Editor’s Note: In sharing articles in Tikkun, we often print articles with which we don’t agree

. This

is a classic case. Though Jay Janson has a very strong point in critiquing the way that veterans lives have been sacrificed to serve the imperial goals of America’s elites (as has been true for veterans in almost every war in history as people died to serve their own country’s elites), it is not true when thinking about the veterans who served the North in the Civil War nor those who fought the Second World War. War is almost always wrong, but

those who fought them have often been motivated by goals quite different from the goals of those who instigated the wars.

We at Tikkun want to see an end to all wars, but we don’t want to negate the decency and even idealism of many who have fought in these wars, an idealism that has often been manipulated by unscrupulous leaders like, in the case of the U.S., Presidents Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Bush, and perhaps Obama also (in his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq), and by advisors like Henry Kissinger and Vice President Cheney, and the list could go on and on on.  Of course, it makes sense to emphasize that soldiers engaged in human rights abuses during those wars also do not deserve to be honored, as for example the Nazis, Stalin’s Soviet armies in the 2nd world war, and some U.S. soldiers in Vietnam and Iraq, not to mention that role of the School of the Americas in training South and Central American soldiers and police in torture techniques (and that School still persists at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA).

Indeed, we do not deny that there is something fundamentally evil about every war–and the untold abuses of others that almost always accompany every battle and every army. We want to see them all ended, right now.

So Jay Janson’s point deserves a lot of public attention, but won’t get it because it doesn’t include these kinds of more nuanced reflections. Yet in its outrage at war, and its constant reminder that we should not celebrate all veterans but only those who did not consciously aid in manipulating us into wars and did not engage in activities like those in Guantanamo and the dozens of other torture centers run by the U.S. military and intelligence forces around the world, Janson has an important point that should be discussed by everyone on Veterans Day.  And we should insist that the best way to honor Veterans and all they went through is to end all wars starting NOW. –Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun

Jay Janson on Veterans Day:

Is it good for America to honor indiscriminatelyall Veterans on Veterans Day?

Contrast such honoring of all Veterans with some famous admonishments by:

Nelson Mandela,

former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark,

Martin Luther.King,

Mark Twain,

Major General Smedley Butler, the most highly decorated US Marine ever,

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for years pastor of Barack Obama and family

MIT’s Noam Chomsky, often voted America’s Preeminent Intellectual.

Ron Paul, Medical Doctor, US Representative, Presidential candidate

Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784 most distinguished man of letters in English history

President Abraham Lincoln

Robert Jackson, US Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg Trials of Nazis

General Telford Tayor, Counsel for the Prosecution at Nuremberg Trials

Jesus – as reported to have said by Evangelist Matthew 25:40-41

December 15, 2013

[SURPRESSED] Mandela in 2003: “USA Has Committed Unspeakable Atrocities in the World!” Just as the corporate conglomerate media cartel, owned by investors in profitable wars, has for 44 years blacked out all mention of Martin Luther King Jr.’ condemnation of US atrocity wars and covert genocide on three continents in maintenance of predatory investments, does it black out Mandela’s denunciations of US atrocities and his love and appreciation for Fidel Castro for Cuban sacrifices and for Gadaffi’s aid to Mandela’s ANC fighting Apartheid.

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December 13, 2014
Ramsey Clark, “Without Demands for Compensation for Wrongful Deaths/Destruction, AntiImperialist Journalism is Hypocrisy World Economic power shift Eastward will bring a reconstituted UN that will certainly establish a Nuremberg Principles court to adjudicate the lawsuits for compensation for millions of wrongful deaths, injuries, deformed babies, destruction of property and theft of natural resources filed once the US can no longer intimidate victim nations with crippling sanctions. Lets make this prosecution arrive sooner to spare lives.

November 16, 2013

Few American Progressives Joining Ramsey Clark’s Call for Prosecution of US Genocide! Survivors of heartless bombings, invasions, occupations, and covert violence ware aware that even US antiwar intellectuals never seem to say or write that America should be brought to justice. What is now unthinkable and unimaginable in majority mankind, will become first plausible, then possible, then expected, then inevitable and necessary in a sane and just world, able to deal with the problems that affect survival. The greatest crime since World War Two has been US Foreign Policy. from his The Fire This Time – US War Crimes in the Gulf

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/America-Betrayed-Rev-Dr–by-Jay-Janson-Beyond-Vietnam-Breaking-The-Silence_Genocide_Predatory-Capitalism_Wars-140115-371.html

January 15, 2014

America Betrayed Rev. Dr. King Gagged His Condemning US Wars for Predatory Investments On TV, the week-end of the MKJjr’ birthday holiday, see all the celebrities, black, white, Asian, Latino. They will come to praise King and bury again King’s condemnation of US atrocity “wars meant to maintain unjust predatory investments on three continents.” They will hail King to heaven, loudly, to drown out anyone whispering that King called their dirty government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”     But King held them and all Americans, including himself responsible, not government, for Americans refusal to forgo the pleasures and privileges that derive from the immense profits in those unjust predatory overseas profits.  

July 31, 2014

Arundhati Roy: ‘Civil Rights Movement in US Has Become a War Supporting Movement’ Article bemoans how selective it is to bemoan the lack of civil rights, but only in America, and even for those Americans who return from willingly denying the very right to remain alive in their own beloved countries overseas. King had warned in his world shaking sermon in April of 1967 that there will be no progress on issues of social and racial justice at home while we continue to kill the poor oversea using up the enormous human and financial resources that make such progress at home impossible.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

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In 1902, Mark Twain wrote:“It is easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled” 

“Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your Honor. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism” 
Mark Twain wrote as quoted the above before TV, before Radio, and the present 98% control of all print and electronic news and entertainment giant 6  CIA and Pentagon fed media all owned by investors speculating profitably in the illegal and unconstitutional use of US Armed Forces and CIA.

Mark Twain and Helen Keller co-founded The Anti-imperialist League, but  failed to stop the US genocide in the Philippines.

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US Marine Major General Smedley Butler in 1935 published his

WAR Is a Racket – It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns.

Smedley Butler on Interventionism

I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

https://archive.org/stream/WarIsARacket/WarIsARacket_djvu.txt

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July 11, 2013
“God Damn America for Her Crimes Against Humanity” Rev. Jeremiah Wright 2008 Non-white majority Mankind, mostly descendants of the planet”s earliest humans educated in the arts and sciences, long plundered by savage descendants of ferocious Vikings and other primitive European tribes, will soon force America, and the white Colonial Powers it leads, to pay compensation for wrongful death, injury, stolen property and natural resources as condemned by Jeremiah Wright in sermon. Video

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Noam Chomsky, Prof. emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology, often voted America’s preeminent intellectual, lecturing at ST. Mcihael’s College, 1990.

“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. 

By violation of the Nuremberg laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which Nazis were hanged in Nuremberg”.          

(Chomsky has repeated this statement, bringing it up to date to include the current US President.)

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Ron Paul

During the GOP Presidential Candidates Debates of 2008, Ron Paul was shown repeating on prime time news programs over two weeks that ‘all US invasions and military action beginning with the war in Korea have been illegal and unconstitutional and have sadly has taken a huge toll in human lives.’

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Samuel Johnson, April 7, 1775

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” 

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Abraham Lincoln

“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.“

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Robert Jackson, US Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg Trials of Nazis

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

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General Telford Taylor

Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and political director for CBS Newsfrom 1965 to 1968 recently wrote in Bomber Pilot McCain: War Heroism or War Crimes? published by Institute for Public Accuracy, October 15, 2008,

I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a Chief Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals — and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.

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December 25, 2013
Jesus’ Birthday in an Apostate USA that Kills HIM Everyday Multiple Times USA places itself above Jesus. Shoots an Afghani, Pakistani, Yemeni, Somalia, Bang! Boom! there goes Jesus, shot down again at the same time, for in Matthew 25:40: Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” All who draw the sword will die by the sword. (Matt. 26:52) “you know the commandments: you must not kill” Mark 10.18

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Nuremberg Principles of International Lay, which are an integral part of the US Constitution criminalize, not only killing, but invading and threatening invasions, bombings and occupations unless in self-defense as crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.
US Attorney General Ramsey Clark endorses, and has inspired, the educational and stimulus website Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains the pertinent laws and a country by country history of US crimes. The immediate hoped for effect of the campaign is to seed as rapidly as possible, the idea of eventual prosecution as a topic of conversation throughout the world, which though now seems unthinkable and unimaginable will begin to be thought of first as plausible, then as logical and probable, to be expected, inevitable and necessary in a sane and just world, able to deal with the insanity of capitalism over humanity.

Internet’s Dissident Voice, which identifies itself as “A Radical Newsletter in the Struggle for Peace and Social Justice,” features at the bottom of each issue a statement and link as follows:

“Dissident Voice supports the call to Prosecute US Crimes against Humanity Now Campaign.”

Former Attorney Clark is also a co-founder along with Howard Zinn of the

King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, long widely endorsed and strongly supported by Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents in 67 countries; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, Sweden and the US; now resides in NYC