Vichy French/Japanese occupation of their country became shockingly apparent to me. The greater shock was that all my family and friends considered me duped by communist propaganda. I had assumed that if a simple, slow thinking guy like me could notice this obvious horror of horrors, others would be aware of it more quickly, once alerted to the lies. I was wrong. No one around me was interested to think it through — all except my mom, who had not finished grade school and never learned not to think.
KP: You have had a long career as a musician; has that played any part in your social justice activism?
JJ: Since every masterpiece in the orchestral repertoire is of a particular culture, place and time, a musician tends to falls in love with mankind in all its diversity along with the music.
Then, work as a musician taking me to some many countries became the critical part of my education about America’s crimes against humanity, made me want to represent the people that [Martin Luther] King said have no voice in America.
The timing of quite a few of my particular invites for overseas performance led quite a few musician colleagues in the US to suspect I was CIA. Seems I was always coming back from some ‘hot spot.’ I was touring Germany and the continent during the intrigues in post World War Two Europe. Spent a week in Berlin and East Berlin before the wall went up. Was invited to Cuba at the beginning of the Castro revolution. Was on the first State Dept. cultural exchange with the Soviet Union. State Dept. sponsored ABT tour of all of Latin America during US supported coups in 1964; I had a letter from the head of Latin American Studies, Columbia U., got to interview ex-ministers. Another State Dept. sponsored tour to Central America to patch over a recent US invasion of the Dominican Republic. While teaching and performing in Puerto Rico, I agitated and worked to keep students from being drafted for Vietnam. One year playing in Tito’s Yugoslavia and touring with its best ensembles. Four years in Rome, when Italian politics was a confrontation between Christian Democrats and Communists. I was working on a film for the African Development Bank in Ethiopia during the Mengistu communist government and in Mali, also socialist governed. In Lesotho just before the South Africans invaded for it being leftist, thrown out of rightist Malawi. Taught in many conservatories and orchestras in China, took its Shanghai Symphony as Assistant Conductor on 1st tour to Japan right after Tiananmen Square [Massacre]. Lived in Hong Kong during the run up to its return to China. Was Assistant Conductor of the Ho Chi Minh-founded Vietnam Symphony during most of the 1990s and before the US let up on its economic sanctions. Did a stint for the State Dept. as Coach of the Bangkok Symphony during continuing Army clamp down on university students. Visited Manila in the time of Marcos. Lived in South Korea for six years not very long after the end of military dictatorships there. By virtue of having a weekly column on Music in the South China Morning Post and doing reviews for Ta Kung Bao, I got invited to write commentary for China Daily following publication of my first submission, and to write a well-received series of articles on seven deadly areas of cultural pollution emanating from Western media published in an important Hong Kong magazine. My articles on media got me in good with Howard Zinn, Chomsky, Ed Herman and others.
KP: I see we have touched down in a few similar parts of the globe. You spent time in South Korea. My view from 2004-2006 is that the country is split. There is a segment of the Korean people who would like American occupiers to leave and close their bases, and there are those who believe that Americans are needed because they have been propagandized into believing North Koreans pose a threat. What are your impressions?
JJ: I would say, your view is a good synopsis, Kim. Maybe add that, no matter what Koreans think of Realpolitik, practicality and personal safety, below the surface of an exemplary and obligatory strict Confucian respectful behavior towards individual Americans, to say that Americans are especially disliked in general, is a huge understatement. Koreans are aware, as Americans are not, that the US had for forty years treated Korea as territory of Imperial Japan by an arrangement among colonial powers before its Army arrived in 1945. US occupation began after the Japanese surrender elsewhere and proceeded to put aside the proto government that unions and farm organizations had already set up and criminally divide their land in two and forcing the election of a murderous dictator in the US zone. Syngman Rhee was so hated that he had to flee for his life within a few years after the colonial powers invaded Korea under the UN flag to reinstate his overthrown presidency. Today Syngman Rhee’s name is never mentioned apart from noting in schoolbooks that he was the first president of the southern half of what any Korean will tell you was, and will always be, one Korean nation.
I have Korean family, and as a founding professor of a now prestigious Seoul conservatory of music, I am close with quite a few intellectuals and many students who by Korean Confucian tradition insist on making themselves closer to me than my own sons. I’ve heard so many hair-raising stories of family life under American occupation and under the hated American installed President Rhee, who was brought over from Washington. His having massacred some 200,000 of his own people before the North came South is now well documented. Before the partition and before the invasion that reunited the peninsula in five short weeks, the northern zone had been looked to as the more industrially and culturally developed part of Korea. I know many in the art world who still today look to the uncommercialized North for cultural purity. Of course, the scary side of today’s carefully overseen freedom in South Korea makes them careful to not be overheard.
KP: I am in sympathy with Martin Luther King’s activism for human rights and peace, but I find myself more drawn to Malcolm X and his active resistance rather than passive resistance. As an anarchistic type myself, I prefer, however, to focus on the masses and the power that lies within them rather than on individuals, as a focus on individuals strikes me as somewhat elitist. Why did you choose to focus your activism around Martin Luther King?
JJ: USSR, Fidel, China, Nepal are historic revolts against the deadly private investment banking hegemony. Yes, Che Guevara was, as few know, a towering, perceptive, well-educated intellectual who predicted the coming failure of the Soviets vis-à-vis the private investment-controlled West. Che also saw the preferable possibility of the ballot box that actually came to happen with Bolivia electing a revolutionary farmer as president.
I too, was more drawn to Malcolm X for his not wanting to see African-Americans become a part of what he called a satanic Anglo-Saxonized America; however, the bullets to his chest and the chest of Fred Hampton put a perhaps impracticable goal to rest, as I see it. Anyway, just as you believe, and King stressed, we the people have enough power, and the responsibility to get the job done non-violently.
In any case, my focus on Martin Luther King has nothing to do with the civil rights movement that gave King notoriety. My focus is the same focus that Martin Luther King switched to the year the investment community made sure was his last, a focus that held himself, America and Americans responsible for its government being the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
It was only in 2010, a full year after I, along with Ramsey Clark and Howard Zinn’s wish, co-founded the King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign that I realized that none of its celebrity endorsers were following in King’s footsteps. Firstly, King held himself and all America and Americans responsible for these “‘atrocity wars’ and homicidal use of CIA covert operations on three continents.” Responsible, for their being fully capable of making these criminal atrocities unacceptable and inoperable through non-cooperation. King did not blame the government, which he dismissed as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. He blamed himself and us.
Secondly, King stated clearly, in his sermon “Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence,” that he could “no longer work for social and racial justice at home while Americans deny the very right to life itself to the poor overseas at cost in human and financial resources that makes social progress here among us impossible.” My fellow antiwar activists, as a whole, continue to protest to their re-elected war criminals and focus heartlessly on the domestic issues of the very Americans that continue to kill my brothers and sisters overseas with great fervor.
KP: Recently you have focused on a Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign. DV agrees with the cause 100%, as — obviously — prosecution for war crimes might serve to give pause to war criminals, something that Nuremberg does not seem to have done, as aggression – “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” – has been serially launched by hyper-empire. You have openly been taking issue with some people usually identified as progressives for not having the same focus as you, and this comes across as, with all due respect, bully-like and attempting to coerce something that cannot be coerced: solidarity. Why should every social justice activist conform to your stance?
JJ: My stance? I didn’t make the law. Social justice activists should obey the law like everyone else should obey the law, and not be an accomplice, supporter, or accessory after the fact to American mass murder ongoing on for sixty two years.
I have been taking issue with prominent journalists who expose US crimes but are careful not to call for their prosecution and consistently ignore the 1967 teaching of Martin Luther King Jr. a teaching that was such an enormous threat to investors in war and thievery.
Or to put it more directly, I take issue with them for calling their organizations antiwar while they focus on getting a better cut of the imperialist pie for Americans continuing to kill for Wall St. overseas. Better housing, health care, higher wages, veterans perks, safety from rape of our women training to go kill overseas, homosexual rights, lower taxes, voting rights so minorities can participate in the choosing between two parties promising more war. Look over the daily fare of antiwar journalists and see how many of their articles are about domestic issues while the US crimes against humanity go on unaddressed by them.
Bullying? I realized long ago that my colleagues, and even some of my mentors, have no intention to stop Americans from continuing to murder people in their own beloved countries, more often than not in their own homes. They have no intention, for believing it to be impossible to stop, or being aware that protests have never ended or prevented a war. Most volunteers want to feel better about themselves and present themselves as Americans innocent of war support and participation, which of course is not true. Too many progressive sites avoid taking on the horrific lies of commercial media when so well planted that their liberal sources of funding would be at risk. Example, Libya and Syria.
But in any case, education for education’s sake alone amounts to little or no consequence, and is in effect like prayer without intention to act. All the truth we learned about the real reasons for the invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq et al., has had zero effect upon the continuing massive bloodshed for the same investment power maintenance that no one can stop without law enforcement.
No matter the daily death toll adding to the millions of victims of US Armed Forces, the idea of prosecuting known US crimes against humanity is unacceptable in the peace industry. However, in poor immigrant communities it is felt to be a very logical step and would be God’s compassionate justice. The only people that protested to Al Capone were those in the racket with him. The people of Chicago called for his arrest and prosecution.
My Korean and Vietnamese family members and colleagues see through this contradiction of protesting to, at the same time protecting, supporting and re-electing, leaders overseeing continuing atrocities in poor nations.
Antiwar activists today would not think of spitting on returning soldiers as many activists did in the 1970s. There is no opposition at all to veterans of illegal wars being continuously honored as eternal heroes by re-elected politicians and media anchors for the crimes they committed in poor countries. Today’s peace activists call for support for the troops and rarely, if ever, ask them to stop killing and become conscientious objectors, as martyred Martin Luther King Jr. advised.
Bullying activists who don’t tell their fellow Americans to stop killing my brothers and sisters overseas; bullying activists who don’t call TV anchors and war promoting movie stars like punk Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Tom Hanks, Charlton Heston, John Wayne war criminals for suckering kids into dealing in death and maiming for the lies generated by the investment community; bullying activists who don’t stand up to apostate clergy like Billy Graham blessing just wars and returning coffins?
Bullying, no, I hope not. Sounds too weak. I have been attacking, with all my poor abilities, those masquerading behind words as good guys against crimes they support in a million ways. And I include myself. In Vietnam and Korea no one was impressed that I was against the wars. The pitiful little I did, knowing the truth, makes me worse than those who championed the killing in ignorance.
Since my retaking up residence stateside, I have written some three hundred well documented articles aimed at Americans pretending not to support deadly US imperialism. Are progressive imperialists, progressive capitalists any less imperialist, any less capitalist, for being progressively so? Every empire has had its apologists and reformers of the unreformable.
In an America mostly made up of incoming immigrants or descendants of immigrants or colonizers, I have had the good fortune of being sent in the opposite direction. I am a product of my experiences abroad. My heart is always with the purer peoples my fellow Americans have seen fit to bomb, torture, and exploit.
I am happy Dissident Voice endorses King Condemned US Wars Awareness, and that on the educational website Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now, the clear and simple words of DV’s Co-Editor Kim Petersen, “Justice is required, otherwise what would serve as a brake on future war crimes?” sum up well the more dramatic quotes from Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Jeremiah Wright, Cindy Sheehan and Cornel West, which I have committed to memory. “America must prosecute its own war criminals”; “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged”; “The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy”; “God Damn America for her crimes against humanity”; “War criminals need to go to prison for what they have done, no pardon”; “Drones are War Crimes!” Too many activists find these blistering remonstrations over the top, even humorous. But your cool succinct description of the powerful effect of the law, brought to bear, cannot be laughed off, and for me is the best incentive for joining a public call for the prosecution of US crimes against humanity.
KP: You write, “Social justice activists should obey the law like everyone else should obey the law…” but that law is almost always crafted by the arch-criminals themselves. Yet what right do governments founded through aggression and genocide – for example, Canada, the US, Aotearoa, Australia — have to formulate and dictate laws. They have violated the very core and sanctity of Natural Law. Insofar as any law is crafted by and just for everyone, then it should be obeyed. However, I submit that since the system is an abomination, since the system is immoral, since the system is wreaking gross injustices and evils, the masses have a legitimate right to resist and to resist in equal measure the violence of the system – the law be damned.
Let me elaborate on what I meant by bullying because it is based on what I read in some emails where a “progressive” was being taken to the task for not calling for prosecution of US war crimes. From the wording and my perspective, it seemed as if the criticism was based on the absence of the call for prosecution, in an article or articles, rather than the fact that the person actually opposed prosecution. It made me wonder if you had contacted that person for their view on whether to prosecute or not — and if they did indeed support prosecution, why did this person not write on the subject. In the event that someone were holding their hand over US war criminals, then they are open to criticism/attack; however, when the person who is being criticized/attacked has not been asked to make known their views, then that sounds unfair, and it borders on bullying.
As far as “support for the troops,” I profess no support for killers. Many are victims of ignorance or just trying to scrape by and make a living. Society owes it to all citizens to provide a decent-paying job, and it owes it to all citizens to be open and up front with all information about warring. I recognize the power patriotism has on many minds. To some extent the duped are responsible for being duped, but the deserving target for greatest scorn is the duper.
As you stated, that duping plays out in every election cycle, but it also played out among some of those names you put forth in your cause because people like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky are among those having advocated a lesser evilist voting strategy – at least in certain constituencies.
JJ: Howard Zinn agreed final responsibility rests on we the people, and he let me use his name in campaigning for everyone to quote from King’s “Beyond Vietnam.” Chomsky wishes me luck to get US crimes prosecuted in my lifetime. Boy, have I ever contacted, even gone to see a few prominent activists, and their view is consistent with my description: “They answer as if throwing up their hands and say no court would ever prosecute US crime.” But they will, Kim! There are hundreds of examples of moving in this direction — the family of the three US citizens that were ordered killed by drones are suing Panetta, Petraeus and two commanders in a federal district court right now — and the NY Times (of all people) is planning to appeal Manhattan District Court’s refusal to open files of ‘judicious decision’ to murder by drones.
Cindy Sheehan, Angela Keaton, Chomsky, Bill Blum, Kevin Zeese, and Cynthia McKinney insist they wholeheartedly agree, but STILL, to my knowledge, have never urged the public to call for prosecution of the crimes they write about, and I’m grateful David Swanson politely says, “I have a point.”
I am still urging them, Glen Ford, various religion-based King-endorsing groups. But to call for prosecution of the crimes, not individuals beforehand.
Social justice activists should obey those very basic to life laws that are not crafted by the arch-criminals themselves, and be a model for everyone else obeying these basic laws, and not be an accomplice, supporter, or accessory after the fact to American mass murder ongoing on for sixty two years. Don’t have to worry about resisting the immoral laws crafted by the arch-criminals that are in contradiction to common law, Nuremberg Principles Law and scriptural law. These in-fact-illegal wars will evaporate as the real and true laws are enforced, as did the racist ‘laws’ of the South with the prosecutions of the crimes against humanity initially in the streets almost silently by a multitude that could not be denied. Social justice activists should not ignore common law, the US Constitution, Nuremberg Principle Laws, The General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, and the fiercest injunctions in scripture they live by in their personal life, and be an accomplices, supporters, or accessories after the fact to American mass murder ongoing for sixty two years.
Not only ignorance, but apathy is also no excuse before the law, both in public court and in the court of our conscience.
I make a practice of memorizing a hell of a lot of quotes that Tom Feeley of Information Clearing House prefaces his current round-up newsletter with.
“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” — Plato
“Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.” — Bodie Thoene
“Most Americans aren’t the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right.” — Joseph Sobran, columnist
“By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy — indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.” — William Osler (Canadian physician, 1849-1919)
KP: Recently you wrote to Michael Moore, “Michael, if we know all this [the crimes perpetrated by the United States], and yet do not call for the full force of the law to be put into effect in prosecution of these crimes against humanity, are we not acting as Accessories After the Fact… [Quoting from the Text – USC Title 18 – CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE www.gpo.gov/fdsys/…/USCODE-2010-title18-partI-chap1-sec3.htm ‘ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT = Whoever, knowing that an offense has been committed, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial or punishment, is an accessory after the fact; one who knowing a felony to have been committed by another, receives, relieves, comforts, or assists the felon in order to hinder the felon’s apprehension, trial, or punishment.’].” I submit that following a strict adherence to the law you cited that no judge would find ordinary citizens as Accessories After the Fact. I fail to see in what way Moore “receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial or punishment.” I find Moore’s progressivism rather effete; that aside, however, could you explain how Moore is criminally culpable?
JJ: I don’t think that Michael Moore, who gave us that most astounding movie Bowling for Columbine, portraying America’s killer reality, would for a moment want to extricate himself from the “we” in “if ‘we’ know all this [the crimes perpetrated by the United States], and yet do not call for the full force of the law to be put into effect in prosecution of these crimes against humanity, are we not acting as Accessories After the Fact.”
Michael knows he has continued to make marvelous public education films that await use in prosecuting all the crimes against humanity he has so well documented — deprivation of health care, exploitation of communities, death and destruction abroad, and economic Wall Street crimes, etc. But if Martin Luther King Jr. held himself, along with America, responsible for “US atrocity wars,” why would the extraordinarily, perceptive, talented and incisively compassionate Michael Moore not hold himself as co-responsible and complicit, as the very Obama, Moore saw as necessary to reelect, continues to sign his name to ever new “atrocity wars” — the same kind of US atrocities ongoing since Korea, which, as in the cases of Vietnam and Iraq, he lyingly praises as protective of American freedom. Moore knows otherwise; the wars were illegal, as Ron Paul repeated over and over again on prime time. Moore knows the criminal wars are meant, as King cried out, “for maintaining unjust predatory overseas investments.”
Does it help assuage a conscience that no judge is presently going to indict anyone as an accessory after the fact of crimes for calling for the reelection of a good prospective candidate for Nuremberg judgement?
What seems unheard of today can come about tomorrow: technology racing forward, instant personal world-wide communication, and computers capable of a trillion operations a nano-second. King could not find a judge to prosecute racist crime, but today racist crime is prosecuted. Gandhi could not expect to get a judge to prosecute the crimes of the British Empire, but once the British left indictments were issued. Iranians could not find a court to prosecute the crimes of the Shah that did come to be prosecuted in courts. In all three cases and many more, prosecution took place in the street before it did in court. When the public is heard murmuring in the street about bringing the law to bear on this continuing illegal homicidal it will cause some fright among investors, media, clergy and politicians involved! — as it did when King condemned imperialist capitalism.
Imagine how many parents, right now, are against their young sons killing the poor in their own beloved country far from US shores. How many are against paying the taxes they pay every year that are used to kill charming people and patriots fighting brutal US invasions of their homelands. How many will come to want the lies and adulation of merciless gun play overseas on TV inciting violence on public owned airwaves prosecuted? Well, what is stopping them from speaking up?
KP: Now prince Harry is a clearer case for me. Here is a silver-spoon-in-mouth type that is truly in the military of his own accord, a person who should be as well apprised of what is actually going on in Afghanistan and why it is going on as any government minister or in-the-loop military officer. The question is how does one put royalty on trial for war crimes? They hobnob with the powers-that-be. This actually is asking how one puts power on trial? It is not that simple, and trying to put these big-time war criminals in the docket, in Orwellian fashion, usually finds one brutalized by police and sentenced in court. Splitting the Sky attempted a citizen’s arrest of George Bush Jr when he visited Calgary, Alberta in 2009 and wound up in court himself. (See “Canadian court to sentence Splitting the Sky over attempted Bush arrest,” RT.com, 8 June 2010.)
JJ: You are obviously referring to my article: “Prince Harry Cowardly Murders in Afghanistan as Savage British Have for Centuries.” I have in all my recent articles promoted a call for prosecution of US crimes against humanity from the angle of a particular news event, but always pointing out that selective prosecution of fall guys is not going to do anything except permit the investors behind the wars to continue them. The indictment of pathetic figures of homicidal notoriety like Prince Harry, King Obama, or a mentally challenged Dubya and their entourage, though to be expected, is not fundamental to restoring reason and law in the world.
The failure of the Allied trial of the generals, a few ministers and media propagandist Nazis, was dramatically pointed out by the council for the defense in his famous summation. Watch the Burt Lancaster movie, Judgement at Nuremberg. Ford and DuPont were among those who succeeded in funding Hitler against the wishes of the great majority of the German public who in the beginning saw him as a frightening and freaky nut, and not only for his monstrous plans for communists, the Soviet Union and Jews. Crucial American investment, led by Rockefeller, Harriman, Dulles, Bush, Walker, Kennedy and almost every single large American corporation led by GM and GE, by investing in low-wage German labor and joint ventures, raised an economically prostate Nazi Germany to #1 military power, all the while knowing full well of Hitler’s announced intentions, and already begun actions, against Jews, communists, socialists and for eastward expansion.
My article, “US Economic Facilitation of Holocaust and Middle East Destabilizing Partition,” published in the UK, subtitled — US Invested Heavily in Hitler Facilitating Holocaust Used Survivors to Destabilize Arabia documents this basic deceit that childishly blames Hitler for WW II. Though five Nazi media personalities were tried at Nuremberg, no German banker or industrialist was indicted, most certainly because the super heavy involvement of the elite of American society would have come out like gangbusters. Instead of dealing with this basic deceit, we fight to expose each new deceit, new war on the criminal media’s agenda.
There is no excuse for not demanding that our laws be enforced and crimes prosecuted, especially if the crime is the mass-murder of millions of innocent people. Everyone knows laws that are not being enforced do not cease to exist. When I ask and finally challenge my peace activist colleagues, they throw up their hands at me, and say no court would try any of these crimes against humanity like the Vietnam War, as every one didn’t know the present courts are involved in the crimes.
I have come to know personally many activists, and feel I’m spoiling their having a good time. It is the same in Europe. In London with the start of the bombing of Baghdad in an assassination attempt that instead took the lives of a multitude in an air raid shelter, I joined a protest march, but dropped out after twenty minutes. I couldn’t stand the inappropriate laughing and merry making of the well meaning young paraders waving to the onlookers.
- I have memorized the resolution on the Prosecute Now website, which was neither approved or disapproved at the 2012 Veterans For Peace Convention and at a United National Antiwar Coalition week-end affair:
Whereas during WW II and the Allied occupation of Germany afterward, we soldiers, our folks back home and the citizens of the many nations Germany invaded, bombed, and occupied, in their hearts, to a great degree, held the German people responsible for the crimes of their soldiers and government,
and
– whereas there be few adult Americans, who are not in some way or another complicit in the crimes against humanity of their brothers and sisters in colonially impoverished nations since WW II,
whereas Martin Luther King Jr. finding no court willing to prosecute racist crimes, successfully led their prosecution in the court of public opinion;
– whereas Mahatma Gandhi finding no court would prosecute the crimes of the British Empire, successfully led their prosecution in the court of public opinion;
– and whereas the people of Iran finding their courts unwilling to prosecute the crimes of the Shah, successfully led their peoples prosecution in the court of public opinion;
– be it resolved that law-abiding Americans, finding that US courts will not bring the force of common law, statutory law, Constitutional law and Nuremberg Principles law down upon perpetrators of illegal wars on poor people in colonially impoverished nations, that we citizens of all walks of life will seek to lead prosecution of these illegal and homicidal wars in the court of public opinion to punish these crimes against humanity and prevent them from further happening until our courts can do so.
I am so positive that our being accessories after the fact to US crimes against humanity will soon be realized by a lead segment of the public that will call for prosecution of those US crimes against humanity and allow indictments to fall as they may.
Perhaps, it is more likely that this will be driven from abroad. It won’t be a selective and partial prosecution of particular politicians in office, but an in depth prosecution of US crimes against humanity that will indict leaders in various areas of US society. David Rockefeller, who through his appointed confidants, Dulles, Kissinger and Brzezinsky has had a hand in all of America’s illegal wars from Korea to Syria, will surely be a star defendant if he manages to live a little longer. At the same time citizens of other NATO nations will call for prosecution of their nations’ participation in crimes against humanity.
With universal deceit in successfully programed psy-ops for predatory investment maintenance able to easily marginalize the efforts of filmmakers Stone and Moore while greater wars are being prepared by fabulous investments in manufacture and deployment of WMD, I see no other scenario than a dawn of reason and implementation of the Nuremberg and other laws to finally bringing sanity to humanity long savaged by a criminal international banking consensus.
It would be nicer if it could come about before, not after, the multinational war being planned.
At eighty-two I am looking to handing off my campaigns to someone more well known and capable than I am and returning to music full time. The educational website Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign features the pertinent laws and a country-by-country color-coded history of US crimes in nineteen and counting countries, as well as the King Condemned US Wars website is there for all to use. No obligation, no request, no organized activity, no money or any commitment asked for.
You are conducting this interview from China, where I came across Siddhartha Buddha’s final admonishment not to trust what you are told by anyone, even himself, above your own discernment. Let people everywhere decide for themselves what can bring back reason in the world, if not the enforcement of laws that protect society from criminal violence.
I recently happened to watch Paul Newman’s desperate plea to the jury in the movie Verdict. It is a piece of visionary poetry worth memorizing.
You know, so much of time is just lost.
We say, Please, God, tell us what is right; tell us what is true.
And there is no justice: the rich win, the poor are powerless.
We become tired of hearing people lie.
And after a time, we become dead… a little dead.
We think of ourselves as victims… and we become victims. We become… we become weak.
We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs.
We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law.
But You ARE the law. Not some book… not the lawyers… not the, a marble statue… or the trappings of the courts.
See, those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are… they are, in fact, a prayer: a fervent and a frightened prayer.In my religion, they say, “Act as if ye had faith… and faith will be given to you.”
IF… if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And ACT with justice. I believe there is justice in our hearts.
… the above is similar to how Martin Luther King Jr. ended his otherwise fiery sermon and history lesson, “Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence.”