History

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/thomas-jefferson-slavery-wrath-of-god

This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.

Under Dalai Lama’s rule over Tibet

• 80-95% of the population were serfs, some monasteries owned thousands of serfs
• Disobedient serfs endured torture including having their eyes being gouged out
• The 14th Dalai Lama’s family owned 27 manors and 6000 serfs
• 95% of the population were illiterate
• Tibet had a life expectancy of just 35 years
• No modern roads, railways, or electricity infrastructure

Contrast this to modern Tibet after liberation

• Extreme poverty eliminated by 2020
• Literacy rate: 95%+
• Life expectancy: 72-74 years
• Universal primary education, with expansion of universities
• Railway infrastructure to the rest of China, with airports, highways and electrification

Yugoslav government records tallied 1,200–2,500 civilians killed and 5,000 wounded. Key strikes: passenger train at Grdelica Gorge (April 12); RTS Belgrade headquarters where at least 14 journalists killed (April 23); Niš market cluster bomb strike with 14–16 dead; Savine Vode bus with 17 dead. Human Rights Watch documented 90+ civilian casualty incidents. NATO has compensated no one.

NATO fired 15 tons of DU munitions. Four zones in southern Serbia were confirmed contaminated, with projectiles buried 1.5–2 meters deep. Former Health Minister and neuro-oncologist Danica Grujičić reported a dramatic post-1999 rise in aggressive cancers with unofficial estimates citing 18,000 malignancies, including pediatric medulloblastoma. A peer-reviewed study confirmed a statistically significant thyroid cancer spike between 1999–2008. Italy compensated 181 soldiers who developed cancer after Kosovo deployment. Serbia's civilians received nothing.

78 industrial sites and 42 energy installations destroyed. Pančevo alone: 1,500 tonnes of vinyl chloride, 15,000 tonnes of ammonia, 100 tonnes of mercury, and 250 tonnes of liquid chlorine released necessitating 80,000 residents to be evacuated. The UN Environment Program named Pančevo the worst environmental hot spot of the campaign. Novi Sad's refinery burned 50,000 tons of crude; the city lost all three Danube bridges and water services for two years. The Council of Europe concluded the environmental destruction was a deliberate breach of the Geneva Convention's Additional Protocol.

Strobe Talbott later acknowledged Yugoslavia's resistance to Western economic restructuring, not only Kosovo, which drove the war. Former Czech presidents Klaus and Zeman, on the 25th anniversary of NATO membership, called the bombing a serious mistake.

The ICTY reviewed NATO's conduct and declined to prosecute. This is the same tribunal that indicted Milošević saw nothing worth investigating on the other side. No international court has established a final civilian death toll. No NATO state has paid reparations. The contaminated soil around Vranje, Preševo, and Bujanovac still holds DU rounds buried two meters deep. Children in Serbian cancer wards have no idea why they are sick. The bridges, the factories, the TV tower, the market in Niš was never accounted for. NATO called it a humanitarian intervention.

Serbia calls it what it was: 78 days of unpunished war crimes against a sovereign people.

Don't give me that look!

He was born on November 23, 1882, in Hamburg. He spent nearly 30 years of his life in China, working for the Siemens company. In 1934, like many German citizens of that time, he joined the NSDAP. A typical expat, a successful businessman, a loyal citizen of the Third Reich. It would seem his story could have been lost in the archives as just another biography of an ordinary party functionary.

However, in 1937, when the Japanese army invaded Nanking, something awakened in Rabe that Nazi ideology tried to root out of a person—compassion. While other foreigners hastily left the city, Rabe decided to stay. Together with a group of like-minded individuals, he organized the “Nanking Safety Zone.”

It was here that the most bitter paradox of the war manifested: Rabe used his status as an NSDAP member and the swastika as a shield. He was certain that the Japanese—Germany’s allies—would not dare to bomb an object flying the flag of the Third Reich. He placed swastika flags on the roofs of hospitals and shelters where civilians were hiding. And it worked. Risking his life, Rabe personally stood in the way of Japanese soldiers, preventing massacres, and documented the horrors of the Nanking Massacre, hoping that Hitler would stop his “allies.”

In the Safety Zone, Rabe managed to save between 200,000 and 250,000 Chinese. He shared his last food supplies, nursed the wounded, and literally snatched people from the hands of executioners, appealing to “Aryan dignity” and his party badges.

Upon returning to Germany in 1938, he tried to show the Reich leadership photographs of the atrocities committed by the Japanese. In response, the Gestapo confiscated all his evidence, and Rabe himself was detained for a time. After the war, the paradox reached an absurd level: due to his NSDAP membership, Rabe underwent denazification, was stripped of his livelihood, and was interrogated by both Soviet and British intelligence services.

A hero who saved hundreds of thousands of lives, he died in 1950 in poverty and obscurity. His name was rehabilitated only decades later, when the world learned of his diaries. He is often called the “Oskar Schindler of Nanking”—a man who remained human even while being part of an inhuman system.

Note: The story of John Rabe formed the basis of the biographical drama “John Rabe” (2009), which details his confrontation with the Japanese occupiers.

Spotify audio with commercials: https://open.spotify.com/episode/61DQToPHY68qkTUWXEvNp2

Danny and Derek speak with historian Alfred McCoy about how the Cold War operated as a global conflict influenced by decolonization, covert action, and geopolitical strategy. They discuss the role of individual intelligence operatives as “men on the spot”; Cold War rivalry and the collapse of European empires; how conflicts across Asia, Africa, and Latin America produced much of the war’s violence; the development of U.S. containment strategy and covert action institutions; and Iran as flashpoint in Cold War and post-Cold War geopolitics, and how Alfred interprets these conflicts through a lens of imperial decline and strategic chokepoints like the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz.

Buy Alfred’s book Cold War on Five Continents!

Reading recommendation: The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace by Paul Thomas Chamberlin.

https://annas-archive.pk/md5/550b0692a6e5617283de4d595589a06f