NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

On February 16 th the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at UOG will be holding a forum titled “Tip of the Spear? Or Tip of a Nuclear Bomb?” The forum will feature a panel discussion on nuclear issues related to Guam and take place from 6 – 7:30 pm in the CLASS Lecture Hall. The event is free and the public is invited to come and learn more about a topic that is largely under-analyzed in our daily lives on Guam, but is in desperate need of more awareness.    Last year I conducted a study with my colleague at UOG Dr. Isa Kelley Bowman on local perceptions of risk, safety and security. We passed out surveys to 100 UOG undergraduate students in order to get a sense of what they felt the major and likely threats were to life on Guam. The surveys featured a list of 10 natural or manmade disasters that might affect the island. They were asked to rate on a scale of 1 – 10 how likely or unlikely they felt each was occur in our corner of the Western Pacific, someti

2016 World Conference against A & H Bombs Declaration of the International Meeting Seventy one years ago, the USA used nuclear bombs for the first time against humanity by releasing atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With tremendous destructive power and radiation, the two bombs burned out the cities and claimed the lives of about 210,000 people by the end of the year. It was a hell on earth. The Hibakusha who survived then had to suffer from latent effects and social discrimination for many subsequent years. Such inhumane weapons should not be used again in any circumstances whatsoever. The nuclear powers still maintain more than 15,000 nuclear warheads. Not a small number of them are on alert for launch. The concern for the outbreak of nuclear war due to deteriorating regional tensions is real. A recent study shows that even if only a small percentage of existing nuclear weapons are used, it would cause serious climate change and would bring the huma

Three years ago I was fortunate enough to travel to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan to represent Guam at the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. This meeting is held annually at either of the two cities where atomic bombs fell during World War II. The meetings are attended by thousands of peace and anti-nuclear activists across Japan and across the world. Here is the statement below from this year's conference, held last week.  **************   Declaration of the International Meeting                  Sixty-eight years have passed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered the atomic bombings.  The bombs instantly devastated the two cities and took lives of over 200,000 citizens by the end of 1945.  They created a “hell on earth,” which denied humans either to live or die as humans.  The Hibakusha, who survived the days have continued to suffer from wounds in both mind and body.  The tragedy like this should never be repeated anywhere in the world.         Nucl

Published on Tuesday, August 6, 2013 by Common Dreams Remembering Hiroshima at Los Alamos, New Mexico by Rev. John Dear   In 1981, while traveling in Europe, some friends and I visited Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp outside of Munich. Most of it was razed to the ground, but the original fences and barbed wire remained, along with a few buildings. That was enough to send chills down the spine. It was too much for me to take in. It’s still too much for me to take in. Upon leaving, I noticed the beautiful suburban neighborhood surrounding Dachau. The houses, green trees, streets, shrubs, shops—it could have been any suburb in the U.S.—and it was right next to the Nazi concentration camp. I was shocked and asked the officials, “Was Dachau like this 35 years ago? Were these homes here?” Yes, they answered. They smelled the smoke--and went on with their lives. The normality of evil! The suburba

Published on Friday, July 26, 2013 by Common Dreams After 60 Years of Suffering, Time to Replace Korean Armistice with Peace Treaty by Christine Ahn Sixty years ago today, the United States, North Korea and China sat down to sign the Korean Armistice Agreement to “insure a complete cessation of hostilities.” Several provisions were to guarantee a peaceful settlement, including a permanent peace agreement, withdrawal of all foreign troops, and no new arms introduced into Korea. Six decades later, none of these have been honored. As such, war, not peace, defines the relationship between Washington and Pyongyang. Official commemorations are now taking place throughout Korea and United States, mostly honoring veterans who sacrificed their lives to fight the Forgotten War. Missing from this sanctioned remembering are the nearly four million Korean, mostly civilian, lives lost in just three years.

One of the speakers on the first day, Hiroshi Taka, the Secretary General of the group Gensuikyo, which is the main group who organized this conference, made a remark which has been a running theme throughout this conference, but the way that he said it ended up staying with me. Part of the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs is solidarity with hibakusha or those affected by nuclear radiation, primarily in Japan, but also people the Marshall Islands, Tahiti, Christmas Island or even the Western United States. …with the passing of 65 years since the A-bombings, it is as especially important task for us to share the experiences and struggles of the Hibakusha as a common knowledge of the human race. Here, in Hiroshima, hundreds of young people participating in this conference will visit Hibakusha and listen to their messages, to inherit their struggle for the survival of humanity. Their testimonies of the tragedies are themselves a powerful refutation of the “nuclear det

In June I traveled to South Korea on a solidarity trip with delegates from the Philippines, Okinawa and the United States, to learn about the current situations of different struggles against US and South Korean military expansion. It’s not even two months later and I’m already on another similar sort of solidarity trip. For the next ten days I’ll be in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan learning about the history of nuclear damage to this country and the peoples from these cities, but I’ll also be speaking to and presenting with people from other countries about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the need for the world to finally sum up the courage to abolition them. The conference that I’m attending is the 2010 World Conference Against Atom and Hydrogen Bombs. There are more than a hundred delegates from at last count 23 countries, 70 + NGOs and 9 national governments. The conference will be talking about nuclear weapons from all angles, how to fight against existing battles for compe

I'd have a laugh, chinatge yu' didide', over the past few years, each time that I make an assertion about the military buildup on Guam, and someone rebuts me by saying that that's just what I want and not really the way things are. This usually happens when I say something to the effect that " ti madiside esta, este na mamta' i militat." Or "this military buildup is not already a done deal." The response I get sometimes, is that I am refusing to recognize reality, that the obvious is staring me in the face, in truth about to slam me in the face, but I am just consumed in my own ideological world that the cold, hard, searing truth is something I cannot feel or admit to. Agreements have been signed, opinion polls have been conducted, fancily dressed and not so fancily dressed military brass and Washington politicians have come through giving basically the same speech over and over again several hundred times. The DOD says their gonna do it, and ev

"The [Jeju] government only thinks of economy in terms of military money. But they do not see the economic potential of this beautiful place. If Gangjeong is to be developed it should be through eco-tourism not militarization… We, the people of this island should determine what our fate should be. The geography of this island puts us at a very important crossroads between nations. We should make the choice to develop this island because of its beauty through eco-tourism and not through militarization, which would only make us a target…If we all fight, who will win? No one. We would be gone in three seconds. To survive we must pursue dialogue and seek co-existence, not seek to force one another." Kang Dong-Kyun Mayor of Gangjeong Village Jeju Island, South Korea (via an interpreter)

Prime Minister of Japan Yukio Hatoyama has just resigned , and from the news reports that I've read, they are all attributing this to the fact that he could not keep a campaign promise that he made, to resolve the US basing issue in Okinawa. This is a very interesting turn of events. As I posted a few weeks ago, the road for the US military buildup to Guam is far from smooth, uneventful or straight. It is instead gof matahlek , very twisted and looks to only get mas matahlek as time goes on. A recently posted piece on The Huffington Post by Steve Clemons, can help shed some light on how it came to this: *********************************** Of Presidents & Prime Ministers in the Age of Obama by Steve Clemons Jan ken pon. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers Rock. Rock smashes scissors. There is an interesting drama playing out between several world leaders today that reminds of this game. President Barack Obama seems to be smashing the political fortunes of Japan Prime Ministe

I successfully defended my dissertation last month and even walked in my graduation ceremony a few weeks ago. But despite both of these dongkalu na gestures of closure to my life as a student, I still have at least one hurdle left before I can say that I've truly moved on and that hokkok umestudiante-ku. I've got some revisions to work on for my dissertation, they aren't alot, but I do have a few mental blocks that are keeping me from completing them. To sum up a much longer and more interesting story, my dissertation is, to put it kindly, unconventional, and so I have to go through a number of different steps in order to explain why this unconventional approach is both useful and necessary. So for instance, the usual way that you would talk about sovereignty, is to provide a history of the topic, and name a few famous theorists or scholars whose theories or versions of sovereignty you'll be using over the course of your dissertation. I don't do this, and I have m