North Korea

[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.

[cashead]

Hey remember when I said "appeal to accomplishment?"

[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.

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Cumings is a superb and intriguing historian and undoubtedly one of the most interesting authorities writing on Korea in English; but he is also, undeniably, left-leaning and has his own revisionist biases. You cannot form a balanced view of the 20th Century history of Korea by reading his work alone. He does tend to play a little fast and lose in his selection of references and sources and his manipulation of the historical chronology could be construed as misleading at best.

William Stueck, perhaps the leading right-leaning authority on the Korean War would argue that Cumings "displays a limited grasp of sources that have emerged since he published his second volume on the war's origins in 1990," and that readers "wanting an up-to-date account of the war in all its complexity should look elsewhere."

As with everything, there is a balance of truth somewhere in between.

[Stones of granite]

The fiction of the North’s invasion of the South being a reaction to an invasion by the South was created by the three Soviet Generals that Stalin had sent to Korea to oversee the invasion planning . It is a standard device for creating a causus belli, beloved by aggressors the world over, and still used by Russia now(e.g South Ossetia). Probably the most famous example was Nazi Germany invading Poland to “prevent closure of the Danzig corridor “.

[rowan]

Cumings is a superb and intriguing historian and undoubtedly one of the most interesting authorities writing on Korea in English; but he is also, undeniably, left-leaning and has his own revisionist biases. You cannot form a balanced view of the 20th Century history of Korea by reading his work alone. He does tend to play a little fast and lose in his selection of references and sources and his manipulation of the historical chronology could be construed as misleading at best.

William Stueck, perhaps the leading right-leaning authority on the Korean War would argue that Cumings "displays a limited grasp of sources that have emerged since he published his second volume on the war's origins in 1990," and that readers "wanting an up-to-date account of the war in all its complexity should look elsewhere."

As with everything, there is a balance of truth somewhere in between.

Bruce Cumings (born September 5, 1943) is an American historian of East Asia, professor, lecturer and author. He is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History, and former chair of the history department at the University of Chicago. He specializes in modern Korean history and contemporary international relations.

In May 2007, Cumings was the first recipient of the Kim Dae Jung Academic Award for Outstanding Achievements and Scholarly Contributions to Democracy, Human Rights and Peace granted by South Korea. The award is named in honor of 2000 Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President of South Korea Kim Dae Jung. The award recognizes Cumings for his "outstanding scholarship, and engaged public activity regarding human rights and democratization during the decades of dictatorship in Korea, and after the dictatorship ended in 1987."

Cumings' Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1 (1980) won the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association, and his Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2 (1991) won the Quincy Wright Book Award of the International Studies Association.[1]

- Wiki

Reginald Thompson's first hand account provides a very similar account of the war's origins in 'Cry Korea,' re-released several years ago after government-imposed censorship was relaxed. These are Western historians, of course, American and British. It would be very interesting to see what the North Koreans themselves think about it, and also what the Russian and Chinese perspective is.

[morepork]

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.

and he does it again. You have issues my friend. Every point you make above can be applied legitimately to your own posting.

[rowan]

Anyone who wishes to examine the chronology of this thread will see that I began by presenting perfectly valid opinions, was challenged on my sources, presented the sources, was told the sources were biased, replied that mainstream media was itself extremely biased, came in for a barrage of ad hominems and insults, and thus the tit-for-tat began. You completely ignored the initial, unprovoked ad hominems and insults I responded to and are taking exception to the presentation of the sources I was challenged on to begin with. I'm well aware that this is the standard tactic, to try and discredit me because you can't discredit my arguments and the subject matter I've backed them up with. Puja actually owned up to this on another thread before deciding he'd rather hide from me

[SerjeantWildgoose]

Rowan, you Clampet! You don't have arguments; you merely rehash the arguments of others and stick them on here in voluminous quotes. Given that you are merely representing the arguments of others, it is surely appropriate to question the credibility of those whose arguments you present?

[morepork]

Seconded. You do not have any arguments. You seem to specialise instead in having arguments.

[rowan]

Once again, you challenged my sources. If you don't like them, I have others...

[SerjeantWildgoose]

I'd say its a fair bet I won't like those either but fill your boots.