J. Rankin: Peacemaker with heart – a viable path for everyone!

21.02.2023 | www.kla.tv/25193

“As a woman I can’t go to war and I refuse to send anyone else.” - Jeannette Rankin - With these words, Jeannette Rankin was the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry into the war against Japan in 1941. As early as 1917, she had been the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress to vote against U.S. entry into World War 1. And in 1968 – at the age of 88 – she led along with more than 5,000 women the so-called “The Jeannette Rankin Brigade” to demonstrate at the Capitol against the Vietnam War. Through Rankin’s involvement in the campaigns of various organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Council for the Prevention of War, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, among many others, she became known as “America’s conscience”. As courageous and noble-minded as Jeannette Rankin may have been, according to contemporary witnesses, and on the basis of which she may also have deserved a statue, she initially failed in her peace efforts. The majority of U.S. citizens were swayed from their original neutrality and anti-war stance to enter the war, both in the 1st and 2nd World War, as well as the Vietnam War. Wars with tens of millions of deaths and indescribable devastation. The terror bombing of German cities, the two atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilians, and the napalm and Agent Orange drops on the Vietnamese are mentioned here only as brief spotlights and, as it were, the tip of the iceberg of misery. But how on earth was this possible, this leading of the U.S. nation away from neutrality, peace and freedom to war and terror? A look at the reaction of the U.S. leading media provides an answer to Rankin’s clear no to entry into World War 1: For example, Rankin was defamed by the Helena Independent as a “dagger in the hands of German propagandists,” a “dupe of the Kaiser,” a “member of the Hun army in the United States,” and a “crying schoolgirl.” This was despite the fact that President Wilson had significantly violated U.S. neutrality by already supplying arms and money to the Allied powers that had been fighting Germany since 1914. History repeated itself 24 years later. President Roosevelt, at the urging of Great Britain and other colonial powers, imposed an existentially strangulating economic embargo on Japan. Just around eighty years ago, on December 8, 1942, one year after her unequivocal “no” vote to enter the war, Jeannette Rankin commented in her speech to the U.S. Congress, like this: A week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, I asked a prominent non-Japanese Asian: “Is the situation in the Pacific as serious as it appears?” “Yes,” – he replied “it is serious. Japan has no choice but to go to war or to submit to economic slavery for the rest of her existence.” Propagandistic films, compilations of footage taken by U.S. cameramen filming “purely by chance” on location in China or Hawaii, shown on all U.S. newsreels, did their disastrous, war-mongering work. In the case of the Vietnam War, it was the lie, later admitted by then U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara, that Vietnamese speedboats had attacked a U.S. Navy ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The financial-military power complex in conjunction with think tanks, politics and the leading media were obviously at the longer end of the lever, and cunningly succeeded in imposing their war policy, which was geared to power and profit, against the original peace-mindedness of the people and against the peace efforts of Jeannette Rankin and other peace activists. So much for a look into the past. It is worthwhile to listen seriously to opposing voices a la Jeannette Rankin, to weigh them against all the agitation, no matter how clever it may seem, and to become a peacemaker yourself. Or do you unconditionally and without ifs and buts put your hand in the fire for the current war, Covid and climate agitation?

von hm

Quellen/Links: Jeannette Rankin https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannette_Rankin
https://fee.org/articles/woodrow-wilson-made-the-world-unsafe-for-democracy/
http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/seehowtheyran/portfolios/1940-fdrs-third-presidential-campaign-fdr-a-third-term/
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/on-this-day-jeanette-rankins-history-making-moment
Incident Tonkin https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonkin-Zwischenfall