Chris Hedges's Blog, page 431

189 Dead in Airliner Crash; Hunt Is On for Bodies in Java Sea

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Rescuers in inflatable boats retrieved human remains, pieces of aircraft and personal belongings from the Java Sea on Monday after a new-generation Boeing jet operated by an Indonesian budget airline crashed minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 people on board.

Distraught family members struggled to comprehend the sudden loss of loved ones in the crash of the 2-month-old Lion Air plane with experienced pilots in fine weather.

They gathered at crisis centers set up by the authorities at airports, hoping desperately for a miracle. But a top search official, citing the condition of the remains recovered, said no survivors are expected.

The disaster is a setback for Indonesia’s airline industry, which just emerged from decadelong bans by the European Union and the U.S. over safety concerns.

President Joko Widodo ordered an investigation and urged Indonesians to “keep on praying.”

The crash of the Boeing 737 Max 8 is the latest in a series of tragedies that have struck Indonesia this year, including earthquakes and a tsunami that killed several thousand people.

An air transport official, Novie Riyanto, said the flight was cleared to return to Jakarta after the pilot made a “return to base” request two to three minutes after taking off. It plunged into the sea about 10 minutes later. Weather conditions were normal but the plane, which Lion Air received in August, had experienced an unspecified technical issue on its previous flight.

Relatives and friends wept, prayed and hugged each other as they waited at Jakarta’s airport and at Pangkal Pinang’s airport on Bangka island off Sumatra where the flight was headed. Some including Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani headed to the search and rescue agency’s headquarters in Jakarta for information. About 20 ministry staff were on the flight.

Latief Nurbana said he and his wife Yeti Eka Sumiati stayed up late Sunday talking to their 24-year-old son Lutfi Nuramdani, squeezing every moment they could from his weekend visit to Jakarta to catch up on his life in Pangkal Pinang.

Nurbana said they talked until falling asleep and Sumiati woke up early to take their son, a post office worker, to the airport.

“Last night, we were chatting together about his wife who is now seven months’ pregnant, his plans and his dreams with his own small family until we fell asleep,” he said as his wife wept and clung to him.

“Now he’s gone. We can’t believe that he left us this way, we can’t believe that his plane crashed. That’s something we only see on TV news, now it happened to my son,” Nurbana said. “We want to see his body, his face, his remains.”

More than 300 people including soldiers, police and fishermen are involved in the grim search, retrieving aircraft debris and personal items such as a crumpled cellphone, ID cards and carry-on bags from the seas northeast of Jakarta.

Search and Rescue Agency chief Muhammad Syaugi said he’s certain it won’t take long to locate the hull of the aircraft and its black box due to the relatively shallow 25 to 30 meter (100 to 115 foot) depths of the waters it plunged into. Three specialized search ships, including one from Singapore, were headed to the crash location.

The jet, on a 1-hour flight, was carrying 181 passengers, including one child and two babies, and eight crew members.

Lion Air said there were two foreigners on the plane: one of the pilots, Indian national Bhavye Suneja, and an Italian citizen.

Friends and relatives gathered at the pilot’s family home in New Delhi to comfort his immediate family.

“His father is stunned and not in a condition to talk or do anything. Sister and mother have not come out. They are distressed,” said family friend Anil Gupta.

The pilot of Flight 610 had more than 6,000 flying hours while the co-pilot had more than 5,000 hours, according to Lion Air.

The Transport Ministry said the plane took off from Jakarta at about 6:20 a.m. and crashed just 13 minutes later. Data from FlightAware showed it had reached an altitude of only 5,200 feet (1,580 meters).

Boeing Co. said it was “deeply saddened” by the crash and was prepared to provide technical assistance to Indonesia’s crash probe.

The 737 Max 8 was leased from China Minsheng Investment Group Leasing Holdings Ltd., according to the official China News Service.

Malindo Air, a Malaysian subsidiary of Lion Air, was the first airline to begin using the 737 Max 8 last year. The Max 8 replaced the similar 800 in the Chicago-based plane maker’s product line.

Lion Air president-director Edward Sirait said the plane had a “technical problem” on its previous flight from Bali to Jakarta but it had been fully remedied. He didn’t know specifics of the problem when asked in a TV interview.

“Indeed there were reports about a technical problem, and the technical problem has been resolved in accordance with the procedures released by the plane manufacturer,” Sirait said. “I did not know exactly but let it be investigated by the authorities.”

The crash is the worst airline disaster in Indonesia since an AirAsia flight from Surabaya to Singapore plunged into the sea in December 2014, killing all 162 on board.

Indonesian airlines were barred in 2007 from flying to Europe because of safety concerns, though several were allowed to resume services in the following decade. The ban was completely lifted in June. The U.S. lifted a decadelong ban in 2016.

Lion Air, a discount carrier, is one Indonesia’s youngest and biggest airlines, flying to dozens of domestic and international destinations. Earlier this year it confirmed a deal to buy 50 new Boeing narrow-body aircraft worth an estimated $6.2 billion.

It has been expanding aggressively in Southeast Asia, a fast-growing region of more than 600 million people. In a record transaction, Lion Air signed a deal to buy 230 Boeing jets for $21.7 billion during a visit by then-President Barack Obama in November 2011

___

AP journalists Elaine Kurtenbach in Bangkok, Shonal Ganguly in New Delhi and Achmad Ibrahim and Ali Kotarumalos in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.

Jair Bolsonaro’s Victory in Brazil Carries a Grave Warning for the West

Last month, more than 150 Brazilian artists and intellectuals denounced then-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro as a “clear threat to our civilisational heritage.” This weekend, under threat of arrest for violating election law, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters told concertgoers in the city of Curitiba, “This is our last chance to resist fascism. … Not him!” (a reference to the popular #EleÑao campaign on social media).

Their pleas largely fell on deaf ears. In a runoff with Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party, Bolsonaro captured more than 55 percent of the vote on Sunday to become the country’s 38th president—this despite calling for his political opponents to be shot and openly praising former military dictator Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, among countless other barbarities. As Alex Hochuli observes in The Baffler, the triumph of a neofascism in the world’s fourth largest democracy is a “historic tragedy” with grave warnings for the West, perhaps none more urgent than that liberals cannot be entrusted to preserve liberalism.

“Bolsonaro’s base is the constituency identified in classic studies of fascism: reactionary small business owners and independent professionals, plus members of the state’s repressive apparatus, the police and armed forces,” he writes. “But it was the backing of the educated upper-middle class—you know, the sensible, cultured, rational types—who propelled him into the political mainstream.”

Brazil’s recent history would appear to bear out his thesis. Following President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016, support for the rival conservative Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) has cratered amid a growing economic crisis, record-high murder rates and the implementation of draconian austerity measures. Whatever the Workers’ Party’s failures, the PMDB earned just 5 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election, and President Michel Temer will likely leave office with an approval rating in the single digits.

Enter Bolsonaro, a former military officer and fringe congressman promising a “cleansing” like Brazil has never seen. Prior to the first round of voting, the Social Democratic Party head—who leads a party that is anything but—had the support of 50 percent of households earning 10 times the minimum wage.

“Here, the center never bothered holding,” rues Hochuli. “The coalition assembled behind Bolsonaro is more than content to tolerate authoritarian head-banging when the alternative is moderate social democracy.”

Brazil’s business elites have lined up behind the violent right-wing extremist in no small part because he has outsourced his economic policy to University of Chicago graduate and Milton Friedman acolyte Paulo Roberto Nunes Guedes. (During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Guedes taught at the University of Chile.) But these elites are not alone. Corporate interests across the Americas are openly salivating about the investment opportunities that a fascist Brazil might present.

“There are basically two types of liberals: political liberals, who value equality and want to expand democracy, and economic liberals, who are keen to protect private property and the market,” Hochuli continues. “Through the 2000s, they were still signed up to uphold a lawful order that they created with political liberals. They posed as democrats against the Bolivarian dictators. The problem, though, is that political liberals’ rhetoric of inclusion opened the door for materially excluded populations to demand their share. In times of crisis, when the consensus view is that there’s not enough to go around, liberals feel the need to shut that door. Liberals run to daddy.”

That the forces of capital have bared their teeth without a true threat of socialism, much less communism, makes Bolsonaro’s victory all the more grotesque. If his victory carries a lesson for the left wing in the United States and Western Europe, as Hochuli suggests, it is this: Simply holding power can never be enough.

“If you’re going to govern, you must implement your program,” he writes. “If you can’t see it through, get out of government. Ruling at all costs is for the Right. Let the forces of reaction take the flak when it all goes wrong. While there may be an honest desire to protect workers from the worst consequences of right-wing government, if you are the ones implementing soft austerity, you will be blamed for the social consequences. The Right will win the next election and undo whatever limited good you did. You won’t be thanked for softening the blow, and your credibility as a workers’ party will be blown.”

Read Hocchuli’s essay in its entirety at The Baffler.

A Glimpse Into the U.S. Warfare State Abyss

Perpetual War

In the 242-year existence of the U.S. (1776–2018), the nation has been involved in 79 wars.

If we define a “war year” as one during which the U.S. was involved in war part or all of the year, and if we define a “peace year” as one during which the U.S. was not involved in war, then the record shows there were 224 war years (92.5 percent) and only 18 peace years (7.5 percent).

There have been 45 presidents. If we define a “war president” as one whose entire term included at least one war year, and if we define a “peace president” as one whose entire term included only peace years, then the record shows there were 45 war presidents and no peace presidents!

In addition to the aforementioned 79 wars, the U.S. is involved in many “secret wars.” In 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces, including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, deployed to 149 countries around the world, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command. That’s about 75 percent of the nations on the planet and represents a jump from the 138 countries that saw such deployments in 2016 under the Obama administration. It’s also a jump of nearly 150 percent from the last days of George W. Bush’s White House. This record-setting number of deployments comes as American commandos are battling a plethora of terror groups in quasi-wars that stretch from Africa and the Middle East to Asia.

Prisoner of the Military-Industrial Complex

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation on Jan. 17, 1961, warned against a formidable union of defense contractors and the armed forces:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

We shall see below how much his wisdom has been ignored.

‘The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today: My Own Government’

“Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” was a speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City.

MLK proclaimed that “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” and he described the war’s destructive effects on both America’s poor and Vietnamese peasants, and insisted that it was morally imperative for the United States to take radical steps to halt the war through nonviolent means.

He recounted his “experience” in the ghettos of the North over the last three years—especially the last three summers:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

The historical record shows that MLK’s impassioned and humane plea for nonviolence has fallen on the deaf ears of the military-industrial complex.

Consequences of the Out-of-Control Military-Industrial Complex, the American Empire and the National Security/Surveillance State

Department of Defense (DOD)

The defense industry is a partnership between government agencies and the private-sector industry involved in research, development, production and service of military programs, arms, personnel and facilities.

DOD is the largest employer in the world. It has 3.2 million employees, including 1.6 million active-duty military personnel, of which 250,000 staff foreign U.S. military bases. There are 801,000 in the Coast Guard and Reserves and 800,000 civilian employees.

DOD defense contractors include over 50,000 corporations. The total employment is just under 2,000,000.

DOD has contractors in 190 of the 200 nations on earth.

There are between 1,077 and 1,180 U.S. military bases dotting the globe. In each of 80 different countries, there are at least one or more bases.

Military Spending

In every year of the existence of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), also called the “payroll tax” (paid by both employee and employer), is enough to pay full benefits to all beneficiaries and leaves a surplus. The surplus ($3.044 trillion in fiscal year 2017) may be borrowed (with IOUs) to pay for the set of all programs except Social Security and Medicare. We partition this set into three categories: Military (M), Interest on National Debt (I) and All Other (AO).

We examine the 17-fiscal-year (Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 of the following year) period from 2001 to 2017.

The following table shows non-FICA receipts, outlays for M, I and AO, shortfalls, national debt, annual deficits, and program outlay percentages relative to non-FICA outlays. Just below the table is a summary of vital facts.

War Resisters League

1. The national debt increased by $14.327 trillion, from $5.674 trillion to $20.201 trillion, a 356 percent increase. The equivalent annual compound interest rate is 7.47 percent.

2. Military spending exceeded the national debt growth by $1.654 trillion, an 11.4 percent increase.

3. The percentage of federal outlays for all other programs was 41.6 percent ($15.267 trillion); the percentage for military outlays was 44.0 percent ($15.181 trillion); the percentage for interest outlays was 14.4 percent ($5.302 trillion); the percentage for military and interest outlays combined was 58.4 percent ($21.683 trillion).

4. In March 2018, the federal budget was signed by President Trump. The War Resisters League (WRL) reported that the military spending for fiscal years 2018 and 2019 is, respectively, $1.450 and $1.501 trillion. For the 19 fiscal years spanning 2001–2019, the analysis of all federal budgets by WRL shows that 80 percent of annual interest outlays are due to military spending. It comes to $23.374 trillion. Here is the table:

Amounts in trillions of dollars (*total: past includes 80 percent interest on national debt due to military spending)

Military Spending of the U.S. Versus All Other Countries

In 2016, the U.S. spent $1.036 trillion, which is 3.66 times more than the combined total of $0.2829 trillion for China ($0.2157) and Russia ($0.0672).

In 2016, the U.S. spent 1.6 times more than the rest of the world combined ($0.650 trillion).

Nuclear Weapons Spending

Between 1940 and 1996, the U.S. government spent at least $9.08 trillion in present-day dollars on nuclear weapons, including platforms development (aircraft, rockets and facilities), command and control, maintenance, waste management and administrative costs. Since 1945, the United States produced more than 70,000 nuclear warheads, which is more than all other nuclear weapon states combined. As of 2017, the U.S. has an inventory of 6,800 nuclear warheads; of these, 2,800 are retired and awaiting dismantlement and 4,018 are part of the U.S. stockpile. Of the stockpiled warheads, the U.S. stated in its April 2017 New Start declaration that 1,411 are deployed on 673 ICBMs, SLBMs and strategic bombers. Currently (2018), Trump wants to spend $1.2 trillion on upgrading the nuclear arsenal.

Destruction, Deaths and Casualties Caused by U.S. Military Forces

1. Estimates of the number of American Indians killed by the U.S. government range from 1 to 4 million. The first estimate was sponsored by the United States government, and, while official, does not stand up to scrutiny and is therefore generally discounted. The second study was not sponsored by the U.S. government but was done by independent researchers. This study estimated populations and population reductions using later census data. The figure was at least 10 million. Two figures are given, both low and high, at between 10 and 14 million.

2. Since the end of World War II, U.S. military forces were directly responsible for approximately 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths, while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

There also are proxy wars for which the United States is responsible. In these wars, there were between 9  million and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones, which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 million and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisers, or other causes, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive. (James A. Lucas, Global Research, April 15, 2018)

3. During the war with North Korea (1950-1953), U.S. military forces killed 1.8 million people (20 percent of the 9.726 million population in 1950). U.S. combat deaths were 33,000, so the ratio is 55 to 1. It destroyed 75 percent of North Korea’s cities and villages, including 75 percent of the capitol, Pyongyang. The U.S. dropped a total of 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm. By comparison, 503,000 tons were dropped in the Pacific theater during World War II, and 864,000 tons were dropped on North Vietnam.

4. The Vietnam War occurred in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. There were 3.8 million violent war deaths, of which 2 million were civilian. The U.S. dropped over 7 million tons of bombs (flown in 3.4 million U.S. and South Vietnamese sorties) on Indochina during the war—more than triple the 2.1 million tons of bombs the U.S. dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II, and more than 10 times the amount dropped by the U.S. during the Korean War. Five hundred thousand tons were dropped on Cambodia, 1 million tons were dropped on North Vietnam, and 4 million tons were dropped on South Vietnam. On a per capita basis, the 2 million tons dropped on Laos make it the most heavily bombed country in history, amounting to a ton for every person there. The amount of ammunition fired per soldier was 26 times higher than in World War II.

Climbing Out of the Abyss

So, you see, we are a warfare state, and are hopelessly addicted to war. What can we do to end this madness?

We the People of the United States, in Order to assure a non-violent and humane world society, do create a Department of Peace to establish Justice, Liberty and the General Welfare of all.

The Department of Defense, as decades of history show, is a euphemism for Department of War. By contrast, a Department of Peace would be dedicated to the resolution of conflicts by exhaustive, peaceful, nonviolent, non-threatening means, rather than by the use or threats of force if “irresolvable” impasses in negotiations ultimately occur. In short, let’s agree to disagree and coexist without killing each other.

A national commitment is essential in order to transform our horrendous, astronomical, waste-infested war economy to one that fulfills the multitude of severely neglected needs of the people.

A future outlay of at least $23.374 trillion (= military/national debt spending for the 19-fiscal-year period 2001 to 2019) would go a long way in providing the trillions of dollars to pay for:

• Free tuition for every enrolled post-secondary student.

• Free job training for anyone who seeks employment.

• Rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of America.

• Medicare for all citizens.

• Free internet service for all households.

• Free mass transit for all urban regions.

• Free U.S. Postal Service.

• Conversion from fossil fuel usage to clean energy sources (i.e., wind, solar).

• Restoration and creation of national parks, wilderness areas, and national monuments with free access to all.

•Establish regulations for organic farming and the elimination of harmful pesticides.

This long-overdue transformation would enable all to thrive and enjoy the benefits of a much more humane society.

Are you ready to start?

If not now, when?

Stocks Tumble Again on Report U.S. Plans More Tariffs

NEW YORK — Stocks sank again Monday on fears that the Trump administration will escalate its trade dispute with China by imposing tariffs on all remaining imports from China to the U.S.

The declines came during another dizzying day of trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average swung between a gain of 352 points and a loss of 566 before closing down 245.39 points, or 1 percent, to 24,442.92.

Bloomberg News reported in the afternoon that the Trump administration will put tariffs on the rest of the country’s imports from China if Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping don’t make substantial progress in easing the trade dispute next month. The month comes in the midst of a corporate earnings season where a number of big companies have warned that tariffs already in place have raised their costs.

Technology and internet companies, industrials and retailers took steep losses after the Bloomberg report as Wall Street’s recent bout of volatility continued. The S&P 500 index has dropped 9.4 percent in October and is on track for its worst monthly loss since February 2009. That was right before the market hit its lowest point during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

The S&P 500 index fell 17.44 points, or 0.7 percent, to 2,641.25.

The Nasdaq composite, which is heavily weighted with technology stocks, lost 116.92 points, or 1.6 percent, to 7,050.29. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks gave up 6.51 points, or 0.4 percent, to 1,447.31.

Stocks have plunged since early October, breaking a long period of relative calm over the summer, and trading has been especially volatile the last few days.

Among industrials, Boeing sank 6.6 percent to $335.59. Some early gains for tech and internet stocks also faded. Microsoft shed 2.9 percent to $103.85. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, lost 4.5 percent to $1,034.73.

Amazon.com dropped another 6.3 percent to $1,538.88. The online retailer tumbled Friday after it reported weak sales and gave a lower-than-expected revenue estimate for the quarter that includes the holiday shopping season. Its stock traded above $2,000 a share in early September and has fallen 24.5 percent since then.

The S&P 500, the main benchmark for the U.S. stock market, has fallen 9.9 percent from its latest record high on Sept. 20. The Nasdaq has plunged 13 percent from its record high reached Aug. 29.

For most of this year investors have remained hopeful that the U.S. and China would work out their disagreements on trade policy and that many of the tariffs would be reduced or eliminated. But in recent weeks they’ve lost some of their confidence, and their fear that the dispute will last longer and have bigger effects has contributed to the market’s tumble.

The effects of higher tariffs could be especially severe for technology companies, which make many of their products in China, and for industrial companies, which are already paying higher prices for metals. The U.S. and China are the world’s largest economies and their trade relationship is the world’s largest, so the higher taxes on imports could also slow global economic growth and increase inflation.

While most technology companies fell, open-source software company Red Hat jumped after IBM agreed to buy it for $34 billion in stock. IBM Chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty said the deal will make IBM the world’s biggest hybrid cloud provider, meaning it will offer companies a mix of on-site, private and third-party public cloud services.

Red Hat soared 45.4 percent to $169.63, reversing its losses from earlier this year. IBM fell 4.1 percent to $119.64.

The prospect of reduced barriers to trade helped auto makers on Monday. Car companies rose after Bloomberg News reported that regulators in China intend to propose cutting the tax on imported cars to 5 percent from 10 percent. The trade fight between the U.S. and China has hurt sales, and that slowdown is one of several factors that have damaged car company stocks this year.

Ford climbed 3.3 percent to $9.28 and auto parts retailer BorgWarner advanced 4 percent to $39.56. After Cooper Tire & Rubber reported a bigger third-quarter profit than analysts expected, its stock surged 21.4 percent to $30.89.

Germany’s DAX rose 1.2 percent as Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW made big gains. Italy’s FTSE MIB index rose 1.9 percent after Standard & Poor’s did not downgrade the company’s credit rating. Italy’s new government plans to ramp up spending and European Union leaders have demanded it change its plans.

The CAC 40 in France added 0.4 percent and the British FTSE 100 rose 1.3 percent.

Mexico’s stock index shed 4.2 percent after President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he will respect the result of a referendum that rejected a partly-built new airport for Mexico City. He said 70 percent of voters opposed the $13 billion project.

Brazil’s Bovespa rose in morning trading after far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro was elected president, but it later turned lower and lost 2.2 percent. Stocks climbed earlier this month after Bolsonaro led the previous round of voting, as investors preferred him to leftist parties.

Bond prices dipped. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 3.08 percent from 3.07 percent.

The price of U.S. crude oil dropped 0.8 percent to $67.04 per barrel in New York while Brent crude, used to price international oils, lost 0.4 percent to $77.34 per barrel in London.

Wholesale gasoline added 0.5 percent to $1.82 a gallon and heating oil slid 0.8 percent to $2.28 a gallon. Natural gas was unchanged at $3.19 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Gold lost 0.7 percent to $1,227.60 an ounce. Silver fell 1.8 percent to $14.44 an ounce. Copper was little changed at $2.74 a pound.

The dollar rose to 112.35 yen from 111.85 yen. The euro fell to $1.1390 from $1.1412.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 sank 0.2 percent and Seoul’s Kospi lost 1.5 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng advanced 0.4 percent.

5,200 U.S. Troops Being Sent to the Border

WASHINGTON — A week out from the midterm elections, the Pentagon said Monday it is sending 5,200 troops, some armed, to the Southwest border this week in an extraordinary military operation to stop Central American migrants traveling north in two caravans that were still hundreds of miles from the U.S. The number of troops is more than double the 2,000 who are in Syria fighting the Islamic State group.

President Donald Trump, eager to focus voters on immigration in the lead-up to the elections, stepped up his warnings about the caravans, tweeting: “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”

His warning came as the Pentagon began executing “Operation Faithful Patriot,” described by the commander of U.S. Northern Command as an effort to help Customs and Border Protection stiffen defenses at and near legal entry points. Advanced helicopters will allow border protection agents to swoop down on migrants trying to cross illegally, he said.

“We’re going to secure the border,” Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, the Northern Command leader, said at a news conference. He spoke alongside Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.

Eight hundred troops already are on their way to southern Texas, O’Shaughnessy said, and their numbers will top 5,200 by week’s end. He said troops would focus first on Texas, followed by Arizona and then California.

The number of people in the first caravan has dwindled to 3,500 from about 7,000, though a second one was gaining steam and marred by violence. About 600 migrants in the second group tried to cross a bridge from Guatemala to Mexico en masse on Monday but were met by ranks of Mexican federal police who blocked them from entering. The riverbank standoff followed a more violent confrontation Sunday when the migrants used sticks and rocks against Mexico police. One migrant was killed Sunday night by a head wound, but the cause was unclear.

The first group passed through the spot via the river — wading or on rafts — and was advancing through southern Mexico. That group appeared to begin as a collection of about 160 who decided to band together in Honduras for protection against the gangs who prey on migrants traveling alone and snowballed as the group moved north. They are mostly from Honduras, where it started, as well as El Salvador and Guatemala.

Overall, they are poor, carrying the belongings that fit into a knapsack and fleeing gang violence or poverty. It’s possible there are criminals mixed in, but Trump has not substantiated his claim that members of the MS-13 gang, in particular, are among them.

The president’s dark description of the caravan belied the fact that any migrants who complete the long trek to the southern U.S. border already face major hurdles, both physical and bureaucratic, to being allowed into the United States. Migrants are entitled under both U.S. and international law to apply for asylum, but it may take a while to make a claim. There is already a bottleneck of asylum seekers at some U.S. border crossings, in some cases as long as five weeks.

McAleenan said the aim was to deter migrants from crossing illegally between ports, but he conceded his officers were overwhelmed by a surge of asylum seekers. He also said Mexico was prepared to offer asylum to the caravan.

“If you’re already seeking asylum, you’ve been given a generous offer,” he said of Mexico. “We want to work with Mexico to manage that flow.”

The White House is also weighing additional border security measures, including blocking those traveling in the caravan from seeking legal asylum and preventing them from entering the U.S.

The military operation drew quick criticism.

“Sending active military forces to our southern border is not only a huge waste of taxpayer money, but an unnecessary course of action that will further terrorize and militarize our border communities,” said Shaw Drake of the American Civil Liberties Union’s border rights center at El Paso, Texas.

Military personnel are legally prohibited from engaging in immigration enforcement. The troops will include military police, combat engineers and others helping on the southern border.

The escalating rhetoric and expected deployments come as the president has been trying to turn the caravans into a key election issue just days before the midterm elections that will determine whether Republicans maintain control of Congress.

“This will be the election of the caravans, the Kavanaughs, law and order, tax cuts, and you know what else? It’s going to be the election of common sense,” Trump said at a rally in Illinois on Saturday night.

On Monday, he tweeted without providing evidence: “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border.”

“Please go back,” he urged them. “you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”

The troops are expected to perform a wide variety of functions such as transporting supplies for the Border Patrol, but not engage directly with migrants seeking to cross the border, officials said. One U.S. official said the troops will be sent initially to staging bases in California, Texas and Arizona while the CBP works out precisely where it wants the troops positioned. U.S. Transportation Command posted a video on its Facebook page Monday of a C-17 transport plane that it said was delivering Army equipment to the Southwest border in support of Operation Faithful Patriot.

The U.S. military has already begun delivering jersey barriers to the southern border in conjunction with the deployment plans.

___

Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Lolita C. Baldor in Prague contributed to this report.

Trump Escalates Anti-Media Rhetoric After Wave of Violence

WASHINGTON — Grappling with a wave of election-season violence, President Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric against the news media on Monday even as he made plans for a somber visit to Pennsylvania to mourn a synagogue massacre that left 11 dead.

Days after the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue and a mail-bomb scare targeting prominent Democrats and CNN, Trump argued that “fraudulent” reporting was contributing to anger in the country and declared that the press was the “true Enemy of the People.”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders continued in the same vein at a press briefing, saying: “The very first action that the president did was condemn these heinous acts. The very first thing that the media did was condemn the president, go after him, try to place blame.”

While Trump has condemned the Pennsylvania shootings as an anti-Semitic act and has decried political violence, he also has continued his political schedule over the past week and largely kept up his criticism against Democrats and the media. The White House has rejected any suggestion that the president’s harsh rhetoric contributed to the toxic moment.

And Sanders made clear Trump was unlikely to change course, saying the president will “continue to fight back” against critics.

Trump will travel to Pennsylvania on Tuesday with first lady Melania Trump. Sanders said Trump would go “to express the support of the American people and to grieve with the Pittsburgh community.”

The White House did not immediately provide further details on Trump’s trip, which drew mixed reactions in Pittsburgh.

Leaders of a liberal Jewish group in Pittsburgh penned an open letter to Trump before the White House announced the plans, saying he was not welcome in the city until he denounced white nationalism. But Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, of the Tree of Life synagogue, made clear he would be welcome, telling CNN: “The President of the United States is always welcome. I am a citizen. He is my president. He is certainly welcome.”

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, a Democrat, told reporters ahead of the announcement that the White House should consult with the families of the victims about their preferences and asked that the president not come during a funeral.

“If the President is looking to come to Pittsburgh, I would ask that he not do so while we are burying the dead. Our attention and our focus is going to be on them, and we don’t have public safety that we can take away from what is needed in order to do both,” Peduto said.

The White House did not immediately respond to the mayor’s request. Asked if Trump has done enough to condemn white nationalism, Sanders said he “has denounced racism, hatred and bigotry in all forms on a number of occasions.”

She added: “Some individuals—they’re grieving, they’re hurting. The president wants to be there to show the support of this administration for the Jewish community. The rabbi said that he is welcome as well.”

Throughout his Republican campaign and presidency, Trump has been an unrelenting critic of the media. Last week, the New York offices of CNN, the cable network frequently criticized by Trump and his supporters, was evacuated after receiving an explosive device and an envelope containing white powder.

CNN President Jeff Zucker said another suspicious package addressed to CNN was intercepted Monday at an Atlanta post office.

With eight days to go before the midterm elections, Trump has continued to hold his political rallies, complete with harsh criticism of Democrats and the media.

He is planning an aggressive campaign schedule during the final days leading up to the Nov. 6 elections.

At a rally Saturday night, Trump was somewhat muted but still offered his standard campaign attack lines against critics including Democrat Hillary Clinton and Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, both of whom were targeted in the bomb plot. On Twitter on Sunday, he savaged billionaire businessman Tom Steyer, another target of the mail bombs, as a “crazed & stumbling lunatic.”

Trump’s Role in the Tree of Life Massacre

It doesn’t take much to set off the racism that has always been an undercurrent in American life. The nativist scorn for the foreign-born and their descendants is always ready to explode, as is the oppression of the dark-skinned; and, as we were reminded again in Pittsburgh on Saturday, the hatred of Jews.

To the Southern Poverty Law Center, the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue, in which 11 were killed, “Reminds us of the slaughter of nine African Americans at Charleston’s Mother Immanuel Church in 2015, the killings of six Sikh worshippers at a temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church (where four African American girls were killed).”

Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that has been a leading fighter against anti-Semitism for many decades, said, “We believe this is the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the United States.”

The attack didn’t come out of nowhere. The ADL reported the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States rose 57 percent in 2017, the largest single increase on record. In addition, the ADL said there was an increase in neo-Nazi groups, a doubling of hate-motivated murders, and an increase in white supremacist propaganda on college campuses, as well as in elementary and high schools.

That is why it is important now, after the slaughter in the Tree of Life Congregation, to give some thought to the speeches, tweets and random thoughts of President Donald Trump, whose words, rather than calming the nation in this trying time, are further inflaming it.

His messages in rallies and tweets spread anger and fear among his political base to increase the Republican vote in the midterm elections. At a rally in Charlotte, N.C., Friday, the night before the Pittsburgh shooting, he said, “The Democrats want to invite caravan after caravan of illegal immigrants into our country, and they want to sign up them for free health care, welfare, and they want to sign them up for the right to vote.”

Did words like these influence Robert Bowers, charged with the murders of 11 in the synagogue? Bowers, himself, threatened immigrants and he spread his anti-Semitic venom on the darkest reaches of the internet, notably on the social media site Gab, a home for white nationalists. Trump, actually, was too soft on his targets for Bowers.

Bowers combined his loathing of Jews and immigrants in his attacks on the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS, founded in 1881 to help Jews escape Russian pogroms and now assisting all refugees and asylum seekers. He blamed HIAS for the caravan of immigrants making its way from Honduras through Mexico to the U.S. border, and, in a post just before the shooting, said, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” He had an arsenal of guns.

Equally deluded was Cesar Sayoc, accused of mailing bombs to prominent anti-Trump figures around the country. A Trump obsessive, he plastered his van with pro-Trump material, including attacks on immigrants.

There’s no doubt that Trump, with his rhetoric, has encouraged hatred of the “other”: those who are not nationalistic white Anglo-Saxon Christians. Neo-Nazis hold these feelings. Though only a minority of Americans, they have shown there are enough of them to make trouble.

Let’s look at Trump’s own relationship with Jews.

While getting only about 25 percent of the Jewish vote, Trump has strong support among Orthodox Jews and those supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard line against the Palestinians. Among them is Sheldon Adelson, the very wealthy Las Vegas casino owner who contributes millions to Republicans.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism and is raising a Jewish family after marrying Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew. Kushner is now a Trump adviser, after a career in his family’s real estate business. Among other Jews in the administration are Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin; David Friedman, ambassador to Israel; and Stephen Miller, mastermind behind Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.

In a post-Pittsburgh column headlined, “Cry, Don’t Politicize,” Shmuel Rosner wrote in the Jewish Journal, “There is no doubt that the President is not a Jew hater, does not encourage or condone hate of Jews, does not aim to hurt Jews. … [B]laming him is a fool’s errand. Trump has many followers. Most of them bear no ill will against Jews.” He warned that denouncing Trump would hurt the Jews. “… [I]f the Jews make the president their prime target of criticism—if they portray him and his supporters as anti-Semitic haters—alienation will follow, and anger,” Rosner wrote.

Rosner and those like him are urging Jews to turn the other cheek.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and a leading Jewish intellectual, offered just mild criticism of Trump. “Where I won’t let Trump off the hook here is the way in which he does nothing to try to calm the political atmosphere and rather seeks to secure an advantage from the way it roils. He should be better than this, because everyone should, and he’s not, and that’s both sad and bad. He’s just not a good person, and there are times, times like these, when the country would benefit from having a better person as president.”

Podhoretz’s hope for a “better person” as president and Rosner’s headline advice to “Cry, Don’t Politicize” ignore an atmosphere that is increasingly dangerous to Jews, to minorities of color and to immigrants and their families.

We Jews ignore history if we paper over Trump’s words as just “Trump being Trump” or dismiss the accused synagogue shooter and the suspected bomber as deluded nuts acting in a vacuum.

Unfortunately, there is a temptation in parts of the Jewish community to want to work things out, behind the scenes if possible, to avoid an ugly confrontation.

But anti-Semitism is too old and too deeply rooted to permit this, going back to the pre-medieval blaming of Jews for the death of Christ and accusing them of the ritual murder of Christians, the infamous blood libel. Although a minority, Jews have been blamed for everything. Most were poor, but they were portrayed as Shylocks, part of a mysterious cabal of international bankers.

These lies took hold in New York and Los Angeles, the cities with the most Jews. And, as is the case today, the community was divided on how to deal with them. In his excellent history “Hitler in Los Angeles,” Steven J. Ross details the rise of Nazis in Los Angeles and the movie business. Jews argued over how to confront Hitler. Some wanted to fight back. Others, Ross said, thought attacking Hitler would make things worse for the Jews. As a boy, I wanted the Jews to fight back and immersed myself in stories of when—as in the Warsaw Ghetto—they did.

From the time he emerged as a candidate, Trump played the Shylock theme familiar to those who knew their history.

For example, in October 2016 he evoked the image of the mysterious international banker: “We’ve seen first hand in the WikiLeaks documents in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.”

Commenting on the speech, the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt said, “Whether intentionally or not, Donald Trump is evoking classic anti-Semitic themes that have historically been used against Jews and still reverberate today.”

And reverberate they do, from the grimy recesses of social media sites such as Gab, working their way into the political debate on cable television and on the internet where they are surefire viewer clickbait.

Most likely, there are other Robert Bowerses and Cesar Sayocs lurking out there absorbing this stuff. The recipients of the bombs, and American Jewry, now know what is the ugly truth for African-Americans, Latinos and others: There is no safety from hate or hateful words. They must be confronted and fought.

Pittsburgh Jewish Group Upbraids Trump in Powerful Letter

President Donald Trump often shields himself from criticism of anti-Semitism by hiding behind his Jewish daughter and son-in-law, but some Jewish leaders aren’t buying it. Following the mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in which 11 people were killed, members of a progressive Jewish organization wrote an open letter to Trump, telling him he’s unwelcome in their city until he denounces white nationalism.

The letter was written by 11 members of the Pittsburgh chapter of Bend the Arc, a national progressive Jewish organization. “President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism,” the group writes.

“Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted,” they continue. “… You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country.”

The writers also directly link Trump’s rhetoric against multiple minority groups, and his policies, to the Pittsburgh shooting, explaining, “For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement. You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence.”

Trump was criticized for his remarks following the violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 during a rally for multiple far-right groups. He claimed there was “blame on both sides,” while neglecting to mention the white supremacist aims behind the rally.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in America. According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, there was a 57 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2017. Speaking to The New York Times, Deborah E. Lipstadt, professor of Holocaust history at Emory University, said, “I’m not a Chicken Little who’s always yelling, ‘It’s worse than it’s ever been!’ But now I think it’s worse than it’s ever been.”

Members of Bend the Arc Pittsburgh are afraid but undaunted and are committed to working in collaboration with multiple groups that have been the targets of Trump and his supporters: “The Torah teaches that every human being is made b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. This means all of us.”

Read the full letter here.

Angela Merkel Won’t Seek Re-Election in 2021

BERLIN — Germany’s Angela Merkel announced Monday that she will step down as head of her conservative party in December after 18 years and won’t seek a fifth term as chancellor in 2021, launching a leadership transition in Europe’s biggest economy.

Merkel has led her conservative Christian Democratic Union since 2000 and Germany since 2005. She put Germany — and Europe — on track toward a new political era after voters punished Germany’s governing parties in a state election Sunday, the latest in a string of woes to hit her fourth-term federal administration.

Merkel currently governs Germany in a “grand coalition” of what traditionally have been the country’s biggest parties — the CDU, Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union, and the center-left Social Democrats. Her current coalition took office only in March, after six months of tortuous negotiations, but has become notorious for its squabbling.

The 64-year-old chancellor’s personal popularity remains solid but she appeared keen to launch an orderly transition period amid signs that her authority is eroding. Merkel will now concentrate her energy on keeping her government going until 2021, something that still remains uncertain.

Merkel told reporters in Berlin that she has led the CDU with “passion and dedication” but added “today it is time to start a new chapter.”

That will start with her handing off the party leadership to a successor at a party congress in December.

“This fourth term is my final term as chancellor,” Merkel added. “I will not run as candidate for chancellor in the 2021 election, and will not seek re-election to the German parliament. And, just for the record, I will not aim for any other political office.”

It had been widely assumed this would be Merkel’s final term in office, but the comments were the chancellor’s first public confirmation of that.

For years, Merkel has insisted that the chancellor should also be party leader. But she said Monday that she had decided splitting the two jobs is “justifiable” since she didn’t plan to seek a fifth term as chancellor.

“With this decision, I am trying to contribute to allowing the government to concentrate its strength, finally, on governing well — and people rightly demand that,” Merkel said.

At the same time, she said the CDU will be able “to prepare for the time after me.”

She said she had been mulling her decision for months. Merkel’s one-time mentor, Helmut Kohl, did seek a fifth term in 1998 and lost power after 16 years.

There is precedent for the chancellor not leading his or her party.

Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, stepped down as leader of his Social Democrats in 2004 as his government struggled, but remained chancellor until he narrowly lost an election 18 months later. Helmut Schmidt, West Germany’s chancellor from 1974 to 1982, never led the Social Democrats.

Two prominent candidates immediately threw their hats in the ring for the CDU leadership. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who gave up her job as a state governor earlier this year to become the party’s general secretary, is viewed as an ally of Merkel and largely backs her centrist approach.

And Health Minister Jens Spahn, an ambitious conservative who has talked tough on migration and has criticized Merkel, stands for a more right-wing candidate.

Merkel said she wouldn’t interfere in the choice of her successor.

“Historically, that has always gone wrong and I won’t participate in trying to influence discussions on my successor,” she said. “I see this as an opening, a phase of opportunities.”

Merkel has dragged the CDU to the political center in her years as leader, dropping military conscription, introducing benefits encouraging fathers to look after their young children and abruptly accelerating the shutdown of Germany’s nuclear power plants following Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011.

She swung her conservatives behind bailouts for Greece and other struggling eurozone nations, striking a balance between calls for a strict approach at home and more generosity abroad.

In one of her most debated moves, Merkel allowed large numbers of asylum-seekers into Germany in 2015, many of them fleeing the fighting in Syria, declaring that “we will manage it,” before gradually pivoting to a more restrictive approach to migration. That decision has led to lasting tensions in her conservative Union bloc, particularly with Bavaria’s CSU, and helped the far-right anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party gain support.

At the other end of the spectrum, the traditionally left-leaning Greens have also gained support.

Sunday’s election in the central state of Hesse saw both the CDU and the Social Democrats lose significant ground amid gains for both the Greens and the Alternative for Germany party. Merkel’s party managed an unimpressive win in Hesse, narrowly salvaging a majority for its regional governing coalition with the Greens in the state.

The debacle followed a battering in a state election in Bavaria two weeks ago for the CSU and the Social Democrats.

The U.S. Ignores Its Vietnamese Victims to This Day

Nguyen Van Tu asks if I’m serious. Am I really willing to tell his story—to tell the story of the Vietnamese who live in this rural corner of the Mekong Delta? Almost 40 years after guerrilla fighters in his country threw the limits of U.S. military power into stark relief—during the 1968 Tet Offensive—we sit in his rustic home, built of wood and thatch with an earthen floor, and speak of two hallmarks of that power: ignorance and lack of accountability. As awkward chicks scurry past my feet, I have the sickening feeling that, in decades to come, far too many Iraqis and Afghans will have similar stories to tell. Similar memories of American troops. Similar accounts of air strikes and artillery bombardments. Nightmare knowledge of what “America” means to far too many outside the United States.

“Do you really want to publicize this thing,” Nguyen asks. “Do you really dare tell everyone about all the losses and sufferings of the Vietnamese people here?” I assure this well-weathered 60-year-old grandfather that that’s just why I’ve come to Vietnam for the third time in three years. I tell him I have every intention of reporting what he’s told me—decades-old memories of daily artillery shelling, of near constant air attacks, of farming families forced to live in their fields because of the constant bombardment of their homes, of women and children killed by bombs, of going hungry because U.S. troops and allied South Vietnamese forces confiscated their rice, lest it be used to feed guerrillas.

After hearing of the many horrors he endured, I hesitantly ask him about the greatest hardship he lived through during what’s appropriately known here as the American War. I expect him to mention his brother, a simple farmer shot dead by America’s South Vietnamese allies in the early years of the war, when the United States was engaged primarily in an “advisory” role. Or his father who was killed just after the war, while tending his garden, when an M-79 round—a 40-mm shell fired from a single-shot grenade launcher—buried in the soil, exploded. Or that afternoon in 1971 when he heard outgoing artillery being fired and warned his family to scramble for their bunker by shouting, “Shelling, shelling!” They made it to safety. He didn’t. The 105-mm artillery shell that landed near him ripped off most of his right leg.

But he didn’t name any of these tragedies.

“During the war, the greatest difficulty was a lack of freedom,” he tells me. “We had no freedom.”

A Simple Request

Elsewhere in the Mekong Delta, Pham Van Chap, a solidly built 52 year-old with jet black hair tells a similar story. His was a farming family, but the lands they worked and lived on were regularly blasted by U.S. ordnance. “During the 10 years of the war, there was serious bombing and shelling in this region—two to three times a day,” he recalls while sitting in front of his home, a one-story house surrounded by animal pens in a bucolic setting deep in the Delta countryside. “So many houses and trees were destroyed. There were so many bomb craters around here.”

In January 1973, the first month of the last year U.S. troops fought in Vietnam, Pham heard the ubiquitous sound of artillery and started to run to safety. It was too late. A 105-mm shell slammed into the earth four meters in front of him, propelling razor-sharp shrapnel into both legs. When he awoke in the hospital, one leg was gone from the thigh down. After 40 days in the hospital, he was sent home, but he didn’t get his first prosthetic leg until the 1990s. His new replacement is now eight years old and a far cry from the advanced, computerized prosthetics and carbon fiber and titanium artificial legs that wounded U.S. veterans of America’s latest wars get. His wooden prosthetic instead resembles a table leg with a hoof at the bottom. “It has not been easy for me without my leg,” he confides.

When I ask if there are any questions he’d like to ask me or anything he’d like to say to Americans, he has a quick response. He doesn’t ask for money for his pain and suffering. Nor for compensation for living his adult life without a leg. Nor vengeance, that all-American urge, in the  of George W. Bush to “kick some ass.” Not even an apology. His request is entirely too reasonable. He simply asks for a new leg. Nothing more.

Ignorance Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

I ask Nguyen Van Tu the same thing. And it turns out he has a question of his own: “Americans caused many losses and much suffering for the Vietnamese during the war, do Americans now feel remorse?” I wish I could answer “yes.” Instead, I tell him that most Americans are totally ignorant of the pain of the Vietnamese people, and then I think to myself, as I glance at the ample pile of tiny, local potatoes on his floor, about widespread American indifference to civilians killed, maimed, or suffering in other ways in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even those Vietnamese who didn’t lose a limb—or a loved one—carry memories of years of anguish, grief, and terror from the American War. The fall-out here is still palpable. The elderly woman who tells me how her home was destroyed by an incendiary bomb. The people who speak of utter devastation—of villages laid waste by shelling and bombing, of gardens and orchards decimated by chemical defoliants. The older woman who, with trepidation, peeks into a home where I’m interviewing—she hasn’t seen a Caucasian since the war—and is visibly unnerved by the memories I conjure up. Another begins trembling upon hearing that the Americans have arrived again, fearing she might be taken away, as her son was almost 40 years earlier. The people with memories of heavily armed American patrols disrupting their lives, searching their homes, killing their livestock. The people for whom English was only one phrase, the one they all seem to remember: “VC, VC”—slang for the pejorative term “Viet Cong”; and those who recall model names and official designations of U.S. weaponry of the era—from bombs to rifles—as intimately as Americans today know their sports and celebrities.

I wish I could tell Nguyen Van Tu that most Americans know something of his country’s torture and torment during the war. I wish I could tell him that most Americans care. I wish I could tell him that Americans feel true remorse for the terror visited upon the Vietnamese in their name, or that an apology is forthcoming and reparations on their way. But then I’d be lying. Mercifully, he doesn’t quiz me as I’ve quizzed him for the better part of an hour. He doesn’t ask how Americans can be so ignorant or hard-hearted, how they could allow their country to repeatedly invade other nations and leave them littered with corpses and filled with shattered families, lives, and dreams. Instead, he answers calmly and methodically:

“I have two things to say. First, there have been many consequences due to the war and even now the Vietnamese people suffer greatly because of it, so I think that the American government must do something in response—they caused all of these losses here in Vietnam, so they must take responsibility for that. Secondly, this interview should be an article in the press.”

I sit there knowing that the chances of the former are nil. The U.S. government won’t do it and the American people don’t know, let alone care, enough to make it happen. But for the latter, I tell him I share his sentiments and I’ll do my best.

Nguyen Van Tu grasps my hands in thanks as we end the interview. His story is part of a hidden, if not forbidden, history that few in the U.S. know. It’s a story that was written in blood in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the 1960s and 1970s and now is being rewritten in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s a story to which new episodes are added each day that U.S. forces roll armored vehicles down other people’s streets, kick down other people’s doors, carry out attacks in other people’s neighborhoods and occupy other people’s countries.

It took nearly 40 years for word of Nguyen Van Tu’s hardships at the hands of the United States to filter back to America. Perhaps a few more Americans will feel remorse as a result. But who will come forward to take responsibility for all this suffering? And who will give Pham Van Chap a new leg?