North Korea

[rowan]

The old drag 'em down to your level & beat 'em with experience tactic

Now, that superior-minded, nobody can tell us anything attitude is symptomatic of your problem and the unaccountability of the society which spawned you. Very ironic indeed.

[Digby]

The old drag 'em down to your level & beat 'em with experience tactic

Now, that superior-minded, nobody can tell us anything attitude is symptomatic of your problem and the unaccountability of the society which spawned you. Very ironic indeed.

Nobody is arguing any of the western countries is perfect nor even close. But if I had to rank countries with the higher levels of accountability I'd rank Western Europe, Canada and the USA, SK, Australia and NZ and so on all above what we find in the Middle East, Turkey, Russia, NK, South and Central America...

And this idea seems to repeat in much of your drivel, which is to say by all means criticise the UK for instance, just don't do that and rank Russia for instance ahead of us.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

I have been convinced by the sheer profligacy of Rowan's carefully selected quotes. If you Imperialist Filth-peddlars need any more evidence you only need look to the regular and disgraceful kidnapping and abduction of North Koreans by the South Korean authorities - 25,000 of them in the last 60 years. One of them, a dedicated and faithful soldier, was even reported recently to have been taken to a 'hospital' where he was forced to watch back-to-back episodes of NCIS!!!!

The horrors that these poor people are forced to endure in the South are so dreadful that the humane and benevolent North Korean border guards try to shoot them rather than leave them to suffer.

By contrast, since the end of the Korean War the benign and peace-loving North Koreans have helped nearly seven people to escape into the North from their hellish southern prison - and when they do get them in, they like to put them in a place of such security and serenity that they sometimes slip into a blissful coma.

[Digby]

If you Imperialist Filth-peddlars need any more evidence you only need look to the regular and disgraceful kidnapping and abduction of North Koreans by the South Korean authorities - 25,000 of them in the last 60 years.

Is the number escaping really only that low? Blimey. If we could have more regimes like NK across the Middle East and Africa it'd do wonders for the migrant problem in Europe.

[rowan]

"But if I had to rank countries with the higher levels of accountability I'd rank Western Europe, Canada and the USA, SK, Australia and NZ and so on all above what we find in the Middle East, Turkey, Russia, NK, South and Central America..."

Now, which of these have killed approximately 20 million people with their wars and interventions since WWII? Which have killed several million Muslims since the 1990s? Which have continued to build hundreds of military bases all around the world, including upon the door steps of their ideological enemies? Which are continuing to rape the 3rd World of its natural resources and hinder its development through economic tyranny? & which has a history of doing so, genocide, slavery, colonization, imperialism - and all of the unthinkable horrors that went with it.

The answer is clear, and it serves as the basis for the superior-minded, no one can tell us anything mentality you plainly demonstrate.

There are two sides to all of these issues. We are force-fed one side on a daily basis if we pay any attention, so there is no need to regurgitate it here. But the other side remains hidden from view, ignored by mainstream media and fiercely attacked by self-righteous denialists.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

If you Imperialist Filth-peddlars need any more evidence you only need look to the regular and disgraceful kidnapping and abduction of North Koreans by the South Korean authorities - 25,000 of them in the last 60 years.

Is the number escaping really only that low? Blimey. If we could have more regimes like NK across the Middle East and Africa it'd do wonders for the migrant problem in Europe.

I couldn't agree more! We would all be better off if the peace-loving armed forces of Syria and their benevolent Russian allies diverted a fraction of the efforts that they are currently expending trying to reduce the number of people living in poverty in Eastern Ghouta and instead deployed their forces along Syria's borders to assist those desperately trying to stay in the country, perhaps by shooting some of them.

Perhaps the UN could persuade the charitable salafists of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb to give up their humanitarian efforts to secure all of the water sources on the route from southern Mali up to the Algerian coastline and instead assist the flood of economic migrants to find work in Africa by building shopping malls and hotel complexes which their friends from Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen can periodically purge by conducting merciful culling to make way for more. This could not only form a reciprocal arrangement between north and east Africa, but could become a continental franchise by persuading Boko Haram to set up along the west coast.

[rowan]

I couldn't agree more! We would all be better off if the peace-loving armed forces of Syria and their benevolent Russian allies diverted a fraction of the efforts that they are currently expending trying to reduce the number of people living in poverty in Eastern Ghouta and instead deployed their forces along Syria's borders to assist those desperately trying to stay in the country, perhaps by shooting some of them.


The Syrians and their Russian allies are attempting to liberate Eastern Ghouta from the terrorists America and their allies sent in there in the first place, and of course that isn't going to entail waltzing in and tossing daisies in the air. America can't even liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban or Iraq from "Al Qaeda" after more than a decade of constant war. Meanwhile, there is a higher casualty rate in Afrin being ignored by the West right now, but we've already been over this, and it's the wrong thread for it anyway. Suffice to add that the majority of refugees from the proxy war have actually fled to Damascus, not from it, and are living in camps just outside the capital under the government's protection. But of course plenty have fled abroad. That's what you do when your country is invaded by foreign-backed terrorists, sparking all-out war. There wasn't a refugee tidal wave out of Syria prior to 2011.

[rowan]

Back to Korea:

For more than seven decades, US policymakers and military strategists have bullied, intimidated and ultimately tried to isolate the self-professed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a., North Korea). It is particularly instructive to examine official Congressional, CIA and Pentagon sources relating to North Korea’s motivates. These often paint a much more honest picture of events than mainstream media.

The official sources, conspicuously absent from mainstream US and European media, strongly and consistently suggest that threats and aggression on the part of Western countries, in this case the USA, are met with threats and aggression by weaker states; in this case, North Korea. From this we learn that if we want peace or at least de-escalation, it pays to pursue diplomacy and to stick to international agreements. We also learn that US elites are committed to global military domination at any cost, not to peace.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/22/99894/

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Is Counterpunch your radical left-wing mouthpiece of this week, or only on this particular subject? I only ask as it does not appear to offer what any neutral observer might describe as a 'balanced opinion' on very much at all.

Might it be reasonable to suggest that anyone who bases his view almost wholly on the articles in Counterpunch is as ill-informed as someone who bases theirs on the Daily Mail? Or that someone who reads more widely and is prepared to accept that the truth lies somewhere in the middle is, perhaps, the more credible?

I am genuinely interested in your view on this?

[SerjeantWildgoose]

... and who owns and who funds MintPress News? Is there any reason not to believe that Mnar Muhawesh is a pro-Assad mouthpiece as capable of misrepresenting the truth as any other unregulated and unaccountable 'news' source?

[rowan]

Ad hominems & false assumptions. We all know the mainstream media is completely biased and unreliable, so you need to balance your reading with a wide variety of sources - which I do, in more than one language. Meanwhile you have failed to address the subject matter at all.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

We all know the mainstream media is completely biased and unreliable ...

Er, no. We all know that you believe it to be those things, but your view is highly subjective and really not very convincing at all.

[rowan]

We all know the mainstream media is completely biased and unreliable ...

Er, no. We all know that you believe it to be those things, but your view is highly subjective and really not very convincing at all.

& your view is completely skewed by mainstream propaganda. Your ideas about Syria are nonsensical, biased and hypocritical. That is very clear to anyone living in this part of the world, talking with people and analyzing the news in the local language as well as English. You condemn those defending a country, just as Britain would defend itself if invaded by terrorists, within the confines of international law and either defend or completely ignore NATO members who have invaded a country illegally and boast about the number of human beings they have butchered. Your self-importance and superior-mindedness is a complete fallacy, based on the distortions and falsities of the world's most warmongering nation.

Now, how about addressing the subject matter, which is not produced by the Counterpunch web site itself, btw, but actually selected among articles by some of the world's most prominent independent journalists and political analysts - people with about a million times as much knowledge and expertise as yourself.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

See now I'd be interested to know how you measure knowledge and determine how someone might have a million times as much of it as someone else. I can't help thinking that you're digging yourself into a hole from which no amount of calculation is going to get you out.

[rowan]

I think you began with the ad hominems because you didn't have a valid argument to offer. & I measure your knowledge by your warped perspective on Syria, which is clearly the imperialist perspective of the warmongering nations orchestrating the carnage.

But let's try to stick with the topic here, which is actually Korea, if anyone remembers.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

I think you began with the ad hominems because you didn't have a valid argument to offer. & I measure your knowledge by your warped perspective on Syria, which is clearly the imperialist perspective of the warmongering nations orchestrating the carnage.

But let's try to stick with the topic here, which is actually Korea, if anyone remembers.

Well now, I actually began not with an attack on you (ad hominem) but rather an entirely valid questioning of the credibility of your sources. I reiterate it and ask why my views are considered by you to be derived from propaganda, while you consider your own views, obtained from exposure to what is clearly a biased media, to be authoritative.

I feel at this point that I must resort to an ad hominem approach and argue that you are a tiresome and opinionated prick. I acknowledge that I must appear to be a tiresome and opinionated prick to you, but this does not alter the fact that you are one.

And as for Syria, I do not agree with or support the US' or the UK's military intervention in Syria other than to engage and destroy IS. At the same time I abhor the Assad regime's atrocious attacks on its own citizens, which have not been restricted to the recent conflict, and do support the international community's right and legal responsibility to intervene. I believe that the Russian intervention in support of Assad is a criminal enterprise.

As for Korea, I am not prepared to discuss a conflict in which men I knew were engaged with an individual who has formed an intransigent view based on revisionist nonsense peddled by idiots whose utopian vision of history writ in black and white bears no relation to the complex realities that had to be faced by men of their time.

[Zhivago]

Rowan is actually a capitalist stooge, discrediting the left (or whatever he is).

[rowan]

Well now, I actually began not with an attack on you (ad hominem) but rather an entirely valid questioning of the credibility of your sources

You just gave me a definition of an ad hominem approach You rely on the mainstream news of the warmongering nations then accuse alternative news sources of bias. That smacks of superior-minded hypocrisy.

At the same time I abhor the Assad regime's atrocious attacks on its own citizens, which have not been restricted to the recent conflict, and do support the international community's right and legal responsibility to intervene.

So the international community should be intervening in America and Britain right now. You have an imperialist mentality and have bought into the racist mainstream news propaganda. NATO members orchestrated the conflict and now you want international intervention? Ok, we have intervention, by Russia and Iran, long-standing allies of the Damascus. That's a problem for you too. You presumably want their enemies to intervene then - the same countries which created the conflict in the first place.

I believe that the Russian intervention in support of Assad is a criminal enterprise.

Looks like an acute case of Russophobia, no different to any other variety of racism, and caused entirely by propaganda. They are actually helping the government reclaim territory from the US-backed terrorists, who are holed up with civilian hostages. The idea that they or Syria are deliberately targeting civilians is childish waffle. Where did you get that from - the terrorists disguised as the White Helmets, no doubt.

Your superior-minded, condescending attitude is as much a symptom of the warped ideology you grew up with as are the countless wars, the genocides, the crimes against humanity, and the widespread oppression and suffering.

Here's some news out of Turkey today: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/istanb ... glu-127766

Berberoğlu is accused of leaking footage purporting to show Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MİT) trucks sending weapons to Syrian rebels to former daily Cumhuriyet editor-in-chief Can Dündar.

More than 1,800 YPG militants ‘neutralized’ so far in Afrin operation: Turkish military All 'militants,' of course, and accusations of 'chemical weapons' being used are nothing but evil lies!
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/more-t ... ary-127729

[Digby]

Rowan is actually a capitalist stooge, discrediting the left (or whatever he is).

More a discredit to humanity

[rowan]

John Pilger

Selected Awards
1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year
1967: Reporter of the Year
1967: Journalist of the Year
1970: International Reporter of the Year
1974: News Reporter of the Year
1977: Campaigning Journalist of the Year
1979: Journalist of the Year
1979-80: UN Media Peace Prize, Australia
1980-81: UN Media Peace Prize, Gold Medal, Australia
1979: TV Times Readers' Award
1990: The George Foster Peabody Award, USA
1991: American Television Academy Award ('Emmy')
1991: British Academy of Film and Television Arts - The Richard Dimbleby Award
1990: Reporters San Frontiers Award, France
1995: International de Television Geneve Award
2001: The Monismanien Prize (Sweden)
2003: The Sophie Prize for Human Rights (Norway)
2003: EMMA Media Personality of the Year
2004: Royal Television Society Best Documentary, 'Stealing a Nation'
2008: Best Documentary, One World Awards, 'The War On Democracy'
2009: Sydney Peace Prize
2011: Grierson Trustees' Award

The people of Korea understand this well. The slaughter on their peninsula following the second world war is known as the "forgotten war", whose significance for all humanity has long been suppressed in military histories of cold war good versus evil.

I have just read 'The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings' (2010), professor of history at the University of Chicago. I first saw Cumings interviewed in Regis Tremblay's extraordinary film, 'The Ghosts of Jeju', which documents the uprising of the people of the southern Korean island of Jeju in 1948 and the campaign of the present-day islanders to stop the building of a base with American missiles aimed provocatively at China.

Like most Koreans, the farmers and fishing families protested the senseless division of their nation between north and south in 1945 - a line drawn along the 38th Parallel by an American official, Dean Rusk, who had "consulted a map around midnight on the day after we obliterated Nagasaki with an atomic bomb," wrote Cumings. The myth of a "good" Korea (the south) and a "bad" Korea (the north) was invented.

In fact, Korea, north and south, has a remarkable people's history of resistance to feudalism and foreign occupation, notably Japan's in the 20th century. When the Americans defeated Japan in 1945, they occupied Korea and often branded those who had resisted the Japanese as "commies". On Jeju island, as many as 60,000 people were massacred by militias supported, directed and, in some cases, commanded by American officers.

This and other unreported atrocities were a "forgotten" prelude to the Korean War (1950-53) in which more people were killed than Japanese died during all of world war two. Cumings' gives an astonishing tally of the degree of destruction of the cities of the north is astonishing: Pyongyang 75 per cent, Sariwon 95 per cent, Sinanju 100 per cent. Great dams in the north were bombed in order to unleash internal tsunamis. "Anti-personnel" weapons, such as Napalm, were tested on civilians. Cumings' superb investigation helps us understand why today's North Korea seems so strange: an anachronism sustained by an enduring mentality of siege.

"The unhindered machinery of incendiary bombing was visited on the North for three years," he wrote, "yielding a wasteland and a surviving mole people who had learned to love the shelter of caves, mountains, tunnels and redoubts, a subterranean world that became the basis for reconstructing a country and a memento for building a fierce hatred through the ranks of the population. Their truth is not cold, antiquarian, ineffectual knowledge." Cumings quotes Virginia Wolf on how the trauma of this kind of war "confers memory."

The guerrilla leader Kim Il Sung had begun fighting the Japanese militarists in 1932. Every characteristic attached to the regime he founded - "communist, rogue state, evil enemy" - derives from a ruthless, brutal, heroic resistance: first to Japan, then the United States, which threatened to nuke the rubble its bombers had left. Cumings exposes as propaganda the notion that Kim Il Sung, leader of the "bad" Korea, was a stooge of Moscow. In contrast, the regime that Washington invented in the south, the "good" Korea, was run largely by those who had collaborated with Japan and America.

The Korean War has an unrecognised distinction. It was in the smouldering ruins of the peninsula that the US turned itself into what Cumings calls "an archipelago of empire". When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, it was as if the whole planet was declared American - or else.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/new ... es-in-iraq

[morepork]

Rowan, access to a search engine does not in itself define authority, and if you have a point to make you should be able to make it without frustrating recourse to labeling other posters who offer a personalised contribution to dialogue as brainwashed by mainstream media on the strength of your cutting and pasting opinion pieces from media sources selected by yourself. You bandy accusations of hypocrisy with gay abandon but appear unaware of the relevance of your own behaviour in the definition of such. Ditto your accusations of ad hominem. I think you have something to contribute, but that contribution is not thus far as clever as you seem to believe it to be. In short, get over yourself.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

At the same time I abhor the Assad regime's atrocious attacks on its own citizens, which have not been restricted to the recent conflict, and do support the international community's right and legal responsibility to intervene.

So the international community should be intervening in America and Britain right now. You have an imperialist mentality and have bought into the racist mainstream news propaganda. NATO members orchestrated the conflict and now you want international intervention? Ok, we have intervention, by Russia and Iran, long-standing allies of the Damascus. That's a problem for you too. You presumably want their enemies to intervene then - the same countries which created the conflict in the first place.

I believe that the Russian intervention in support of Assad is a criminal enterprise.

Looks like an acute case of Russophobia, no different to any other variety of racism, and caused entirely by propaganda. They are actually helping the government reclaim territory from the US-backed terrorists, who are holed up with civilian hostages. The idea that they or Syria are deliberately targeting civilians is childish waffle. Where did you get that from - the terrorists disguised as the White Helmets, no doubt.

It is not just about reading news sources, Rowan; They're all filtered through some editorial prism. It is necessary to go to the primary source documents if you want to develop a view that is free of others' biases; Sources like UN World Summit Outcome documents that lay down the responsibility to protect (R2P):

http://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention ... otect.html

and source documents from International NGOs supported by a broad spectrum of other international NGOs:

http://www.globalr2p.org/regions/syria

Forgive me from quoting from the latter:

"Following the outbreak of violence during March 2011, the international community responded by censuring the Syrian government for its widespread violations of human rights. The CoI, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have all called for the situation in Syria to be referred to the International Criminal Court.

Despite this, the UNSC has failed to adequately respond. Since 2013, the UNSC has passed resolutions on humanitarian access, peace talks and chemical weapons in Syria. Several of these refer to the government's responsibility to protect populations, but none have been fully implemented. Meanwhile, Russia and China have jointly vetoed six UNSC draft resolutions and Russia has independently vetoed a further five resolutions. On 16 and 17 November Russia vetoed two draft resolutions that would have renewed the mandate of the OPCW-JIM. As a result, the mandate expired on 17 November. On 19 December the UNSC renewed Resolution 2165, authorizing cross-border and cross-conflict-lines humanitarian access in Syria until January 2019."

[rowan]

Rowan, access to a search engine does not in itself define authority

The fellow questioned the sources. How could you question that?

labeling other posters who offer a personalised contribution to dialogue as brainwashed by mainstream media

No, it was a response to ad hominems and insults which you have chosen to ignore.

but that contribution is not thus far as clever as you seem to believe it to be

The above evidence would suggest this is your problem.

[rowan]

It is not just about reading news sources, Rowan

You question the sources. How could you question that?

Sources like UN World Summit Outcome documents

You mean the same UN which partitioned Palestine and Korea? Yes, that sounds very reliable

Meanwhile, Russia and China have jointly vetoed six UNSC draft resolutions and Russia has independently vetoed a further five resolutions.

Wonder why?

[rowan]

It's the standard narrative in the West that the North invaded the South, but there were actually no independent observers at the time and the North claims to have been invaded first. This interview explains it well, including the racist ideology behind America's genocidal actions. They pretty much had their butts kicked on the ground at the start of the war, so just took to the air and bombed 'everything that moved.' South Korean atrocities on the ground are also discussed.