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North Korea

"If you only listened to Nazi Radio you would think the USA is the victim and the USA is being threatened by N.Korea." Brad Kahn 

What the mainstream media don't tell you 

"What DPRK leaders say publicly–we need a deterrent against U.S. aggression–is the same thing their diplomats have said to me privately. And how can the permanent members of the Security Council reject this argument when every one of them believes in nuclear deterrence? Which one of them can claim to be under more threat than the DPRK?", 'Remember Pearl Harbor: Provoking Japan, Provoking North Korea', Dec. 2017, Prof. Graeme McQueen
 
"Soviet archives reviewed by US scholars at the Woodrow Wilson Center suggest that “from February 1945 to April 1950 Stalin did not aim to gain control over the entire peninsula.” Stalin, according to the records, assumed that the US would seek control over Japan’s territories. A declassified CIA assessment of troop movements in the North in January 1950, says that the North Korean movements were “probably a defensive measure to offset the growing strength of the offensively minded South Korean Army (sic).” This is in accord with the Defense Department report quoted earlier, which says that North Korea’s threat assessments are shaped by its sense of external vulnerability. It also adds weight to the idea that if you threaten people, they tend to respond." How the US Bullies North Korea, 1945-Present, Feb. 2018, by T.J. COLES
 
 
"An American B-1B Lancer strategic bomber and F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets accompanied by South Korean military aircraft have conducted simulated bombing drills in the skies over South Korea amid rising tensions on the peninsula, Yonhap News Agency says. The maneuvers are part of the unprecedented joint air force Vigilant Ace 18 drills which kicked off Monday. The drills staged by the US and South Korea feature hundreds of warplanes conducting mock attacks on North Korean nuclear and missile objects in different war scenarios, but are claimed to be of a “defensive nature.” US B-1B bomber flies over Korean Peninsula in show of force – S. Korean media, Dec 6, 2017
 
"The absurdly cartoonish “news” one hears in Western media about North Korea is meant to detract from America’s past and current crimes against the Korean people, and to garner support for yet another American-led slaughter of innocent people. (..) What we hardly ever see in articles on North Korea is the human side, some of the faces among the 25 million people at risk of being murdered or maimed by an American-led attack. I was part of a small delegation that visited the DPRK, with the intent of hearing from Koreans themselves about their country and history." By Eva Bartlett, Oct 2017  
 
Obscuring The Truth With Lies & Demonisation, Oct 2017, Ian Sinclair: "Surveying the US media’s reluctance to report on the willingness of North Korea to negotiate, The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz argues: “there are huge roadblocks” to finding a peaceful solution to the crisis “and one of the biggest is the Western media’s failure to simply inform their audience of the basics of what’s happening”."
 
"Journalist Fragkiska Megaloudi, the only Greek citizen known to have resided in Pyongyang, talks to Greek Reporter’s Anastasios Papapostolou about daily life in the isolated country as well as the DPRK regime and its leader Kim Jong-un. - 
Fragkiska Megaloudi is a rare kind of a person who lived and worked in North Korea as a family guest of a United Nations representative between 2012 and 2014. Video Interview
 
December 28, 2017. Gareth Porter: 'My latest at Truthout tells the story of how Dick Cheney and his allies killed a Clinton administration deal with North Korea to end the latter's nuclear program and freeze its long-range missile development program and then killed a Bush administration agreement with Pyongyang to end its nuclear program. And it was all to protect the interests behind what may be the biggest military boondoggle of all time: the "national missile defense system". How Cheney and His Allies Created the North Korea Nuclear Missile Crisis, Truthout
 
Ernesto Che Guevara, on visiting DPRK after reconstruction (L'Antidiplomatico):
"North Korea came out of the [Korean] war without any industry, even without animals. In an era when American air superiority, was much greater, the planes had nothing left to destroy; they amused themselves by killing cattle and what animals they met. It was really an orgy of death that swept over North Korea in just two years; Mig-15s appeared in the third year, and thing changed, but those two years of war meant, perhaps, the most barbarous systematic destruction ever attempted."  Via Luciana Bohne
 
'Putin's Warning To The World. North Korea "On The Verge Of A Large-Scale Conflict".' Sep. 2017 Tyler Durden, ICH: "As tensions between the US, its regional allies and North Korea continue ebb and flow, depending on what and where Kim lobs the next missile and whether Kelly can block Trump from tweeting for the next few hours, Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to personally weigh in on the conflict for the first time since the UN passed new sanctions against the North earlier this month. In an article published on the Kremlin’s web site, the Russian president warned that the two sides are “balancing on the verge of a large-scale conflict," adding that any efforts to pressure the North to end its nuclear program would prove “futile,” and that the only tenable solution to the standoff would be a "dialogue with preconditions." 
 
 
 
"Commentators say sanctions don’t work against North Korea. Nothing works.[ii] They don’t ask why. It’s as if there is no history. And it’s as if there are no people, because people have reasons, partly explained by history. There are no reasons because there are no people. The people disappear. (...) Bruce Cuming’s The Korean War explains North Korea’s resistance.[i] The history provides reasons and makes it unsurprising. But there’s also a story about that history: about how some histories disappear, and must." 'Why the Surprise About North Korea’s Resistance?', August 2017, Susan Babbitt
 
John Pilger: "Look, the problem is not North Korea. The problem is not Russia. The problem is not China. The problem is the United States." 'North Korea solution depends on ‘containment of the US’, Sep, 2017
 
'Trump at the UN: The Politics of Rodomontade. Full of sound and fury, signifying not much' by Justin Raimondo, ANTI-WAR. September 21, 2017: "What will go down in history as the “Rocket man” speech underscores the confusion, the contradictions, the dangers, and even some of the virtues - however attenuated - of the Trump presidency. Despite the flamboyant rhetoric – or, perhaps, because of it – it’s hard to take Trump’s threat to “destroy” North Korea seriously.
Trump knows, as his generals surely do, that the destruction of Pyongyang would be accompanied by the annihilation of Seoul – a city of over ten million people. Aside from that, however, the hysterics amongst us failed to note that Trump’s threat was conditional: “if we are forced to defend ourselves or our allies.” There was much hand-wringing about how such an act would be a “war crime,” and this is undoubtedly true. Yet our historically ignorant – or is that willfully blind? — punditariat seems not to realize that we already “totally destroyed” North Korea. By 1951, the US had leveled every North Korean city to the ground – eighty to ninety percent destroyed."
 
 
"Without the US presence in South Korea the stage would be set for a rapprochement between North and South Korea under the aegis of Russia and China. If a peace agreement was to be reached there would be no reason for the US to remain in Korea. This is what the US fears the most as it would be read out of the Korean peninsula and its position in East Asia would be severely jeopardized. It would lose a major front in its containment wall around China.

With a peace agreement between North and South Korea under joint Sino-Russian auspices both countries would be able to guarantee peace on the peninsula and protect it militarily against any enemies. Trump, with his war-mongering rhetoric has already shown that the US is ready to sacrifice South Korea to obtain its goal of a permanent presence on the Korean peninsula no matter what the cost. Moon must realize this but is caught between a rock and a hard place. Does he have the guts to oppose the US and seek a unilateral peace with the North brokered by Russia and China? So far it seems not.

A Korean peace treaty, in which the North gives up its nukes and the South foregos its military alliance with the US and all foreign troops withdraw, is the last thing the US wants. As far as the US is concerned, If there is to be any possibility of peace on the peninsula it has to be on Washington's terms, which means regime change in the DPRK and a continued US presence on the peninsula to secure the peace. China however would never agree to that, so unless the US agrees to the Sino-Russian peace plan there will be a perpetual state of hostilities on the peninsula with the omnipresent threat of war.

Right now the South is still in bondage to the US. With 26,500 US troops stationed on its territory it can be said that South Korea is being held hostage with a gun to its head. If Moon tries to seek a peace agreement in conjunction with Russia and China there could simply be a military coup with its leaders beholden to the US. It's happened before and can happen again. No way will the US allow a peace agreement which would entail its eventual withdrawal from the peninsula.

The whole nuclear issue can thus be seen as a ploy instigated by the US to allow it to maintain its grip on East Asia in opposition to China. Problem is it's a game of Russian roulette and someone's brains may be blown out. To use a chess analogy as China rises we enter the endgame. There are four possibilities, either China or the US checkmates the other, there is a stalemate or the US throws over the board and we all lose." By Dennis Etler  

"North Korea’s threat of turning the United States into a “sea of fire,” while rhetorically inflammatory and unproductive, is based on its historical experience of the Korean War, during which the United States engaged in a literal scorched earth campaign of incendiary bombing that exhausted all targets. Despite American introduction of nuclear weapons into South Korea in 1958 in violation of the 1953 Armistice Agreement, North Korea began developing its own nuclear weapons in earnest only in the 1990s when it could no longer rely on the Soviet nuclear umbrella." 'The Cold War Never Ended: Historical Roots of the Current North Korea Crisis', Aug. 15, 2017

Some links

'There Will Be No New Korean War': What Putin Knows, Western Pundits Don't', Sep, 2017

 
 
".. for the last three weeks, Japan, South Korea and the US have been engaged in large-scale joint-military drills on Hokkaido Island and in South Korea. These needlessly provocative war games are designed to simulate an invasion of North Korea and a “decapitation” operation to remove (Re: Kill) the regime." What the Media isn’t Telling You About North Korea’s Missile Tests, Sep, 2017. Mike Whitney
 
 
 
Noam Chomsky: "North Korea have continuously offered to cease all development and use of nuclear weapons. - US presidents Obama & Trump both refused the offer." Via MediaLens - https://twitter.com/Merlin_Norbury/status/904722058474553344
 
But the US' UN Haley claims that North Korea is beggin for war ...
 
 
 
 
https://www.liberationnews.org/my-trip-to-north-korea-13-misconceptions-corrected/
 
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/08/16/n-korea-better-equitable-health-care-system-us/
 
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/9245
 
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/08/28/how-history-explains-the-korean-crisis/
 
https://www.blackagendareport.com/US-empire-building-interventions
Imagine a North Korean general boasting that he had killed 20% of the population of the US or Britain. - As did General Curtis LeMay.
Paul O'Hanlon
Pyongyang today
From Eva Bartlett article Oct 2017
Below Pyongyang 1953
 

North Korea Facts

"For those who know little about the history of the DPRK, and would like a text that is free of the West’s official thinking that has locked away the DPRK behind a veil of obscurity, contrived mystery, and the subject of some of the most awful representations, then Stephen Gowans’ Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom will be an informative and thought-provoking volume that synthesizes some very interesting historical analyses.", Max Forte reviews “Patriots, Traitors and Empires” by Stephen Gowans, 2018, Baraka Books
 
 
 
 
 

(North) Korea

Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth About North Korea, Iran, And Syria, 2007

More books by Bruce Cumings   

 
 
 
"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." Cumings, Wikipedia (Sep. 2017)

More History

'Could USA Do Worse To Korea Than Last Time? N. Korean Joy To Have Nuclear Deterrent Understandable', Oct. 2017: "The following is a short history of genocidal crimes against humanity bitterly suffered by Koreans in their own beloved country from savage attack, conquest, and manipulation by the USA before and after it became the sole world superpower as a result of the Second World War, which could not have happened without the mega enormous investment in, and joint venturing by, US corporations and banks in building impoverished Nazi Germany up to world number one military force; a rearmament permitted by the powerful elite in Washington and Europe in clear abrogation of the prohibitions of the Versailles Treaty – with Hitler’s promise to invade socialist Russia in mind."