Category: Military
Only 2 days into 2025 & already multiple terrorist attacks in the U.S.
Backers Of Impeached South Korean President Wave “Stop The Steal” Signs And Beg Trump For His Support
Seems the tRump / right wing cult playbook for domination and elimination of democracy is going worldwide. This is of course pushed by the mega wealthy in their quest to return the world to where they were mini kings and the people were just desperate peasants taking any job at any risk. Remember that Musk wanted people to work 80 hours a week with no pay. He would find it shocking if someone wanted him to work for free with no income. But he thinks it is fine to demand others do it. Look at how Bezos of Amazon wrote about workers. He wrote that upper management should push the workers as hard as possible until they were worn and broken, then fire the worker and hire new ones. He called workers lazy and useless unless driven ever harder with no mercy. Also according to the comments South Korea has a large fundamentalist Christian population who also want to force their religion into government the same way US Christian Nationalist do. Hugs
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Reuters reports:
Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol are adopting “Stop the Steal” slogans popularized by President-elect Donald Trump supporters and said they hoped the incoming president would help their embattled leader.
As Yoon supporters gathered outside his residence in the pre-dawn hours of Friday in an effort to prevent his arrest, some carried signs in English saying “Stop the Steal,’ a slogan Trump supporters used to question the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which he lost.
Yoon avoided arrest on Friday after presidential guards and troops blocked efforts to carry out a warrant in a criminal insurrection investigation into his short-lived martial law on Dec. 3.
The Guardian reports:
While pro-Yoon groups criticize their opponents as being subservient to North Korea, they openly venerate the United States. Over recent years, these groups, which remain a fringe element of South Korean society, have increasingly adopted rhetoric from the American right, particularly around claims of election fraud.
The allegations have been amplified through a network of far-right YouTube channels, where conservative commentators livestream the rallies and promote a wide range of conspiracy theories.
These online echo chambers, which Yoon himself has been accused of relying on for information, have become key platforms for spreading unfounded claims and maintaining supporter morale.
The Trump disease is truly global. Watch the video report below in which supporters attempt a feeble rendition of the US national anthem.
Peace & Justice History for 1/3
| January 3, 1961 A nuclear reactor exploded at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls, Idaho, killing three military technicians, and released radioactivity which, in the words of John A. McCone, Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, was “largely confined” to the reactor building. One technician was blown to the ceiling of the containment dome and impaled on a control rod. His body remained there until it was taken down six days later. The men were so heavily exposed to radiation that their hands and heads had to be buried separately with other radioactive waste. ===================================================== January 3, 1967  Carl Wilson Carl Wilson of the the Beach Boys was indicted for draft evasion. Claiming conscientious objector status, he eventually won his battle against the charges. ===================================================== January 3, 1971 On her first day as a member of Congress, Bella Abzug (D-New York) introduced a resolution calling for the withdrawal of troops from Southeast Asia.  Bella Abzug Born in the Bronx in 1920, one month after the passage of the U.S. Constitution’s 19th amendment granting women the right to vote, she was the first Jewish woman elected to Congress. After attending Columbia University Law School, she practiced civil rights and labor law for twenty-three years. Throughout her career, she was known as one of the most vocal proponents of civil rights for women, as well as for gays and lesbians. Background on the indomitable Bella ======================================================= January 3, 1993 The United States of America and the Russian Federation agreed to cut the number of their nuclear warheads to between 3,000 and 3,500 (nearly half).U.S. President George H.W. Bush, just before leaving office, and his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, signed the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – Start II – in Moscow. Start II marked the biggest reduction in nuclear arms ever agreed, eliminating land-based multiple warhead missiles, and putting limits on submarine-based missiles.  Read more ======================================================= January 3, 2003  Brazil’s new leftist president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, suspended purchase of 12 new fighter planes, saying money could be better used to relieve hunger. More about Luiz Inacio |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjanuary.htm#january3
Some Joe My God headlines of republican right wing feces
The eight tech titans alone gained more than $600 billion this year, 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase among the 500 richest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Greenland’s natural resources are worth many trillions; future drillers and diggers won’t care that it’s cold and distant. As Alaska proves, where there’s value, there’ll be value-extractors
plus, perhaps, a casino or two. Yes, the right kind of development could MGGA—Make Greenland Great Again.
Peace & Justice History for 1/1
January 1, 1831 William Lloyd Garrison first published The Liberator (four hundred copies printed in the middle of the night using borrowed type), which became the leading abolitionist paper in the United States. He labeled slave-holding a crime and called for immediate abolition. From the first issue: “I will be harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. “Assenting to the ‘self-evident truth’ maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights—among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.” Selections from The Liberator |
| January 1, 1847 Michigan became the first state – the first government in the English-speaking world – to abolish capital punishment (for all crimes except treason). This was done by a vote of the legislature, and was not a part of the state’s constitution until 1964. How it happened (it’s a .pdf) |
| January 1, 1959 32-year-old lawyer Fidel Castro led Cuban revolutionaries to victory over the corrupt government of Fulgencio Batista who had fled the island the day before. Batista, a former army sergeant, had seized power in a coup, canceling an election, in 1952.  Fidel Castro More on pre-Castro Cuba The news at the time Perspective of a U.S. intelligence agent |
| January 1, 1983 44 women scaled a 12-foot fence at dawn, breaking into a cruise missile base at Greenham Common in Great Britain, and danced on a missile silo. The lyrics to their “Silo Song” |
| January 1, 1987 Ten anti-nuclear activists were arrested for trespassing at the Nevada Test Site, the culmination of a 54-day encampment at the main Test Site gate. The camp established momentum for what became a movement ultimately involving over 10,000 arrests in numerous Test Site protests over the following years in the campaign to achieve a freeze of all nuclear weapons testing.  Nevada test site landscape The Nevada site includes more than 14,000 sq. km. (nearly 6000 sq. miles, larger than the state of Connecticut) of uninhabited land where atmospheric, and later underground, nuclear testing had been conducted since the 1950s. About the the Nevada Test Site |
January 1, 1989 Kees Koning Kees Koning, a former army chaplain and priest, and Co van Melle, a medical doctor working with homeless people and illegal refugees, entered the Woensdrecht airbase (for a second time), and began the “conversion” of NF-5B fighter airplanes by beating them with sledgehammers into ploughshares. The Dutch planned to sell the NF-5B to Turkey, for use against the Kurdish nationalists as part of a NATO aid program which involved shipping 60 fighter planes to Turkey. Koning and van Melle were charged with trespass, sabotage and $350,000 damage; they were convicted, and both sentenced to a few months in jail. Read more about the plowshares movement |
| January 1, 1991 Early in the morning Moana Cole, a Catholic Worker from New Zealand, Ciaron O’Reilly, a Catholic Worker from Australia, and Susan Frankel and Bill Streit, members of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community in Washington, D.C., calling themselves the ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand and U.S.) Peace Force Plowshares, entered the Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York.  Moana Cole After cutting through several fences, Frankel and Streit entered a deadly force area, and hammered and poured blood on a KC-135 (a refueling plane for B-52s), and then hammered and poured blood on the engine of a nearby cruise missile-armed B-52 bomber. They presented their action statement to base security who encircled them moments later. About Moana Cole |
| January 1, 1994 The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. A treaty among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, it called for all three countries to follow similar policies for environmental, safety and investment regulation, apart from laws passed by their respective legislatures. |
| January 1, 1994 On the day NAFTA (see above) took effect, more than 2,000 native Mayans in Mexico’s Chiapas state marched into the state capital, San Cristóbal de las Casas, and five neighboring towns, and seized control. Calling themselves Zapatistas, or the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a “declaration of war” was issued. Chiapas is among the poorest parts of Mexico. The indigenous peoples of Mexico long suffered as second-class citizens due to the dominance of the Roman Catholic church and the traditional Mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry) political leadership of the country. The EZLN was certain that NAFTA would permanently lock in the top-down economic situation in Mexico. The Zapatistas’ slogan was !Ya basta! (“Enough is enough”). Employees at the Mexican stock exchange were evacuated by riot police. 25,000 Mexican soldiers arrived in Chiapas equipped with automatic weapons, tanks, helicopters and airplanes. 145 deaths were reported, mostly civilians. Massive arrests and subsequent torture of prisoners by the government took place. |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjanuary.htm#january1
Israeli Strikes Yemen’s Civilian International Airport | HasanAbi reacts
Peace & Justice History for 12/31
| December 31, 1915 The U.S. branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) was founded. FOR’s Mission StatementThe Fellowship of Reconciliation seeks to replace violence, war, racism and economic injustice with nonviolence, peace and justice. We are an interfaith organization committed to active nonviolence as a transforming way of life and as a means of radical change. We educate, train, build coalitions, and engage in nonviolent and compassionate actions locally, nationally, and globally. FOR’s website |
| December 31, 1970 The U.S. Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which in 1964 authorized an increase in U.S. military involvement in Vietnam as a response to a reported attack on U.S. naval forces patrolling close to the North Vietnamese border. The reports of the attacks were later revealed to be fictitious. The resolution was used as the basis for the entire war which lasted until 1974 and took the lives of millions of Vietnamese and over 58,000 Americans.  What really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december31
Peace & Justice History for 12/30
(Their email program seems to be off for the holidays! I keep a link; here is today’s.)
| December 30, 1901 The worst year in the 20th century for lynching in the U.S. ended with a total of 130 victims (105 blacks, 25 whites). Ida Wells-Barnett had been a teacher and newspaper editor in Memphis, Tennessee, where she wrote against the evils of lynching in her columns in The Free Speech and Headlight. Forced from the South by threat of violence, she continued her efforts in Chicago. From a letter to President William McKinley from Barnett, published in the Cleveland Gazette April 9, 1898: Mr. President, the colored citizens of this country in general, and Chicago in particular, desire to respectfully urge that some action be taken by you as chief magistrate of this great nation, first for the apprehension and punishment of the lynchers of Postmaster Baker, of Lake City, S.C.; second, we ask indemnity for the widow and children, both for the murder of the husband and father, and for injuries sustained by themselves; third, we most earnestly desire that national legislation be enacted for the suppression of the national crime of lynching. For nearly twenty years lynching crimes, which stand side by side with Armenian and Cuban outrages, have been committed and permitted by this Christian nation. Nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 and 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hang or burn to death a single individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless. Statistics show that nearly 10,000 American citizens have been lynched in the past 20 years. To our appeals for justice the stereotyped reply has been that the government could not interfere in a state matter. Postmaster Baker’s case was a federal matter, pure and simple. He died at his post of duty in defense of his country’s honor, as truly as did ever a soldier on the field of battle. We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home. Italy and China have been indemnified by this government for the lynching of their citizens. We ask that the government do as much for its own. |
December 30, 1936 above: Workers sit down at GM  Supporters pass in food to sitdown strikers Members of the United Automobile Workers sat down at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. GM, the world’s largest corporation at the time, had refused to recognize or negotiate with the union, despite passage of the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) in 1935 which promised unions the right to organize. The local’s membership adopted a tactic developed by French workers. Instead of picketing outside a factory only to be ignored or forcibly cleared away, the sit-down strike enabled workers to halt production and seize the plant “from the inside.” The strike began just days after the end of a successful sit-down at Ford supplier Kelsey-Hayes. “Master Hands,” a corporate documentary about the Flint plant shot shortly before the strike |
| December 30, 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst, and his colleague Anthony Russo were indicted by a federal grand jury for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the news media. The papers were part of a 7000-page, top-secret government history of the United States’ political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971, and described air strikes over Laos, raids along the coast of North Vietnam, and offensive actions taken by U.S. Marines well before the American public had been told that such actions had occurred.  The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers The Post – new movie (2017) watch trailer Why were they being prosecuted? |
| December 30, 1972 President Richard Nixon ordered an end to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. The most recent air strikes had been retaliation for North Vietnam’s walking out of the peace negotiations in Paris and pressure to force it to submit to U.S. terms. Bombing of strategic targets and Hanoi (the North’s capital) and Haiphong lasted for eight days with a 36-hour break for Christmas. The 20,000 tons (18.1 million kg) of bombs killed just over 1600 North Vietnamese, and a dozen B-52s were lost. North Vietnam agreed to return to the bargaining table. |
| December 30, 1993 The state of Israel and the Vatican under Pope John Paul II agreed to extend diplomatic recognition to one another. |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december30
Letters From An American
December 28, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson
Read on Substack
On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.
As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.
Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.
As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.
What haunts me is the night of December 28.
On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.
In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka’s band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.
Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.
But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka’s band. The encounter didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.
By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn’t sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.
And the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again.
In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Indian encampment from a slight rise above the camp.
For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?
On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
But it is never too late to change the future.
—
Note:
Every year on this date, I post the story of the Wounded Knee Massacre.
My book about that event was so hard to write I had to take a long break in the middle of it. When you write a book, you get to know your characters as if they were family. Sometimes you love them and sometimes you don’t, but they become part of you. As the massacre drew inexorably closer, I wrote about the scenery, plant life, and animals of the Plains as a distraction from what I knew was coming.
But it came anyway. Even after all these years, I still have a hard time on the date of the massacre.
In an interview this year, someone asked me why I write as if I am running out of time, and it hit me that I write these letters because no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop the Wounded Knee Massacre.
But maybe I can help to stop the next one.
