Nyaho Stands Up For Mahama

Dr Nyaho Nyaho Tamakloe

By Ekow Mensah

Dr Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe, a leading member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is living up to his billing as a fearless and independent public commentator.

He says it as it is no matter who profits or suffers from his usually caustic statements.

Dr Nyaho- Tamakloe says that he is confident that President John Dramani Mahama will deliver on his promises by 2016.

In an interview on TV3’s “Hot Issues” Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe said with the election petition over President Mahama now has the opportunity to perform”.

He also asked the people of Ghana to give the government enough space to enable it meet its obligations to the people of Ghana.

In the one hour twenty minutes interview, Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe also reaffirmed his faith in the New Patriotic Party (NPP) saying that the NPP and its philosophy will continue to be vibrant and relevant.

He lashed out at political party leaders who have unleashed badly behaved young people to pour insults and invectives on their opponents.

He said he is appalled by the level of insults in national politics and said “the leadership of the political parties must call their members to order.

“They even insult the president” he lamented.

Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe said he would support anybody chosen by the NPP as its Presidential candidate for the 2016 elections.

Editorial

CONGRATULATIONS

The people of Ghana deserve congratulations for being given the singular privileged of hosting the 8th Pan African Congress in Accra.

On a recent visit to Ghana, major General Kahinde Otafire, Minister of Justice of Uganda and Chairman of the Pan African Movement announced that Ghana has been chosen to host the 8th Congress of the movement.

For those who appreciate the role of the Pan African Movement in shaping the destiny continent, this must be, a great honour bestowed on the people of Ghana.

At the very least, it is acknowledged that the 5th Pan-African Congress which was held in Manchester provided the impetus for accelerating the decolonisation in Africa.

It was at that conference that Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Du Bois and other Pan-Africanists fine tunes their strategy for the decolonisation process on the continent.

Since then Pan- Africanism has rightly focused on the dismantling of neo-colonial structures on the continent and the re-crucifixion of Africa.

 The hosting of the 8th Pan African Congress in Accra will once again provide the people of Ghana with a huge opportunity to contribute to the advancement of the Africa revolution.

THOUGHT OF A MYSTEROUS MAN

A United States Drone

By Ebow Duncan.

DIFFERENT FATHERS

In the very small village of Gomoa Abora in the Central Region of Ghana resides a 41 year old father of four.

This father is by all standards poor. He is barely able to elk out a living. He is unable to pay for the education of his children and modern healthcare is only a dream that survives in the inner reaches of his brain.

Egya Pra works very hard. Indeed he works harder than the Chief Executives of many of the multi-national corporations which continuously steal the natural resources of his homeland.

He wakes up at dawn and as waddles through path ways to his farm, the dew falls on his head and his short pants get wet by touching the dew which had fallen on leaves.

 Egya Pra works from dawn to dusk to give life to the seeds he plants and to nature his cassava, cocoyam, beans, tomatoes and pepper to healthy life.

 He tenders the plants for his own survival, the survival of his family and his people.

He is constantly engaged in a struggle to improve life. To feed the hungry and to bring nourishment to all including those who operate the neo-colonial system to his disadvantage.

When Egya Pra says to his family that he is going to work, he means exactly that. He sets out to till the land in a back breaking endeavour for the survival of the human race.

 The truth is that Egya Pra does not typify all fathers. There are others who are so different.

The only thing which is common to all fathers is that they are assumed to be responsible for some freak moments of passion necessary for procreation.

Somewhere in the United states of America sits another father who is nothing more than a killing machine in the hands of the decadent forces of imperialism.

 When Jim Jones tells his family that he is going to work, what he actually means is that he is going  to commit mass murder.

As a drone pilot all he does is to manipulate the computer send what looks like toy aircrafts into other peoples countries to kill innocent women and children in the name of the fight against terrorism.

These drones have killed thousands of people in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and many other places.

The irony is that the biggest of terrorists don’t live in these countries. They live in the capitals of the USA, Germany, France, Britain and Italy.

It is these big terrorists who recruit and train those they are chasing around the world with drones resulting in the death of innocent women children.

Isn’t it the Western leaders who are busily training, arming and financing the Syrian terrorists who rip the chest of human beings open eat their still beating hearts in front of television cameras ?

Was it not the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America which recruited, trained, armed and financed Osama bin Laden and his band of terrorists?

If drones must kill terrorists why send them to Kabul when the biggest of terrorist resides in the White House?

Jim Jones’ Job is to chase Phantoms and to kill the innocent and that is exactly what he does as a drone pilot.

This is the story of two father’s one poor and exploited natures life and contribute to our survival while the other, rich and powerful destroys life and helps to build the hegemony of the elite of the Western World.

Nigeria’s Long Emergency

Boko Haram militants

By Adewale Maja-Pearce

Last month, we Nigerians received some startling news from the army: Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram, which has killed some 3,000 people in northern Nigeria over the last four years, “might have died.”

The government has provided no proof of this claim. No corpse has been displayed, and Boko Haram, whose name loosely translates as “Western education is sinful,” has been silent on the matter. Just a few days ago, Boko Haram militants set up a roadblock in the northern town of Benisheik and shot at least 87 people to death as they were trying to flee.

This would not be the first time we had heard false rumors of his death — there was one in 2009 — and many Nigerians believe the announcement was merely a ruse, designed to provoke Mr. Shekau into making a public appearance or statement, in the hope of flushing him out. The theory is not so crazy: Boko Haram released a video a few days before the August announcement that purported to show Mr. Shekau, but the government said the man in the video was “an impostor.”

Given that the United States has placed a $7 million bounty on his head — a figure that puts him well up there in the terrorists’ league — there is plenty of incentive to get hold of Mr. Shekau, especially for soldiers in the three states in northern Nigeria where the sect is believed to be holding out, and where a state of emergency was declared a few months ago.

Little is actually known about Mr. Shekau, except for his taste for killing. In a rare video clip released early last year, he said, “I enjoy killing anyone that God commands me to kill — the way I enjoy killing chickens and rams.”

Mr. Shekau’s ascent to power — and the concomitant increase in violence — followed the extrajudicial execution of the sect’s founder, Mohammed Yusuf, by the police in 2009. This singular event, which was also videotaped, gave Mr. Shekau the excuse he needed to start bombing churches and schools in what quickly became a reign of terror. But the virulence of his murderous campaign points to a much deeper problem: the power struggle between the largely Islamic north and the largely Christian south.

From independence in 1960 until the return of democracy in 1999, Nigeria was ruled almost exclusively by elites (largely military) from the north, who practically believed that they had a divine right to govern. By 1999, the elite accepted that its monopoly on power was no longer feasible, and allowed a southerner of its choosing, Olusegun Obasanjo, to emerge as president for two four-year terms, on the understanding that the presidency would return to the north afterward.

A northerner, Umaru Yar’Adua, indeed took over in 2007, but he died in office nearly three years later, and was succeeded by his deputy, Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, who was supposed to act as a caretaker but then decided to run in 2011. He initially promised to serve just one full term, but has now reneged and talks about pursuing a second term in the next election, in 2015.

Why does this regional struggle matter? It’s partly a curse of the bonanza of crude oil in the south, the control of which is the raison d’être of our government. As one northern ruler put it during the oil-price rises of the 1970s, Nigeria’s problem is not money, but how to spend it.

Decades later, Nigeria — the world’s seventh most populous country — is the world’s second-largest importer of Champagne but is unable to deliver more than a few hours of electricity a day.

The southerners who inhabit the oil-producing Niger Delta, which financed the northern elite’s decades-long party, have awakened to the theft of their resources and started demanding greater political representation. Some have purloined their region’s crude wealth to buy military hardware on the high seas. Unlike Boko Haram, however, these militants are mostly focused on securing autonomy for the delta, not on imposing a radical religious ideology.

By the time Boko Haram started its own, far more ferocious, brand of violence four years ago, the case for a continued northern monopoly on power seemed lost. That’s why some Nigerians believe that the northern elite quietly tolerated — or even abetted — the sect, as a way to bog down Mr. Jonathan’s government, and to preserve the privileges of political patronage by keeping resources flowing to the north.

Mr. Jonathan himself has accused some leading northern politicians of consorting with Boko Haram. Muhammadu Buhari, a northern leader, former military officer and frequent presidential candidate, who plans to run again in 2015, has declined to condemn the terrorist group and has accused the government of hypocrisy. Niger Delta militants “were given money, and a training scheme was introduced for their members,” he said, while in contrast, “when Boko Haram emerged, members of the sect were killed.”

This is a ludicrous comparison, but a sad measure of the gulf between the two sides fighting for the soul of this country.

The problem goes beyond Boko Haram, which in any case appears to be splitting into several splinter groups, some expanding their reach beyond Nigeria. It may have been just such a splinter group that kidnapped members of a French family over the border in Cameroon in February and held them for two months.

As the latest deadly attacks in the north show, it hardly matters whether Mr. Shekau is dead or not. The killings continue, which is why the state of emergency is unlikely to end anytime soon.

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of “A Peculiar Tragedy: J. P. Clark-Bekederemo and the Beginning of Modern Nigerian Literature in English.”

ILLITERACY

By Yenia Silva Correa

The United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012), has concluded, the problem of illiteracy is far from resolved.

Data reported by UNESCO last September indicated the existence of some 775 million illiterate adults worldwide, in addition to 61 million children not attending school.

The situation is of serious concern considering that teaching all of these people to read and write within a short time period, for which there is no plan, is not in itself enough to eliminate this social problem.

Primary education must be available universally and teachers must be trained, to ensure that studies continue and the general level of education rises. If this is not done, within a few years, short term gains in eliminating illiteracy will vanish.

In Latin America and the Caribbean regional organizations indicate that 6.5 million children are not in school. It is well-known that women – rich and poor – around the world have more difficulty gaining access to education.

The subject cannot be reduced to statistics. Illiteracy’s effects are wide-ranging, with poverty and lack of education going hand in hand, along with violence, unemployment, exclusion – the full gamut of social problems.

Seen in this light, it appears unlikely that the situation will be addressed by 2015, and even less that primary education will be made universally available to all children – one of the Millennium Objectives which has received significant attention, but continues to face great challenges.

Multiple attempts to reach a definitive solution to the problem of illiteracy have been frustrated more than once by armed conflicts, lack of infrastructure or indifference on the part of governments and institutions.

Additionally, many who lack education are also suffering from hunger and illness. Focused on daily survival, they have little time for study, thus maintaining the vicious circle which keeps them marginalized on the periphery of society.

Nevertheless, there have been many successful efforts to eliminate illiteracy in different parts of the world. In Cuba’s case, the most illustrative example is that of the Yes, I Can program, which has allowed 7,126,433 persons to become literate in some 30 Latin American, African and Asian countries over the last decade.

Much earlier, in 1961, Cuba made a historic effort to ensure that the entire population was literate, long before there was any discussion of an information society, the digital age or functional illiteracy, concepts commonly cited today, which remind us that knowing how to read and write is not enough.

Despite the efforts made, UNESCO acknowledges that full literacy remains a distant goal. What is needed is collaboration among governments, support for educational programs and training for the personnel required. If this cannot be mustered, the number of people denied literacy will shamefully remain in the millions.

US bidding for hair trigger

US President Hussein Obama

By Finian Cunningham

The US has become a psychotic superpower, high on paranoia induced by its own poisonous propaganda. This unstable, lawless rogue state, armed to the teeth and deluded by its own self-righteousness, poses the greatest risk to world security.

The Western public, in particular, should forget about all sorts of imagined evil enemies, and just focus on this one fact: the safety of the world and the future of mankind are being held hostage by the US government, its shadow agencies and the financial-military-industrial complex that it serves.

The Western public, in particular, should forget about all sorts of imagined evil enemies, and just focus on this one fact: the safety of the world and the future of mankind are being held hostage by the US government, its shadow agencies and the financial-military-industrial complex that it serves.

This week sees an ominous move towards the psychotic superpower being placed on a hair-trigger. According to the US-based Foreign Policy publication, the Pentagon is being advised by its own deluded people - the Defense Science Board - to create a doomsday retaliation force in the event of a «catastrophic cyber-attack.

The retaliation force is to be maintained as a separate entity from the conventional military structure. It would include B52 bombers with nuclear weapons that are ordered to strike on foreign enemies if the US government should «experience» a fatal cyber threat. Note the subjectivity here…

What makes this development disquieting is the self-fulfilling tendency. In recent months, American politicians and so-called news media have taken to accusing foreign states of launching computer virus attacks. China in particular has been singled out for allegedly carrying out hacking raids on American government and news media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

As with so many other recent secretive official US claims and decisions, the accusations of cyber attacks are not convincingly evidenced. Just like the Pentagon`s assassination drone program, the public is expected to accept the word of shadowy US government agencies about «imminent» foreign terrorism.

American claims of cyber warfare conducted by China, Russia and Iran seem unfounded and indeed betray a mindset that is hysterical, if not duplicitous. No doubt all governments conduct some level of computer spying and invasion as a modern technological extension of age-old espionage activity. But the claim made by the US that it is being subjected to an unprecedented wave of unilateral cyber attacks appears to be unhinged hysteria.

China in particular has denied any wrongdoing and in fact Beijing has produced data that purports to show that it is the one coming under massive cyber attack - from American sites. It is also conclusive that the US, along with its Israeli cat`s paw, has been sabotaging Iranian sites with the Stuxnet and Flame viruses.

The very real danger, therefore, is that the US is creating a cyber doomsday pretext to justify its long-held prerogative to launch war and destruction against any country that it so designates - regardless of fact or international law.

Whereas before, the US would have had to mount a lengthy, time and cost-consuming, politically tricky process of fabricating a cause for war, now the cyber trigger can be pulled in a secretive and efficacious manner.

Now, presumably, it would be so easy to set up a cyber Pearl Harbour incident or 9/11 type false flag to pin on any designated enemy. The lights go out in Washington for a few hours, social panic sets in with the help from the dutiful news media, and before you know it the B-52s are on their way to turn some alleged miscreant country back to the Stone Age. Stage then set for American-led capitalist neo-colonisation.

Since at least World War II, the genocidal propensity and practices of the US are proven, if not widely known, especially among its propagandized public.

The atomic holocaust of hundreds of thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the beginning of the long shadow cast upon the world by this deranged superpower.

For a few decades, the crazed American giant could hide behind the veil of the «Cold War» against the Soviet Union, pretending to be the protector of the «free world». If that was true, then why since the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago has there not been peace on earth? Why have conflicts proliferated to the point that there is now a permanent state of war in the world? Former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan have melded into countless other US-led wars across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

The «War on Terror» and its tacit invocation of «evil Islamists» have sought to replace the «Cold War» and its bogeymen, the «evil communists». But if we set aside these narratives, then the alternative makes compelling sense and accurate explanation of events.

That alternative is simply this: that the US is an imperialist warmonger whose appetite for war, plunder and hegemony is insatiable. If the US had no official enemy, it would have to invent one.

The Cold War narrative can be disabused easily by the simple contradictory fact, as already mentioned, that more than 22 years after the collapse of the «evil» Soviet Union the world is no less peaceful and perhaps even more racked by belligerence and conflict. The War on Terror narrative can likewise be dismissed by the fact that the «evil Islamists» supposedly being combated were created by US and British military intelligence along with Saudi money in Afghanistan during the 1980s and are currently being supported by the West to destabilize Libya and Syria and indirectly Mali.

So what we are left to deduce is a world that is continually being set at war by the US and its various surrogates. As the executive power in the global capitalist system, the US is the main protagonist in pursuing the objectives of the financial-military-industrial complex. These objectives include: subjugation of all nations - their workers, governments and industries, for the total economic and political domination by the global network of finance capitalism. In this function, of course, the US government is aided by its Western allies and the NATO military apparatus.

Any nation not completely toeing the imperialist line will be targeted for attack. They include Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. In the past, they included Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Grenada, Nicaragua, Chile and Panama. Presently, others include Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Mali undergoing attack operations.

The difference between covert and overt attack by the US hegemon is only a matter of degrees. The decades-long economic sanctions on Iran, the cyber sabotage of that country’s industries and infrastructure, the assassination of nuclear scientists, deployment of terrorist proxies such as the MKO, and the repeated threat of all-out war by the US and its Israeli surrogate, could all qualify Iran as already being subjected to war and not just a future target.

Likewise with Russia: the expansion of US missile systems around Russia’s borders is an act of incremental war. Likewise China: the American arming of Taiwan, relentless war gaming in the South China Sea and the stoking of territorial conflicts are all examples of where «politics is but war by other means.

What history shows us is that the modern world has been turned into a lawless shooting gallery under the unhinged misrule of the United States of America. That has always been so since at least the Second World War, with more than 60 wars having been waged by Washington during that period, and countless millions killed. For decades this truth has been obscured by propaganda - the Cold War, War on Terror etc - but now the appalling stark reality is unavoidably clear. The US is at war - against the entire world.

The latest move by the US ruling elite to give itself a thoroughly modern hair trigger for its warmongering global plunder - the secret, un-provable cyber trigger - is the culmination of its psychotic depravity to rule the world.

This article was originally posted at Strategic Culture Foundation website.

How to destroy the future

What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So imagine that you're an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what's happening here or, for that matter, imagine you're an historian 100 years from now – assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious – and you're looking back at what's happening today. You'd see something quite remarkable.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That's been true since 1945. It's now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

And there are other dangers like pandemics, which have to do with globalization and interaction. So there are processes underway and institutions right in place, like nuclear weapons systems, which could lead to a serious blow to, or maybe the termination of, an organized existence.

The question is: What are people doing about it? None of this is a secret. It's all perfectly open. In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it.

There have been a range of reactions. There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them. If you look at who they are, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer would see something strange indeed. Trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them, tribal societies and first nations in Canada. They're not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they're really trying to do something about it.

In fact, all over the world – Australia, India, South America – there are battles going on, sometimes wars. In India, it's a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally, but also in their general consequences. In societies where indigenous populations have an influence, many are taking a strong stand. The strongest of any country with regard to global warming is in Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority and constitutional requirements that protect the "rights of nature."

Ecuador, which also has a large indigenous population, is the only oil exporter I know of where the government is seeking aid to help keep that oil in the ground, instead of producing and exporting it – and the ground is where it ought to be.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died recently and was the object of mockery, insult, and hatred throughout the Western world, attended a session of the U.N. General Assembly a few years ago where he elicited all sorts of ridicule for calling George W. Bush a devil. He also gave a speech there that was quite interesting. Of course, Venezuela is a major oil producer. Oil is practically their whole gross domestic product. In that speech, he warned of the dangers of the overuse of fossil fuels and urged producer and consumer countries to get together and try to work out ways to reduce fossil fuel use. That was pretty amazing on the part of an oil producer. You know, he was part Indian, of indigenous background. Unlike the funny things he did, this aspect of his actions at the U.N. was never even reported.

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible. Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed.

Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call "a century of energy independence" for the United States. Energy independence is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside. What they mean is: we'll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to destroying the world.

And that's pretty much the case everywhere. Admittedly, when it comes to alternative energy development, Europe is doing something. Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps 100 relevant ones that doesn't have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn't even have renewable energy targets. It's not because the population doesn't want it. Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming. It's institutional structures that block change. Business interests don't want it and they're overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.

So that's what the future historian – if there is one – would see. He might also read today's scientific journals. Just about every one you open has a more dire prediction than the last.

The other issue is nuclear war. It's been known for a long time that if there were to be a first strike by a major power, even with no retaliation, it would probably destroy civilization just because of the nuclear-winter consequences that would follow. You can read about it in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It's well understood. So the danger has always been a lot worse than we thought it was.

We've just passed the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was called "the most dangerous moment in history" by historian Arthur Schlesinger, President John F. Kennedy's advisor. Which it was. It was a very close call, and not the only time either. In some ways, however, the worst aspect of these grim events is that the lessons haven't been learned.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane. There was a point, as the missile crisis was reaching its peak, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy offering to settle it by a public announcement of a withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey. Actually, Kennedy hadn't even known that the U.S. had missiles in Turkey at the time. They were being withdrawn anyway, because they were being replaced by more lethal Polaris nuclear submarines, which were invulnerable.

So that was the offer. Kennedy and his advisors considered it – and rejected it. At the time, Kennedy himself was estimating the likelihood of nuclear war at a third to a half. So Kennedy was willing to accept a very high risk of massive destruction in order to establish the principle that we – and only we – have the right to offensive missiles beyond our borders, in fact anywhere we like, no matter what the risk to others – and to ourselves, if matters fall out of control. We have that right, but no one else does.

Kennedy did, however, accept a secret agreement to withdraw the missiles the U.S. was already withdrawing, as long as it was never made public. Khrushchev, in other words, had to openly withdraw the Russian missiles while the US secretly withdrew its obsolete ones; that is, Khrushchev had to be humiliated and Kennedy had to maintain his macho image. He's greatly praised for this: courage and coolness under threat, and so on. The horror of his decisions is not even mentioned – try to find it on the record.

And to add a little more, a couple of months before the crisis blew up the United States had sent missiles with nuclear warheads to Okinawa. These were aimed at China during a period of great regional tension.

Well, who cares? We have the right to do anything we want anywhere in the world. That was one grim lesson from that era, but there were others to come.

Ten years after that, in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert. It was his way of warning the Russians not to interfere in the ongoing Israel-Arab war and, in particular, not to interfere after he had informed the Israelis that they could violate a ceasefire the U.S. and Russia had just agreed upon. Fortunately, nothing happened.

Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan was in office. Soon after he entered the White House, he and his advisors had the Air Force start penetrating Russian air space to try to elicit information about Russian warning systems, Operation Able Archer. Essentially, these were mock attacks. The Russians were uncertain, some high-level officials fearing that this was a step towards a real first strike. Fortunately, they didn't react, though it was a close call. And it goes on like that.

At the moment, the nuclear issue is regularly on front pages in the cases of North Korea and Iran. There are ways to deal with these ongoing crises. Maybe they wouldn't work, but at least you could try. They are, however, not even being considered, not even reported.

Take the case of Iran, which is considered in the West – not in the Arab world, not in Asia – the gravest threat to world peace. It's a Western obsession, and it's interesting to look into the reasons for it, but I'll put that aside here. Is there a way to deal with the supposed gravest threat to world peace? Actually there are quite a few. One way, a pretty sensible one, was proposed a couple of months ago at a meeting of the non-aligned countries in Tehran. In fact, they were just reiterating a proposal that's been around for decades, pressed particularly by Egypt, and has been approved by the U.N. General Assembly.

The proposal is to move toward establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region. That wouldn't be the answer to everything, but it would be a pretty significant step forward. And there were ways to proceed. Under U.N. auspices, there was to be an international conference in Finland last December to try to implement plans to move toward this. What happened?

You won't read about it in the newspapers because it wasn't reported – only in specialist journals. In early November, Iran agreed to attend the meeting. A couple of days later Obama cancelled the meeting, saying the time wasn't right. The European Parliament issued a statement calling for it to continue, as did the Arab states. Nothing resulted. So we'll move toward ever-harsher sanctions against the Iranian population – it doesn't hurt the regime – and maybe war. Who knows what will happen?

In Northeast Asia, it's the same sort of thing. North Korea may be the craziest country in the world. It's certainly a good competitor for that title. But it does make sense to try to figure out what's in the minds of people when they're acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? Just imagine ourselves in their situation. Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.

Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that, since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea's dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply – a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive. The journals were exulting in what this meant to those "Asians," horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death. How magnificent! It's not in our memory, but it's in their memory.

Let's turn to the present. There's an interesting recent history. In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it. Shortly after that, in retaliation, North Korea carried out a minor missile test. The U.S. and North Korea did then reach a framework agreement in 1994 that halted its nuclear work and was more or less honored by both sides. When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn't producing any more.

Bush immediately launched his aggressive militarism, threatening North Korea – "axis of evil" and all that – so North Korea got back to work on its nuclear program. By the time Bush left office, they had eight to 10 nuclear weapons and a missile system, another great neocon achievement. In between, other things happened. In 2005, the U.S. and North Korea actually reached an agreement in which North Korea was to end all nuclear weapons and missile development. In return, the West, but mainly the United States, was to provide a light-water reactor for its medical needs and end aggressive statements. They would then form a nonaggression pact and move toward accommodation.

It was pretty promising, but almost immediately Bush undermined it. He withdrew the offer of the light-water reactor and initiated programs to compel banks to stop handling any North Korean transactions, even perfectly legal ones. The North Koreans reacted by reviving their nuclear weapons program. And that's the way it's been going.

It's well known. You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship. What they say is: it's a pretty crazy regime, but it's also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy. You make a hostile gesture and we'll respond with some crazy gesture of our own. You make an accommodating gesture and we'll reciprocate in some way.

Lately, for instance, there have been South Korean-U.S. military exercises on the Korean peninsula which, from the North's point of view, have got to look threatening. We'd think they were threatening if they were going on in Canada and aimed at us. In the course of these, the most advanced bombers in history, Stealth B-2s and B-52s, are carrying out simulated nuclear bombing attacks right on North Korea's borders.

This surely sets off alarm bells from the past. They remember that past, so they're reacting in a very aggressive, extreme way. Well, what comes to the West from all this is how crazy and how awful the North Korean leaders are. Yes, they are. But that's hardly the whole story, and this is the way the world is going.

It's not that there are no alternatives. The alternatives just aren't being taken. That's dangerous. So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it's not a pretty picture. Unless people do something about it. We always can.

How the Pentagon Removes Entire Peoples

Worldwide Network of US Military Bases

By David Swanson

If we think at all about our government's military depopulating territory that it desires, we usually think of the long-ago replacement of native Americans with new settlements during the continental expansion of the United States westward.

Here in Virginia some of us are vaguely aware that back during the Great Depression poor people were evicted from their homes and their land where national parks were desired. But we distract and comfort ourselves with the notion that such matters are deep in the past.

Occasionally we notice that environmental disasters are displacing people, often poor people or marginalized people, from their homes. But these incidents seem like collateral damage rather than intentional ethnic cleansing.

If we're aware of the 1,000 or so U.S. military bases standing today in some 175 foreign countries, we must realize that the land they occupy could serve some other purpose in the lives of those countries' peoples. But surely those countries' peoples are still there, still living -- if perhaps slightly inconvenienced -- in their countries.

Yet the fact is that the U.S. military has displaced and continues to displace for the construction of its bases the entire populations of villages and islands, in blatant violation of international law, basic human decency, and principles we like to tell each other we stand for. The United States also continues to deny displaced populations the right to return to their homelands.

At issue here are not the bombings or burnings of entire villages, which of course the United States engages in during its wars and its non-wars. Nor are we dealing here with the millions of refugees created by wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan or by drone wars like the one in Pakistan. Rather, the following are cases of the intentional displacement of particular populations moved out of the way of base construction and left alive to struggle as refugees in exile.

In the Philippines, the United States built bases on land belonging to the indigenous Aetas people, who "ended up combing military trash to survive."

During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho'alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated.

In 1942, the Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders.

President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island. He had them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.

On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and -- in 2003 -- to stop bombing the island.

On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s.

The Navy is right now looking at the island of Pagan as a possible replacement for Vieques, the population already having been removed by a volcanic eruption. Of course, any possibility of return would be greatly diminished.

Beginning during World War II and continuing through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia -- where land and money were promised but not delivered.

In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return.

DIEGO GARCIA

The story of Diego Garcia is superbly told in David Vine's book, Island of Shame. Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants from this island in the Indian Ocean. On orders from, and with funding from, the United States, the British forced the people onto overcrowded ships and dumped them on docks in Mauritius and the Seychelles -- foreign and distant and unwelcoming lands for this indigenous population that had been part of Diego Garcia for centuries. U.S. documents described this as "sweeping" and "sanitizing" the island.

Those responsible for the displacement of the people of Diego Garcia knew that what they were doing was widely considered barbaric and illegal. They devised ways of creating "logical cover" for the process. They persuaded the ever-compliant Washington Post to bury the story. The Queen of England and her Privy Council bypassed Parliament. The Pentagon lied to Congress and hid its payments to the British from Congress. The planners even lied to themselves. Having originally envisioned a communications station, they concluded that advances in technology had rendered that unhelpful. So, Navy schemers decided that a fueling station for ships might offer a "suitable justification" for building a base that was actually a purposeless end in itself. But the Pentagon ended up telling a reluctant Congress that the base would be a communications station, because that was something Congress would approve.

Those plotting the eviction of the island's people created the fiction that the inhabitants were migrant workers not actually native to Diego Garcia. Sir Paul Gore-Booth, Permanent Under Secretary in the Foreign Office of the U.K., dismissed the island's people as "some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure." This stood in contrast to the respect and protection given to some other islands not chosen for bases because of the rare plants, birds, and animals resident there.

On January 24, 1971, remaining inhabitants of Diego Garcia were told they'd need to leave or be shot. They were allowed to take a small box of possessions, but had to leave their homes, their gardens, their animals, their land, and their society. Their dogs were rounded up and killed in a gas chamber as they watched, waiting to themselves be loaded on ships for departure. Arriving in Mauritius, they were housed in a prison. Their fate has not much improved in the decades since. David Vine describes them as very forgiving, wishing nothing but to be permitted to return.

Diego Garcia is purely a military base and in some ways more of a lawless zone than Guantanamo. The United States has kept and may be keeping prisoners there, on the island or on ships in the harbor. The Red Cross and journalists do not visit. The United States has de facto control of Diego Garcia, while the U.K. has technical ownership. The Pentagon is not interested in allowing the island's people to return.

JEJU ISLAND

The South Korean government, at the behest of the U.S. Navy, is in the process of devastating a village, its coast, and 130 acres of farmland on Jeju Island with a massive military base. This story is best told in Regis Tremblay's new film The Ghosts of Jeju. This is not a tragedy from the past to be remedied but a tragedy of this moment to be halted in its tracks. You can help. Tremblay's film examines the history of decades of abuse of the people of Jeju, and the resistance movement that is currently inspiring other anti-base efforts around the globe. The film begins somber and ends joyful. I highly recommend creating an event around a screening of it.