The mayor of Nagasaki, Tomihisa Taue, presents the Nagasaki Peace Declaration, saying that “rather than envisioning a nuclear-free world as a faraway dream, we must quickly decide to solve this issue by working towards the abolition of these weapons, fulfilling the promise made to global society”. Credit: YouTube

By Ramesh Jaura
BERLIN/TOKYO, Aug 10 2015 (IPS)

Seventy years after the brutal and militarily unwarranted atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, a nuclear weapons free world is far from within reach.

Commemorating the two events, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made impassioned pleas for heeding the experiences of the survivors of the atomic bombings and the growing worldwide awareness of the compelling need for complete abolition of such weapons.

The atomic bombings in 1945 destroyed the two cities, and more than 200,000 people died of nuclear radiation, shockwaves from the blasts and thermal radiation. Over 400,000 have died since the end of the war, from the after-effects of the bombs.

As of Mar. 31, 2015, the Japanese government had recognised 183,519 as ‘hibakusha’ (explosion-affected people), most of them living in Japan. Japan’s Atomic Bomb Survivors Relief Law defines hibakusha as people who were: within a few kilometres of the hypocentres of the bombs; within 2 km of the hypocentres within two weeks of the bombings; exposed to radiation from fallout; or not yet born but carried by pregnant women in any of these categories.“Our world still bristles with more than 15,000 nuclear weapons, and policy-makers in the nuclear-armed states remain trapped in provincial thinking, repeating by word and deed their nuclear intimidation” – Kazumi Matsui, mayor of Hiroshima

During the commemorative events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reports in several newspapers confirmed that those bombings were militarily unwarranted.

Gar Alperovitz, formerly Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, wrote in The Nation that that “the war was won before Hiroshima – and the generals who dropped the bomb knew it.”

He quoted Adm. William Leahy, President Harry S. Truman’s Chief of Staff, who wrote in his 1950 memoir ‘I Was There’ [that] “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender …”

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the U.S. president from 1953 until 1961, shared this view. He was a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.

Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

Even the famous “hawk” Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command, went public the month after the bombing, telling the press that “the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all,” wrote Alperovitz.

“The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish,” warned Robert Oppenheimer, widely considered the father of the bomb, as he called on politicians to place the terrifying power of the atom under strict international control.

Oppenheimer’s call has yet to be followed.

In his fervent address on Aug. 6, Kazumi Matsui, mayor of the City of Hiroshima, said: “Our world still bristles with more than 15,000 nuclear weapons, and policy-makers in the nuclear-armed states remain trapped in provincial thinking, repeating by word and deed their nuclear intimidation.”

He added: “We now know about the many incidents and accidents that have taken us to the brink of nuclear war or nuclear explosions. Today, we worry as well about nuclear terrorism.”

As long as nuclear weapons exist, he warned, anyone could become a hibakusha at any time. If that happens, the damage would reach indiscriminately beyond national borders. “People of the world, please listen carefully to the words of the hibakusha and, profoundly accepting the spirit of Hiroshima, contemplate the nuclear problem as your own,” he exhorted.

As president of Mayors for Peace, comprising mayors from more than 6,700 member cities, Kazumi Matsui vowed: “Hiroshima will act with determination, doing everything in our power to accelerate the international trend toward negotiations for a nuclear weapons convention and abolition of nuclear weapons by 2020.”

This, he said, was the first step toward nuclear weapons abolition. The next step would be to create, through the trust thus won, broadly versatile security systems that do not depend on military might.

“Working with patience and perseverance to achieve those systems will be vital, and will require that we promote throughout the world the path to true peace revealed by the pacifism of the Japanese Constitution,” he added.

“We call on the Japanese government, in its role as bridge between the nuclear- and non-nuclear-weapon states, to guide all states toward these discussions, and we offer Hiroshima as the venue for dialogue and outreach,” the mayor of Hiroshima said.

In the Nagasaki Peace Declaration issued on Aug. 9, Nagasaki mayor Tomihisa Taue asked the Japanese government and Parliament to “fix your sights on the future, and please consider a conversion from a ‘nuclear umbrella’ to a ‘non-nuclear umbrella’.”

Japan does not possess any atomic weapons and is protected, like South Korea and Germany, as well as most of the NATO member states, by the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

He appealed to the Japanese government to explore national security measures, which do not rely on nuclear deterrence. “The establishment of a ‘Northeast Asia Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (NEA-NWFZ),’ as advocated by researchers in America, Japan, Korea, China, and many other countries, would make this possible,” he said.

Referring to the Japanese Parliament “currently deliberating a bill, which will determine how our country guarantees its security”, he said: “There is widespread unease and concern that the oath which was engraved onto our hearts 70 years ago and the peaceful ideology of the Constitution of Japan are now wavering. I urge the Government and the Diet to listen to these voices of unease and concern, concentrate their wisdom, and conduct careful and sincere deliberations.”

The Nagasaki Peace Declaration noted that the peaceful ideology of the Constitution of Japan was born from painful and harsh experiences, and from reflection on the war. “Since the war, our country has walked the path of a peaceful nation. For the sake of Nagasaki, and for the sake of all of Japan, we must never change the peaceful principle that we renounce war,” the declaration said.

The Nagasaki mayor regretted that the Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) held at the United Nations earlier this year had struggled with reaching agreement on a Final Document.

However, said Taue, the efforts of those countries which were attempting to ban nuclear weapons had made possible a draft Final Document “which incorporated steps towards nuclear disarmament.”

He urged the heads of NPT member states not to allow the NPT Review Conference “to have been a waste”. Instead, they should continue their efforts to debate a legal framework, such as a ‘Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC),’ at every opportunity, including at the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Many countries at the Review Conference were in agreement that it was important to visit the atomic-bombed cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Against this backdrop, the Nagasaki mayor appealed to “President [Barack] Obama, heads of state, including the heads of the nuclear weapon states, and all the people of the world … (to) please come to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and see for yourself exactly what happened under those mushroom clouds 70 years ago.”

No U.S. president has ever attended the any event to commemorate the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller was the highest-ranking U.S. official at the Aug. 6 ceremony. She was reported as saying that nuclear weapons should never be used again.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The 100-year anniversary of World War I (1914-18) may have come and gone, but the role of Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip – the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – remains controversial in the turbulent history of the Balkans. For some he was a terrorist, for others a hero.

The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo marked the 100 years since assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie over the weekend in series of ceremonies dedicated to the event that triggered the 1914-18 war, and numerous messages of peace were delivered with calls that history should not be repeated and that violence should be excluded from the modern world.

But if many are looking to the future, historians agree that the tragic event of June 28, 1914, still haunts the region, after Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats were plunged into an atrocious inter-ethnic war more than seven decades later.Historians agree that the tragic event of June 28, 1914, still haunts the region, after Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats were plunged into an atrocious inter-ethnic war more than seven decades later

“Unfortunately, it is possible to link World War I and its influence to recent events in the Balkans,” historian Danilo Sarenac of the Belgrade Institute for Modern History told IPS in an interview.

“World War I led to the creation of Yugoslavia, which disintegrated in the 1990s; there is a predominant idea among its former republics that this state was a sort of illusion, a mistake, a kind of ‘dungeon of nations’, and that it had to disappear,” he said.

When Yugoslavia fell apart, six new states – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia – were created. Ethnic Albanian-populated Kosovo declared unilateral independence from Serbia in 2008, but has not yet been widely recognised as a state.

Socialist Yugoslavia itself was an heir to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, created at the end of WW I. Its biggest portion, Serbia, an ally of Great Britain and France, was rewarded for participation in victory over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany by obtaining South Slav-populated areas of Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia.

The assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was Gavrilo Princip, a 20-year-old Bosnian Serb and member of Young Bosnia, a revolutionary movement seeking the unification of all South Slav nations. He claimed to be “a Yugoslav (South Slav) nationalist” at his trial in 1914. At the time, Bosnia was part of the Austro-Hungary Empire that disintegrated in WW I.

According to Sarenac, “Princip’s action is being interpreted differently, depending on periods we observe in consecutive Yugoslavias.”

“When needed, Princip is a hero who helped create Yugoslavia; but, as newly carved out states (former Yugoslav republics) renounce Yugoslavia, they describe him as a ‘cruel Serb nationalist’. Divisions along such lines were visible in World War II, and came full circle in the 1990s. They were used or abused by everyone at will,” he added.

Princip is blamed by many outside Serbia as the man who triggered World War I, but historians say the world was practically ready for a major war due to many complicated circumstances.

“Princip’s act was just an ingredient that was needed to ignite it,” says Sarenac.

History books say that the Austro-Hungarian Empire blamed Bosnia’s neighbour Serbia for masterminding the assassination of the Archduke; Germany backed the Empire in declaring war against Serbia on June 28, and in a matter of days Russia, Great Britain, France and many other nations were drawn into an unprecedented conflict that took 16 million lives and left 20 million wounded.

For university history professor Predrag Markovic, there is a paradox among the states created by the disintegration of former Yugoslavia.

“They deny that Yugoslavia was created as a deliberate project after World War I, that it was a secular state, designed to bridge religious and regional differences between its new member nations,” Markovic told IPS.

“At the time, Yugoslavia was created much like the European Union today, as a union of entities that share same values. It is absurd that newly created states (since 1991) deny its progressive essence, because many of them – like Macedonia or Slovenia – would not exist had there not been the Yugoslavia after the WW I and Serbia’s victory in it,” he added.

“Their people would cease to exist or would be blended into the ethnicity of the country they’d gone to; Croatia would have been split by Italy, Hungary and Austria,” according to Markovic.

However, he points out, Yugoslavia was a “noble idea”, but with inadequate solutions and deficiencies.

“It inherited all the problems of the empires it helped bring down – Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman (Turkish) state: large numbers of minorities, and an inability to efficiently steer and govern”, he says.

The inter-ethnic problems continued until the Communists took over after World War II, but the two pillars of their regime – late leader Josip Broz Tito and socialist ideology with a human face – helped Yugoslavia to survive.

Markovic says that when these two pillars collapsed, with death of Tito in 1980 and the end of cold war in the 1980s, nationalisms revived and took over in Yugoslavia, setting the scene for the disintegration that began with secession of Slovenia and Croatia in 1991. Bosnia followed in 1992. The secession was opposed by the largest republic of Serbia which was engaged in bloody wars that took more than 100,000 non-Serb lives.

“The experience of Yugoslavia is very ominous for the European Union, bearing in mind the differences that are arising now between the member states,” Markovic argues.

“The circumstances of 1991 were poorly understood by many, the European Union in particular,” The independence of the newly-created states “was hastily acknowledged without any exit strategy or awareness on the consequences, on the next steps; it is much like the rush into the war in 1914, or recently in Iraq,” he added.

In a recent essay on ‘Shots fired by Gavrilo Princip’, Bosnian historian Slobodan Soja summed up the political abuse of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by saying that there is a paradox in recent efforts to establish “whether Princip was a terrorist or not.”

According to Soja, a university professor and former Bosnian ambassador to several countries, “the noble idea of liberation of oppressed and unity among Slav nations is giving way to manipulation” in the deeply divided Bosnian society, where its Muslims, Serbs and Croats are still not mentally at peace.

“Had they known what kind of people would live 100 years on, I doubt that the members of the Young Bosnia movement would give their lives for the generations to come,” Soja wrote.

“The majority of people living today in Bosnia are simply not up to the task of criticising or praising the Young Bosnians. Those were the idealists whose ideas we badly need today,” he added.

Fascism means unlimited surveillance of one's own people and others, made possible by postmodern technology. Credit: Frédéric BISSON/CC-BY-2.0

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

The atrocious Second World War left behind lasting damage by lowering our standards for what is marginally acceptable.

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

War is bad but if it’s not nuclear war, the limit has not yet been reached.

Fascism is bad, but if it does not come with dictatorship and the elimination of an entire people, the limit has not yet been reached.

Hiroshima, Hitler, Auschwitz are deeply rooted in our minds. And we distort them.

Hiroshima makes us disregard the state terrorism against German and Japanese cities, the killing of citizens of any age and both genders. And Hitler and Auschwitz make us disregard fascism as the pursuit of political goals by means of violence and the threat of violence.

It takes two to make a war, by whatever means. But it takes only one to make fascism, against one’s own people, and/or against others.

What is the essence of fascism? A definition has been given: coupling the pursuit of political goals with massive violence. We have democracy exactly to prevent that, a political game for the pursuit of political goals by nonviolent means, and more particularly by getting the majority, as demonstrated by free and fair elections or referenda, on one’s side.

A wonderful innovation with a logical follow-up: nonviolence even when the majority oversteps lines or limits, for instance, as written into the codes of human rights. The strong state, able and willing to display its force – including through the use of capital punishment – belongs to the essence of fascism.

That means absolute monopoly on power, including the power that does not come out of a gun, including nonviolent power. And it means a view of war as an acceptable activity of the state, normalising, even eternalising war. It means a deep contradiction with an omnipresent enemy, like Aryans against non-Aryans, or Judeo-Christianity against Islam, glorifying the former, demonising the latter.

It means unlimited surveillance of one’s own people and others, made possible by postmodern technology. What matters is fear, that people are afraid and abstain from protests and nonviolent action lest they are singled out for the ultimate punishment: extrajudicial execution.

More important than actually checking everybody’s email and web activity and listening to telephone calls is that people believe this is happening. The trick is to do so indiscriminately, not focusing on suspects only but making people feel that anyone is a potential suspect.

The even more basic trick is to make fascism compatible with democracy. A piece of news comes to mind: “Admitting that British forces tortured Kenyans fighting against colonial rule in the 1950s – the government (has agreed) to compensate 5,228 victims.” (International Herald Tribune, 07-06-2013).

A staggering number, more than 5,000 – for sure there were more. Where was the Mother of Parliaments during this display of fascism? One senses a formula behind this decision, “the security of Britons in Kenya” – “security” being the bridging word between fascism and democracy, sustained by that academically institutionalised paranoia, “security studies”.

There are other ways to make fascism compatible with democracy.

First, a reductionist definition of democracy as multi-party national elections.

Second, making the parties close to identical in matters of “security”, ready to use violence internationally or nationally.

Third, privatising the economy under the heading of “freedom”, the other bridging word, essentially granting the Executive power over the judiciary, the police and the military – a move for which there is already manufactured consent. To arrive at that consent, a permanent crisis with a permanent enemy ready to hit is useful, but there are other approaches.

Just as a crisis defined as “military” catapults the military into power, a crisis defined as “economic” catapults capital into power. If the crisis is that the West has been outcompeted in the real economy, then the finance economy – the huge banks – start handling the trillions under the formula of freedom.

There is a way out, and sooner or later it will be traveled. People pay around 20 percent (in the U.S. they pay half) in tax to the state when they buy goods or services in the real economy – for end consumption – but the finance economy effectively lobbies against even one percent. Even a compromise like five percent would solve the dilemma of Western states that the real economy does not generate a surplus sufficient to run a modern state beyond force.

If freedom is defined as the freedom to use money to make more money, and security as the force to kill the designated enemy wherever he is, then we get a military-financial complex, the successor to the military-industrial complex in deindustrialising societies.

They know their enemies: peace movements and environment movements, threats to security and freedom respectively by not only casting doubts on killing, wealth and inequality but also framing them as counter-productive.

Both movements say that you are in fact producing insecurity and dictatorship. Both operate in the open, are easily infiltrated with spies and provocateurs, thereby eliminating badly needed voices.

So, here we are. Torture as enhanced investigation, de facto camps of concentration like Guantanamo, habeas corpus eliminated. And a U.S. president up front for the gullible, telling progressive tales he never enacts, never mind whether he is a hypocrite or is put up by somebody as a veil over fascist reality.

Those who pull the veil aside – Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden – are criminalised, not those building fascism. The old adage: when democracy is most needed, abolish it.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

The crisis that started a few years ago with the collapse of major financial institutions in the United States is now centred in Europe and threatens other parts of the world. Many emerging countries in Asia and Latin America that had thus far avoided contamination because of their sound economic and fiscal policies and their timely adoption of domestic consumption stimulus packages are now beginning to experience secondary effects.

Despite the current financial turmoil and uncertainty, hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be spent each day on military operations without any apparent success in solving the problems they were supposed to. Other disquieting signs loom large. Although combat operations in some troubled areas are being discontinued, the root causes of tension remain unaddressed, with unpredictable consequences. As formerly all-powerful war-bent nations feel constrained to pull back into their own territories, new financial resources are nevertheless earmarked in their budgets for designing, testing, and eventually producing and deploying new generations of deadly weapons in the name of maintaining their national security. By the same token, a few others seem determined to devote a considerable percentage of their scarce national resources to achieve means of destruction to counter real or imagined threats from abroad.

The “contagious doctrine of deterrence”, as Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon once described it, is no longer an exclusive feature of the two antagonists of the Cold War. If some nations feel entitled to possess a nuclear “insurance policy” ­ as a former prime minister described his country’s atomic arsenal- there is no reason to expect that others will not follow suit if they deem it necessary.

Sergio Duarte

It is unfortunate that the days when international conferences could succeed in hammering out bilateral or multilateral arms control agreements seem to be over. Even if past agreements did not bring about effective disarmament, at least they preserved a degree of sanity by curbing some of the most dangerous aspects of the arms race and by signalling the possibility of further progress toward disarmament. For over fifteen years now the multilateral machinery put together by the United Nations over many decades has been unable to achieve the slightest headway towards any significant agreement on both nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. Mankind seems to have lost the ability or the will to follow up on the progress previously achieved in banning other types of weapons of mass destruction, namely chemical and biological arms.

Despite important reductions in the number of nuclear weapons since Cold War peaks, there has been little, if any, progress towards their actual elimination or even the reduction of their importance in the military doctrines of the countries that hold them. The world continues to devote increasing resources to the production of conventional weapons, a large number of which find their way to illegal brokers to feed conflicts in the least developed areas, severely jeopardising chances of improving the lot of their populations.

At last count, world expenditures on armaments reached some 1.7 trillion dollars ­ possibly as much as the industrialised nations have already spent to prop up their financial situation.

All is not lost, however – at least not yet. Analysts have remarked that every real advance in the interaction among nations has been the product a deep crisis in international relations. In recent history, landmark international achievements have been preceded by major conflicts, immense destruction, and severe strife. That was the case of the Hague Conferences, the creation of the ill-fated League of Nations, and the successful establishment of the United Nations.

But mankind does not have to wait for a major war or a similar catastrophe to occur. Whatever progress has been achieved in the past few decades came as a result of the timely perception that something had to be done before real disaster struck. That was the case of the realisation that the insane buildup of ever more deadly nuclear arsenals by the two superpowers had to cease, that proliferation had to be curbed, that at least the most harmful and indiscriminate conventional weapons had to be banned, and that ways must be found to ensure that the power of the atom is used exclusively for peaceful purposes ­ to name just a few examples.

The combined effect of the current financial crisis and of the deadlock in international structures dealing with security, disarmament, development, and the environment can yet lead to new realisations. Wealthy nations, for instance, are already well aware that their own prosperity and well-being, just like natural resources, may not last forever. They should therefore join forces with poorer ones to find wise solutions for the benefit of all. The most heavily armed nations should realise that converting their territories into fortresses while building ever more sophisticated means of destruction will not enhance their security but rather endanger it.

Sterner fiscal policies could trigger significant reductions in military budgets worldwide. Perhaps most importantly, all nations, regardless of their wealth and political or military might, should finally understand that any crisis can be defused if they are able to work together in an international system that recognises that World War II and the Cold War are definitively over. It is not too late. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Sergio Duarte, Brasilian ambassador and former United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs.

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