[gha-peace] Re: Conference 2019

From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "rsieb3" for DMARC)
To: gha-peace@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2019 14:58:29 +0000 (UTC)

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I've been asked to help organize a conference/workshop at Western Michigan
University in honor of Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert's lifelong scholarly work and his
coming retirement. The workshop, sponsored by the Department of Comparative
Religion of WMU, will take place this fall in Kalamazoo, Michigan. A date has
yet to be set. At this point, we're attempting to gauge the interest and
availability of potential attendees and speakers. If you'd be interested in
attending and/or presenting some of your work, we'd greatly appreciate if you
could email me and let me know your availability. Of course, the
conference/workshop will focus on Rudi's Critical Theory of Religion and
Society, i.e. Dialectical Religiology, but will nevertheless be open to all
matters relating to religion, philosophy, sociology, etc. This event will be a
good time to catch up with Dr. Siebert, the Department of Comparative Religion,
and Rudi's former students and international colleagues.

As you may already know, Rudi was recently honored with Emeritus status for his
over 50 years of teaching and service to WMU. He was also recently recognized
by the state of Michigan, its governor Gretchen Whitmer, and representatives of
the legislature, for his "stellar career" at WMU. Congratulations to Rudi! The
recognition is well-deserved.

Also, if you know anyone who you think would be interested in the
conference/workshop, please forward their name to me and feel free to forward
this email to them. Additionally, if you have contact information for 1)
Nicholas Budimir, 2) Federico Velez-Velez, or 3) Anthony Squires, please let me
know. We want to extend invitations to all those who studied under and/or with
Rudi.

I hope to see you all in the fall!

Auf Wiedersehen!

Dustin J. Byrd, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Philosophy and ReligionOlivet College320 S. Main St.
Olivet, MI
49076
USA
Ofc: 269-749-7382https://dustinjbyrd.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Lana Yang <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Charles Mercieca <CharlesMercieca@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Association Global Harmony <gha-peace@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wed, Jul 24, 2019 5:55 am
Subject: [gha-peace] Interview of author: How to hide an empire

Here is an interview of the informed American author Daniel Immerwahr by
Democracy Now for those who are interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvlUGYvLg0s

On Jul 23, 2019, at 9:18 AM, Lana Yang <lanayang@xxxxxxx> wrote:

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Today's selection -- from How to Hide An Empire by Daniel Immerwahr.
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On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed the American territory of the Philippines:

"Nine hours after Japan attacked the territory of Hawai'i, another set of
Japanese planes came into view over another U.S. territory, the Philippines. As
at Pearl Harbor, they dropped their bombs, hitting several air bases, to
devastating effect.

"The army's official history of the war judges the Philippine bombing to have
been just as disastrous as the Hawaiian one. At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese
hobbled the United States' Pacific fleet, sinking four battleships and damaging
four others. In the Philippines, the attackers laid waste to the largest
concentration of U.S. warplanes outside North America -- the foundation of the
Allies' Pacific air defense.

"The United States lost more than planes. The attack on Pearl Harbor was just
that, an attack. Japan's bombers struck, retreated, and never returned. Not so
in the Philippines. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids,
then by invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos -- U.S. nationals who
saluted the Stars and Stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief --
fell under a foreign power. They had a very different war than the inhabitants
of Hawai'i did.
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| Advancing Japanese troops moving toward Manila. |

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| "Nor did it stop there. The event familiarly known as 'Pearl Harbor' was in
fact an all-out lightning strike on U.S. and British holdings throughout the
Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the U.S. territories of
Hawai'i, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island, and Wake Island. They also
attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and they
invaded Thailand.

"It was a phenomenal success. Japan never conquered Hawai'i, but within months
Guam, the Philippines, Wake, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong all fell under
its flag. Japan even seized the westernmost tip of Alaska, which it held for
more than a year.

"Looking at the big picture, you start to wonder if 'Pearl Harbor' -- the name
of one of the few targets Japan didn't invade -- is really the best shorthand
for the events of that fateful day.

"'Pearl Harbor' wasn't how people referred to the bombings, at least not at
first. How to describe them, in fact, was far from clear. Should the focus be
on Hawai'i, the closest target to North America and the first bit of U.S. soil
Japan had struck? Or should it be the Philippines, the far larger and more
vulnerable territory? Or Guam, the one that surrendered nearly immediately? Or
all the Pacific holdings, including the uninhabited Wake and Midway, together?

"'The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves,' Roosevelt said in his
address to Congress -- his 'Infamy' speech. But did they? JAPS BOMB MANILA,
HAWAll was the headline of a New Mexico paper; JAPANESE PLANES BOMB HONOLULU,
ISLAND OF GUAM was that of one in South Carolina. Sumner Welles, FDR's
undersecretary of state, described the event as 'an attack upon Hawaii and
upon the Philippines.' Eleanor Roosevelt used a similar formulation in her
radio address on the night of December 7, when she spoke of Japan 'bombing our
citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines.'

"That was how the first draft of FDR's speech went, too. It presented the event
as a 'bombing in Hawaii and the Philippines.' Yet Roosevelt toyed with that
draft all day, adding things in pencil, crossing other bits out. At some point
he deleted the prominent references to the Philippines and settled on a
different description. The attack was, in his revised version, a 'bombing in
Oahu' or, later in the speech, 'on the Hawaiian Islands.' He still mentioned
the Philippines, but only as an item on a terse list of Japan's other targets:
Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, and Midway -- presented
in that order. That list mingled U.S. and British territories together, giving
no hint as to which was which.

"Why did Roosevelt demote the Philippines? We don't know, but it's not hard to
guess. Roosevelt was trying to tell a clear story: Japan had attacked the
United States. But he faced a problem. Were Japan's targets considered 'the
United States'? Legally, yes, they were indisputably U.S. territory. But would
the public see them that way? What if Roosevelt's audience didn't care that
Japan had attacked the Philippines or Guam? Polls taken slightly before the
attack show that few in the continental United States supported a military
defense of those remote territories.

"Consider how similar events played out more recently. On August 7, 1998,
al-Qaeda launched simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Hundreds died (mostly Africans), and thousands were
wounded. But though those embassies were outposts of the United States, there
was little public sense that the country itself had been harmed. It would take
another set of simultaneous attacks three years later, on New York City and
Washington, D.C., to provoke an all-out war.

"An embassy is different from a territory, of course. Yet a similar logic held
in 1941. Roosevelt no doubt noted that the Philippines and Guam, though
technically part of the United States, seemed foreign to many. Hawai'i, by
contrast, was more plausibly 'American.' ...

"Yet even when it came to Hawai'i, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point
[and] ... clearly worried that his audience might regard Hawai'i as foreign. So
on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the
Japanese squadrons had bombed not the 'island of Oahu,' but the 'American
island of Oahu.' Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to 'American
naval and military forces,' and 'very many American lives' had been lost." |

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| How to Hide an Empire
Author: Daniel Immerwahr
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright 2019 by Daniel Immerwahr
Pages: 4-7
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Attachment: Flight 2019Blank_2018 copy 04.doc
Description: MS-Word document

[gha-peace] Re: Conference 2019

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