Pacific Peace Tour: Combined opposition to Talisman Sabre

As the Talisman Sabre military war games held on this continent draw to close and we mark the 78th anniversary of the dropping of a nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki we take a look at the corporate greed and colonisation that see the ongoing manufacture of these weapons and create the conditions for their use.Today we’ll hear from Monaeka Flores from Guahan and Shinako Oyakawa from Okinawa who are touring some of the continent with the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network’s current initiative the Pacific Peace Tour and Conference.Monaeka Flores is a Guahan representative – indigenous people of Guam whose land has been occupied by US military since World War II. They have desecrated sacred sites, poisoned the environment and an aquifer that supplies their water as well as committing crimes against her people. She is motivated to stand up against United States militarism and the expanding bases on her Pacific island nation because of the love of her people, peace, decolonisation and anti-racism.Shinako Oyakawa is an indigenous Pacific peace activist from Okinawa. Roughly 70 percent of the land area in Japan used for U.S. bases is in Okinawa, the stolen lands of the Ryukyans who had their homelands annexed by Japan since 1879. With the Japanese and U.S. governments violently pushing through construction of new military bases at Henoko and Takae Shinako visited the UN in April this year to highlight Okinawan issues in the context of a broader struggle for the rights of indigenous people around the world.Thanks to Kathryn Kelly for assisting in lining up the interview during a busy schedule.We also bring you a conversation between Uprise Radio's James Brennan and Mercedes Zanker with Jacob Grech (A Friday Rave) about the lesser known aspects of the building of the nuclear bomb.