The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability by Peter Kornbluh
As a result of the efforts of Peter Kornbluh and the National Security Archive, thousands of the government records that spell out US government support of Pinochet have recently been declassified.
Among the formerly top-secret records in The Pinochet File are:
• Top-secret transcripts of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and other cabinet members discussing how to "bring Allende down."
• Minutes of top secret meetings, chaired by Kissinger, to determine covert operations in Chile.
• CIA Chile Task Force organizational and strategy documents.
• White House Situation Room cables welcoming General Pinochet to power.
• Defense Intelligence Agency organizational diagrams of Chile's repressive secret police, DINA.
• Chilean secret police records on Operation Condor.
• Intelligence reporting to Henry Kissinger on Condor.
• Comprehensive CIA, NSC and State Department reports on the September 1976 car bombing assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt.
Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing by James Waller
Political or social groups wanting to commit mass murder on the basis of racial, ethnic or religious differences are never hindered by a lack of willing executioners. In Becoming Evil, social psychologist James Waller uncovers the internal and external factors that can lead ordinary people to commit extraordinary acts of evil. Waller debunks the common explanations for genocide- group think, psychopathology, unique cultures- and offers a more sophisticated and comprehensive psychological view of how anyone can potentially participate in heinous crimes against humanity. He outlines the evolutionary forces that shape human nature, the individual dispositions that are more likely to engage in acts of evil, and the context of cruelty in which these extraordinary acts can emerge. Illustrative eyewitness accounts are presented at the end of each chapter. An important new look at how evil develops, Becoming Evil will help us understand such tragedies as the Holocaust and recent terrorist events.
The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

An Unfinished Song: The Life of Victor Jara by Joan Jara
Reader Review:
Not only does this book offer personal insights into the life of one of Chile's most popular folk musicians, it also vividly shows the impact of the coup of 1973 on Nueva Cancion and popular culture in Chile. The biography is key in understanding this part of Chilean history, Nueva Cancion and other realms of popular culture. Joan Jara is an excellent writer as well.I highly recommend it...you won't be able to stop once you start reading and Victor Jara's music will mean so much more.

The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine
The only comprehensive account of the CIA's torture and assassination operation in Vietnam. Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade reviews The Phoenix Program: "This definitive account of the Phoenix program, the US attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution, remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America's Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians."

Indonesia: The 2nd Greatest Crime of the Century by Deirdre Griswold
When the last decade's setbacks for the world socialist movement are fairly evaluated, and the external, objective factors are considered along with subjective problems of leadership--one antecedent event will stand out as having had a profound effect on the fate of tens of millions of exploited and oppressed workers and peasants. That event was the massacre of the Indonesian progressive movement by the fascist military in 1965-66. -
Deirdre Griswold
A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present by Howard Zinn
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.
 
 

 

 

 
  


Columns

!!!FIGHT!!!

By Alllie

They told them to sit down and they did. They told them to go to the back of the airplane and they did. They told them to be quiet and they were. They told them not to resist and they didn't. They could have fought. They could have resisted. They could have stopped it. But they didn't. Except perhaps on Flight 93.

They told them to come along and they did. They told them to get in cattle cars and they did. They told them to go to the right or the left and they did. They told them to take off their clothes and lay down on the cooling corpses so they could be shot more easily. And they did. They could have fought. They could have resisted. They could have taken some of their murderers with them. They might even have escaped. Instead they complied. They obeyed. They didn't resist.

THE HOLOCAUST IN BUCZACZ
A young German engineer, Dr Kurt Gerstein, who witnessed the killing at Belzec, provided a full description of the workings of the death camp after surrendering to the Western allies at the end of the war, before committing suicide. As he described the arrival of Jewish deportees, "For a number of men there still flickers a lingering hope, sufficient to make them march without resistance to the death chambers. The majority know with certainty what is to be their fate. The horrible, all-pervading stench reveals the truth. Then they climb some small steps and behold the reality. Silent mothers hold their babies to their breasts, naked; there are many children of all ages. They hesitate, but nevertheless proceed toward the death chambers, most of them without a word, pushed by those behind, chased by the whips of the SS men.

We no longer live in a democracy. Someday they might come for you. When they do - Fight!!! From the first moment you realize they have come for you, Resist! Don't be like the Jews. Die a wolf instead of a lamb, die a wolf with your teeth in their throats.

According to Dr Gerstein, old people and invalids were removed separately, so as not to interrupt the flow of people into the gas chamber, and were taken to open pits nearby, and shot.

Fight!! Resist!! At every point!! You know if you've done something wrong. You know if you've robbed a bank or killed someone or broken a law and if you haven't, when they come for you, Resist!!

Yet, as early as December, 1941, when young Jews were being deported to labour camps, a group of 15 youth organized themselves to flee and hide. When the Germans discovered this effort at organized resistance, their forces tried for nearly half a year to capture the group, without success. This group of young people became the core of the Jewish resistance in Buczacz. Following the terrible "Action" of October, 1942, they began a search for arms and prepared themselves to break out of the ghetto.

THE HOLOCAUST 1941
September 27 and 28, 1941: Over 30,000 Jews gather in Kiev, still believing that they were being resettled. Brought to the ravine at BABI YAR, where they are ruthlessly shot down by machine gun. By the hundreds, men, women and children fall into the ravine, as they're riddled with bullets. One woman, gave birth in the middle of the slaughter.

September 29, 1941: In retaliation for Russian bombs in Kiev, German authorities assemble 30,000 Jews, take them to the forest and slaughter them over the next two days.

October 7, 1941: Rowne, Volhunia; over 17,000 Jews are taken from their homes, marched to pits, and slaughtered by the SS and local militia.

October 12 , 1941: Stanislawow, Eastern Gallicia; the whole district of Jews, were driven out of their homes into the center of the town were massive graves had been dug. SS troops and Ukrainian militia commence machine gunning of the gathered populace. Over 6,000 Jews are killed that day, Hoshana Rabba, (the Great Prayer day.)

October 22 , 1941: ODESSA "ACTION" Rumanian command headquarters blown up. 17 Rumanians and 4 Germans killed. In reprisal for this apparent act of defiance over 5,000 Jews are rounded up in Odessa and shot dead the next day.

October 23 , 1941: Odessa "action" continues. 19,000 more Jews are gathered into the city square, sprayed with gasoline and burned alive.

November 6 and 7, 1941: Rovno, Ukraine; 17,500 Jews taken to the forests and ordered to dig five large pits. Bitter cold, they were ordered to strip. Then they are all murdered over a two day period.

December 31, 1941: Outside of Vilna, Abba Kovner, during meeting of groups of Jewish youth movements reads a manifesto, "Let us not go as sheep to the slaughter."

Don't think that the Nazis are dead and gone and you are safe. You're not. Not today. Not in America. Not with the PATRIOT Act giving our dictator the power to arrest any American for any reason. Don't think that because you're nobody they'd never come after you, that because you're not a leader you're safe. The little along with the big were swept up in Germany, in Indonesia, in Chile, in Argentina.

The Chile Coup: The U.S. Hand
Only 19 days after the coup, a secret briefing paper prepared for Kissinger -- entitled "Chilean Executions" -- put the "total dead" from the coup at 1,500. The paper reported that the junta had summarily executed 320 individuals -- three times more than publicly acknowledged.

Reports of mass arrests - by then, U.S. intelligence put the number at 13,500 -- as well as summary executions, torture and "disappearances" Nov/Dec were reaching the world press. The administration fretted about an image problem in the United States, too, because two Americans -- Charles Horman and Frank Terruggi -- were among those executed at the National Stadium.

You know if you've done something criminal. You know if the police have any legitimate reason to arrest you. YOU KNOW. If they don't, if you suspect anything, run, hide, resist because once you are in their hands, you are helpless. Then they can do anything to you. Fight. Make a scene. Make it cost them. Don't make it easy. Even unarmed prisoners being led to death can cost them. Fight at every turn. Fight constantly. NEVER GIVE IN! If they are going to kill you or torture and kill you, you have NOTHING to LOSE! FIGHT!!

But there's another danger. When they come for you they might try to fool you about why they are there. They might tell you that they are trying to help you, just there to take you to safety, to protect you from a terrorist attack, some disease, or some other disaster. "Labor camps" they told the Jews. "Food, sanctuary" they told the Rwandans. Remember how they fooled them. Don't let them fool you. They might even lure you into coming to them but with the lists they are making once they have people in custody they can select who to release and who to treat as an enemy. Be careful. Be suspicious. Don't let yourself get trapped, helpless in their hands.

A Woman's Work
Soon after Pauline's arrival in town, cars mounted with loudspeakers crisscrossed Butare's back roads, announcing that the Red Cross had arrived at a nearby stadium to provide food and guarantee sanctuary. By April 25, thousands of desperate Tutsis had gathered at the stadium.

It was a trap. Instead of receiving food and shelter, the refugees were surrounded by men wearing bandoleers and headdresses made of spiky banana leaves. These men were Interahamwe, thuggish Hutu marauders whose name means ''those who attack together.'' According to an eyewitness I spoke with this summer in Butare, supervising from the sidelines was Pauline, then 48, a portly woman of medium height in a colorful African wrap and spectacles.

Before becoming Rwanda's chief official for women's affairs, Pauline was a social worker, roaming the countryside, offering lectures on female empowerment and instruction on child care and AIDS prevention. Her days as minister were similarly devoted to improving the lives of women and children. But at the stadium, a 30-year-old farmer named Foster Mivumbi told me, Pauline assumed a different responsibility. Mivumbi, who has confessed to taking part in the slaughter, told me that Pauline
goaded the Interahamwe, commanding, ''Before you kill the women, you need to rape them.''

Tutsi women were then selected from the stadium crowd and dragged away to a forested area to be raped, Mivumbi recalled. Back at the stadium, he told me, Pauline waved her arms and then observed in silence as Interahamwe rained machine-gun fire and hand grenades down upon the remaining refugees. The Hutus finished off survivors with machetes. It took about an hour, ending at noon. Pauline stayed on, Mivumbi told me, until a bulldozer began piling bodies for burial in a nearby pit. (When questioned about this incident, Pauline's lawyers denied that she took part in atrocities in Butare.)

Stadiums are often used as a place of confinement, torture and death. They have a large central holding area. Few, easily guarded exits. Many rooms that can be used for torture and interrogation. Once they have filled the jails they will fill the stadiums.

An unfinished song
Tanks had bombarded the technical university as they did the factories. Victor was arrested and taken to the National Stadium to be beaten and tortured to death - the same venue where, only months earlier, he had performed at the celebration for Neruda.

Victor was 'reserved' for special treatment. He raised the spirits of other prisoners by singing. Having been brutally beaten and his fingers broken the officer in charge then demanded, 'sing now, you bastard', in an attempt to humiliate Victor in front of other prisoners. In defiance he sang Venceremos.

The military intended to dump Victor's body in an unmarked grave. Joan Jara movingly describes how this was avoided by the heroism of a young worker at the morgue who, recognising Victor's corpse, risked his life to find Joan and allow her to reclaim his body and bury him.
An Unfinished Song: The Life of Victor Jara by Joan Jara

Testimony: Detainee remembers Chile 1973
Of my two Chilean flat-mates I knew nothing for some days. Wolfgang had been arrested along with Victor Jara and several hundred students and academics at the State Technical University and taken to the Chile Stadium, a small indoor sports arena in downtown Santiago.

Victor Jara was tortured there and killed. Wolfgang, however, managed to escape the military guards, and later we were able to bring him to Britain as a refugee. Juan and his Russian wife reached the Swedish Embassy where they joined hundreds of other asylum seekers. My girl-friend's ex-husband was summarily executed by the police when they discovered a sporting shotgun in his house. Later that afternoon I and a handful of other prisoners were taken out at gunpoint and forced to lie face-down on the floor of a bus, police with sub-machine guns standing astride us.

We were taken to the National Stadium, Chile's equivalent of Wembley, a large football stadium with other sports facilities clustered around it. We were herded into a mustering area which was full of newly arrived prisoners in white coats, doctors and orderlies from several Santiago hospitals which had been raided that day, victims of a savage proscription by the far-right dominated Chilean Medical Association, which accused them of having failed to go on strike against the legal government.

The 'cells' into which we were herded were the team changing rooms. There were 130 prisoners in ours, and at night we were so tightly packed that we could sleep only by lining up in rows and lying down 'by numbers', dovetailing heads and feet.

We were guarded by soldiers and there were sand-bagged machine-gun emplacements at intervals around the walk-way that formed a circuit under the angle of the stadium stands.

The man next to me in my cell was less fortunate. A Brazilian engineer, named Sergio Moraes, he had worked in a factory called Madeco. He was taken out for his first heavy interrogation two days before I was released.

When he returned he could hardly hear or speak: he had been hooded and beaten about the head and ears with a flat wooden bat. He told us that among his interrogators were Brazilian intelligence officers

You know if you've done something dishonest. You KNOW if you've robbed or killed. You KNOW. So if they come to get you you KNOW if it's justifiable or not. If you haven't done anything then fight, fight to your last bit of strength, fight till you die, don't make it easy on them, make sure there's a cost.

If they want you to take off your clothes and lay down so they can rape you, FIGHT!

If they want you to kneel down so they can shoot you easier - FIGHT!.

If they want you to lay down naked in a pit so they can shoot you - FIGHT!!

Don't give up! Never make it easy for them! Fight every moment!! FIGHT!!

The CIA and Poison Letters: BlackValentines?
Saddam Hussein, then an up-and-coming CIA asset and dictator, and other members of the Ba'ath party worked with,the Americans, to overthrow General Kassem. According to Frontline, "With CIA help, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party seized power in 1963. General Kassem was killed in the coup. The CIA provided lists of suspected communists for Ba'ath Party hit squads, who liquidated at least 800 people. Saddam Hussein rushed home to join in as a interrogator, torturer and killer."

There's been a coup. A fixed election and worse treasons. The junta in power can never let go lest they be punished for their crimes. The CIA has been behind massacres before. In Chile. In Argentina. In Indonesia. In Iraq. You think your life is worth more to them than those lives were? Don't fool yourself...fight! Being docile won't save you any more than being docile saved the Jews in Germany or the progressives in Indonesia or Chile. DON'T GIVE IN!! Fight when they come to get you. Fight! Once you realize what is happening! Resist! They tell you if someone tries to kidnap you you should fight and run, to resist at every step because if they manage to take you somewhere else (called a secondary crime scene) they'll do much worse to you than they would have at the primary crime scene. So if they come and get you, if they try to take you somewhere else fight, run, scream, fight because nothing will happen to you including death that will be as bad as what they can do to you once they have you totally in their power.

How Washington backed bloodbath in Indonesia
They made the rivers in many parts of Indonesia literally run red with the blood of their victims. For months, the army went from village to village, island to island, shooting and hacking at whoever was pointed out to them by local reactionaries as "trouble makers."

The police, landlords and merchants used this holocaust as the opportunity to settle old scores and tame the mighty popular movement. Hundreds of thousands who survived the killings were jailed for decades in barbaric concentration camps, where many died.

In a discussion of the difficulties facing the oppressed masses, how can the utter intransigence of the rulers be left out? How can social transformation be seriously considered without taking into account that those with privilege and property may resort to any means, including mass murder, to stay on top?


Our bloody coup in Indonesia
It has been known for more than 10 years that the CIA supplied lists of names for Suharto's assassination squads. What is less widely known is that the supposed pro-communist coup that triggered the crisis was almost certainly also the work of the CIA. Sukarno was finally removed from power in 1967.

Best for Indonesia, in Suharto's view, was the granting of lucrative concessions to western mining and oil companies. It was the beginning of a post-independence economic order that continues today. After 32 years, Suharto was finally overthrown. By then, even the US government had to admit that he was one of the most corrupt dictators of the 20th century.

They talk about the killing fields in Cambodia. They never mention the greater deaths in Indonesia in 1965, and those deaths came first. Did they inspire the communist revolutionaries to react similarly? No "Crimes Against Humanity" trials to bring justice to the million Indonesian dead. No monuments in Indonesia to them. They were "trouble makers", maybe communists, so they don't matter. You think your life is safe? You think no one would ever point you out as a troublemaker, no one would call TIPS with the truth or even a lie, no one has a grudge against you?

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That's our problem." Howard Zinn

"Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about...and kept us so busy with continuous changes and crises and so fascinated...by the machinations of the national enemies, without and within, that we had no time to think about those dreadful things that were growing, little by little all around us...Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted, that...unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these little measures...must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing than a farmer in his field sees corn growing...Each act...is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to go out of your way to make trouble...And it is not just fear...that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty...And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it...But the one great shocking occasion when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty...The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed...You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father...could never have imagined." Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free; The Germans, 1938-45

Ladies and gentlemen it is time. It is time that we wake up and rise up. Do not go silently. Do not go gently. Do not go along with the uninformed, brainwashed masses. Do not wait for someone else to take your stand. Take it for yourself! Take it for your children! Take it for your grandchildren! Take it for generation after generation to come! Take it as your forefathers took it for you! For if we fail in this hour, in this fight, future generations may not know the America that we have known and loved.
Right now things appear to be relatively calm, but we know a storm is coming!
The Calm Before The Storm

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

After various holocausts people say they had no idea what was happening to those targeted. The victims were so quiet and polite as they were taken away. DON'T be quiet!!! Don't be cooperative!!! FIGHT!! Make a scene!!! So everyone who sees it KNOWS!!! And tells!! If they come for you FIGHT!. Make every capture a Waco, every arrest a Ruby Ridge! At least they fought. Their deaths were not secret, not hidden.

Don't give in!!

If they come for you will you trust them?

If they come for you will you acquiesce?

If they come for you will you FIGHT?!!!


Dedicated to the terrifying Bush Junta
who I believe would do ANYTHING
and who bring out the paranoia in my soul.

© Alllie, 2003

Distribution: This article is copyrighted by Alllie, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as you tell me where and this credit is attached as well as a link back to this page, http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/alllieresist.shtml .

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