Let'er Fly

How much blood has been shed at the hands of the Japanese? Let me try to answer that question as fast and simple as I can. It is a very complicated issue. There was the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, they beat Russia. Then in July 1937, the second Sino-Japanese War broke out, and they beat China. They actually occupied the whole coast of China up until 1945. This occupation also included Korea. In 1933, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations since she was heavily criticized for her actions in China. In 1940, Japan occupied French Indochina (Vietnam) upon agreement with the French Vichy government, and joined the Axis powers Germany and Italy. These actions intensified Japan's conflict with the United States and Great Britain which reacted with an oil boycott. The resulting oil shortage and failures to solve the conflict diplomatically made Japan decide to capture the oil rich Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and to start a war with the US and Great Britain. In December 1941, Japan attacked the Allied powers at Pearl Harbour and several other points throughout the Pacific. Japan was able to expand her control over a large territory that expanded to the border of India in the West and New Guinea in the South within the following six months.
The people of China and Korea finally won their own independence after Japan surrendered and ended WW II. It was either surrender, or be annihilated. Korean people are Chinese, just as the Vietnamese were Chinese. Yes.............both of these Wars.....very similarly, fighting over territory North and South, one under Communist control and the other Democratic. The Japanese Emperor's over the years feuded with Chiang Kai Sek, and Russia's Joseph Stalin. In 1947, the Korean Communist had four factions. Natives - those who stayed in Korea (domestic group), Chinese - those who have worked for Mao Zedong (Yenan group) Russian - those who worked for Stalin (Soviet-Korean group), and Newbies - those who became communists after the liberation (Partisan and Kapsan Group).
Americans were polled in early 1953, and 56% said the Korean conflict was not worthwhile. In 1953, the armistice was signed. The cease fire that has existed over fifty years, may just go on forever. The Japanese shed the blood of all these Asian countries over three centuries. The Koreans hate Japan, and they hate the Americans for becoming their ally.
Korea is now threatening a missile test. Some say, they have nuclear capabilities of reaching the United States. This cat and mouse game is amusing. We are waiting for the missile test, so we can shoot it down, and show our allies that we are quite capable of protecting them. At least Taiwan and Japan expect this to be true. It would be quite embarrassing if we missed....lol!
I think about my niece, Miss Amber, who sits in a Air Force mobile unit with her other comrades, They watch 20" LCD monitors, with radar that reaches out hundreds of miles. One wrong bleep on the screen and POW!...........goodbye.........Hello----> meet Miss Amber.
I say to Mr. Kim Jong II------------------------->"Let'er Fly".

National Geographic and IBM have teamed up to bring you the history of our ancestry. This is a five year research project. I have volunteered my DNA results to this study, and I have a personalized web page at http://www.genographic.com. You can access this web page by using my Genographic Project ID - FWUVG6FREH.
Plan to spend more than a day reading all the information at genographic.com. It is alot, and quite interesting.
Enjoy!

Vietnam

The brilliance of Martin Luther King Jr. lives on. I have said before that he was probably the most courageous man of the last century. At least, I have seen no one stand up against such atrocities, with so much passion and committment, since the sixties. Find below, the first paragraph of a speech he made in April 1967. It's ironic, that LBJ had once said he was declaring war on poverty. In turn, he sends all the poor black and white boys off to war. In my view, this was a process of extermination!.........Some ask.....why are Vietnam Veterans so bitter.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"Beyond Vietnam,"
From Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned
about Vietnam, at Riverside Church

4 April 1967
New York City
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

Slavery in America

Abraham Lincoln did not free the slaves.

I always thought slavery was about black people. I was wrong. The first settlers into the continent were the British, who settled in Jamestown in the early 1600’s. Slavery had already been established in many other countries for many years. The slaves themselves were black and white, and even non-Christians. Almost all of the blacks were from Africa and were Muslim. They worked side by side. Slavery was a means of labor. They called them indentured slaves, and after a certain number of years in servitude, you would be rewarded by the companies, with either land and/or money, and then set free. This was a legal contract for labor.
In the beginning there was little hint of racism, but there was a deliberate decisiveness against non-Christians. This was a remnant of the Middle Ages, which is a whole other story in itself. Its ironic, thinking back over the centuries and even today, that we continue to hate and kill each other over peoples religion and the land they embed themselves too, because quite simply, “they don’t believe the way I do”. Every time a president, a King, a Czar, or an Emperor became too sympathetic to one religion or a race of people, they were toppled very quickly.
In Jamestown, some slaves, black and white, worked out their servitude and later owned land. They had the same rights as others, and in some cases, black owners had black and white labor.
Then there were the native Americans. They were already here when the British arrived. The Indians, who were offered servitude, did not want to work the servitude. They already had their own lands, and were perfectly comfortable living off the land and being self sustaining. Besides, what were they going to do with money? Why would they buy back land that they already hunt and gather their food, and claim as there own to begin with. No one challenged them on this point until later years. As long as the settlers left them alone, then there were no problems.
Slavery evolved. Over a period of years, whites began to get more rights as a slave and freed after servitude, and blacks would become slaves for life. Being a slave for life, first began as a form of punishment, and later as a permanent fixture to being a slave when they were brought to America. This led to all black slaves being enslaved for life. The cultivation of sugar, cotton and rice, are what made the Americans, north and south, and the British very rich over the years. Later called
“ The Triangular Trade ” between America, British, and Africa. Americans trade cotton to the British to make cloth, the British trade cloth to Africa for slaves. The Africans made a lot of money off these trades, but as history will tell, the British boot made its way into Africa at a later date. British aggression is another story altogether.
In the middle of the 1700’s, southern America was producing or cultivating and northern America was refining and shipping. It gets more complicated, when the American Revolution takes place. The thirteen British colonies form a Union. The Constitution says nothing about slavery, but does say “all People are created equal”. Slavery for the most part was in the southern colonies, and in the north there was very little slavery that still existed. From this period up to the Civil War, there was a growing resentment among northerners against the southern slave states. Abolitionist societies were formed against slavery, which led to a very uncooperative north toward southern slave ownership states. Slave laws or slave codes, as the south called them, were not being enforced by the northerners. If a slave ran north to free himself and later captured, he was to be returned to his owner in the south. This was suppose to be the cooperation among states of the union, and written in their “contract with America”. These slaves were not being sought and the slaves that were captured, were not being returned to their owners. The southerners were also upset that when the Union Army took the Indians off the land, in southern states, the Federal government declared some 20 million acres of these southern states for themselves in the early 1800’s.

" I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the Negro should be denied everything." The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, "Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois" (September 18, 1858), pp. 145-146.

I always thought Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Although the Republican Party platform was against slavery, Lincoln was not an Abolitionist. Slavery was not part of Lincoln’s platform when he ran for President. Within six months after Lincoln became President, the old southern slave states seceded from the Union and the Civil War began. South Carolina was the first state to secede. This state was part of the old thirteen British colonies. Understand that the old British colonies were forced into their “contract with America”, after the American Revolution. Their contract says they may declare themselves sovereign as an independent nation itself. In their secession documents, they say the northern states have not lived up to what they were supposed to do, mainly the cooperation among fleeing slaves. Other southern states then followed in the secession forming the Confederacy. Lincoln would not let the free black in the north fight the southerners when the Civil War began, even though they volunteered. Lincoln was under a lot of pressure from the Europeans, and he was afraid the Europeans were going to form their own coalition with the south. The Europeans had already abolished slavery, and Lincoln needed their support. It was only under this pressure, and this political move, two years after the war started, did he write the Emancipation Proclamation that gave black slaves freedom. It was, at this time he then allowed blacks to fight southerners in the Civil War. Black soldiers were paid less than white soldiers. The Emancipation Proclamation gives all Americans the same rights, including the right to vote. But blacks were not allowed to vote until 1965, over 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was written. Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War that ensued did not give freedom to Black Americans.
The aftermath of the Civil War was like a cake. It looked like a cake, smelled like a cake, and tasted like a cake, but it was not a cake. Black freedom in America was to become a process that even to this day is still in motion. After the Civil War, discrimination against blacks and others up to the 1960’s was rampant. Black communities began to “maroon” themselves. In the white communities, discriminating among business and public areas with signs that state “whites only”. I have never understood the white supremacy mentality. The white capitalist that settled in this country, now with all the money, and with authority over all other races, becomes completely blind to the fact that men are created equal. Why did white America not learn a lesson from WWII, when the white supremacist of Germany, exterminated the Jews with their “final Solution”? They began this movement in 1937, a long time prior to WWII. Legislation was passed in Germany to legalize racism aginst the Jews. This was also supported at the time by Europe. How could we ever condemn the German’s, when America was caught up in the same racial discrimination? You mean it was alright to have lynching and hangings of blacks in America, but it was not alright to have ethnic cleansing in Germany? With this said, then why wasn’t America an ally with Germany? Where does this hatred come from? I advocate that hatred and violence are to be learned behaviors. Obviously this hatred has been passed from generation to generation from our forefathers among white authority. Why did our Presidents before Kennedy, for 100 years, all the way back to Lincoln, do nothing concerning human rights? Were they afraid of another Civil War, or even assassination? We allowed states to re-write their own state constitutions, which included an outline to qualify to vote. You must be able to read and write and sign a signature. These constitutions knew before they wrote them that the illiterate black Americans, who had been denied education for many years, could not qualify. In 1969, voting restriction’s were abolished by Congress. Beginning in the 1960’s, came a huge Civil Rights movement. It was not coincidence, that the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X took place during this time period.

P.S. Bless Alex Haley(1921-1992), and his book "Roots". Who followed his family back seven generations to tell the story of "Kunta Kinte". In January of 1977, all of America was glued to their television to watch this amazing story unfold for eight consecutive nights.