Good the people of Earth are so concerned over one another in a world of diverse problems on land, sea and air. May we keep up this compassion for others. Any good deed gives happiness to all those concerned.
Meanwhile, history is still recording the dangerous zones of Earth, capitlaized for respect.
Mame
Helene Smith © copyright 2013
www.macdonaldsward.com
DANGEROUS WAR ZONES!
–Earth's Greatest Enemy
Sophocles–Greek
playwright of tragedies–wrote, “War loves to seek its victims in the
young." Aggression also steals other people's sovereign lands. The following
essay is written to share broader knowledge gleaned from sixty years of
in-depth research on centuries of accumulative lethal munitions–what the media
often squelches for military political power in taking over land, not for
benefit of Indians and ranchers who knew they were sick from the contamination,
but for local tourists passing through their lands.
Government proving
grounds–over 1000 atomic bomb explosions from US toxicants–result in sterile
craters on Earth. Malformed,
maimed children suffer the longest period of time under the carbon boot of
war–unless their mutilated bodies are aborted–a sad scenario of the lives of
many traditionalist First Americans living on the last remnants of their land,
now contaminated in many areas from industrial war activity along reservation
borders and within the territories as well. Deceit of land confiscation through
"eminent domain" has less clout than treaty, the highest law of the
land with over 400 US treaties broken against First American nations.
Reservation uranium,
coal, gas, and other natural resources are stolen from indigenous people for
war purposes in the "Land of the free"–for some and not for others.
National aggression continues to take its toll in poverty and ill health from devastating industrial wars and their waste.
Years ago the US Army incarcerated
and forced indigenous people to remain on their own land that the unelected
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) took over, against Constitutional rights, to
keep the original owners separate from colonial immigrant settlers–out of
sight, out of mind. This atrocity resulted in growing numbers of “Indians"
persecuted with birth defects for being in the way from theft of their own
native land. (see Conquest, by Andrea Smith).
The nation's first biological warfare
was used against First Americans. This violation occurred when British and
American 18th century officials presented them with infected blankets from smallpox hospitals as
"gifts" for extermination. Besides attempted extinction of American
bison, their mainstay, nuclear age testing of atomic bombs near their last
sovereign territories was the next step in intentional genocide. Infiltrated
lands are soaked in toxic radiation and an atmosphere polluted with poisonous
emissions. Lands bordering reservations were marked in atlases for years as
DANGER ZONES. Residents trapped in modern warfare were at risk of sterility
from lethal explosives and from handling uranium in mines or being close to
mutating birth defecting munitions.
The next blow was feds targeting reservations
for dumping hazardous chemical and radioactive waste. Nuclear waste products
include raffinate–fertilizer used o indigenous people. Then when the original
people thought all the decimation and genocide was over–leaving less than two
percent traditionalists within the United States–more tragedy struck them in
the 1960s and 70s. The federal government prevented "Indian" women
from having children without their knowledge. Whenever First Americans were
admitted to hospitals for whatever reason, under the Health, Education and
Welfare (HEW) program, they were sterilized. This ethnic organized "ethnic
cleansing" was disclosed by "Indian" doctors and a study of
“red” nation women called WARN, later exposed by Senator James Abourezk to
Congress. Puerto Rican women were victims, too, sterilized in Hartford and New
Haven, Connecticut hospitals. Dark complexioned women were also given
experimental birth control pills before they were safe for the public.
While investigating a
pesticide poisoning on First Nations alnd I stood with the son of a
traditionalist American Indian chief on his Western property. He told me his land was made sterile by
the chemicals from the BIA in the Department of the Interior–what lead to toxic
reactions documented with photos after a sacred ritual (see The
Shoshone-Bannock Sundance Poisoning, involving cancerous chemicals and raffinate.) I was intimidated in my research by
the chemical producer of this agent from eastern United States when I contacted
him.
Nevertheless, I
continued my work by contacting the EPA. They told me there was nothing
detrimental with the chemicals. After a delay of about 20 years the BIA
sent me a letter with the same
result. But I deduced in the
beginning of my investigation the agent was poisonous to humans and animals. In
recent years Tennessee has documented similar environmental problems with the
same detrimental pesticide. Many others as well are being uncovered in alarming
rates, especially with bee colonies dying out, what is quintessential for
agriculture. The EPA after all
this time finally admits that the pesticide is highly toxic and cancerous,
causing blisters and headaches just as First Nation residents told me and showed
me–with photographs proving the toxicity of the chemical used on indigenous
lands harming all life.
During WWI and II
Nazi-invented nerve gases were used as chemical warfare internationally, with
surplus made for commercial pesticides in the aftermath. As a result
Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's and Hodgkin's diseases plague Earth as well as war
carcinogens, with soldiers affected in alarming numbers from pesticide and
herbicide fumigants as well as brain trauma from abusive combat.
Deadly dioxin
herbicide, Agent Orange, was first used against American "Indians"
and later sprayed during the Vietnam War that caused defoliated vegetation and
death to human beings and all life. Lethal fallout from both Gulf wars caused
Vietnam sickness among soldiers in contact with this toxicant, covered up for
years. During that time the US government secretly and illegally bombed
Cambodia and Laos–denied by authoritarians for decades. During that war the
carpet-bombing covered Laos from 1964-1973, when the army pulled out. Pilots
dropped millions of cluster bomblets on citizens, 98% of the population, mostly
kids–killed and maimed–30,000 casualties with more than 20,000 more from
unexploded munitions during the aftermath. This
diabolical onslaught, in an undeveloped nation that war disgraced with abject
poverty, is documented as "the most bombed country in world history."
Holocausts come in all sizes. Besides the tragedy of innocent people massacred,
it cost American taxpayers billions.
Laos, cursed by the targeted bombed-out Ho Chi Minh Trail running
through it, is still under siege by thousands of un-detonated, bomblets blowing
off limbs and blinding youths.
An all-woman team
continues to clean up devastation after forty years, with loss of limbs and
eyesight a regular tragedy whenever anyone steps on one of the live ammunition
that had burst out of shattered shells–particularly amongcurious kids. (Henry Shrapnel invented shrapnel in
1784, although an early form was used in the 1400s in Constantinople.) This
demonic ammunition still causes excruciating military and civilian suffering,
escalating to supersonic radioactive missiles. There is so much war debris left
over in Laos that bomb metal is still supplying a national recycling
industry!
On the same trail the
US Army seeded clouds to prolong the monsoon season to stop Vietnam War
opposition supplies from getting through to the lines. Now micro-magnetic manipulation of the
weather through climate warfare has the potential of destroying economies of
nations, with imperialistic global weather going out of control in an attempt
to own the atmosphere and play god–changed freakish weather. In the meantime,
lethal chemicals and radioactive munitions as well as climate warfare being
illicit, continue to plaque the globe.
Government-hired nuclear physicists working on
the Manhattan Project opposed use of nuclear bomb warfare. American and British
military officials said "it was not necessary to drop nuclear bombs on
Japan," already defeated with 200,000 carpet bomb deaths added to 180,000
dead civilians from bombs that President Truman called "gadgets."
Meanwhile, seven H-bombs were haphazardly dropped into hot ocean water, among
lost radioactive submarines and outdated ones intentionally dumped into seas
and all leaking hot munitions.
The First Persian Gulf
War when Iraq attacked Iran (1980-88) with US weaponry and intelligence given
to Saddam Hussein, was the most incriminating chemical raid in Earth's history.
(Iraq's arsenal held imported sarin nerve gas.) During these invasions,
attacks, and occupations of Iraq 500,000 children died from sanctions that make
citizens suffer. Matt Taibbi, journalist for Rolling Stone Magazine, wrote, "Who has the right to
make any child starve in war?"
When first soldiers
returned from the second Persian Gulf War, what the military 2003 called
"shock and awe"–electrifying disaster that jarred and distressed the
entire world–I was asked to take part in a fife and drum trio in a service
honoring severely wounded veterans for life. Not one eye was dry when two young
honored veterans walked to the pulpit to share their experiences. During a
reception in the church basement we met the wounded. When I shook the hand of
the youngest one, it felt like the hand of a kid. He was blind and one of his
legs had been ripped off from combat. Later I went to see how he was doing.
When I inquired which house was his, a village resident sobbed "Oh, Danny
hanged himself."
From ghostly shadows
another sad memory flashed before my eyes. My husband and I were dining out in 1992 when a group of
young men watching TV in an adjacent bar cheered loudly. The US was invading Iraq during
Operation Desert Storm. Tears ran
down my face. I knew friends that
never came back from Vietnam and Korea. Yet I still have my Junior Commandoes
blue and white eagle badge from WWII, continuation of WWI conflagration–the
second global man-made atrocity, what I supported as a youth. When I was a child, I thought like a
child, but as a woman my outlook on life changed.
Meanwhile my childhood friends and I had
gathered rags, newspapers, bacon grease and milkweed pods, the latter for navy
lifejackets. We also planted victory gardens which were productive and needed
especially for today in the form of unadulterated food. Scrap metal was useful,
but for the most part all the piles of war goods collected for morale boosters
"went overboard" as organized pollution. We later learned this
activity was mostly for psychological and patriotic purposes of war propaganda.
But getting back to
the young men laughing and exalting over war in the bar, they had no idea some
of their buddies in Greensburg, Pennsylvania would never come back–over 30
wounded and 13 killed while purifying water when a bomb landed on them, the
14th Quartermaster Detachment–the worse collective US tragedy of its kind in
that war.
In
those years US-led troops in Baghdad and Fallujah, Iraq sprayed kids and adults
with dangerous white phosphorus ("white pete") that burns, as does
burn-to-the bone napalm. "Depleted" uranium (DU) was also used to dispose of nuclear war waste. This irradiated contaminant made into
bullets powerful enough to blowholes in tanks, also aborts and deforms babies
in mothers wombs through mutated, damaged genetic DNA, as "spent"
congenital ammunition keeps killing one generation to the next. Diabolical brews of chemical child-deforming
toxicants causing millions of deaths sprayed from helicopters over Iraq and
Afghanistan were committed against countries that never attacked the United
States. Violations of the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gasses
and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare is still an abomination. These
poisons the Geneva Protocol had outlawed in 1925, and again in 1993.
The world's largest
outdoor concentration zone is the Gaza Strip where Palestinians are confined on
their own land–ancient Semitic Palestine, later a death camp, with sanctions
oppressing nations for material gains as children are again the first to die.
Nefarious aggression never helped any war-torn, occupied country whose
inhabitants grieve and endure results of burnt offering mindsets. Even today
politicians take pride in soldiers "sacrificing young lives" on
battlefield alters–a carry over from ancient youth sacraments–burnt
offerings–to appease the gods. Many of the committers of youth-killing wars
never experience "contaminated boots on the ground"–anguish from
blowback winds of fire.
During present urban
street warfare outlawed by International Court, International Criminal Court
(ICC founded in 2002), and the Convention for Children's Rights, kids
especially from underdeveloped nations are killed, starved or end up as
refugees.
Besides war, America's
number one killer is now suicide, a byproduct of war. Modern wars not only maim and kill combat soldiers, but also
those manning robotic drones from centers out of harms way. Military personal, too, commit suicide
after witnessing on cold computer monitors piles of butchered human flesh.
Young people very
early became war fodder on battlefields for hawkish warlords. So stressed out
by combat nightmares, soldiers also take their own lives. Drone warfare may be
keeping flame-flowing wars down to a roar, but they prolong aggression
resulting from failure to negotiate. All ammunition brings great sorrow and
grief to families left in the toxic smoke. Einstein called aggression
"murder under the cloak of war"–that spreads terrorism, violence and
generations of revenge.
Women in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran have been
traumatized by endless war. They are afraid to get pregnant, as well as combat
mothers in America and other combatant nations. Bob Dylan wrote profound lyrics for his song Masters
of War,
"You've
thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled, fear to bring children into the
world–for threatening my baby unborn and unnamed, you ain't worth the blood
that runs in your veins."
Aborted
genocide deformities is
now a pandemic of atrocities during satanic prolongation of war. War is the world's worst serial
killer–infants with contorted bodies; disfigured faces; missing eyes, arms and
legs, and even having two-heads–caused by draconian munitions and poisonous
emissions. Damaged ecology also produces two-headed, multiple legged frogs. In
combat where fathers and sons are killed, the women giving birth at home are
left to bury their babies–with no statistical records. Young people have always
been the brunt of brutality. The US is also the largest supplier of torture
devices and incarcerates more people–often from racial discrepancies–than any
other nation as it builds more prisons than schools.
Political protesters
and whistle-blowers exposing historical abuse are hunted down like animals,
civil rights activists striving for the sanity of equality, such as Wounded
Knee II American Indian Leonard Peltier, whom the feds illegally imprisoned for
over 37 year and never given pardon. Assata Shakur, an African woman also
incarcerated, is a freedom fighter against government persecution and
empowerment, plus all present heroes exposing wrongdoing.
Fanatical extremists continue to kill
one another in an Abrahamic circle-of-contamination, on-going revenge among
three original Semitic religions slaying their own family's sons and daughters.
They are all related to each other, many to Jesus of Nazareth in Israel. Jesus who loved children walked on the
road to Damascus in Syria as slaughtered embattling youths are now wasted on
the same streets of the city.
Besides foreign cities bombed to the
ground, US armed forces has over 5000 leaking, polluted military bases costing
trillions to build and maintain–the reason why New York and Washington, DC were
bombed September 11, 2001, a tragedy that led to the killing of millions of
lives. Although the warning was
announced on worldwide TV, the new administration ignored the warning.
In a gun shell, in the game of folly,
industrial corporate military bases contaminate worldwide. Hanford, Washington
is the largest nuclear waste dump of the Americas. As I write, it is in danger
of contaminating the Columbia River and Oregon as well. Some authorities fear explosion.
Irresponsible, reckless men continue to command primitive slaughter instead of
peace negotiations through enforcement and punitive measures for International
Law already in force–but not enforced.
Both the US and USSR
maintained sarin gas ammunition in the Cold War, in an export, import market of
lethal trade. The oldest dump of this kind is the Rocky Mountain Repository in
Denver, Colorado where wells were drilled in unstable rock–what caused multiple
earthquakes, as it happens with "fracturing"–euphemism for drilling
natural gas in shale with lethal chemicals polluting water. Industrial war
exporters of "chiller theater" chemicals are bad actors in the
theater of war, staged by world-wide factories spewing out black cloud emissions
daily. Accumulative hot war explosives cause earthquakes in turn triggering
volcanoes and tsunamis, with "daughter" Krakakoa in Indonesia ready
to erupt again after the 1883 holocaust causing deaths of thousands of people.
Today between deadly toxicants of
radioactive and chemical war munitions and their deadly waste contaminating a
war-torn Earth–we exuberantly sing our national anthem and wave our
star-spangled banner. So proudly we hail rockets, red glares bursting in air.
Marching and conquering we must, for lies of leaders we trust, and sing praise
for war crime carnage–all committed in “God’s name.” I love America and its
people, but corrupt politicians drag the US down to its knees. The vast Roman Empire ceased from its
military sending most of its treasury that circled the drain and made a
waterfalls out of it.
Moses conveyed a command–“Thou shalt
not kill.” Jihad has two meanings, a struggle that also denotes killing. But
Muhammad in the Quran refers to the most humane meaning of jihad–"the
spiritual conquest of the self." Gandhi expressed this universal truth in
his own way, “The only devils are in our hearts, and that’s where the real
battles must be fought"–to quell immoral madness of men. Unfortunately
radical religionists twist wisdom of prophets into excuses for retaliation in
the form of endless war pollution. Abraham Lincoln said, "I destroy my
enemies when I make them my friends."
Great world American Indian prophets.
Buddha, Jesus from Nazareth, Mohammed, the Dali Llama are worshipped as heroes.
Mother Teresa from Macedonia and Amma, "Mother of India" with her
universal hug are also adored by the world. Great men such as Mohandas Gandhi,
Nelson Mandela, Dali Lama and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are worshipped as top
world's leaders. These so-called people of dark complexioned represent
non-violent peace-makers. Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus taught the world's most
powerful defense for peace–"Do not do unto others what you don't want
others to do to you," as Jesus said, "Blessed are the peace-makers. People in power who actual bring about
international peace will be the real everlasting saviors of Mother Earth,
capitalized for respect. And by
the way, why aren't any First Americans being primed for a future US president
since indigenous people care so much for nature and ecology?
The world is still
anguishing for relief from war ammo that causes birth defect embryos passed
from parent to child. There's an old axiom that questions, "Why not pick
on someone your own age?" –also referring to youths sacrificing their
lives for political leaders' gain. Alfred, Lord Tennyson's wishful thinking for
the end of international aggression is best expressed–"Till the war drum
throbs no longer, and battle flags are furled." Sadly militant destructive
forces have turned our planet into a blazing DANGER ZONE of Death! War is a four-lettered word called
gory, not glory.
So what is the
verdict? Do we sit down and sizzle
in deadly carnage and toxic industrial war emissions? We may run, but toxic emissions will always catch us–at
sea, in the air, and on land–unless we all together stand our ground on Earth,
our only sustenance, to protect the only planet we know of having life. Virgil, born in 70 BCE wrote, "There is no safety in
war."
“The innocence of youth dies quickly, when killing becomes a
right of passage . . . to be killed, and maimed and driven crazy by war . . .
bumper-sticker bravado with word but not deed is intoxicated by war’s hysteria
from a safe distance.”–
–courtesy of Camillo “Mac” Bica,
poet, professor of philosophy, Marine member of Vietnam Veterans Against the
War
"Among things we teach the young are truths–the value
of the individual and dignity of all people . . . and the futility and
stupidity of war, mankind's' most tragic folly. The world is spending the hopes of its children. The cost of
one modern heavy bomber is [the same price of] a modern brick school in more
than 30 cities!"
–Dwight D. Eisenhower
