Daily Archives: October 27, 2020

Flash! Nuclear bombs and warheads have just joined landmines, germ and chemical bombs and fragmentation bombs as illegal weapons under international law, as on Oct. 24a 50th nation, the Central American country of Honduras, ratified and signed a U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Of course, the reality is that despite this outlawing of landmines and fragmentation bombs by the U.N., the U.S. still uses them routinely and sells them to other countries, has not destroyed its stockpile of chemical weapons, and continues with controversial research on weaponized germs which critics say has a potential dual defensive/offensive utility and purpose (the U.S. is known to have used illegal germ warfare against both North Korea and Cuba during the 50s and 60s).

That said, the new treaty outlawing nuclear weapons, which the U.S. State Department and Trump administration strenuously opposed and which it has been pressuring countries not to sign or to withdraw their endorsement of, is a big step forward towards the goal of abolishing of these horrific weapons.

As Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, who helped author the international law against germ and chemical weapons, tells ThisCantBeHappening!, Nuclear weapons have been with us since they were criminally used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. We are only going to be able to get rid of them when people realize that they are not just illegal and immoral but also criminal. So for that reason alone this Treaty is important in terms of criminalizing nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence.

David Swanson, author of several books arguing for a ban not just on nuclear weapons but to war itself, and a U.S. director of the global organizationWorld Beyond War, explains how the new U.N. treaty against nuclear weapons, by making the weapons illegal under international law under a U.N. Charter that the U.S. is both an author of and an early signatory to, will help the popular global movement to eliminate these ultimate weapons of mass destruction.

Says Swanson, The treaty does several things. It stigmatizes defenders of nuclear weapons and countries that have them. It aids the divestment movement against companies involved in nuclear weapons, since nobody wants to invest in things of dubious legality. It aids in pressuring nations that align with the U.S. military to join in signing the treaty and abandoning the nuclear umbrella fantasy. And it aids in pressuring the five nations in Europe that currently illegally allow the stockpiling of U.S. nukes within their borders to get them out.

Swanson adds, It may also aid in encouraging nations around the globe with U.S. bases to start putting in place more restrictions on what weapons the U.S. can deploy at those bases.

Thelist of 50 nations that have thus far ratified the U.N. Treaty, as well as the other 34 that have signed it but have yet to have their governments ratify it, is available for inspection here.Under U.N. the Charters terms ratification of an international U.N. treaty requires ratification by 50 nations in order for it to go into effect. There was considerable motivation to get the final required ratification by 2021, which will mark the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the first and thankfully the only two nuclear weapons in war the U.S. bombs dropped in August 1945 on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.With the Honduras ratification, the Treaty will now go into effect on January 1, 2021.

In announcing the ratification of the treaty, which was drawn up and approved by the U.N. General Assembly in 2017, U.N. Secretary General Antnio Guterres praised the work of civil society groups around the world that pushed for ratification. He singled out among them theInternational Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its work.

ICANWs Executive Director Beatrice Fihn declared the treatys ratification, a new chapter for nuclear disarmament.She added, Decades of activism have achieved what many said was impossible: Nuclear weapons are banned.

Indeed, effective Jan. 1, the nine nations with nuclear weapons (the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea), are all outlaw states until they eliminate those weapons.

When the U.S. was racing to develop the atomic bomb during World War II, initially out of concern that Hitlers Germany might be attempting to do the same thing, but later, with the object of obtaining a monopoly on the super weapon to gain control over adversaries like the then Soviet Union and Communist China, a number of the Manhattan Projects senior scientists, including Nils Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, opposed its use after the war and attempted to get the U.S. to share the bombs secrets with the Soviet Union, Americas ally during WWII. They called for openness and for an effort to negotiate a ban on the weapon. Others, like Robert Oppenheimer himself, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, strenuously but unsuccessfully opposed the subsequent development of the vastly more destructive hydrogen bomb.

Opposition to the U.S. intention of maintaining a monopoly on the bomb, andfears that it would be used preemptively against the Soviet Union after the end of WWII (as the Pentagon and Truman administration were secretly planning to do once they produced enough bombs and B-29 Stratofortress planes to carry them), motivated several Manhattan Project scientists, including German refugee Klaus Fuchs and American Ted Hall, to become spies delivering key secrets of the uranium and plutonium bombs design to Soviet Intelligence, helping the USSR to obtain its own nuclear weapon by 1949 and preventing that potential holocaust, but launching the nuclear arms race that has continued down to the present day.

Luckily, the balance of terror produced by multiple nations developing enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems to deter any one nation from using a nuclear weapon, has improbably but fortunately managed to keep any nuclear bomb from being used in war since August 1945. But as the U.S., Russia and China continue to modernize and expand their arsenals, including into space, and continue to race to develop unstoppable delivery systems like the new hypersonic maneuverable rockets and super stealthy missile-carrying subs, the risk only grows of a nuclear conflict, making this new treaty urgently needed.

The task, going forward, is to use the new U.N. treaty banning these weapons to pressure the nations of the world to eliminate them for good.

FALL FUNDRAISER

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Effective January 1, 2021 nuclear weapons will be illegal - NationofChange

Whoever wins the US presidential election will likely not triumph because of coronavirus.

The pandemic is not among the top three issues on the minds of Americans, according to the Pew Research Centre. First is the economy, then health care (not COVID-related) and then the make-up of the Supreme Court.

Coronavirus is the fourth most pressing concern in this election and it matters more to Democrat voters than Republican.

It makes sense. Despite the tragedy of more than 225,000 dead and 8.6 million infections, there are 328 million people in the US. Most have no personal experience of the virus.

Don't know how many people you can invite over? Not sure about the best way to protect yourself at the shops? Send us a question and we will try to answer it.

According to some estimates, COVID-19 is not among the top 10 killers in the world this year. The majority of people who contract coronavirus successfully recover and many experience no symptoms.

The coronavirus crisis is not unprecedented, nor a once in a century event.

The Asian flu of the 1950s killed more than a million people worldwide. An estimated 35 million people have died from the AIDS virus since it was first identified. Just a decade ago, H1N1 (swine flu) spread far more widely albeit less lethally than COVID-19, with some studies showing it infected more than a billion people worldwide.

That is not to deny or downplay the risks of coronavirus: It is highly contagious and threatening especially to the elderly or vulnerable. To battle the virus, entire societies have gone into lockdown and the global economy has been devastated.

But beyond the numbers, personal tragedies and economic hardship or the debates about who has the most successful mitigation strategy COVID-19 haunts us.

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term "hauntology" to describe how the past hovers over our present like a ghost.

Buried in our collective memory is the fear of viruses. Throughout history plague and disease have obliterated societies. The 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak killed more people than World War I.

In our fear, we weaken our immunity to another virus that also preys on anxiety and vulnerability. This virus is a killer too, it has been with us throughout human history and there is no permanent vaccine.

It is the virus of tyranny and it is alive and growing in our world now.

To fight coronavirus we have had to surrender our freedom; we have done it willingly and on balance, for good cause. We have saved lives.

But we have to be alert to the creeping intrusion of state control into our lives. History tells us freedom lost is hard to regain.

Freedom was in retreat well before COVID-19. As part of the war on terror, western democracies have eroded civil liberties. In a growing number of countries, would-be autocratic strongmen have seized power; rule of law and freedom of expression and free press have been wound back.

Technology has invaded our privacy; foreign governments meddle in elections and fake news makes it harder to know who to trust or what to believe.

The virus of tyranny has already found itself in the bloodstream of liberal democracies.

Tyrants through the ages have exploited the fear of viruses to justify or incite the most barbarous crimes against humanity. They use the language of germ warfare.

Joseph Stalin's henchman Vyacheslav Molotov said enemies needed to "be isolated" or "society would have been infected". Heinrich Himmler sent millions to the Nazi gas chambers calling his victims "a bacterium", a "sepsis" that needed to be cauterised.

Adolf Hitler called the holocaust a "surgical procedure" to rid Europe of the "Jewish disease".

Comparisons to the Nazis are wisely avoided and Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. But Trump exploited fear of outsiders, promising to build a wall to keep out illegal Mexican immigrants who he said were bringing "tremendous infectious diseases" across the US border.

In China, the Communist Party has locked up a million Uighur Muslims in re-education or brainwashing camps, saying they are "infected by an ideological illness".

According to a Communist Party audio recording, the Uighur population is a malignant tumour that must be cut out.

Two years after World War II, the writer Albert Camus published his novel The Plague, about a rat-borne disease that forces an entire city into lockdown.

It was an allegory of authoritarianism. When the plague receded, Camus warned that "the bacillus never dies for good". He wrote that the virus "slumbers ... until one day it will rouse up again".

Philosopher Michel Foucault also made the link between the plagues of the 17th century and authoritarian control. Behind state imposed discipline, Foucault wrote, "can be read the haunting memory of contagions".

One of the world's leading thinkers, Bernard Henri Levy, says we need to heed the warnings of Foucault. In his latest book The Virus in the Age of Madness, Levy stresses that when the virus passes we must quickly put away the masks and return to shaking hands or we will lose some essence of what it is to be human.

He supports compliance with health protocols to deal with this emergency but is sceptical of deferring to "experts" or "science" as if there is just one scientific community and one scientific opinion.

The "scientific community", he says, is "riven with fault-lines ... petty jealousies, esoteric disputes". Levy writes that we should follow the advice of "those who know" the same way that we heed the advice of any experts: "Not blindly."

Scientific truth, he cautions, is never more than a "corrected mistake". Like Foucault or Camus, Levy warns of the dangers of the "virus of tyranny" and the need to balance freedom against the necessity to fight the pandemic.

He says health can become an obsession what he calls a "doctrine of hygienics": "All social and political problems are reduced to infections that must be treated; and the will to cure becomes the paradigm of political action".

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world rejoiced at the "triumph of liberal democracy". Thirty years later, democracy is in retreat, and authoritarianism is on the rise. China is fast approaching an authoritarian superpower.

That coronavirus came out of China adds to our fear and vulnerability. COVID-19 forms part of a perfect storm of decades of terrorism, war, instability and economic strife that has battered our world.

The world is haunted by contagion and tyranny; both play on our deepest fears, each feeding into the other. In COVID-19, tyranny may have found a perfect host.

To beat the disease we've all, to some degree, had to become a little more authoritarian.

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The virus of tyranny is alive and growing and there's no permanent vaccine - ABC News

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online.

Cyberspace Administration of China notice:1. Regarding livestreams of the commemorative rally for the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Armys War to Resist America and Aid Korea on October 23, strictly standardize sourcing, and use the video stream from the Central Broadcast and Television General Platform. It is forbidden to change headings without authorization or activate the on-screen comments function. Keep tabs on posts and comments.2. On October 23, there will be activities such as laying of wreaths at the War to Resist America and Aid Korea martyrs cemetery in Liaoyang and monument in Dandong, Liaoning, and the Sino-Korean Friendship Pagoda and Cemetery for the Heroes of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army in Pyongyang, North Korea. Related reports should not relay information from KCNA. (October 22, 2020) [Source]

This week marks the 70th anniversary of Chinas intervention in the Korean War in the thinly veiled guise of Peoples Liberation Army units rebranded as Chinese Peoples Volunteers.Xi Jinping began a week-long remembrance by visiting a memorial exhibit in Beijing on Monday.The Diplomats Shannon Tiezzi analyzed the subtext of Xis highly public visit:

In remarks at the exhibit, Xi said, The victory in the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea was a victory of justice, a victory of peace and a victory of the people. He added that the spirit forged during the war will inspire the Chinese people and the Chinese nation to overcome all difficulties and obstacles, and prevail over all enemies.

Xi did not specifically mention what enemies China might be facing today, instead focusing on the figurative battle for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. But the subtext was obvious from the literal backdrop to his remarks. The United States, that past enemy, looms large as a present villain. Its noteworthy that, amid the worst downturn in U.S.-China relations since at least 1989, and arguably since ties were established in 1979, Xi chose to highlight the one actual war between the two sides.

As Joe Renouard and Woyu Liu noted in an earlier article for The Diplomat, in Chinas official narrative the Korea conflict was not only a just war, but also a vital test for the new PRC and, ultimately, a victory against a technologically superior foe. More specifically, In China today, the Korean War stands as a universally understood symbol of national unity against American belligerence. That gives the Korean War a clear resonance for the current moment. [Source]

Similarly, from William Zheng at South China Morning Post:

Junfei Wu, deputy director of Hong Kong think tank the Tianda Institute, said Xis speech at the museum had a two-pronged message for domestic and overseas audiences.

At the beginning of the Korean war, America misjudged Chinas determination to push them back. They thought China would not send troops into the Korean peninsula. But China did. Xis speech and Beijings high-profile commemorations are clear warning signals to the US not to underestimate Beijings determination to safeguard its core interests, he said.

[] Chen Daoyin, an independent political scientist and a former Shanghai-based professor, noted that from the Communist Partys perspective, historical narratives always needed to serve current politics. Xis historical evaluation of the Korean war corresponds to the current era of the new cold war confrontation between China and the US, he said. [Source]

The Dandong war memorial, mentioned in the censorship directive above, can be seen as a bellwether of Chinese relations with the outside world. Historian Ma Zhao, quoted by The Financial Times, said that recent renovations to the memorial point to a clear flare-up of anti-American sentiment. Chaguans David Rennie traveled to Dandong and reported on how revisions to Korean War historiography reflect Chinese leaders changing world views:

The new memorial in Dandong charges America with crimes against international law in a single display panel, offering few details. A glass case offers supposed evidence: an old bomb casing, and dusty test-tubes containing bacteria-carrying insects scattered by the us forces. In reality the tale was long ago debunked, notably by documents that emerged from Soviet archives decades after the war. The papers included a resolution by the Soviet government in 1953 that called reports of American germ warfare in Korea fictitious. A study by Milton Leitenberg for the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington cites memoirs by Wu Zhili, a former head of Chinas military medical service in Korea. Wu called talk of germ warfare a false alarm that did not make sense: some alleged drop-zones were just metres from American lines, and the winter weather was far too cold for bacteriological warfare.

Cheerful souls might conclude that modern Chinas rulers are embarrassed by this old propaganda but cannot easily disown it, so are taking a middle path. Chaguan draws a different lesson from a recent visit to the memorial. The new museum may tone down its anti-Americanism, eschewing the previous memorials statements about American imperialism being exposed as a paper tiger. But in its place is something that may prove just as disruptive: a deep disdain for the West, which is portrayed as unable to match the efficiency and order of Communist Party rule. Indeed, Americas germ-warfare campaign is called a military failure, thanks to clever Chinese and North Korean anti-epidemic work. [Source]

As part of the Chinese governments campaign to revisit and rethink the Korean War, CCTV released a 20-episode documentary series on the conflict.

Although there might have been noticeably little mention of North Korea in the Chinese state-television documentary, Global Times covered North Korean leader Kim Jong-uns tribute to Mao Anying, Mao Zedongs son, who was killed in a bombing raid while serving in the Chinese army.

Chinas online nationalists criticized the ber-popular South Korean boy band BTS for eliding mention of Chinese war dead during a ceremony commemorating the war. China and South Korea fought on opposite sides of the war and although a truce has been reached the war is, technically, not over. BTS, like all South Korean K-pop groups, is banned from performing in China but nonetheless remains extremely popular. Although some Chinese netizens called for a boycott of all BTS goods, no such large-scale boycott has yet emerged. A Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson even clarified that BTS merchandise has not been banned by Chinese customs.

In Foreign Policy, S. Nathan Park wrote on the boycott that never materialized:

The PRC proved no match for ARMY. When the K-pop superstar group BTS acknowledged the shared sacrifice of Americans and Koreans as they received the Korea Societys James A. Van Fleet Award, named after a U.S. general during the Korean War, Chinese social media roiled with outrage, perceiving BTSs message to be a slight against Chinese soldiers in the war. The Global Times, Chinas state-owned tabloid, blasted the group for its one-sided attitude that negated history. Online stores began pulling BTS-related product, anticipating the kind of nationalist frenzy that has cost giant franchises like the NBA and the South Korean supermarket store Lotte hundreds of millions of dollars in the past.

But Chinas media offensive against the kings of K-pop barely lasted two days. Global Times quietly deleted some of its articles criticizing BTS, and the negativity against the group in Chinese social media also faded quickly. Some Chinese fans call for a boycott hardly made a dent on BTS, supported by their worldwide fan club ARMY (which stands for Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth, if you were wondering). Shortly after they received the Van Fleet Award, BTS became one of only five music groups in history to seize the top two spots simultaneously on Billboards Hot 100 songs chart, joining the Beatles and Bee Gees among others. Last weeks initial public offering of Big Hit Entertainment, BTSs production company, was among the most successful IPOs in the history of the Korean stock market as its share price nearly doubled on the first day. [Source]

In 1950, American President Harry Truman stationed an aircraft carrier in the Taiwan Strait, preventing a PLA invasion of Taiwan. At South China Morning Post, Minnie Chan reported on how memories of the Korean War shape mainland opinions on war with Taiwan:

After returning to Beijing in 1954, Zhang, an English translator and negotiator for the PVA, was classified as a betrayer, dismissed from the PLA and expelled by the party. It was not until 1981 that he was rehabilitated.

The struggle over Taiwan remains a central issue in his reflections of the Korean conflict.

In 2013, Zhang wrote an article, saying he felt relieved after realising the Korean war had avoided a fratricidal fight between Chinese people on the mainland and in Taiwan.

But this month, Zhang told the South China Morning Post he supported actions by the PLA to accomplish Taiwan reunification because he was angry hearing that some Taiwanese refused to recognise they were Chinese. [Source]

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. SeeCDTs collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truthsince 2011.

Read more here:

Minitrue: Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the War to Resist America and Aid Korea - China Digital Times