Movements and Resistance – Page 20

April 27, 2011

Return of US forces to Subic possible

When you cut off a tentacle of a he’e (octopus), the severed arm grows back. Such is the case with the monstrous octopus of the U.S. military in the Asia-Pacific region. With the U.S. bases in Hawai’i as the head of this he’e, its tentacles are grasping Okinawa, Guam, Korea, Japan, the Marshall Islands, and now once again the Philippines. The Philippines People’s Power movement forced the U.S. to close Subic Bay and Clark military bases more than a decade ago. But the tentacles of U.S. militarism have regenerated in Mindanao under the guise of fighting terrorists, and now Senators Inouye and Cochran have visited the Philippines to explore the possibility of U.S. forces returning to Subic. We expect that resistance will be fierce to U.S. forces returning to Subic. But the peace and justice movements in the Pacific region will need to neutralize the head of the he’e in Hawai’i if we will have peace from America’s empire of bases.

The article below quotes former UH professor Dean Alegado:

In an earlier interview, Dean Alegado, executive director of the Association of Pacific Islands Local Government Conference, said the disaster that hit Japan “made the fate of the military build-up uncertain, to say the least.”

Alegado was once very active in progressive Philippines solidarity work in Hawai’i. He worked with the Filipino American Coalition for Environmental Solutions (FACES) which fought for the clean up of the former U.S. military bases at Clark and Subic and for just compensation for the victims of the environmental contamination. We hope he will be vocal in opposition to the return of U.S. forces in Subic.

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http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20110428-333354/Return_of_US_forces_to_Subic_possible

Return of US forces to Subic possible

US military build-up in Guam delayed

By Robert Gonzaga
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:18:00 04/28/2011

SUBIC BAY FREEPORT — High-level visits here by American officials have raised the prospect of a return of the United States’ military presence in this former naval base in the wake of disasters that hit Japan, which have delayed the planned US military build-up in Guam.

US Senators Daniel Inouye and Thad Cochran visited this free port on Tuesday and met with Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) and Olongapo City officials.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer learned of the visit but was told that it was “not open to press coverage.”

In March, US Ambassador to the Philippines Harry Thomas Jr. also met with local officials and briefed them about the impact of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on the transfer of US military bases in Okinawa to Guam. The visit was not announced to reporters here.

Inouye and Cochran, chair and ranking member, respectively, of the US Senate committee on appropriations, appeared to be interested in the possibility of an increased presence of the US military in the country, a source present at the luncheon meeting for the visiting senators hosted by Subic and local officials told the Inquirer.

The source, who asked not to be named for lack of authority to speak on the matter, said: “Their official reason for being here was to obtain a situationer of developments in the area and to consult with local officials about these. They even brought their technical staff. During the discussion, they were curious about the reception in the country of an [increased presence of the US military] here.”

The source also said the US embassy “gave strict instructions that [the media] not be allowed to cover the visit.”

“Their embassy arranged the logistics of the visit directly with Olongapo City [officials], and not the SBMA,” the source said.

Facilities in the free port that can be used by the US military, like the airport and seaport, are intact, according to the source.

“Even now, they are already using it as part of the VFA (Visiting Forces Agreement). But if they substantially increase their presence here, then the free port can still accommodate them,” the source further said.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

April 25, 2011

“Living Along the Fenceline” screenings and talks in East SF Bay Area

Women for Genuine Security and UC Berkeley, Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures present:

LIVING ALONG THE FENCELINE

MILITARY VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, DEMILITARIZATION, & FEMINIST CONCEPTS OF SECURITY

Speaker: Suzuyo Takazato

LOCATION: 370 DWINELLE HALL, UC BERKELEY

DATE & TIME: APRIL 26TH @ 12PM

Suzuyo Takazato is a greatly respected feminist activist in Okinawa (the southern-most prefecture in Japan). Formerly a social worker with victims of gender-based violence, she founded a domestic violence project, and the first rape crisis hotline in Okinawa— REICO. Ms Takazato is a founder of Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence and still co-chairs this organization. She is one of the founding members of the International Women’s Network against Militarism, which held its first international meeting in Okinawa in 1997. She is one of 1,000 women nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, Her article, “Report from Okinawa: Long term military presence and violence against women” is published in Canadian Woman Studies 2000 (19) #4: 42-47.2005.

Is U.S. military relief effort Operation Tomodachi really about friendship?

A post on the Japan Today blog asks:

“Tomodachi?” Friends? To many Japanese living near U.S. military bases, the bilateral “friendship” has seemed more like a prolonged occupation. Will Operation Tomodachi make friends of them, and turn their sullen resistance into gratitude?

It’s the biggest ever U.S. humanitarian mission in Japan – 20,000 troops, 113 aircraft and 12 ships thrown into the battle against chaos in the wake of Japan’s greatest postwar crisis, the earthquake-tsunami-radiation nightmare.

The blogger cites the Shukan Post’s claims that the entire military operation is for publicity:

The whole vast operation is purely for show, it says – and who will be paying the bill, it demands, when the hearts and minds have been won? You guessed it – Japan.

One example cited of the shibai (deception) was story of 78 bodies found along the Iwate Prefecture coast, supposedly by Japanese and American rescuers working cooperatively. However, a Japan Maritime Self Defense Force member was quoted as saying: “All the U.S. side did was send planes and helicopters into the air. The searching was done by Maritime SDF, Japan Coast Guard and Japanese police divers.”

The cost to Japan for U.S. “friendship”?:

Friendship doesn’t come cheap, Shukan Post notes. Operation Tomodachi, it says, is an $80 million undertaking, the cost to be covered through supplements to Japan’s financial commitment to support American troops stationed in Japan.

April 21, 2011

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, “The Butterfly and the Boiling Point – Charting the Wild Winds of Change in 2011”

Rebecca Solnit a San Francisco Bay Area activist, artist, geographer and contributor to TomDispatch wrote a beautiful and hopeful article analyzing the wave of uprisings and revolutionary unrest sweeping the Arab world and theorizing about the “unexpected” and “chaotic” nature of revolutionary phenomena, like butterfly wings fluttering in Brazil, changing the weather in Texas…

The Butterfly and the Boiling Point

Charting the Wild Winds of Change in 2011

By Rebecca Solnit

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass. The women of Cairo do not move as freely in public as they did during those few precious weeks when the old rules were suspended and everything was different. But the old Egypt is gone and Egyptians’ sense of themselves — and our sense of them — is forever changed.

She offers some choice, poetic insights about the alchemical phase shift that transforms fear into hope:

Those who are not afraid are ungovernable, at least by fear, that favorite tool of the bygone era of George W. Bush. Jonathan Schell, with his usual beautiful insight, saw this when he wrote of the uprising in Tahrir Square:

“The murder of the 300 people, it may be, was the event that sealed Mubarak’s doom. When people are afraid, murders make them take flight. But when they have thrown off fear, murders have the opposite effect and make them bold. Instead of fear, they feel solidarity. Then they ‘stay’ — and advance. And there is no solidarity like solidarity with the dead. That is the stuff of which revolution is made.”

When a revolution is made, people suddenly find themselves in a changed state — of mind and of nation. The ordinary rules are suspended, and people become engaged with each other in new ways, and develop a new sense of power and possibility. People behave with generosity and altruism; they find they can govern themselves; and, in many ways, the government simply ceases to exist.

And she offers hopeful advise:

Hard times are in store for most people on Earth, and those may be times of boldness. Or not. The butterflies are out there, but when their flight stirs the winds of insurrection no one knows beforehand.

So remember to expect the unexpected, but not just to wait for it. Sometimes you have to become the unexpected, as the young heroes and heroines of 2011 have. I am sure they themselves are as surprised as anyone. Since she very nearly had the first word, let Asmaa Mahfouz have the last word: “As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

April 21, 2011

Tomgram: Noam Chomsky: “Who Owns the World?”

In the introduction to Noam Chomsky’s article “Who Owns the World?” Tom Englehardt writes:

Military bases R U.S. Or so it seems. After the invasion of 2003, the Pentagon promptly started constructing a series of monster bases in occupied Iraq, the size of small American towns and with most of the amenities of home. These were for a projected garrison of 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops that top officials of the Bush administration initially anticipated would be free to hang out in that country for an armed eternity. In the end, hundreds of bases were built. (And now, hundreds have been closed down or handed over to the Iraqis and in some cases looted). With present U.S. troop strength at about 47,000 (not counting mercenaries) and falling, American officials are now practically pleading with an Iraqi government moving ever closer to the Iranians to let some American forces remain at a few giant bases beyond the official end-of-2011 withdrawal date.

Meanwhile, post-2003, the U.S. went on a base-building (or expanding) spree in the Persian Gulf, digging in and enlarging facilities in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, “home” to the U.S. Fifth Fleet. In that island kingdom, an Obama administration preaching “democracy” elsewhere has stood by in the face of a fierce Bahraini-Saudi campaign of repression against a majority Shiite movement for greater freedom. Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the State Department decided to build a modern ziggurat in Iraq and so oversaw the construction of the largest “embassy” on Earth in Baghdad, a regional citadel-cum-command post meant to house thousands of “diplomats” and their armed minders. It is now constructing a similar facility in Islamabad, Pakistan, while expanding a third in Kabul, Afghanistan.

In fact, in the years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the Pentagon, as Nick Turse reported for this site, went on a veritable base-building bender in that country, constructing at least 400 of them, ranging from micro-outposts to monster spreads like the Bagram and Kandahar air bases, complete with gyms, PXs, Internet cafes, and fast-food outlets. Now, in the tenth year of a disastrous war, the Obama administration is evidently frantically negotiating to make at least some of these permanently ours after the much-vaunted departure of American “combat” troops in 2014. As in Iraq, American officials carefully avoid the word “permanent.” (In 2003, the Pentagon dubbed the Iraqi bases “enduring camps,” and this February Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered the following description of the Afghan situation: “In no way should our enduring commitment be misunderstood as a desire by America or our allies to occupy Afghanistan against the will of its people… We do not seek any permanent American military bases in their country.”)

In the article, taken from a speech given in Amsterdam, Chomsky gives a wide ranging, encyclopedic overview of the present global U.S. empire. He discusses the “Grand Area doctrines” that determine U.S. actions in many parts of the world. He also skewers the double standards of U.S. conduct regarding nuclear enrichment in Iran, military bases and maneuvers near China, the support of “democracy” in the middle east. READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

April 19, 2011

Demilitarization as Rehumanization

In an article in Left Turn magazine, Clare Bayard has beautifully reframed the issues for the peace / anti-war movement. Demilitarization is about challenging the infrastructure and ideology that make wars more likely to occur.

Demilitarization as Rehumanization

By: Clare Bayard

March 11, 2011

The antiwar movement never died. The movement has shifted to the work of long-term, community-based organizing to mount a comprehensive challenge to US militarism. This work is growing inside grassroots movements led by veterans, immigrants, queers, and low-income communities of color. Everywhere domestic militarization burns to the bone, people are fighting for a different future. The mass street marches of 2003 sought to preemptively raise the political cost of the Iraq war. We always knew that beyond those marches we would have to confront the real human cost if the wars moved ahead.

For those who have retreated into depression or distraction, her message is as hopeful as it is challenging:

People are organizing on every level, from federal legislation and military policy to survival programs that start with individuals and generate networks of grassroots resources and programs. Current work with the potential to drastically impact US militarism includes war economy and economic conversion campaigns, migrant justice, and GI resistance organizing.

There are many crucial questions about alternatives to military intervention, or the roles of armed struggle in peoples’ movements for self-determination. We take inspiration from people around the world confronting US militarism on their own territory, particularly in the anti-occupation and anti military base movements, currently finding their strongest expressions in North Africa, West Asia, Latin America and the Pacific.

GI resistance, counter recruitment, women in the military resisting sexual violence are some examples she discusses. She also highlights the need for healing the wounds of war, violence and militarism. A unique example of the cross-constituency, cross issue organizing involved in demilitarization work took place in the San Francisco bay area between the Ohlone Nation and Veterans for Peace:

Members of the Ohlone Nation—the Bay Area’s original inhabitants, displaced to Southern California—journeyed to San Francisco to hold a joint healing ceremony with the local Veterans For Peace Chapter on Veterans’ Day. The ceremony recognized a young person lost to suicide after returning from combat, and honored these two communities, beginning an explicit long-term partnership on healing the wounds of war.

She concludes that demilitarization must also involve healing and decolonizing ourselves from the violent and oppressive influence of militarism:

Demilitarization means untangling layers, from which institutions shape our society and address our needs, and decolonizing our minds, bodies, and organizing practices. Demilitarization practices are healing and wholeness strategies for our communities and cultures. Affirming everyone’s humanity and centering the importance of healing capsizes the logic of militarism. While we campaign to withdraw troops, defund the military, involve the public in reparations, and make racist fear and warmongering unacceptable, we must also be practicing individual and community behaviors that support the values we seek to implement as a society.

“Healing justice is being used as a framework that seeks to lift up resiliency and wellness practices as a transformative response to generational violence and trauma in our communities.” This footnote to principles developed at last summer’s US Social Forum, by Cara Page of Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, explains the power of aligning different antimilitarist threads. We have no choice but to address the violence and trauma carried in so many of our bodies. We must reclaim traditions of wellness that use not the individual but relationships as the fundamental unit. This aligns us with values of community, right relation to the environment, and organizing as a process of building relationships that we set in motion to effect change. Demilitarization means hope for the future.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

April 19, 2011

Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark / Will the US extend the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan

In August 2010, when President Obama announced to much fanfare: “Consistent with our agreement with the Iraqi government, all of our troops will be out of Iraq by the end of next year,” did anyone really believe him?

Earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited Iraq and raised the possibility of U.S. troops staying in Iraq beyond the agreed withdrawal date of 31 December, 2011.

Now, there has been talk of extending the U.S. military presense in Afghanistan beyond the pullout deadline. Here’s an excerpt of a New York Times article:

Talks on U.S. Presence in Afghanistan After Pullout Unnerve Region

First, American officials were talking about July 2011 as the date to begin the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then, the Americans and their NATO allies began to talk about transition, gradually handing over control of the war to the Afghans until finally pulling out in 2014. Now, however, the talk is all about what happens after 2014.

Afghanistan and the United States are in the midst of negotiating what they are calling a Strategic Partnership Declaration for beyond 2014.

Critics, including many of Afghanistan’s neighbors, call it the Permanent Bases Agreement — or, in a more cynical vein, Great Game 3.0, drawing a comparison with the ill-fated British and Russian rivalry in the region during the 19th and 20th centuries.

READ FULL ARTICLE

As Ann Wright reported after her last trip to Afghanistan on a peace delegation, the rapid and widespread construction of military bases in Afghanistan did not indicate a plan to withdraw, but rather a plan for a long term military occupation via a type of permanent bases agreement.

As Tom Engelhardt writes in Tom Dispatch “Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks” these developments are symptomatic of America’s deep denial of its empire. He wonders what it must have felt like to be a citizen of an empire in decline:

at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this — truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.

He concludes:

A post-imperial U.S. could, of course, be open to all sorts of possibilities for change that might be exciting indeed.

Right now, though, it doesn’t feel that way, does it? It makes me wonder: Could this be how it’s always felt inside a great imperial power on the downhill slide? Could this be what it’s like to watch, paralyzed, as a country on autopilot begins to come apart at the seams while still proclaiming itself “the greatest nation on Earth”?

I don’t know. But I do know one thing: this can’t end well.

March 31, 2011

Libya Conflict Highlights NATO’s Imperialist Mission

SOURCE: http://www.truth-out.org/libya-conflict-highlights-natos-imperialist-mission68753

Libya Conflict Highlights NATO’s Imperialist Mission

Saturday 26 March 2011

by: Joseph Gerson, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

Having launched its Libyan regime change war to oust the Qaddafi dictatorship from the United States’ German-based Africa Command, the Obama administration this week arranged to continue its air war under cover of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. Long understood to be a relatively benign and defensive alliance focused on European security needs, people across Europe and, increasingly, in the United States, are questioning how and why NATO is now focused on waging non-defensive wars beyond Europe.

From the beginning, 1948, NATO was about more than containing the Soviet Union, which in the immediate aftermath of World War II was a devastated nation whose occupation of Eastern Europe was as, George Kennan wrote, primarily designed to ensure a buffer against future invasions from the West. Think in terms of the devastation wrought by Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler.

Like the unequal treaties that defined 19th- and early 21st-century European colonialism in Asia, NATO has served as a fig leaf, providing a degree of legitimacy for the continuing US military occupation and related US political influence across Western Eurasia. Recall that Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, wrote that US global dominance requires US hegemony of Eurasia, which in turn necessitates that the United States maintain toeholds (or more) on its western, southern, and eastern peripheries.

Twenty-first century NATO isn’t the cold war alliance that many of us grew up with. The collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated NATO’s cold war raison d’etre, thereby undermining the rationales for the foreign deployment of hundreds of thousands of US warriors on hundreds of US and “NATO” bases across Europe. The Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations responded by transforming NATO into a global alliance to reinforce US imperial ambitions and the privileges of sectors of the European elite. Violating President George H.W. Bush’s pledge not to expand NATO a centimeter nearer to Moscow, in exchange for Gorbachev’s blessing of German reunification on Western terms Clinton began the process of expanding NATO to Russia’s borders, along the way creating the foundation for Donald Rumsfeld and company to renew the game of divide and conquer by playing “New Europe” against “Old Europe.” The US now has bases across Eastern Europe, and there will be more to come with “missile defense” deployments. In violation of the UN Charter, the Clinton administration used NATO to fight its war against Serbia, making possible the creation of Kosovo and the rise of its corrupt client political leadership there.

As the cold war wound down, NATO adopted doctrines permitting “out of area operations,” i.e. military interventions in Africa, the Middle East and beyond. With NATO’s role in the Afghan war, “out of area operations” became the alliance’s primary mission. Today, with 22 additional partnerships still more being planned for Japan, Korea and Southeast Asian nations, NATO is also being used to ensure access to the mineral resources of the Global South and to reinforce the encirclement of China, as well as Russia. Thus, we can identify a major reason that NATO is today fighting in support of a ragtag collection of Libyan rebels in that oil-rich nation. And, as a recent edition of Foreign Affairs put it, China’s rise does not inevitably mean it will become the world’s dominant nation. If NATO can be merged with the European Union, the West, it argued, will remain dominant through the 21st century.
During its recent summits in Strasbourg – enforced by massive and brutal police state repression against nonviolent protesters – and Lisbon, and under pressure from the United States, NATO has resolved to remain at war in Afghanistan at least until 2014. It has adopted a new “strategic concept” consolidating and pointing toward the expansion of the global alliance that can serve as a military enforcer for the United Nations or act in violation of the UN Charter. And NATO has been reaffirmed as a nuclear alliance, while its members have been urged to further increase their military spending.

The 2012 summit to be held in the United States, likely in or near Washington, DC, will be used to plan and build support for the continuing Central Asian and Long wars, to continue the “containment” and encirclement of China and Russia, to bolster the Pentagon and its obscene budget and to reinforce President Obama’s re-election campaign.

Western European peace activists and progressives have long opposed NATO. This opposition grew with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and it is worth noting that there is anything but unity about NATO’s Libyan war in elite European circles. Even Germany has turned its back on the war, leaving the goal of a united European foreign policy a short-lived dream, while Norway has reversed course, no longer contributing its air force to the war.

At the popular level, growing out of the 2008 International Conference on Afghanistan held in Hanover, Germany, a “No to NATO/No to War” network of leading European and US peace organizations has come into being. It organized counter-summit conferences and protests in both Strasbourg and Lisbon. Its members are rallying to oppose NATO’s Libya war and are planning a major demonstration in Bonn this November, when the tenth anniversary of the creation of the Karzai government there will be celebrated. And, with the next NATO summit to be held in the US in 2012, plans on both sides of the Atlantic pond are gearing up to oppose NATO’s wars, related military spending that is robbing our communities of essential social services and the alliance itself.

March 24, 2011

U.S. spending on military operations in Libya drains Pentagon

The Washington Post reported: “The U.S. military operations in Libya will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and force Congress to seek help next week for the cash-strapped Pentagon, which is operating on a short-term funding resolution.”

Here are some figures to consider:

The 162 Tomahawk missiles launched at Libyan targets in the first four days of Operation Odyssey Dawn cost more than $1 million each and will eventually have to be replaced. The F-15E fighter plane that was lost to mechanical failure Tuesday cost about $30 million and more will be needed to replace it.

Fuel for the aircraft flying strikes, capturing intelligence and providing protection are costly, as are the tankers needed to refuel them in flight.

The number of sorties by coalition aircraft has grown exponentially. On Wednesday, Rear Adm. Gerard Hueber, chief of staff for Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn, told reporters that 175 sorties had taken place in the previous 24 hours, 113 by U.S. aircraft. In the first days of the operation, all coalition sorties numbered less than 80 a day.

Experts from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment released a study estimating that a limited no-fly zone such as the one established over the major Libyan population areas could cost $30 million to $100 million a week.

March 24, 2011March 24, 2011

“When nuclear reactors blow, the first thing that melts down is the truth”; What They’re Covering Up at Fukushima

Yesterday the EPA reported its first detection in Hawai’i of radiation from the Japanese nuclear meltdown: “The isotope was “far below any level of concern for human health,” the EPA said.”

As the New York Times reported that Japanese authorities have issued a warning not to drink tap water in Tokyo due to contamination by radioactive Iodine 131, Chip Ward reminds us in “How the “Peaceful Atom” Became a Serial Killer”, “When nuclear reactors blow, the first thing that melts down is the truth. ”

Doug Lummi published in Counterpunch this partial translation of a Japanese news media interview with Hirose Takashi, a well known Japanese nuclear expert. The picture he paints of the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima is much worse than the media has reported. Similar to the arguments made by anti-DU activists in Hawai’i, reports that radiation detections being at “safe levels” are terribly misleading:

They compare it to a CT scan, which is over in an instant; that has nothing to do with it. The reason radioactivity can be measured is that radioactive material is escaping. What is dangerous is when that material enters your body and irradiates it from inside. These industry-mouthpiece scholars come on TV and what to they say? They say as you move away the radiation is reduced in inverse ratio to the square of the distance. I want to say the reverse. Internal irradiation happens when radioactive material is ingested into the body. What happens? Say there is a nuclear particle one meter away from you. You breathe it in, it sticks inside your body; the distance between you and it is now at the micron level. One meter is 1000 millimeters, one micron is one thousandth of a millimeter. That’s a thousand times a thousand: a thousand squared. That’s the real meaning of “inverse ratio of the square of the distance.” Radiation exposure is increased by a factor of a trillion. Inhaling even the tiniest particle, that’s the danger.

According to Mr. Takashi, the only solution is to bury the damaged nuclear plants in a solid block of cement. But the only thing Japanese authorities seem intent on burying is the truth.

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Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/takashi03222011.html

March 22, 2011

“You Get 3,500,000 the Normal Dose. You Call That Safe? And What Media Have Reported This? None!”

What They’re Covering Up at Fukushima

By HIROSE TAKASHI

Introduced by Douglas Lummis

Okinawa

Hirose Takashi has written a whole shelf full of books, mostly on the nuclear power industry and the military-industrial complex. Probably his best known book is Nuclear Power Plants for Tokyo in which he took the logic of the nuke promoters to its logical conclusion: if you are so sure that they’re safe, why not build them in the center of the city, instead of hundreds of miles away where you lose half the electricity in the wires?

He did the TV interview that is partly translated below somewhat against his present impulses. I talked to him on the telephone today (March 22 , 2011) and he told me that while it made sense to oppose nuclear power back then, now that the disaster has begun he would just as soon remain silent, but the lies they are telling on the radio and TV are so gross that he cannot remain silent.

I have translated only about the first third of the interview (you can see the whole thing in Japanese on you-tube), the part that pertains particularly to what is happening at the Fukushima plants. In the latter part he talked about how dangerous radiation is in general, and also about the continuing danger of earthquakes.

After reading his account, you will wonder, why do they keep on sprinkling water on the reactors, rather than accept the sarcophagus solution [ie., entombing the reactors in concrete. Editors.] I think there are a couple of answers. One, those reactors were expensive, and they just can’t bear the idea of that huge a financial loss. But more importantly, accepting the sarcophagus solution means admitting that they were wrong, and that they couldn’t fix the things. On the one hand that’s too much guilt for a human being to bear. On the other, it means the defeat of the nuclear energy idea, an idea they hold to with almost religious devotion. And it means not just the loss of those six (or ten) reactors, it means shutting down all the others as well, a financial catastrophe. If they can only get them cooled down and running again they can say, See, nuclear power isn’t so dangerous after all. Fukushima is a drama with the whole world watching, that can end in the defeat or (in their frail, I think groundless, hope) victory for the nuclear industry. Hirose’s account can help us to understand what the drama is about. Douglas Lummis

Hirose Takashi: The Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Accident and the State of the Media

Broadcast by Asahi NewStar, 17 March, 20:00

Interviewers: Yoh Sen’ei and Maeda Mari

Yoh: Today many people saw water being sprayed on the reactors from the air and from the ground, but is this effective?

Hirose: . . . If you want to cool a reactor down with water, you have to circulate the water inside and carry the heat away, otherwise it has no meaning. So the only solution is to reconnect the electricity. Otherwise it’s like pouring water on lava.

Yoh: Reconnect the electricity – that’s to restart the cooling system?

Hirose: Yes. The accident was caused by the fact that the tsunami flooded the emergency generators and carried away their fuel tanks. If that isn’t fixed, there’s no way to recover from this accident.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE