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The Manning Show Trial
I’m shocked — shocked! — that Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge who ruled in February that Bradley Manning could be tried on various charges even after being held prior to arraignment for more than five times the absolute longest time specified in the US Armed Forces’ “speedy trial” rules, has now also ruled that Manning can be convicted of aiding an enemy that does not exist.
Yes, you read that right: There’s only an “enemy” to aid, in any legal sense, if the United States is at war, a state created by a congressional declaration. There’s been no such declaration since World War II.
Lind had only one legal duty as judge in this case: To dismiss all charges due to the government’s failure to meet the “speedy trial” deadline. If the United States was, as John Adams put it, “a government of laws, not of men,” that’s exactly what she would have done.
Lind’s superiors had a clear duty as well — to remove her from the bench after that first illegal ruling and charge her under Article 98 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice:
“Any person subject to this chapter who –
“(1) is responsible for unnecessary delay in the disposition of any case of a person accused of an offense under this chapter; or
“(2) Knowingly and intentionally fails to enforce or comply with any provision of this chapter regulating the proceedings before, during, or after trial of an accused; shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”
No, I’m not really shocked that none of this happened. It’s par for the course. Laws, including the “supreme law of the land,” aka the US Constitution, are for us little people. The US government doesn’t need or want them, except for use as camouflage. It does whatever it wants to do (or rather whatever the ruling members of the American political class tell it to do).
The only reasonable takeaway from the Manning trial is that American “rule of law” is a sham. The US government doesn’t operate within the Constitution’s constraints on state power, nor does it honor that Constitution’s list of enshrined individual rights. It never has done so absent extreme compulsion and it never will do so on anything like a regular basis.
The corollary: If the US government isn’t bound by its own alleged rules, why on Earth would anyone else be?
Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).
via The Manning Show Trial » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.
Seeds of Destruction: The Diabolical World of Genetic Manipulation
“Control the oil, and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people.”* –Henry Kissenger
“Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” by F. William Engdahl is a skillfully researched book that focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread.
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms. The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
Engdahl’s carefully argued critique goes far beyond the familiar controversies surrounding the practice of genetic modification as a scientific technique. The book is an eye-opener, a must-read for all those committed to the causes of social justice and world peace.
What follows is the Preface to ”Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” by F. William Engdahl (available through Global Research):
Introduction
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so,we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
-George Kennan, US State Department senior planning official, 1948
This book is about a project undertaken by a small socio-political elite, centered, after the Second World War, not in London, but in Washington. It is the untold story of how this self-anointed elite set out, in Kennan’s words, to “maintain this position of disparity.” It is the story of how a tiny few dominated the resources and levers of power in the postwar world.
It’s above all a history of the evolution of power in the control of a select few, in which even science was put in the service of that minority. As Kennan recommended in his 1948 internal memorandum, they pursued their policy relentlessly, and without the “luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
Yet, unlike their predecessors within leading circles of the British Empire, this emerging American elite, who proclaimed proudly at war’s end the dawn of their American Century, were masterful in their use of the rhetoric of altruism and world-benefaction to advance their goals. Their American Century paraded as a softer empire, a “kinder, gentler” one in which, under the banner of colonial liberation, freedom, democracy and economic development, those elite circles built a network of power the likes of which the world had not seen since the time of Alexander the Great some three centuries before Christ—a global empire unified under the military control of a sole superpower, able to decide on a whim, the fate of entire nations.
This book is the sequel to a first volume, A Century ofWar: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. It traces a second thin red line of power. This one is about the control over the very basis of human survival, our daily provision of bread. The man who served the interests of the postwar American-based elite during the 1970’s, and came to symbolize its raw realpolitik, was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Sometime in the mid-1970’s, Kissinger, a life-long practitioner of “Balance of Power” geopolitics and a man with more than a fair share of conspiracies under his belt, allegedly declared his blueprint for world domination: “Control the oil and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people.”
The strategic goal to control global food security had its roots decades earlier, well before the outbreak of war in the late 1930’s. It was funded, often with little notice, by select private foundations, which had been created to preserve the wealth and power of a handful of American families.
Originally the families centered their wealth and power in New York and along the East Coast of the United States, from Boston to New York to Philadelphia and Washington D.C. For that reason, popular media accounts often referred to them, sometimes with derision but more often with praise, as the East Coast Establishment.
The center of gravity of American power shifted in the decades following the War. The East Coast Establishment was overshadowed by new centers of power which evolved from Seattle to Southern California on the Pacific Coast, as well as in Houston, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Miami, just as the tentacles of American power spread to Asia and Japan, and south, to the nations of Latin America.
In the several decades before and immediately following World War II, one family came to symbolize the hubris and arrogance of this emerging American Century more than any other. And the vast fortune of that family had been built on the blood of many wars, and on their control of a new “black gold,” oil.
What was unusual about this family was that early on in the building of their fortune, the patriarchs and advisors they cultivated to safeguard their wealth decided to expand their influence over many very different fields. They sought control not merely over oil, the emerging new energy source for world economic advance. They also expanded their influence over the education of youth, medicine and psychology, foreign policy of the United States, and, significant for our story, over the very science of life itself, biology, and its applications in the world of plants and agriculture.
For the most part, their work passed unnoticed by the larger population, especially in the United States. Few Americans were aware how their lives were being subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, influenced by one or another project financed by the immense wealth of this family.
In the course of researching for this book, a work nominally on the subject of genetically modified organisms or GMO, it soon became clear that the history of GMO was inseparable from the political history of this one very powerful family, the Rockefeller family, and the four brothers—David,Nelson, Laurance and John D. III—who, in the three decades following American victory in World War II, the dawn of the much-heralded American Century, shaped the evolution of power George Kennan referred to in 1948.
In actual fact, the story of GMO is that of the evolution of power in the hands of an elite, determined at all costs to bring the entire world under their sway.
Three decades ago, that power was based around the Rockefeller family. Today, three of the four brothers are long-since deceased, several under peculiar circumstances.However, as was their will, their project of global domination—“full spectrum dominance” as the Pentagon later called it—had spread, often through a rhetoric of “democracy,” and was aided from time to time by the raw military power of that empire when deemed necessary. Their project evolved to the point where one small power group, nominally headquartered in Washington in the early years of the new century, stood determined to control future and present life on this planet to a degree never before dreamed of.
The story of the genetic engineering and patenting of plants and other living organisms cannot be understood without looking at the history of the global spread of American power in the decades following World War II. George Kennan, Henry Luce, Averell Harriman and, above all, the four Rockefeller brothers, created the very concept of multinational “agribusiness”. They financed the “Green Revolution” in the agriculture sector of developing countries in order, among other things, to create new markets for petro-chemical fertilizers and petroleum products, as well as to expand dependency on energy products. Their actions are an inseparable part of the story of genetically modified crops today.
By the early years of the new century, it was clear that no more than four giant chemical multinational companies had emerged as global players in the game to control patents on the very basic food products that most people in the world depend on for their daily nutrition—corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, even vegetables and fruits and cotton—as well as new strains of disease-resistant poultry, genetically-modified to allegedly resist the deadly H5N1 Bird Flu virus, or even gene altered pigs and cattle. Three of the four private companies had decades-long ties to Pentagon chemical warfare research. The fourth, nominally Swiss, was in reality Anglodominated. As with oil, so was GMO agribusiness very much an Anglo-American global project.
In May 2003, before the dust from the relentless US bombing and destruction of Baghdad had cleared, the President of the United States chose to make GMO a strategic issue, a priority in his postwar US foreign policy. The stubborn resistance of the world’s second largest agricultural producer, the European Union, stood as a formidable barrier to the global success of the GMO Project. As long as Germany, France, Austria, Greece and other countries of the European Union steadfastly refused to permit GMO planting for health and scientific reasons, the rest of the world’s nations would remain skeptical and hesitant. By early 2006, the World Trade Organization (WTO) had forced open the door of the European Union to the mass proliferation of GMO. It appeared that global success was near at hand for the GMO Project.
In the wake of the US and British military occupation of Iraq, Washington proceeded to bring the agriculture of Iraq under the domain of patented genetically-engineered seeds, initially supplied through the generosity of the US State Department and Department of Agriculture.
The first mass experiment with GMO crops, however, took place back in the early 1990’s in a country whose elite had long since been corrupted by the Rockefeller family and associated New York banks: Argentina.
The following pages trace the spread and proliferation of GMO, often through political coercion, governmental pressure, fraud, lies, and even murder. If it reads often like a crime story, that should not be surprising. The crime being perpetrated in the name of agricultural efficiency, environmental friendliness and solving the world hunger problem, carries stakes which are vastly more important to this small elite. Their actions are not solely for money or for profit. After all, these powerful private families decide who controls the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and even the European Central Bank. Money is in their hands to destroy or create.
Their aim is rather, the ultimate control over future life on this planet, a supremacy earlier dictators and despots only ever dreamt of. Left unchecked, the present group behind the GMO Project is between one and two decades away from total dominance of the planet’s food capacities. This aspect of the GMO story needs telling. I therefore invite the reader to a careful reading and independent verification or reasoned refutation of what follows.
F. William Engdahl is a leading analyst of the New World Order, author of the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order,’ His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Is Terrorism the New Boogeyman?
Below is the Merriam Webster dictionary definition of two words. Please keep in mind their meaning when reading the article. There is a relationship between the two words:
Boogeyman: a monstrous imaginary figure used in threatening children
Terrorism: Systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective. This word also rhymes with absurdism.
The boogeyman is the fictitious monster that haunts kids particularly when they are going to bed. In my case, he hid underneath my bed ready to grab my ankles and pull me under. To avoid him, I leapt into bed to avoid his reach. To avoid seeing him in case he came out, I covered my eyes with the blanket. I think my feelings and childhood fears of this imaginary creature are common.
Use of a boogeyman in the case of children could be to persuade them to go to bed early or eat their vegetables. “If you don’t do this, the boogeyman might get you”! None of as children wanted that, so we did as we were told. A boogeyman is also useful in the case of adults. In the past 75 years adults in the United States have been under the influence of three or more scary boogeymen. The media outlets and the US government kindly supply us with ever-scarier boogeymen. Whether intended or not, the use of a boogeyman works well in persuading and obtaining compliance (getting adults to do something).
The boogeyman 75 years ago was scary. However, he lived less than ten years, and we eliminated him. The boogeyman I refer to was one for my parents and grandparents: he was called the Nazis and he lived in Germany. He was a threat to the freedom and constitutional rights of Americans. He invaded countries and killed our friends (read allies). For some years my parents actually feared being bombed or invaded by that boogeyman. Note they lived in the Midwest and not the East coast. Had they thought it through, they too would have realized that was not possible due to logistical limitations then present in military aircraft (today they can refuel midair). Today it seems rather absurd that people could believe such a thing back then, but it was real to them.
Nonetheless, the government fanned the flames of fear (maybe use of terrorism) ,and almost all people believed what they were told by media and government back then. The citizenry, young and old alike, complied with government requests and did what they could do to help eliminate the threat. That boogeyman disappeared through a war that ended in 1945.
Only a few years passed before a new, more global, boogeyman emerged. He was the communists and the threat of communism. If we did not stop this boogeyman, he too, might take our liberty and freedom like the one before. We stared to fear this boogeyman shortly after World War II and into the 1980s. The communists were good boogeyman for decades, and represented the opposite of what we stand for. We were told they have no liberty or freedom, and this boogeyman does not want people of the world to have such inalienable rights like that.
Who would doubt this and not want to comply with government support in the elimination of this boogeyman? We largely complied, trillions of dollars were spent, and thousands of people were killed. We fought wars to ward off this boogeyman (Korea Vietnam, and other armed conflicts of smaller duration). We even helped some friends (read allies) fend off this boogeyman-Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Guatemala, to name some examples.
The government softened its stand (ended the terrorism) on this boogeyman, and people don’t perceive it a threat any more. This might be due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the despair we are told of in Cuba, and widespread trading with China and Vietnam In fact, it does not seem to matter that China is a communist country, we can travel there, trade with them, but for some reason, Cuba is off limits.
The boogeyman of the modern era is terrorism. He came out in the late 1990’s and made his real debut on September 11, 2001. He is more nebulous than the former boogeymen, as he does not have a permanent address or place where we can easily find him like the Nazis or the communists. However, being so nimble and fast moving, he can be under your bed, like the boogeyman of childhood. He can be down the street and could be your neighbor. This new monster serves better than those of the past to incite fear and compliance. Lacking an address, we are inspired to chase him down in many places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and down the street from your house. He might even be in your home or office now. We even look for him at the airport every day.
The modern boogeyman has more places to hide, and a better strategy than his predecessors. This new boogeyman might even be friends of our friends (allies, or friends), as President George Bush warned us in his address on September 20, 2001 to a Joint Session of Congress
We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. – Bush, George W. (September 20, 2001). “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People”. The White House. Retrieved 2008-09-19.
Our government finds the current boogeyman scarier than his predecessors, as we have parked our constitution to pursue him. We have spent much money to catch him, and many are currently willing to be spied on to avoid him. As former President Bush said to congress, if you keep company with the boogeyman, we consider you an enemy. Obviously we are very serious about this newer boogeyman, and even willing to give up some things we fought boogeymen in the past for. That being our freedom and parts of the constitution (read Patriot Act).
Let us return to the definition of terrorism: It is systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective. Where did the latest boogeyman come from? Who is creating the fear and the real terrorist? Who wants to bring about a political objective?
Our prior two boogeymen were created by non-United States entities: German and Russian political movements. Maybe the current boogeyman was created because of our past and current follies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, etc. Is it really a boogeyman, or are the good folks that promote him (read terrorists) making him larger than he need be.
Maybe stopping our forays into other parts of the world will eliminate the current boogeyman. However, those wanting to make terror will not have an excuse to bring about a political objective and need this boogeyman. You decide- who are the real terrorists, and who wants political change? Who is who in this game? Is this not all absurdism?
U.S. nuclear site “a true horror story” — Officials should be screaming at top of their lungs in outrage — “Problems could lead to explosions or nuclear reactions” #Hanford
Hanford’s 56 million gallons of the most contaminated nuclear waste in the western hemisphere is a true horror story. [
In February, officials announced that six single-shell tanks were leaking. These are not the first leaks; there have been decades of earth contamination.
Bechtel National is contracted by DOE to oversee the construction of a vitrification plant. Vitrification means processing the waste into glass logs
The decision was made to begin construction of the plant before the design had been vetted. Consequently, there are design problems that could lead to explosions or nuclear reactions.
Senators Murray and Cantwell, et al., should be screaming at the tops of their lungs in outrage. Instead, it appears it’s up to us to make our voices heard. Surely they’d all want to hear from their constituents.
Price of Injustice
British Occupied Ireland(N.Ireland)
A commoner in British Occupied Ireland, can be designated a “terrorist” on the secret, unaccountable dictat of the unelected British Viceroyal Villiers, without notice and without a trial. Under CMPs(Closed Material Procedures) any Irish person may be jailed, simply on vaguely-defined, highly paid “material support,” against any person or group, labeled by the Viceroyal as “terrorist.” Any political dissent, such as wearing green, as in a recent incident, or singing a ‘Celtic Song’, or holding a piece of paper at an Easter ceremony, can be labeled as “terrorism” or “material support for terrorism,”
Two essentials are driving the trampling of democratic rights in British Occupied Ireland and the shift towards authoritarian Viceroyal fascist rule there. The first is the massive social inequality, which the British Chief Constable in Ireland, Matt Baggott, referred to recently, when pleading for greater efforts to counter the economic and social roots of Irish republican dissent, in turn driven by the historic crisis, of British sponsored sectarianism, within their capitalist system of further inequality. Britain as usual, looks to sponsored state terrorism, police state repression, wartime political internment without trial, as a means to preserve their status, power and wealth.
The second is that real democracy is incompatible, with such high levels of sectarianism, social inequality and injustice, it is also incompatible with low intensity imperialist war, such as Britain is still conducting in Ireland, under the guise of a fake Peace Process. The UK military and intelligence agencies, have for centuries been wading in the blood of every country in the world, with the exception of just 10, in a drive to plunder the world’s resources. The dead, wounded, interned and displaced numbered in the millions, with Ireland its first colony of 800 years suffering incessant genocide and invasions.
A knock on the door! In the early hours of the morning. A door smashed with British jackboot of state terrorism, and armed men breaking into your home. They call them military and British paramilitary police, as you are dragged from your bed. Jail, internment camps, no charge, no trial, indefinite detention. This has been the institutionalized pattern of political internment in Ireland, for more than a hundred years now. It is still happening today, as the well documented cases of Marian Price and Martin Corey still testify, despite a much touted Peace Process.
The current international struggle against real and state sponsored “terrorism” is the latest political cover, misused by the British, for their centuries old, worldwide arrest and murder of tens of thousands of political opponents, youth, workers, intellectuals and other enemies of their colonialism or pirate rape of worldwide communities along with their resources. The UK government, currently asserts the power, to subject anyone Irish who disagrees, as a designated “terrorist,” subject to arbitrary arrest and detention without trial indefinitely. Political internment without trial has become institutionalized in Ireland.
Leaving to one side for a moment, how morally grotesque all of this is, one does not have to be particularly bright, to see, that such obvious injustice, has no place in building a genuine peace process.Those secret service puppets, stooges, who are called politicians in British Occupied Ireland, who have curried favour and made lucrative careers, by exclusively condemning non British state violence, are quite comfortable with all of this institutionalized violence, to the point where a mercenary British Chief Constable was forced to highlight some of it, in a one party British sponsored kleptocracy .
It is vital where ever we are, to oppose such criminal British assaults on freedom, in the first instance, no matter who is targeted, because such state kidnap, when unopposed, has become institutionalized. Now that it has happened, this is difficult to stop, because once it happens, it inevitably occurs, that internment without trial, will expand way beyond just the Irish and other groups originally targeted, to include all of the people of no property, wherever criminal privilege, ensnares.
Anyone Irish who has been paying attention, knows that British concepts of “guilt” and “innocence” are quaint relics of a dead Magna Carta and a discarded habeas corpus. All that matters today in British Occupied Ireland, is how many convictions a prosecutor can get and how many secret service careers are advanced in the secret “injustice” system, of a scum sectarian state, sponsored by supremacist British Tories, under the watch of Viceroyal Villiers. “Justice,” just like everything else in ” British civilized” society, is an industry and a product, that keeps the British Tory ruling classes happy with the restless Irish natives still under the colonial jackboot.
Freedom and truth are not part of the equation as with the ruling class worldwide, now in the advanced stages of preparations for the inevitable confrontation with the international people of no property. We need to make our own preparations, conscious of the examples elsewhere, of progressive, evolutionary, political struggles to genuine government by the people of no property, for the people of no property. It is they and only they, who can be trusted to avert the threats of dictatorship and guard a genuine democracy, with social equality and real justice.
After World War II at the Nuremberg Tribunals, the principal Judge said of the purpose of Nuremberg: “We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it.” The intent was to establish a precedent against aggressive war like, Iraq, just 57 years later. Jackson said: “Let me make clear, that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes and if it is to serve a useful purpose, it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.
“We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggression against the rights of their neighbors.”
On April 24, 1946, one of the Nazi defendants Wilhelm Frick, told the Tribunal, “I wanted things done legally. After all, I am a lawyer.” Frick drafted, signed and administered laws that suppressed trade unions and persecuted Jews. He insisted he had drafted the Nuremberg Laws for “scientific reasons,” to protect the purity of German blood. Frick also knew that the insane, aged and disabled (“useless eaters”) were being systematically killed, but did nothing to stop it.
Frick was sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Tribunal and hanged on Oct. 16, 1946.
I do not advocate capital punishment, even for the likes of Viceroyal Villiers and her ancestor also called Viceroyal George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon, who ruled over the genocidal holocaust, that murdered millions of Irish people, in what they call the Great Hunger. I simply want the Villiers and Tories held accountable, as their faux-lawyer Nazi counterparts were. Otherwise Britain has made a liar out of Justice Jackson and made a mockery of the Nuremberg principles, which so many working class people, gave their lives for, including their loyalists in Ireland, which will be revealed as just another case of “victor’s justice” despite promises to the contrary. Their own Churchill called internment, an Act of War in the highest degree Odious and the mark of an authoritarian regime.
I do not know how British law, hold it’s supposed professionals to account but I do know that Viceroyal Villiers obtained a Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) from Jesus College, Oxford, in 1991. After graduating she worked as a barrister and as a lecturer at King’s College London (1994–99). It is understandable that these international colleges may simply be places of ill repute and vice, bearing in mind the British track record, of not honouring it’s Royal pardons and their SS shredding her Majesty’s writs. But if by chance, they even aspire to any claim of morality in their lawless neo-colony, then they sshould not need me to explain to them, how to commence what the Price of Justice requires.
As with freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, is also meant to be guaranteed, in a democratic peace process, with the reality, however being, that political assembly is a semi-criminal activity in British Occupied Ireland. Political protests are routinely met with vastly disproportionate police mobilizations, “kettling” (in which protesters are surrounded and forcibly moved in one direction or prevented from leaving an area), beatings, tear gas, pepper spray, stun grenades or plastic bullets are the standard British response to a peaceful, political protest, in a massive show of force, complete with riot gear and police snipers on rooftops. What is this but a police state, repression, combined with internment without trial, death squads, that murder human rights lawyers and journalists. A foundation for a Peace Process?
Ask the people of no property ghettoized across the neo-colony. They will tell you justice is locked up, it is political interned right now, in the form of Marian Price and Martin Corey. Like a slow burn fuse, internment without trial, is an instrument of war that burns in the Irish psyche and heart. It has no place in a peace process. Nobody can be that stupid, not even the Brits but to realize, it guarantees more war, especially in the instance of icons of Irish street resistance, to British colonial occupation in Ireland. It hasn’t worked in a hundred years and it will not work now. No, like recent British aggressive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Syria the British industrial war complex, demands permanent wars of profit and political research laboratories for their state terror in police state neo-colonies, such as British Occupied Ireland.
Related Link: http://bit.ly/13C9IdY
World War II: The Holocaust-
One of the most horrific terms in history was used by Nazi Germany to designate human beings whose lives were unimportant, or those who should be killed outright: Lebensunwertes Leben, or “life unworthy of life”. The phrase was applied to the mentally impaired and later to the “racially inferior,” or “sexually deviant,” as well as to “enemies of the state” both internal and external. From very early in the war, part of Nazi policy was to murder civilians en masse, especially targeting Jews. Later in the war, this policy grew into Hitler’s “final solution”, the complete extermination of the Jews. It began with Einsatzgruppen death squads in the East, which killed some 1,000,000 people in numerous massacres, and continued in concentration camps where prisoners were actively denied proper food and health care. It culminated in the construction of extermination camps — government facilities whose entire purpose was the systematic murder and disposal of massive numbers of people. In 1945, as advancing Allied troops began discovering these camps, they found the results of these policies: hundreds of thousands of starving and sick prisoners locked in with thousands of dead bodies. They encountered evidence of gas chambers and high-volume crematoriums, as well as thousands of mass graves, documentation of awful medical experimentation, and much more. The Nazis killed more than 10 million people in this manner, including 6 million Jews. (This entry is Part 18 of a weekly 20-part retrospective of World War II)[45 photos]
Warning: All images in this entry are shown in full, not screened out for graphic content. There are many dead bodies. The photographs are graphic and stark. This is the reality of genocide, and of an important part of World War II and human history.







































Some world WW 2 PHOTOS
Japanese Kawanishi H8K seaplane after strafing. Kwajalein
Squad of Rufe’s at Bougainville . These things were very nimble even with the pontoons.-
The A6M2-N float plane version of the Zero did extremely well,
suffering only a small loss in its legendary maneuverability.
Top speed was not affected, however, the aircraft’s relatively light armament was a detriment.
Snow on deck. USS Philippine Sea North Pacific 1945
HARVS on the way in shot by a P-47. Rare shot.
Deck crew climbing up to get the pilot out. They did. Thats a fuel tank his foot is on. Empty?
Marines disembark LST at Tinian Island.
Bougainville …
Guam
Outside Bastogne
(Dec 1944 )
German 280mm K5 firing————————————————————–
U.S. Munitions ship goes up During the invasion of Sicily.
GERMAN V1
wing tips chúng later Developed a tactic of disrupting the Airflow by Placing Their wing very close to the V1’s wing, causing it to Topple . Not every pilot did this. At night this was not possible, the flame from the V1 blinded the pilot to everything else, though some Mossie pilots flew past Closely in front of the V1, again causing it to Topple. The Thought of doing this at 450mph, 4,000 feet above the ground, at night, and being blinded gives me the willies.
Macchi 202v
Italian 303 Bombers over N Africa
10 Lesser-Known Iconic Photos from WWII
10 Lesser-Known Iconic Photos of WWII
by Patrick Weidinger,
There are many iconic photos that emerged from the Second World War. Many of the people in these photos are instantly recognizable – Churchill flashing the “V” for victory sign, for example. In other photographs, however, you may not know the name of the people depicted – the sailor kissing the nurse on VJ Day, the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima – but you definitely know the story.
Ten of those somewhat lesser-known photographs are presented here, along with the fascinating stories of the people in them.
This WWII era photograph was used to show Americans that women were doing their part to fight the war – even when they really weren’t. The four women pictured here, in front of the famous “Pistol Packin’ Mamma” aircraft, were part of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots program – better known as the WASPs. One of the four – the farthest on the right – is Blanche Osborn Bross.
The WASPs were a very exclusive club. Over 25,000 women applied for the program, and only 2,000 were selected of which barely 1,000 graduated and became pilots. Though they did not see wartime action, some of them did die in airplane accidents. After the war, Blanche Osborn Bross continued to fly, and later served with the Red Cross in China. She died at the age of 92.
This Soviet WWII photograph was unidentified for 23 years until the man in it, Aleksey Gordeyevich Yeremenko, was recognized by his wife and children when they saw the photograph in Pravda. It remains one of the most iconic photographs of World War II. Yeremenko was a junior political officer serving with the 220th regiment of 4th Rifle Division. On July 12, 1942, the commander of his regiment fell during battle. Rallying his troops to the attack, Yeremenko stood and waved them on. Seconds after this photograph was taken, Yeremenko was shot dead.
Many WWII photographs are shocking because of what they depict (“The Last Jew of Vinnitsa” for example). This Japanese photograph is shocking because of what it implies. Seen here are two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, each leaning against his Samurai sword. The photograph was widely shown in Japanese newspapers in 1937, and depicted a “contest” between Mukai and Noda to see who could be the first to cut off 100 heads.
The photograph and story came from about the time of the Japanese invasion of China and the slaughter and rape of Chinese cities such as Nanking, where the Japanese army systematically raped and killed untold thousands of civilians and Chinese prisoners of war.
The newspaper articles tried to describe the killing contest as being performed during “hand to hand combat”, but in all likelihood, the beheadings by sword were carried out on helpless civilians and prisoners. Later editions of the newspapers stated that each had broken the “100 head” goal, and were therefore resetting the goal to 150 heads. After the war, one of the men admitted that only four of the beheadings had taken place during combat – most of his total came from passive, lined-up Chinese prisoners. After the war, both Mukai and Noda were executed for war crimes.
On September 16 and September 22, 1941, the Nazis rounded up all of the Jews in the town of Vinnitsa, Ukraine, and executed them. Pictured here in this famous photograph we see a man, kneeling before a pit filled with bodies, about to be shot by a German soldier. This photograph was found among a German soldier’s photo album, and on the back was written the title “The Last Jew of Vinnitsa”.
A Wehrmacht officer who observed the slaughter described it in all its horror. The people were told to show up at the already dug pit for a “census”. They were then forced to disrobe and turn in all their belongings. A row of naked people were then lined up along the pit, and mowed down by German soldiers using pistols. The next group would be ordered to shovel quicklime onto the still-writhing bodies in the pit, then repeat the process of undressing, turning over their valuables, and being shot – until each and every one of them joined their families and neighbors in the pit. All 28,000 Jews from Vinnitsa were killed in this manner.
So many images from World War II, like this one, do not have captions detailing who was in the photograph. In some cases, photographers quickly snapped photographs of soldiers who were on the move or in action. The photographers never had the time to ask their name, company, or other information.
Other images, similar to this one, were never documented because of what they depicted. Though the year and campaign are given for this tragic photo, there is little wonder why the name of the woman and her child were never recorded. They were about to be executed by a German soldier. Who were they? All we know is that the photograph was taken in the Ukraine, and shows the execution of Jews from Kiev. Mailed from the Eastern Front back to Germany, the photograph was intercepted by a member of the Polish Resistance who kept it as documentation of German war time atrocities. The only description written on the photograph was “Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [operation], Ivangorod.”
hough largely over shadowed by the bloody fighting the U.S. Marines and Army encountered on other islands such as Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the battle for Peleliu Island in 1944 was just as bloody – maybe even more so. The fighting on Peleliu was sheer butchery on both sides. The US Marines and army would suffer 6,800 casualties, the Japanese army at least double that.
Captured here in an iconic photograph of WWII, on September 15, 1944, are two Marines enjoying a brief respite from the constant battle. Gerald Churchby (later found out to be Thursby) and Douglas Lightheart are sitting in a shell hole, with the jungle of Peleliu shattered and broken all around them. That’s private Lightheart from Michigan, sitting holding the large machine gun in his lap, with a cigarette butt hanging from his mouth. The look in his eye is one of acute awareness, as if the enemy were about to attack at any second (which they probably were). Sitting to his right is private Churchby, seen holding his rifle with a far more casual and unconcerned look. Maybe he was just trying to smile for the picture?
Thomas Murray would do his part to win WWII by being the poster boy for rationing. During the war, Americans had to use ration stamps to buy all manner of goods that were in short supply, because these goods were needed for the war effort. Coffee, butter, rubber, and many other staples were hard to come by. The US used poster campaigns to put a face on the soldier who was fighting for the country and who needed these goods, as a way to encourage Americans to make sacrifices and tolerate rationing. This iconic photograph of Murray smiling to the camera and holding a military cup of “Joe” was one of the most popular “support rationing” posters of the war effort. Murray died in 2002 at the age of 87, and was buried with full military honors.
Murray’s face would later be used in another war effort – the war (still ongoing) for Internet discussion board civility. A copy of the poster, with the words changed to “How About a Nice Big Cup of Shut the Fuck Up” (Think Before You Say Something Stupid) was – and still is – commonly used on discussion boards to try to shame trolls into thinking before they post. The rationing effort was far more successful.
Not much is known about this iconic World War II photograph, but to many it is instantly recognizable, and is titled simply “Grief”. The photograph was taken by Soviet photographer Dmitri Baltermants. He photographed many Soviet battles including Stalingrad, and he himself was wounded twice. All of his photographs were censored by the Red Army. Only the ones that fit into the Soviet propaganda campaign would be published. Though this photograph was sent around the world during WWII, few newspapers or magazines would publish it, considering it to be another piece of staged Soviet propaganda.
The photograph did not become widely known until the 1960s, and is now one of Baltermant’s most famous images. Shown is the aftermath of a German army massacre of Jews in Kerch, in 1942. The village women search the bodies for loved ones. The brooding, saturated sky adds to the drama of the photo. The woman standing with her arms out would later find the body of her murdered son.
Everyone recognizes General Dwight D. Eisenhower in this famous image. He is seen here addressing American paratroopers on June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion of Europe. The tall man standing directly in front of Eisenhower and wearing the #23 around his neck was Lt Wallace C. Strobel. Strobel was part of an airborne infantry regiment that parachuted behind enemy lines, the night of the D-Day invasion. Of the 792 men in Strobel’s regiment, only 129 would still be fighting six days later. One of those 129 was Strobel. He died in 1999.
Strobel remembered meeting Ike. He and the other paratroopers had smeared burned cork or cooking oil over their faces, to blacken them for night-time operations. The number hanging around his neck was meant to designate his assigned plane. Strobel was the jump master for his plane. He and his fellow crew were making last minute preparations for the mission when Ike appeared and walked straight up to him. Ike asked him what state he was from, and whether or not he felt ready for the mission. Strobel told Eisenhower that he was from Michigan – and yes, they were ready. Eisenhower responded that he had been to Michigan, and loved the fishing there. Though Strobel felt Eisenhower had come to try to reassure the men and lift their spirits, it actually seemed to be they who lifted Ike’s spirits. Strobel remembered how well-trained and prepared they were, and that their confidence had a real calming and reassuring effect on Eisenhower.
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Sergeant Leonard Siffleet was a commando fighting with the Australian Army in New Guinea when he was captured by natives, who turned him over to the occupying Japanese army. Trained as a radio operator in the Special Forces, Siffleet was part of a secret surveillance detachment sent to New Guinea to watch the coast and report back on enemy activities.
After they were turned over to the Japanese, they were held for about two weeks, tortured, and then – on October 24, 1943, on the orders of Vice-Admiral Michiaki Kamada of the Imperial Japanese Navy – Siffleet was executed by beheading. He was beheaded by a Japanese officer, Yasuno Chikao. Chikao ordered another soldier to photograph him while he performed the execution. U.S. forces later recovered the photograph from the body of a Japanese major, in April 1944. Though the Japanese often executed prisoners by beheading (see Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda above), this is the only known surviving photograph documenting the beheading of a prisoner.
HOW HUMANS RUN THE EARTH
A quick look at how we humans run our planet
It would appear we as a race are clueless when it comes to population control.
In relation to the distribution of resources and wealth we appear to be equally naive.
When it comes to the subject of Ecocide this is an area where humans appear to have developed considerable skills