Missile offence at sea: protest fasts in US and Korea

STANDING AT BATH IRON WORKS

Coastline of Gangjeong village on Jeu Island ... imagine these rocks covered with cement

At BIW yesterday as workers left the shipyard

I was able to hand out six leaflets yesterday as the hundreds of workers walked past me and hundreds more drove past my little spot on the corner in front of Bath Iron Works (BIW).

I plan on going back again today, and every weekday, as long as I continue with this fast (now 3rd day) in support of the extraordinary people of Gangjeong village on Jeju Island.

They build the Navy Aegis destroyers at BIW that are outfitted with missile offense systems and will be deployed at the base on Jeju Island and at other bases in the Asian-Pacific thus forcing China to expand its military in response.

I am grateful to Dennis Bernstein at KPFA in Berkeley who yesterday interviewed me about this story. I was touched by the sincerity of Dennis about Professor Yang Yoon-Mo who today is on his 51st day of hunger strike. You can hear the interview here.

Global Network board member MacGregor Eddy (Salinas, California) is working non-stop to create Facebook support for Yang, fellow GN board member Sung-Hee Choi (who is now on her 7th day of hunger striking while in jail), and the seven other villagers now in detention. It appears that the Navy has picked out many of the key leadership of the non-violent resistance to the base construction and put them in the slammer. So this is where we all come in - we have to internationalize this struggle in order to pick up the slack.

Last night I had an email from one of our supporters here in Maine. He told me he had called the South Korean embassy in Washington DC and they told him he had to call Boston to lodge his complaint against the treatment of the Gangjeong villagers. So when he called Boston the person there said they knew nothing about the Jeju story. It seems to me that the South Korean embassy in Washington must be getting tired of the phone calls and are trying to divert and frustrate those who are making the call. I take this as a good sign that they are trying to deflect the growing public support.

So my response is - step up the emails and phone calls! You can write to the South Korean Defense Attaché assigned to Washington DC. at this email and demand an end of the Navy base construction, defenattache@yahoo.com or you can call the South Korean Embassy in Washington at 202-939-5600 to show your solidarity with the Gangjeong villagers. Or call the South Korean embassy in your own country.

If you haven't yet watched the video interview with Professor Yang you must do so and help us get others to see it as well. More than 6,400 have seen it since it got posted on May 20. You can see it here.

Keep checking my blog for regular posts about the situation on Jeju Island. Your support is urgently needed and appreciated.

Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://www.space4peace.org/
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain

Tate Liverpool: Exhibition 28 February – 11 May 2014 Adult £8.80 (without donation £8) Concession £6.60 (without donation £6) Help Tate by including the voluntary donation to enable Gift Aid Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain , is a new take on how the changes in the meaning of words reflect the cultural shifts in our society. This dynamic exhibition takes its name and focus from the seminal 1976 Raymond Williams book on the vocabulary of culture and society. An academic and critic influenced by the New Left, Williams defined ‘Keywords’ as terms that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. His book contains more than 130 short essays on words such as ‘violence’, ‘country’, ‘criticism’, ‘media’, ‘popular’ and ‘exploitation’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams expressed the wish some other ‘form of presentation could be devised’ for his book, and this exhibition i...

'Not as dumb as he looks' - Muhammad Ali on Bertrand Russell

In his autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story , Muhammad Ali recounts how Bertrand Russell got in contact with him, and their ensuing correspondence: *** For days I was talking to people from a whole new world. People who were not even interested in sports, especially prizefighting. One in particular I will never forget: a remarkable man, seventy years older than me but with a fresh outlook which seemed fairer than that of any white man I had ever met in America. My brother Rahaman had handed me the phone, saying, ‘Operator says a Mr. Bertrand Russell is calling Mr. Muhammad Ali.’ I took it and heard the crisp accent of an Englishman: ‘Is this Muhammad Ali?’ When I said it was, he asked if I had been quoted correctly. I acknowledged that I had been, but wondered out loud, ‘Why does everyone want to know what I think about Viet Nam? I’m no politician, no leader. I’m just an athlete.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is a war more barbaric than others, and because a mystique is built up ...

James Kirkup

James Kirkup has died, aged 91. In 2004 he sent us a copy of No More Hiroshimas . He had originally collected together this volume of hia A-bomb poems in 1983, but it took twenty years before we published it 'as a real book'. James recounts 'My A-Bomb Biography' in his preface. Here are the opening lines of the title poem, No Mor e Hiroshimas . At the station exit, my bundle in hand, Early the winter afternoon's wet snow Falls thinly round me, out of a crudded sun. I had forgotten to remember where I was. Looking about, I see it might be anywhere - A station, a town like any other in Japan, Ramshackle, muddy, noisy, drab; a cheerfully Shallow impermanence: peeling concrete, litter, 'Atomic Lotion, for hair fall-out', a flimsy department store; Racks and towers of neon, flashy over tiled and tilted waves Of little roofs, shacks cascading lemons and persimmons, Oranges and dark-red apples, shanties awash with rainbows Of squid and octopus, shellfish, slabs o...

Spokesman Books

Search This Blog