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Let us sum up our hopes for victory: total destruction of imperialism by eliminating its firmest bulwark, the oppression exercised by the United States of America. To carry out, as a tactical method, the people's gradual liberation, one by one or in groups: driving the enemy into a difficult fight away from its own territory, dismantling all its sustenance bases, that is, its dependent territories.
This means a long war. And, once more, we repeat it, a cruel war. Let no one fool himself at the outset and let no one hesitate to start out for fear of the consequences it may bring to his people. It is almost our sole hope for victory. We cannot elude the call of this hour. Vietnam is pointing it out with its endless lesson of heroism, its tragic and everyday lesson of struggle and death for the attainment of final victory.
There, the imperialist soldiers endure the discomforts of those who, used to enjoying the U.S. standard of living, have to live in a hostile land with the insecurity of being unable to move without being aware of walking on enemy territory-death to those who dare take a step out of their fortified encampment, the permanent hostility of the entire population. All this has internal repercussions in the United States [and] propitiates the resurgence of an element which is being minimized in spite of its vigor by all imperialist forces: class struggle even within its own territory.
How close we could look into a bright future should two, three, or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world!
And if we were all capable of uniting to make our blows stronger and infallible and so increase the effectiveness of all kinds of support given to the struggling people-how great and close would that future be!
If we, in a small point of the world map, are able to fulfill our duty and place at the disposal of this struggle whatever little of ourselves we are permitted to give: our lives, our sacrifice; and if some day we have to breathe our last breath on any land, already ours, sprinkled with our blood, let it be known that we have measured the scope of our actions and that we only consider ourselves elements in the great army of the proletariat but that we are proud of having learned from the Cuban Revolution, and from its maximum leader, the great lesson emanating from his attitude in this part of the world: "What do the dangers or the sacrifices of a man or of a nation matter, when the destiny of humanity is at stake?"
Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America. Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear, that another hand may be extended to wield our weapons, and that other men be ready to intone our funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory.
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Taken from "Guerilla Warfare", by Che Guevara, published by SR Resources. © Copyright 1997 by Scholarly Resources.
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"This interesting book is more than a mere translation of Che Guevara's handbook on how to be a guerilla fighter. Rather, the translation of Guevaras historic work. Guerilla Warfare, and two of his later pieces, "Guerilla Warfare: A Method" and "Message to the Tricontinental," are nestled between an informative and well-developed introduction and essays describing the struggles in seven South American countrys whose guerilla movements were inspired by Che Guevaras writings and beliefs...This work is quit useful for anyone who desires to understand the struggles occurring around the world today." Che Guevara message to the Tri-Continental
Afghanistan is the new Vietnam. I know most of you will fight for the corporate lackeys. Good luck you're gonna need it.
Che Guevara wannabe
exactly, afghanistan IS the new vietnam... i just wish the armies would combat on land instead of bombing from air and far away bases... that way we'll be sure they'll come back in a body bag with their boots shoved up their asses... anyone who takes part on the attacks on afghanistan by his/her own will before anythings proven, i think deserves that fate...
\"I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how
I agree with you Guest, with nedd to fight the great agressor, the imperialist states of america.
I see the they have already started.......
I do regret the loss of civilian life, but I support the strike at the heart of enemy <pentagon>.
what do u mean they have already started?
\"I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how
i hardly think that afganistan is the new vietnam. in terms of war perhaps, but that fucking taliban would have us praying five times a day if they could help it and subjecting our women to the most inhumane treatment since nazi germany as they're already doing in their own country, poor bastards. personally, in a war between the taliban and the us i would be praying five times a day that both forces will wipe each other out. on the other hand when i think about vietnam feelings of solidarity rise up and coincidentally enough i'm actually wearing a ho chi minh t-shirt as we speak.
(Edited by gooddoctor at 7:08 pm on Sep. 17, 2001)
an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind
Why do people feel the need to take sides?
Neither the terrorists responsible nor the American government have my support for their historical approaches to political issues or humanity in general.
How ironic that of all the groups on Earth, those most devoted to the credo of 'an eye for an eye' appear to be Muslim fundamentalists and Americans. Perhaps they should take time to note the similarities in their thinking.
It cannot but be supportive, socialist, communist or whatever you want to call it. Does nature, and the human species with it, have much time left to survive in the absence of such change? Very little time. Who will be the builders of that new world? The
lol well that would be the perfect solution wouldnt it?
\"I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how
the agressors are hurting right now........
they ask how is this possible???
well, you should have known ,,,,people can take for so many years ......now its their time to strike back!!!!
right at the heart !!!!
and for loss of the civilians life ,,,,,,the U.S. have done the same remenber hiroshima and nagasaki?????
was a military target??? i don't think so....
they got what they deserved.......
they got what they deserved......
A land invasion was the alternative to the nuclear bombings. It's hard to say which would've been better, and yes, one does have to kind of take sides in this situation, as Japan in that state couldn't really be left alone to prepare to reinstate its imperialism. It's hard to make the trade off between your soldiers and the civilians of your enemy. I'd probably support a 1:1 tradeoff in American soldiers killed instead of civilians, but any higher than that would be a very difficult decision.
(Edited by CheGuevara at 12:31 am on Sep. 19, 2001)
Well, yes...it was a difficult decision. Just that with a land invasion, I daresay that even more people would have been killed. And please keep in mind that even after the first bomb dropped, Japan STILL refused to surrender...a land war would have dragged on for years...
A land war would have dragged on for years? By what authority do you assert that? The lies you were fed in the schools of US imperialists?
I don't re-invent the wheel every day, and there's no need to further answer this question, for it's already been answered by historian Howard Zinn:
The Bombs of August
by Howard Zinn
The Progressive magazine, August 2000
Near the end of the novel The English Patient there is a passage in which Kip, the Sikh defuser of mines, begins to speak bitterly to the burned, near-death patient about British and American imperialism: "You and then the Americans converted us.... You had wars like cricket. How did you fool us into this? Here, listen to what you people have done." He puts earphones on the blackened head. The radio is telling about the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Kip goes on: "All those speeches of civilization from kings and queens and presidents . . . such voices of abstract order . . . American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium, and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA."
You probably don't remember those lines in the movie made from The English Patient. That's because they were not there.
Hardly a surprise. The bombing of Hiroshima remains sacred to the American Establishment and to a very large part of the population in this country. I learned that when, in 1995, I was invited to speak at the Chautauqua Institute in New York state. I chose Hiroshima as my subject, it being the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb. There were 2,000 people in that huge amphitheater and as I explained why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unforgivable atrocities, perpetrated on a Japan ready to surrender, the audience was silent. Well, not quite. A number of people shouted angrily at me from their seats.
Understandable. To question Hiroshima is to explode a precious myth which we all grow up with in this country-that America is different from the other imperial powers of the world, that other nations may commit unspeakable acts, but not ours.
Further, to see it as a wanton act of gargantuan cruelty rather than as an unavoidable necessity ("to end the war, to save lives" ) would be to raise disturbing questions about the essential goodness of the "good war."
I recall that in junior high school, a teacher asked our class: "What is the difference between a totalitarian state and a democratic state?" The correct answer: "A totalitarian state, unlike ours, believes in using any means to achieve its end."
That was at the start of World War II, when the Fascist states were bombing civilian populations in Ethiopia, in Spain, in Coventry, and in Rotterdam. President Roosevelt called that "inhuman barbarism." That was before the United States and England began to bomb civilian populations in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Dresden, and then in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
Any means to an end-the totalitarian philosophy. And one shared by all nations that make war.
What means could be more horrible than the burning, mutilation, blinding, irradiation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, children? And yet it is absolutely essential for our political leaders to defend the bombing because if Americans can be induced to accept that, then they can accept any war, any means, so long as the war-makers can supply a reason. And there are always plausible reasons delivered from on high as from Moses on the Mount.
Thus, the three million dead in Korea can be justified by North Korean aggression, the millions dead in Southeast Asia by the threat of Communism, the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 to protect American citizens, the support of death squad governments in Central America to stop Communism, the invasion of Grenada to save American medical students, the invasion of Panama to stop the drug trade, the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, the Yugoslav bombing to stop ethnic cleansing.
There is endless room for more wars, with endless supplies of reasons.
That is why the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is important, because if citizens can question that, if they can declare nuclear weapons an unacceptable means, even if it ends a war a month or two earlier, they may be led to a larger question-the means (involving forty million dead) used to defeat Fascism.
And if they begin to question the moral purity of "the good war," indeed, the very best of wars, then they may get into a questioning mood that will not stop until war itself is unacceptable, whatever reasons are advanced.
So we must now, fifty-five years later, with those bombings still so sacred that a mildly critical Smithsonian exhibit could not be tolerated, insist on questioning those deadly missions of the sixth and ninth of August, 1945.
The principal justification for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it "saved lives" because otherwise a planned U.S. invasion of Japan would have been necessary, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Truman at one point used the figure "a half million lives," and Churchill "a million lives," but these were figures pulled out of the air to calm troubled consciences; even official projections for the number of casualties in an invasion did not go beyond 46,000.
In fact, the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not forestall an invasion of Japan because no invasion was necessary. The Japanese were on the verge of surrender, and American military leaders knew that. General Eisenhower, briefed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the imminent use of the bomb, told him that "Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary."
After the bombing, Admiral William D. Leary, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the atomic bomb "a barbarous weapon," also noting that: "The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."
The Japanese had begun to move to end the war after the U.S. victory on Okinawa, in May of 1945, in the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. After the middle of June, six members of the Japanese Supreme War Council authorized Foreign Minister Togo to approach the Soviet Union, which was not at war with Japan, to mediate an end to the war "if possible by September."
Togo sent Ambassador Sato to Moscow to feel out the possibility of a negotiated surrender. On July 13, four days before Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met in Potsdam to prepare for the end of the war (Germany had surrendered two months earlier), Togo sent a telegram to Sato: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace. It is his Majesty's heart's desire to see the swift termination of the war."
The United States knew about that telegram because it had broken the Japanese code early in the war. American officials knew also that the Japanese resistance to unconditional surrender was because they had one condition enormously important to them: the retention of the Emperor as symbolic leader. Former Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew and others who knew something about Japanese society had suggested that allowing Japan to keep its Emperor would save countless lives by bringing an early end to the war.
Yet Truman would not relent, and the Potsdam conference agreed to insist on "unconditional surrender." This ensured that the bombs would fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It seems that the United States government was determined to drop those bombs.
But why? Gar Alperovitz, whose research on that question is unmatched (The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Knopf, 1995), concluded, based on the papers of Truman, his chief adviser James Byrnes, and others, that the bomb was seen as a diplomatic weapon against the Soviet Union. Byrnes advised Truman that the bomb "could let us dictate the terms of ending the war." The British scientist P.M.S. Blackett, one of Churchill's advisers, wrote after the war that dropping the atomic bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia."
There is also evidence that domestic politics played an important role in the decision. In his recent book, Freedom From Fear: The United States, 1929-1945 (Oxford, 1999), David Kennedy quotes Secretary of State Cordell Hull advising Byrnes, before the Potsdam conference, that "terrible political repercussions would follow in the U.S." if the unconditional surrender principle would be abandoned. The President would be "crucified" if he did that, Byrnes said. Kennedy reports that "Byrnes accordingly repudiated the suggestions of Leahy, McCloy, Grew, and Stimson," all of whom were willing to relax the "unconditional surrender" demand just enough to permit the Japanese their face-saving requirement for ending the war.
Can we believe that our political leaders would consign hundreds of thousands of people to death or lifelong suffering because of "political repercussions" at home?
The idea is horrifying, yet we can see in history a pattern of Presidential behavior that placed personal ambition high above human life. The tapes of John F. Kennedy reveal him weighing withdrawal from Vietnam against the upcoming election. Transcripts of Lyndon Johnson's White House conversations show him agonizing over Vietnam ("I don't think it's worth fighting for...." ) but deciding that he could not withdraw because: "They'd impeach a President-wouldn't they?"
Did millions die in Southeast Asia because American Presidents wanted to stay in office?
Just before the Gulf War, President Bush's aide John Sununu was reported "telling people that a short successful war would be pure political gold for the President and would guarantee his reelection." And is not the Clinton-Gore support for the "Star Wars" anti-missile program (against all scientific evidence or common sense) prompted by their desire to be seen by the voters as tough guys?
Of course, political ambition was not the only reason for Hiroshima, Vietnam, and the other horrors of our time. There was tin, rubber, oil, corporate profit, imperial arrogance.
There was a cluster of factors, none of them, despite the claims of our leaders, having to do with human rights, human life.
The wars go on, even when they are over. Every day, British and U.S. warplanes bomb Iraq, and children die. Every day, children die in Iraq because of the U.S.-sponsored embargo. Every day, boys and girls in Afghanistan step on land mines and are killed or mutilated. The Russia of "the free market" brutalizes Chechnya, as the Russia of "socialism" sent an army into Afghanistan. In Africa, more wars.
The mine defuser in The English Patient was properly bitter about Western imperialism. But the problem is larger than even that 500-year assault on colored peoples of the world. It is a problem of the corruption of human intelligence, enabling our leaders to create plausible reasons for monstrous acts, and to exhort citizens to accept those reasons, and train soldiers to follow orders. So,) long as that continues, we will need to refute those reasons, resist those exhortations.
(Edited by vox at 8:17 pm on Sep. 18, 2001)
(Edited by vox at 8:19 pm on Sep. 18, 2001)
Economists have provided capitalists with a comforting concept called the "free market." It does not describe any part of reality, at any place or time. It's a mantra conveniently invoked when it is proposed that government do something the faithful don't like, and just as conveniently ignored whenever they want government to do something for them.
Vox,
Thank you for posting this article. I had been looking for some authoritative and critical comments about Hiroshima and Nagasaki but hadn't found anything satisfactory.
Re the present situation - I've heard some commentators remark with fear things to the effect of 'What's next? A nuclear attack?!' - as if it would be the first. I feel that Hiroshima may become an even more sensitive topic for Americans now. Now that they've experienced extreme violation of their own land, Hiroshima should be all the more disturbing and instructive.
It cannot but be supportive, socialist, communist or whatever you want to call it. Does nature, and the human species with it, have much time left to survive in the absence of such change? Very little time. Who will be the builders of that new world? The
Holy shit...hmmm...I guess this is the result of
1. Me paying attention mostly to the Holocaust.
2. Paying NO attention to the Pacific.
3. Not researching about this for years and forgetting what was once known.
But this...I was told that Japan WAS trying to surrender before the bombs, but I didn't believe it.
It seems to me that all Japan wanted was to keep the Emperor. Why was that so wrong?
I was going to say:
"The thing is though, in the Pacific, DESPITE the bad condidtions in Japan, they refused to surrender. Even with the first bombing, they STILL refused to surrender(gods...one would have to admire that). A ground war would have made it much easier for MILITARY leadership of Japan to say, "surrender? Nope." As a matter of fact, it took Hirohito to say, "we surrender" for Japan to do so...I wonder if he would have done that with a ground war...we don't know though..."
Now, I don't know what to say...because people obviously came up with different conclusions...
This isn't, of course, meant to excuse Japan's actions during the war.
We, in the US at least, and I imagine elsewhere, are taught recent history in terms of good and bad. Too often, that's not the case. It's quite common for there to be no hero, no good guy, no sterling example of morality.
I think that we, as human beings, need to realize this.
vox
Economists have provided capitalists with a comforting concept called the "free market." It does not describe any part of reality, at any place or time. It's a mantra conveniently invoked when it is proposed that government do something the faithful don't like, and just as conveniently ignored whenever they want government to do something for them.
I agree. There are some things that fall totally outside ideology all together and can't be justified. Like these probable 6,000 dead, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Che Guevara wannabe
"It's quite common for there to be no hero, no good guy, no sterling example of morality.
I think that we, as human beings, need to realize this. "
Hmmm...yea...indeed. But how can they NOT? Hell, even in Video Games(eh...the ones MADE IN JAPAN) illustrate that...Final Fantasy Tactics anyone?
Books do the same.
