Many Americans are tuning out on politics and international affairs – feeling they have no real say in what the government does – but there is a danger from such passivity, particularly the license given to the powers-that-be to make war and more war, as Gary G. Kohls explains.
A bitter irony of the Nagasaki atomic bomb was that an all-Christian American crew used the steeple of Japan’s most prominent Christian church as the target for an act of unspeakable barbarism, making a mockery of Christian teachings on non-violence, writes Gary G. Kohls.
On Aug. 9, 1945, three days after obliterating Hiroshima with one nuclear bomb – as Japan’s high command met on surrender plans – the U.S. government dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki killing 74,000 people instantly, a decision that has never been adequately explained, writes John LaForge.
The scandal about excessive waiting times for U.S. veterans to get medical coverage is a fresh reminder about the delayed costs from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed from the excessive use of the American military, as Michael Winship reflects on the message from Memorial Day.
In theory, many people hail the idea of independent thinking and praise the courage of speaking truth to power. In practice, however, the pressure of “group think” and the penalties inflicted on dissidents usually force people into line even when they know better, as Lawrence Davidson notes.
Special Report: Seven decades ago, the Allies celebrated a hard-fought victory with the capture of Monte Cassino, but the huge cost in blood and the destruction of Saint Benedict’s famous abbey still make the battle controversial, as war correspondent Don North explains.
When the Ukraine crisis began, the mainstream U.S. media cast aside any pretense of objectivity and joined in the service of State Department propaganda. But – given the emergence of the Internet – a far more honest and nuanced story is possible to detect, as William Blum describes at Anti-Empire Report.
A new wave of neocon opinion is pounding President Obama for failing to keep troops in Iraq and resisting wars in Syria and Iran – claiming U.S. prestige and power are in decline – but these bellicose appeals are, for once, getting little traction with a war-weary public, as Lawrence S. Wittner observes.
The second – and hopefully last – nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945. Among the bitter ironies of that day, the U.S. plane was flown by an all-Christian crew that picked for its target the landmark of a Christian church that had survived Japanese persecution, writes Gary G. Kohls.
In the years before World War II, as the U.S. military remained segregated, an African-American soldier was chosen to lead an integrated American army. But it was not an official U.S. government command, but rather part of the volunteer effort to stop fascism in Spain, as William Loren Katz recalls.