4. That when the US criminally divided Korea in half and occupied militarily the southern half, no Korean was asked beforehand.
5. That the US disrupted Korean arrangements, brought Singman Rhee over from Washington and installed him as president of an separate government of South Korea in rigged elections under US occupation. [Biographies: Syngman Rhee, Dillard, James]
6. That the Special Forces and Police of Rhee government massacred nearly 200,000 unionist and community organizers of communist or socialist beliefs, not infrequently along with their women and children in the years BEFORE the North Korean armies attacked the Rhee government. [UN statistics document a minimum of 30,000 massacred just on Cheju Island far off the southern coast of South Korea in 1948.] In 2005 the South Korean National Assembly established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission during the presidency of independent minded Kim Daejung. The Commission sought to "reveal the truth behind civilian massacres during the Korean War and human rights abuses during the [South Korean] authoritarian period and to write truth into Korea's modern history and recent evidence of U.S. and South Korean responsibility for the massacre of civilians before and during the Korean War"). [Wikipedia]
7. That when the US invaded in force, the fighting between Koreans was already over, the peninsula again united except for the southern most city of Pusan occupied by American forces - The army of the hated Rhee government had either defected north or gone home. (The large city of Seoul had been easily occupied in a few days. In five weeks all Korea except Pusan had been unified.)(More than a month later came the 75,000 troops strong, 260 flotilla landing at Inchon preceded by 43 planes dropping 94 canisters of napalm with no regard to civilians - now recognized by both sides a an atrocity worthy of compensation.) South Korea Says U.S. Killed Hundreds of Civilians, NY Times, 8/3/2008]
8. That northern Korea back then was more highly cultured and industrially developed than the south - not the draconian, most militarized nation in the world, it is today after having been completely flattened by US bombers and hermetically sealed off by sixty years of severely punishing US mandated international sanctions.
9. The US and its allies even under colonial powers dominated UN flag bombed every city and town North and 3 million Koreans perished, along with a nearly a half million Chinese who in the end came to Korea's aid and pushed the US forces back out of the North.
10. When Korea was again divided, Singman Rhee was so
despised that after the American war was over, he had to flee for his
life. Today his name is avoided even in Korean school books. After three
decades of military dictatorships a civilian government was elected in
the 1990s and the US. has kept the pressure on North Korea militarily,
politically, economically as if the Cold War was still on.
In between the lies and war in Korea then and the lies and war in Afghanistan today, Americans have either invaded or bombed, or both: Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Granada, Nicaragua, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, and Libya, always to protect the indigenous population from itself. Starting with Greece and Iran, America's CIA has practiced homicidal violence in the interests of American overseas enterprise in three times that number of nations. On the screen John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris and many other macho movie idols have pictured US invaders of poor nations not as superpower punks, but as brave, manly and courageous saviors of local children.
I recall how we American WW II soldiers slowly began to understand that by the time most good German citizens realized they had allowed their government to be stolen by self-seeking nefarious gangs, they no longer were permitted to speak out without deadly consequences for their families. And so, I marvel that though most Americans realize their government has been highjacked by a crooked and criminally homicidal investment banking elite, and still enjoy the freedom to speak out, they do not bother themselves to do so.
Before Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead, he proclaimed in two now famous sermons, "Silence is betrayal!" Forty years later, even American antiwar activists never seem to go beyond blaming the war crimes on the various US Commander-in-Chief Presidents, of whom America's number one intellectual, Noam Chomsky, says every one of them after FDR could have been hung if tried by the Nuremberg Principles.
Yet democracy would have it that the president is only the servant of all Americans, duly elected to honestly execute the law in representing the will of Americans in general. And by the way, those presidents giving criminal war commands are never themselves personally pulling the trigger on anyone. It's Americans individually who carry out their president's ordered crimes against humanity while fellow Americans at home watch.
If a people be not responsible for what kind of a government it has and the crimes that government commits, who is? How can it be solely the president they themselves have chosen who is responsible?
Someday Americans will count up the millions of their fellow Earthlings who have fallen in harms way of American soldiers, marines and airmen in their own beloved countries, and come to see themselves for what they are: Less than intelligent, less than honest, less than kind and less than sane in prosecuting all these sixty years of war on vulnerable third world populations without concern for such a massive taking of lives, maiming and destruction.
God Bless America for her virtues and keep her safe, but
"God Damn America for her crimes against humanity."
[Rev. Jeremiah Wright, President Barak Obama's former pastor who presided over his marriage vows and later the baptism of his children.]
---------------------------
Author jay janson, lived and taught in Seoul 1993-99, and four of his draftee basic-training bunk-mates are buried somewhere in North Korea.
5. That the US disrupted Korean arrangements, brought Singman Rhee over from Washington and installed him as president of an separate government of South Korea in rigged elections under US occupation. [Biographies: Syngman Rhee, Dillard, James]
6. That the Special Forces and Police of Rhee government massacred nearly 200,000 unionist and community organizers of communist or socialist beliefs, not infrequently along with their women and children in the years BEFORE the North Korean armies attacked the Rhee government. [UN statistics document a minimum of 30,000 massacred just on Cheju Island far off the southern coast of South Korea in 1948.] In 2005 the South Korean National Assembly established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission during the presidency of independent minded Kim Daejung. The Commission sought to "reveal the truth behind civilian massacres during the Korean War and human rights abuses during the [South Korean] authoritarian period and to write truth into Korea's modern history and recent evidence of U.S. and South Korean responsibility for the massacre of civilians before and during the Korean War"). [Wikipedia]
7. That when the US invaded in force, the fighting between Koreans was already over, the peninsula again united except for the southern most city of Pusan occupied by American forces - The army of the hated Rhee government had either defected north or gone home. (The large city of Seoul had been easily occupied in a few days. In five weeks all Korea except Pusan had been unified.)(More than a month later came the 75,000 troops strong, 260 flotilla landing at Inchon preceded by 43 planes dropping 94 canisters of napalm with no regard to civilians - now recognized by both sides a an atrocity worthy of compensation.) South Korea Says U.S. Killed Hundreds of Civilians, NY Times, 8/3/2008]
8. That northern Korea back then was more highly cultured and industrially developed than the south - not the draconian, most militarized nation in the world, it is today after having been completely flattened by US bombers and hermetically sealed off by sixty years of severely punishing US mandated international sanctions.
9. The US and its allies even under colonial powers dominated UN flag bombed every city and town North and 3 million Koreans perished, along with a nearly a half million Chinese who in the end came to Korea's aid and pushed the US forces back out of the North.
In between the lies and war in Korea then and the lies and war in Afghanistan today, Americans have either invaded or bombed, or both: Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Granada, Nicaragua, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, and Libya, always to protect the indigenous population from itself. Starting with Greece and Iran, America's CIA has practiced homicidal violence in the interests of American overseas enterprise in three times that number of nations. On the screen John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris and many other macho movie idols have pictured US invaders of poor nations not as superpower punks, but as brave, manly and courageous saviors of local children.
I recall how we American WW II soldiers slowly began to understand that by the time most good German citizens realized they had allowed their government to be stolen by self-seeking nefarious gangs, they no longer were permitted to speak out without deadly consequences for their families. And so, I marvel that though most Americans realize their government has been highjacked by a crooked and criminally homicidal investment banking elite, and still enjoy the freedom to speak out, they do not bother themselves to do so.
Before Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead, he proclaimed in two now famous sermons, "Silence is betrayal!" Forty years later, even American antiwar activists never seem to go beyond blaming the war crimes on the various US Commander-in-Chief Presidents, of whom America's number one intellectual, Noam Chomsky, says every one of them after FDR could have been hung if tried by the Nuremberg Principles.
Yet democracy would have it that the president is only the servant of all Americans, duly elected to honestly execute the law in representing the will of Americans in general. And by the way, those presidents giving criminal war commands are never themselves personally pulling the trigger on anyone. It's Americans individually who carry out their president's ordered crimes against humanity while fellow Americans at home watch.
If a people be not responsible for what kind of a government it has and the crimes that government commits, who is? How can it be solely the president they themselves have chosen who is responsible?
Someday Americans will count up the millions of their fellow Earthlings who have fallen in harms way of American soldiers, marines and airmen in their own beloved countries, and come to see themselves for what they are: Less than intelligent, less than honest, less than kind and less than sane in prosecuting all these sixty years of war on vulnerable third world populations without concern for such a massive taking of lives, maiming and destruction.
God Bless America for her virtues and keep her safe, but
"God Damn America for her crimes against humanity."
[Rev. Jeremiah Wright, President Barak Obama's former pastor who presided over his marriage vows and later the baptism of his children.]
---------------------------
Author jay janson, lived and taught in Seoul 1993-99, and four of his draftee basic-training bunk-mates are buried somewhere in North Korea.
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