lo yeeOn
2017-03-21 21:28:48 UTC
S. Brian Willson traveled 900 ground miles through six of North
Korea's nine provinces, as well as Pyongyang, the capital, and
several other cities, talking with dozens of people from all walks
of life; all wanted to know about the "axis of evil" speech.
He found that North Koreans "simply cannot understand why the US is
so obsessed with them."
and decide for ourselves. No electricity? Then they can't have an
orchestra and get together and play a concert. A certain Polish or
German conductor has been cited by the BBC news for repeatedly going
back to North Korea for musical purposes. If they "have no
electricity" as you claimed, how do they rehearse and play a concert
together? Most conductors conduct with scores in front of them and
the musicians do not play ensemble music by heart. Also, all the
pictures from the BBC news I have seen show North Koreans looking
strong and healthy and their women looking very pretty, with a more
chiseled look than other Far East Asian women. You can't be starving
and looking good at the same time!
anywhere on this planet. If it is a systematic thing, the Chinese
wouldn't stand for it. (Cf. the rape cases in South Korea and Japan's
Okinawa leveled against US soldiers.)
Lastly, if the propaganda that "North Korea or whoever is ruling it is
a monster" holds any currency for the US politicians, it's only
because getting into China is Washington's long term goal - its real
aim. China has stuff and North Korea doesn't. Also, once the US has
access to NK, Russia is not far behind to see a foreign invasion.
That's the beginning and the end of the North Korea story.
The US should negotiate a peace treaty with NK and forget about war
with it. We have killed too many Korean people already.
Now Let's read Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers'
"The U.S. and North Korea: Will the Real Aggressor Please Stand Down!"
[The] historical context results in North Korea taking the threats
of the United States very seriously. It knows the US has been
willing to kill large portions of its population throughout history
and has seen what the US has done to other countries.
In 2002, President George W. Bush labeled North Korea part of the
"axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran. S. Brian Willson traveled
900 ground miles through six of North Korea's nine provinces, as
well as Pyongyang, the capital, and several other cities, talking
with dozens of people from all walks of life; all wanted to know
about the "axis of evil" speech. He found that North Koreans
"simply cannot understand why the US is so obsessed with them."
Of course, the North Korean government witnessed the "shock and awe"
campaign of bombardments against Iraq and the killing of at least
hundreds of thousands . . .
Should we have to be reminded of the hundreds of thousands of innocent
victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who lived and died not far from the
homeland of the Koreans, north or south?
Did these victims of our atom bombs offend us Americans in any way
that could ever justify their horrible and painful deaths?
So, who are the monsters? Comparing George W Bush and his cabal and
the Kims and their henchmen, the choice is clear, if it is a binary
forced choice kind of answer you're asked to provide.
lo yeeOn
--------
North Korea and the United States: Will the Real Aggressor Please
Stand Down?
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, March 05, 2013
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/03/05/north-korea-and-the-united-states-will-the-real-aggressor-please-stand-down/
Near the end of World War II, as Japan was weakened, Korean "People's
Committees" formed all over the country and Korean exiles returned
from China, the US and Russia to prepare for independence and
democratic rule. On September 6, 1945, these disparate forces and
representatives of the people's committees proclaimed a Korean
People's Republic (the KPR) with a progressive agenda of land reform,
rent control, an eight-hour work day and minimum wage among its
27-point program.
But the KPR was prevented from becoming a reality. Instead, after
World War II and without Korean representation, the US quite
arbitrarily decided with Russia, China and England, to divide Korea
into two nations "temporarily" as part of its decolonization. The
powers agreed that Japan should lose all of its colonies and that in
"due course" Korea would be free. Korea was divided on the 38th
parallel. The US made sure to keep the capital, Seoul, and key ports.
Essentially, the US took as much of Korea as it thought the Russians
would allow. This division planted the seeds of the Korean War,
causing a five-year revolution and counter-revolution that escalated
into the Korean War.
Initially, the South Koreans welcomed the United States, but US
Gen. John Hodge, the military governor of South Korea working under
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, quickly brought Koreans who had cooperated
with the Japanese during occupation into the government and shut out
Koreans seeking democracy. He refused to meet with representatives of
the KPR and banned the party, working instead with the right wing
Korean Democratic Party - made up of landlords, land owners, business
interests and pro-Japanese collaborators.
Shut out of politics, Koreans who sought an independent democratic
state took to other methods and a mass uprising occurred. A strike
against the railroads in September 1946 by 8,000 railway workers in
Pusan quickly grew into a general strike of workers and students in
all of the South's major cities. The US military arrested strike
leaders en masse. In Taegu, on Oct. 1, huge riots occurred after
police smashed picket lines and fired into a crowd of student
demonstrators, killing three and wounding scores. In Yongchon, on
Oct. 3, 10,000 people attacked the police station and killed more than
40 police, including the county chief. Some 20 landlords and
pro-Japanese officials were also killed. A few days later, the US
military declared martial law to crush the uprising. They fired into
large crowds of demonstrators in numerous cities and towns, killing
and wounding an unknown number of people.
Syngman Rhee, an exile who had lived in the US for 40 years, was
returned to Korea on MacArthur's personal plane. He initially allied
with left leaders to form a government approved of by the US. Then in
1947, he dispensed with his "left" allies by assassinating their
leaders, Kim Ku and Kim Kyu-Shik. Rhee consolidated power and the US
pushed for United Nations-sponsored elections in May 1948 to put a
legal imprimatur on the divided Koreas. Rhee was elected at 71 years
old in an election boycotted by most parties who saw it as sham. He
came to power in the midst of an insurgency.
On Jeju Island, the largest Korean island lying in a strategic
location in the Korea Strait, there continued to be protests against
the US military government. It was one of the last areas where
people's committees continued to exist. Gen. Hodge told Congress Jeju
was a truly communal area that is peacefully controlled by the
People's Committee," but he organized its extermination in a
scorched-earth attack.
In September, Rhee's new government launched a massive
counterinsurgency operation under US command. S. Brian Willson
reports it resulted in the killing of "60,000 Islanders, with another
40,000 desperately fleeing in boats to Japan. Thus, one-third of its
residents were either murdered or fled during the 'extermination'
campaign. Nearly 40,000 homes were destroyed and 270 of 400 villages
were leveled." It was an ugly attack, Iggy Kim notes: "Torture,
mutilation, gang rape and arbitrary execution were rife. . . a quarter
of the Jeju population had been massacred. The US embassy happily
reported: "The all-out guerilla extermination campaign came to a
virtual end in April with order restored and most rebels and
sympathizers killed, captured, or converted.'" This was the single
greatest masssacre in modern Korean history and a warning of what was
to come in the Korean War. As we will se, Jeju is part of the story
in Today's US asian escalation.
More brutality occurred on mainland Korea. On October 19, dissident
soldiers in the port city of Yosu rose up in opposition to the war in
Jeju. About 2,000 insurgent soldiers took control of the city. By
Oct. 20, a number of nearby towns had also been liberated and the
People's Committee was reinstated as the governing body. People's
courts were established to try police officers, landlords, regime
officials and other supporters of the Rhee dictatorship. This
rebellion was suppressed by a bloodletting, planned and directed by
the US military.
The Korean War followed. S. Brian Willson summarizes the war:
"The Korean War that lasted from June 1950 to July 1953 was an
enlargement of the 1948-50 struggle of Jeju Islanders to preserve
their self-determination from the tyrannical rule of US-supported
Rhee and his tiny cadre of wealthy constituents. Little known is
that the US-imposed division of Korea in 1945 against the wishes of
the vast majority of Koreans was the primary cause of the Korean War
that broke out five years later. The War destroyed by bombing most
cities and villages in Korea north of the 38th Parallel, and many
south of it, while killing four million Koreans - three million
(one-third) of the north's residents and one million of those living
in the south, in addition to killing one million Chinese. This was a
staggering international crime still unrecognized that killed five
million people and permanently separated 10 million Korean families."
Bragging about the massacre, USAF Strategic Air Command head General
Curtis LeMay, who blanket-bombed Japan in World War II and later ran
for vice president with segregationist George Wallace, summed it up
well, "Over a period of three years or so we killed off - what -
twenty percent of the population." Willson corrects LeMay, writing
"it is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th
Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8-9 million people
during the 37-month long "hot" war, 1950-1953, perhaps an
unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to
belligerence of another.
Context Today: Korea Targeted, Mock Attacks, Learning from Iraq and
Libya and the Asia Pivot
This historical context results in North Korea taking the threats of
the United States very seriously. It knows the US has been willing to
kill large portions of its population throughout history and has seen
what the US has done to other countries.
In 2002, President George W. Bush labeled North Korea part of the
"axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran. S. Brian Willson traveled
900 ground miles through six of North Korea's nine provinces, as well
as Pyongyang, the capital, and several other cities, talking with
dozens of people from all walks of life; all wanted to know about the
"axis of evil" speech. He found that North Koreans "simply cannot
understand why the US is so obsessed with them."
Of course, the North Korean government witnessed the "shock and awe"
campaign of bombardments against Iraq and the killing of at least
hundreds of thousands (credible research shows more than 1 million
Iraqis killed, 4.5 million displaced, 1-2 million widows and 5 million
orphans). They saw the brutal killing by hanging of the former US
ally, now turned into an enemy, Saddam Hussein. And, they can look to
the experience of Libya. Libya was an enemy but then began to develop
positive relations with the US. In 2003, Libya halted its program to
build a nuclear bomb in an effort to mend its relations with the US.
Then last year Libya was overthrown in a US-supported war and its
leader Moammar Gadhafi was brutally killed. As Reuters reports, "`The
tragic consequences in those countries which abandoned halfway their
nuclear programs... clearly prove that the DPRK (Democratic People's
Republic of Korea) was very far-sighted and just when it made the
(nuclear) option," North Korea's KCNA news agency said."
The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea. In November
2012 the US upgraded its weapons systems and announced an agreement
with Japan that would allow South Korea to bomb anywhere in North
Korea. In June 2012 the Pentagon announced that Gen.l Neil H. Tolley
would be removed as commander of US Special Operations in South Korea
after he revealed to a Japanese foreign affairs publication that
American and South Korean troops had been parachuting into North Korea
on spy missions. US troops and bases are not popular. Protests
erupted in 2002 after two Korean woman were killed and a court martial
found the US soldiers not guilty of negligent manslaughter. Several
pubs and restaurants put up signs saying "Americans Not Welcome Here."
In an August 2005 protest against US troops by 1,100 people, 10 were
injured by police. One month before that, 100 were injured in a
protest. In 2006 protesters occupied land on which the US planned to
expand a base, resulting in a conflict and their eviction followed by
installing barbed wire around the area to protect it from South
Koreans. The South Korean government banned a rally that was expected
to draw more than 10,000 protesters.
South Korea and the US regularly hold military exercises off the
Korean coast, which North Korea describes as planning for an
invasion. The United States claims these exercises are defensive in
nature to assure preparedness. Prior to the recent nuclear test,
Seoul and Washington conducted a joint naval exercise with a US
nuclear submarine off South Korea's east coast, followed by a joint
air force drill as well as live weapon exercises near a disputed sea
boundary between North and South Korea. These drills have gotten more
aggressive during the Obama administration and since the death of Kim
Jong-il, as outlined by geopolitical analyst Jen Alic here:
The first joint military exercises between the US and South Korea
since Kim Jong-il's death suddenly changed their nature, with new
war games including pre-emptive artillery attacks on North Korea.
. . .
Korea's nine provinces, as well as Pyongyang, the capital, and
several other cities, talking with dozens of people from all walks
of life; all wanted to know about the "axis of evil" speech.
He found that North Koreans "simply cannot understand why the US is
so obsessed with them."
North Korea is a failure. They cannot raise food. They jail people and
execute people. They have no electricity.
If you want to be taken seriously, cite some sources so we can readexecute people. They have no electricity.
and decide for ourselves. No electricity? Then they can't have an
orchestra and get together and play a concert. A certain Polish or
German conductor has been cited by the BBC news for repeatedly going
back to North Korea for musical purposes. If they "have no
electricity" as you claimed, how do they rehearse and play a concert
together? Most conductors conduct with scores in front of them and
the musicians do not play ensemble music by heart. Also, all the
pictures from the BBC news I have seen show North Koreans looking
strong and healthy and their women looking very pretty, with a more
chiseled look than other Far East Asian women. You can't be starving
and looking good at the same time!
North Korean guards kill Chinese and Communists do nothing.
This is sensationalism. If it was a random crime, it could occuranywhere on this planet. If it is a systematic thing, the Chinese
wouldn't stand for it. (Cf. the rape cases in South Korea and Japan's
Okinawa leveled against US soldiers.)
Lastly, if the propaganda that "North Korea or whoever is ruling it is
a monster" holds any currency for the US politicians, it's only
because getting into China is Washington's long term goal - its real
aim. China has stuff and North Korea doesn't. Also, once the US has
access to NK, Russia is not far behind to see a foreign invasion.
That's the beginning and the end of the North Korea story.
The US should negotiate a peace treaty with NK and forget about war
with it. We have killed too many Korean people already.
Now Let's read Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers'
"The U.S. and North Korea: Will the Real Aggressor Please Stand Down!"
[The] historical context results in North Korea taking the threats
of the United States very seriously. It knows the US has been
willing to kill large portions of its population throughout history
and has seen what the US has done to other countries.
In 2002, President George W. Bush labeled North Korea part of the
"axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran. S. Brian Willson traveled
900 ground miles through six of North Korea's nine provinces, as
well as Pyongyang, the capital, and several other cities, talking
with dozens of people from all walks of life; all wanted to know
about the "axis of evil" speech. He found that North Koreans
"simply cannot understand why the US is so obsessed with them."
Of course, the North Korean government witnessed the "shock and awe"
campaign of bombardments against Iraq and the killing of at least
hundreds of thousands . . .
Should we have to be reminded of the hundreds of thousands of innocent
victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who lived and died not far from the
homeland of the Koreans, north or south?
Did these victims of our atom bombs offend us Americans in any way
that could ever justify their horrible and painful deaths?
So, who are the monsters? Comparing George W Bush and his cabal and
the Kims and their henchmen, the choice is clear, if it is a binary
forced choice kind of answer you're asked to provide.
lo yeeOn
--------
North Korea and the United States: Will the Real Aggressor Please
Stand Down?
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, March 05, 2013
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/03/05/north-korea-and-the-united-states-will-the-real-aggressor-please-stand-down/
Near the end of World War II, as Japan was weakened, Korean "People's
Committees" formed all over the country and Korean exiles returned
from China, the US and Russia to prepare for independence and
democratic rule. On September 6, 1945, these disparate forces and
representatives of the people's committees proclaimed a Korean
People's Republic (the KPR) with a progressive agenda of land reform,
rent control, an eight-hour work day and minimum wage among its
27-point program.
But the KPR was prevented from becoming a reality. Instead, after
World War II and without Korean representation, the US quite
arbitrarily decided with Russia, China and England, to divide Korea
into two nations "temporarily" as part of its decolonization. The
powers agreed that Japan should lose all of its colonies and that in
"due course" Korea would be free. Korea was divided on the 38th
parallel. The US made sure to keep the capital, Seoul, and key ports.
Essentially, the US took as much of Korea as it thought the Russians
would allow. This division planted the seeds of the Korean War,
causing a five-year revolution and counter-revolution that escalated
into the Korean War.
Initially, the South Koreans welcomed the United States, but US
Gen. John Hodge, the military governor of South Korea working under
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, quickly brought Koreans who had cooperated
with the Japanese during occupation into the government and shut out
Koreans seeking democracy. He refused to meet with representatives of
the KPR and banned the party, working instead with the right wing
Korean Democratic Party - made up of landlords, land owners, business
interests and pro-Japanese collaborators.
Shut out of politics, Koreans who sought an independent democratic
state took to other methods and a mass uprising occurred. A strike
against the railroads in September 1946 by 8,000 railway workers in
Pusan quickly grew into a general strike of workers and students in
all of the South's major cities. The US military arrested strike
leaders en masse. In Taegu, on Oct. 1, huge riots occurred after
police smashed picket lines and fired into a crowd of student
demonstrators, killing three and wounding scores. In Yongchon, on
Oct. 3, 10,000 people attacked the police station and killed more than
40 police, including the county chief. Some 20 landlords and
pro-Japanese officials were also killed. A few days later, the US
military declared martial law to crush the uprising. They fired into
large crowds of demonstrators in numerous cities and towns, killing
and wounding an unknown number of people.
Syngman Rhee, an exile who had lived in the US for 40 years, was
returned to Korea on MacArthur's personal plane. He initially allied
with left leaders to form a government approved of by the US. Then in
1947, he dispensed with his "left" allies by assassinating their
leaders, Kim Ku and Kim Kyu-Shik. Rhee consolidated power and the US
pushed for United Nations-sponsored elections in May 1948 to put a
legal imprimatur on the divided Koreas. Rhee was elected at 71 years
old in an election boycotted by most parties who saw it as sham. He
came to power in the midst of an insurgency.
On Jeju Island, the largest Korean island lying in a strategic
location in the Korea Strait, there continued to be protests against
the US military government. It was one of the last areas where
people's committees continued to exist. Gen. Hodge told Congress Jeju
was a truly communal area that is peacefully controlled by the
People's Committee," but he organized its extermination in a
scorched-earth attack.
In September, Rhee's new government launched a massive
counterinsurgency operation under US command. S. Brian Willson
reports it resulted in the killing of "60,000 Islanders, with another
40,000 desperately fleeing in boats to Japan. Thus, one-third of its
residents were either murdered or fled during the 'extermination'
campaign. Nearly 40,000 homes were destroyed and 270 of 400 villages
were leveled." It was an ugly attack, Iggy Kim notes: "Torture,
mutilation, gang rape and arbitrary execution were rife. . . a quarter
of the Jeju population had been massacred. The US embassy happily
reported: "The all-out guerilla extermination campaign came to a
virtual end in April with order restored and most rebels and
sympathizers killed, captured, or converted.'" This was the single
greatest masssacre in modern Korean history and a warning of what was
to come in the Korean War. As we will se, Jeju is part of the story
in Today's US asian escalation.
More brutality occurred on mainland Korea. On October 19, dissident
soldiers in the port city of Yosu rose up in opposition to the war in
Jeju. About 2,000 insurgent soldiers took control of the city. By
Oct. 20, a number of nearby towns had also been liberated and the
People's Committee was reinstated as the governing body. People's
courts were established to try police officers, landlords, regime
officials and other supporters of the Rhee dictatorship. This
rebellion was suppressed by a bloodletting, planned and directed by
the US military.
The Korean War followed. S. Brian Willson summarizes the war:
"The Korean War that lasted from June 1950 to July 1953 was an
enlargement of the 1948-50 struggle of Jeju Islanders to preserve
their self-determination from the tyrannical rule of US-supported
Rhee and his tiny cadre of wealthy constituents. Little known is
that the US-imposed division of Korea in 1945 against the wishes of
the vast majority of Koreans was the primary cause of the Korean War
that broke out five years later. The War destroyed by bombing most
cities and villages in Korea north of the 38th Parallel, and many
south of it, while killing four million Koreans - three million
(one-third) of the north's residents and one million of those living
in the south, in addition to killing one million Chinese. This was a
staggering international crime still unrecognized that killed five
million people and permanently separated 10 million Korean families."
Bragging about the massacre, USAF Strategic Air Command head General
Curtis LeMay, who blanket-bombed Japan in World War II and later ran
for vice president with segregationist George Wallace, summed it up
well, "Over a period of three years or so we killed off - what -
twenty percent of the population." Willson corrects LeMay, writing
"it is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th
Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8-9 million people
during the 37-month long "hot" war, 1950-1953, perhaps an
unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to
belligerence of another.
Context Today: Korea Targeted, Mock Attacks, Learning from Iraq and
Libya and the Asia Pivot
This historical context results in North Korea taking the threats of
the United States very seriously. It knows the US has been willing to
kill large portions of its population throughout history and has seen
what the US has done to other countries.
In 2002, President George W. Bush labeled North Korea part of the
"axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran. S. Brian Willson traveled
900 ground miles through six of North Korea's nine provinces, as well
as Pyongyang, the capital, and several other cities, talking with
dozens of people from all walks of life; all wanted to know about the
"axis of evil" speech. He found that North Koreans "simply cannot
understand why the US is so obsessed with them."
Of course, the North Korean government witnessed the "shock and awe"
campaign of bombardments against Iraq and the killing of at least
hundreds of thousands (credible research shows more than 1 million
Iraqis killed, 4.5 million displaced, 1-2 million widows and 5 million
orphans). They saw the brutal killing by hanging of the former US
ally, now turned into an enemy, Saddam Hussein. And, they can look to
the experience of Libya. Libya was an enemy but then began to develop
positive relations with the US. In 2003, Libya halted its program to
build a nuclear bomb in an effort to mend its relations with the US.
Then last year Libya was overthrown in a US-supported war and its
leader Moammar Gadhafi was brutally killed. As Reuters reports, "`The
tragic consequences in those countries which abandoned halfway their
nuclear programs... clearly prove that the DPRK (Democratic People's
Republic of Korea) was very far-sighted and just when it made the
(nuclear) option," North Korea's KCNA news agency said."
The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea. In November
2012 the US upgraded its weapons systems and announced an agreement
with Japan that would allow South Korea to bomb anywhere in North
Korea. In June 2012 the Pentagon announced that Gen.l Neil H. Tolley
would be removed as commander of US Special Operations in South Korea
after he revealed to a Japanese foreign affairs publication that
American and South Korean troops had been parachuting into North Korea
on spy missions. US troops and bases are not popular. Protests
erupted in 2002 after two Korean woman were killed and a court martial
found the US soldiers not guilty of negligent manslaughter. Several
pubs and restaurants put up signs saying "Americans Not Welcome Here."
In an August 2005 protest against US troops by 1,100 people, 10 were
injured by police. One month before that, 100 were injured in a
protest. In 2006 protesters occupied land on which the US planned to
expand a base, resulting in a conflict and their eviction followed by
installing barbed wire around the area to protect it from South
Koreans. The South Korean government banned a rally that was expected
to draw more than 10,000 protesters.
South Korea and the US regularly hold military exercises off the
Korean coast, which North Korea describes as planning for an
invasion. The United States claims these exercises are defensive in
nature to assure preparedness. Prior to the recent nuclear test,
Seoul and Washington conducted a joint naval exercise with a US
nuclear submarine off South Korea's east coast, followed by a joint
air force drill as well as live weapon exercises near a disputed sea
boundary between North and South Korea. These drills have gotten more
aggressive during the Obama administration and since the death of Kim
Jong-il, as outlined by geopolitical analyst Jen Alic here:
The first joint military exercises between the US and South Korea
since Kim Jong-il's death suddenly changed their nature, with new
war games including pre-emptive artillery attacks on North Korea.
. . .