Ignorance solvent: Fred Reed punctures silly gringo notions about Mexico

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BY FREED REED

Among many things unimagined by gringos, Mexico boasts an astonishing architecture.

Now that some criminally ignorant yankees, full of exceptionalist hubris, are again floating the notion of invading Mexico, understanding our complex neighbor to the South becomes a necessity for those who retain their sanity.

Introduction

The Plan Revealed

"It helps to have some freaking idea of who you are dealing with, especially if they are Latin Americans."--Sun Tzu

It is odd that Americans know less of the world to the south of them, with which they share a border, than they do of Europe, with which they don't, though they know very little of Europe either. For a country still of large importance in the world, the United States lives in peculiar cultural isolation. Americans are inward-looking and profoundly local, traveling little, lacking curiosity about other countries, and virtually never learning languages. Their sense of superiority to all them fern places leaves them little reason to look around. What could there possibly be to learn? And so their ideas of Mexico, of Latin America in general, go beyond the bliss said to be concomitant to ignorance and plunge headlong into the absurd.

For them Mexico is a land of lazy and shiftless people, dirty, disease-ridden, keeping burros in their living rooms, probably criminal, fit only to be maids and gardeners and prostitutes and, well, just not civilized. All of Latin America is indistinguishable from Mexico.

One looks at this vast ignorance in stupefaction.

Certain differences separate the Protestant, North European civilization of the United States from the Catholic, Southern European societies of Latin America. It takes a trained eye to notice them, though.

Actually a sprawling complex civilization lies below the Rio Bravo, a world unknown to Yanquis, stretching from Nuevo Laredo to Tierra del Fuego. The countries differ sharply—Mexico is not Argentina is not Bolivia, or even close—but they are all Latin. Being Latin implies things many of which make gringos uneasy: The music is so…you know, strident or sassy, and sometimes has horns in it, and just doesn’t sound like Top Forty. The food has too much spice, and so does the whole damned civilization. The churches are gaudy instead of being insipid little boxes with a pointed thing on them as God intended. Latins are brown and they dance. Everything is wrong with them.

In the little literary missiles that follow I hope to give one man’s view of the world in which he now lives, warts and all (and there are plenty of warts). It will be personal and idiosyncratic as well as sporadic, as I am not going to attempt surveys or hurl statistics. I hope they will be of use to any who wonder about the lands to the south.

••••

Glimpse the First

We Up Periscope

Mexico secured its liberty from Spain in 1810, but European influence continued, however never rooting out the indigenous traditions.

It ain't Kansas any more, Dorothy. Not even close. Mexico is the polar opposite of Denmark or Massachusetts, looser, less regimented and less homogenized than the lands to the north, burning at a higher emotional temperature. Colors are sharper here, or at least more prevalent. The past lives in buildings from the sixteenth century, still used. The mass culture of the United States with its conformism and homogeneity, the inability to tell one place from another because all places are the same, the frantic consumerism that has become the American national purpose—these are not yet here.

Things are different, at first physically and then, as you begin to understand the place, profoundly. In any town you find a plaza, unlike any other plaza in any other town, and a church, unlike any other church. Both will be old. The local hotel will be locally owned, alive with color, idiosyncratic. Mexico was not designed at corporate. Nor was it designed by people whose interests were only money, efficiency, and the economy born of uniformity. Imperfect? Oh yes. Those in power have been frequently cruel, eaten by greed, viciously dictatorial, and every bit as bad as the slave drivers of the American South or the good New Yorkers who worked children of six to death or the Christians who exterminated the Indians. I do not romanticize the hidalgos and hacendados. Yet, like the patricians of ancient Rome, they combined the usual barbarity of humanity with an esthetic eye.

Written by a serious author and adapted to the screen by a true artist, John Huston's Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948) presented a credible Mexico along with a respectful homage to its culture.

 

And so, as you enter towns and small cities, you do not see awful deserts of Holiday Inn, Days Inn, Ramada Inn, Hyatt, Sheraton, Arby’s, Wendy’s, McDonalds, Hooters, Burger King, the Gap, and Circuit City, in mall after identical mall after bleak indistinguishable suburb laced by roaring concrete highways. These things are coming, but slowly.

Cathedral, Tepic. Whatever else it is, it ain't boring. Not real Puritan either.

The taste of life differs. Towns have recently been overrun by automobiles, and Mexico begins to follow the American pattern of satellite “developments”—a curious word for sterile hamster plains of quietly unhappy sheep—dependent on cars. Today the rule remains: shops and restaurants that can be walked to, large stores on the plaza or close by and tienditas, small mom-and-pop joints every few blocks. Here you go for milk and dog food, tortillas and bolillos, which are bread not designed at corporate. Of a morning you can go to the plaza for espresso at the sidewalk coffee shop and supervise the beginning of the day. Italians in New York, now aged, would recognize their ancestral towns. It is not the American way. We value efficiency, money, return on investment, the bottom line.

Probably not Mexico.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fred Reed, who met Joe Bageant in Mexico, turned out to be not only a fellow Virginian and expat,  but a literary gem, as well. Fred specializes in sharp social and cultural commentary about any topic that catches his iconoclastic fancy. As the above and many other essays prove, his wit and sense of humor make him a delight to read. We welcome Fred to our pages.

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The Bana Alabed Twitter Account Is Deleting Pro-War Tweets In Preparation For Book Release

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.


—FALSE FLAGS & DISINFORMATION FOR SUCKERS 101—
THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST POSTED ON Oct 3, 2017

Editorial POV: We are not exactly shocked by J.K. Rowling's defence of this outrageous fraud and one of many imperial lies that have facilitated the crucifixion of Syria. What else could we expect from a "liberal" billionaire who made her money writing faddish fantasies for kids?  —PG

Bustle magazine has published an article today strangely titled “16 Of The Best Nonfiction Books Coming In 2017”, despite the fact that it includes in its list a book that indisputably belongs in the fiction aisle. The New York Postpublished an article yesterday about that same book, calling its purported author “this generation’s Anne Frank”, a label given to the Bana Alabed war psy-op last year by the NYP’s supposed ideological rival, the Washington Post. 

How a 7-year-old Aleppo girl on Twitter became our era's Anne Frank
The harrowing farewell message came Sunday, just three short sentences. "We are sure the army is capturing us now. We will see each other another day dear world. Bye.”… The harrowing farewell message came Sunday, just three short sentences.  www.washingtonpost.com

 

Other media outlets have joined in celebrating the release of “Dear World: My Story of War, My Plea for Peace”, including Glamour magazine and Bana’s most ardent supporter J.K. Rowling, who earlier today tweeted a sharp admonition of everyone who has ever dared to question the veracity of this patently false act of war propaganda.

The Bana Alabed Psy-Op Proves The West Is Saturated In War Propaganda
If I could have everyone in the English-speaking world watch only one video on Youtube, it would without a doubt be a…medium.com
 

There are many, many reasons to be absolutely certain that the little Syrian girl on the cover of “Dear World” is being exploited in the most brazen act of western war propaganda in modern history to manufacture support for military intervention against Bashar al-Assad, but many of these come from anti-establishment voices that mainstream establishment loyalists like Rowling will be quick to dismiss. The most compelling evidence in my opinion therefore consists of the following video footage of Bana herself.

Here is a clip of a fake, staged interview CNN’s Alisyn Camerota did with Bana and her mother in April, in which the child is plainly sounding out scripted words about complex subjects that she does not understand:

 

This next video clip is shorter and of poorer quality than the one I was going to show you because the other one was deleted by YouTube, but it is still enough to show conclusively that Bana Alabed did not have any command of the English language at the time CNN and Camerota staged their scripted interview. This interview took place after Bana’s family fled Syria to Turkey, shortly before the April interview. Watch as the child is asked a simple question about the food she likes to eat and she mistakenly responds with a scripted line about saving the children of Syria.

Speaking of deleted posts, the Twitter account which propelled Bana Alabed to international fame has been removing its pro-interventionist tweets lately. Here’s an article I wrote back in May of this year in which you can see two embedded tweets which were active at the time of publication are no longer active on the account. Other tweets by @AlabedBana remain, but the ones I’d used to illustrate how aggressively the account pushes for western military intervention against Russia and the Assad government are now missing. The tweets are still archived here and here, however.

Here are screen shots:

 
 

This is not the first time the purveyors of this exploitative psy-op have deleted tweets from the account to preserve its public image. Last year a tweet archived here briefly surfaced saying it was better for the west to start World War 3 than to allow Russia and Assad’s forces to retake East Aleppo, which was quietly removed after public backlash.

 

“Dear world”.

These propagandists can delete all the tweets they like, but people like me will never forget. We will always remind the world of how the highest echelons of American mainstream media collaborated with a blatant psy-op in an attempt to manufacture support for western military interventionism in Syria. We will never let people forget that the west is saturated in war propaganda and to take everything the mainstream media says with a planet-sized grain of salt. The unelected power establishment that is loosely centralized in the United States has launched one of the most extensive propaganda campaigns in modern history against the nation of Syria, and no amount of deleted tweets is going to cover up the fact that that campaign is failing.

I hope that poor little girl at least gets some share of the book profits she’s being paraded around for. It would be the very first good thing to come out of this mess.

I’m a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or throwing some money into my hat on Patreon. 

About the Author
 
Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—“Dear world”.—These propagandists can delete all the tweets they like, but people like me will never forget. We will always remind the world of how the highest echelons of American mainstream media collaborated with a blatant psy-op in an attempt to manufacture support for western military interventionism in Syria.

 Creative Commons License  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licens

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Snipers at Ukraine’s Maidan confess to shooting both sides in Italian report ignored by MSM (Revised)

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First run on 28 Nov 2017. Reposted 2 June 2019
REPOSTED JAN 29, 2022

If we had truth and elementary decency in media, humanity would not be constantly on the brink of catastrophic wars—
ow much of the current Russophobia campaign is to detract from the outrageous far-right regime Barry Obama installed in Ukraine? Certainly, if this wave of anti-Semitism - excuse me, Russophobia - was not clouding everything involving that region of the world, Ukraine’s chaos would necessarily receive more attention.

So even though protecting the US Democratic Party’s domestic standing is probably the primary goal, another key goal is obfuscating the heinous effort to get NATO (finally) installed in Ukraine and to destabilise Russia via Afghanistan Part II.

There has now been 3.5 years of war in the Ukraine, and very little genuine coverage of it in the Mainstream Media.

That’s why it is not surprising that the West has not cared to relay the appalling - but unsurprising - Italian news interview with 3 men who claim they were snipers at Maidan Square in Kiev in February 2014. The Italian newspaper Il Giornale and Italian Mediaset Matrix TV (Channel 5, most popular in Italy, English subtitled report here) first carried the story.

NOTE: These two videos were at one time working normally on this site, but through the deliberate and underhanded sabotage and obstructionism of Deep State tools like Google (YouTube), they have now been crippled in their reach by prohibiting, on false pretexts, their wider dissemination by third-party sites such as the Greanville Post.  Notice that another respected anti-imperialist site, The Saker, also tried to publish these videos and they, too, have been barred from doing so. 


Because of that, try these versions below, outside of YouTube's dictatorial restrictions (make sure to enable the sound):

“Everyone started shooting two or three shots at a time. It went on for fifteen, twenty minutes. We had no choice. We were ordered to shoot both on the police and the demonstrators, without any difference,” says one of the snipers in the report.

Ambitious sociopath Mikheil Saakashvili: an international crook and political gangster in the employ of the West. But 99.99% of the Americans never heard of him. Don't be surprised, it's not by accident.

The Mainstream Media/Western governments have long alleged that democratically-elected ex-president Viktor Yankovich masterminded the massacre of more than 80 people. But does that sound like the orders a sitting president would make, assuming he was trying to stay in office?

The Italian report offers a far more plausible explanation: the 3 snipers - all Georgian - were recruited by “color revolution” beneficiary Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia. This fanatical Russophobe fled corruption charges there, but was fantastically propped up in post-coup Ukraine in 2015 as a provincial governor (given citizenship as well). It seems unsurprising that he would be linked to being a major part of yet another colour revolution aimed at weakening Moscow.

Saakashvili has since been hounded out of Ukraine by the coup regime. His benefactor is obviously Washington, but woe betide the nation he adopts next! The latest report is that he has illegally returned to Ukraine - the man does not have a passport, after all.

In the Italian report the 3 snipers claim to have been hired in the Georgian capital by Saakashvili’s military advisor, Mamuka Mamulashvili. Guns, passports and a $5,000 fee secured the allegiance of these mercenaries.

One of the mercenaries is quoted as saying: "I also told him (Mamulashvili): ‘Things are getting complicated, we have to start shooting….But who should we shoot?’. He replied that who and where did not matter - we only had to shoot somewhere in order to sow chaos.”

But, in one sense, this is is not really news….

This was all already clear at the very beginning

The Italian report confirms what was famously leaked in a 2014 phone call between European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet.

The US made a significant investment, and in capitalism government is a business: it wants a return on its investment. This is not socialism, where the USSR/China supports Cuba, or Iran supports Palestine while getting little in return - capitalist countries have no ideology other than mercenary nihilism.

Paet to Ashton: “…all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, (thus contradicting Ashton, who just said that ex-president Yanukovych was behind the killings) that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides….

Ah the new coalition…feted as democracy lovers through and through…not wanting to find out who killed more than 80 of their fellow protesters. This phone call obviously threw the Nobel Committee for a loop - obviously, they had to cancel their Peace Prize plans for the Maidan protesters and even had to wait until 2015 to award an anti-Soviet Belorussian novelist who was willing to denounce Russia over Ukraine.

So everybody knew back in February 2014 that the Maidan Protests were not a true expression of the People’s will because they had been co-opted by sinister forces. Compounded with the vast presence of neo-Nazis and their Russophobic statements and policy plans, and most people (except Americans and many clueless souls in the "West") saw through the Mainstream Media’s coverage.

That Ashton-Paet leak made international news. It also forced a counter-narrative from the Western nations trying to install a chocolate billionaire - or a former heavyweight champion, that would have worked too - into Ukraine’s highest office.

The lede sentence from CNN’s report on the leak story gives all the instructions an American audience needs in order to turn off their brain before reading: “Don’t read too much into the conversation.”

The problem is that Mainstream Media like The Guardian denigrate such a leak as a “conspiracy theory” when it was actually a serious policy conversation between two top government officials. Either they can’t tell the difference, or they are controlled, because the only possible “conspiracy” here would have to necessarily have to be between Ashton and Paet?

It must be quite frustrating for Moscow: I have no proof, but I assume they were the ones who orchestrated the Ashton whistle-blowing (or leak, if you prefer) and yet the Western Mainstream Media was able to completely ignore it. This is what happens when you have professional Russian politicians, diplomats and journalists going up against self-serving rank amateurs: they don’t play by the rules, even by the rules of common sense, and therefore they have recourse to the unpredictable tactics provided by fantasy and delusion.

There was also some fine whistle-blowing behind the leak that same month of Victoria Nuland’s infamous “F—- the EU” statement.

The actual translation of Nuland’s meaning is: “Forget about Ukraine’s European and IMF creditors who are worried that near-bankrupt Ukraine is going to default: Obama wants extreme right-wingers to take control of the government in order to provide total Western subservience, a NATO base on Russia’s borders and capitalist gutting on behalf of US-dominated corporatocracy/fascism.”

Nuland’s rant came just two months after she boasted that the US had spent $5 billion in Ukraine to achieve “democracy” in already-democratic Ukraine. The US made a significant investment, and in capitalism government is a business: it wants a return on its investment. This is not socialism, where the USSR/China supports Cuba, or Iran supports Palestine while getting little in return - capitalist countries have no ideology other than mercenary nihilism.

Back in March 2014 I posited that Ukraine was not a neo-Nazi movement, but a “NaLi movement” - National Liberals (“liberal” meaning “free-market capitalist” in Europe).

“Because, of course, that’s what the West wants: Nalism everywhere, and for the benefit of the international already-moneyed elite. European social safety nets: dismantled. Communism: already destroyed in Russia and permanently embargoed anywhere else. Nalism for all, for the benefit of a few.”

The 3 snipers say they never received payment and were abandoned by their paymasters, but the ideologically-nihilistic mercenaries contended that coming forward now is an act of conscience:

"At that time I did not realize, I was not ready, then I understood. We've been used. Used and stuck,” said Alexander.

Long-term analysis thanks to  Eric Zuesse

Zuesse

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] corresponded on this Italian report with Eric Zuesse, who was the first to break the Italian story into English. Mr. Zuesse, a historian and investigative journalist, has provided superb coverage and analysis of Ukraine since the situation began.

We must remember that even a fragmentation of Ukraine represents a major victory for the US. As long as they have a hostile “Little Ukraine” government on Russia’s borders - that’s cause for celebration in the Pentagon. The US does not care if a new “Little Ukraine” has lost Crimea and Donbass - they do not care about the interests of Ukrainians, after all.

Russia, even if we cynically assume it to be as self-interested as Washington, does indeed care more for the Ukrainian People because their two fates are intertwined and have been for centuries. 

This desire to keep Ukraine intact and peaceful via democratic means is why Putin refuses to accept Donbass' offer to secede from Ukraine, as he did with Crimea. (Of course, Crimea has a totally different history than the Donbass region, and anyone who doesn’t realise that knows very little about the entire situation, so just politely bear with them, LOL.)

“It’s in Russia’s national interest to improve the situation there, because if Donbass again participates in Ukraine’s national elections, Russia (Putin) will want enough Donbassers still to be living in Donbass so as to enable a neutralist such as Yanukovych to win power in Ukraine again, which is the only possible way to defeat the U.S. plan,” Zuesse told me.

So Donbass will remain the target of the Barry Obama-led ethnic cleansing - i.e., those who don’t support Washington’s man.

“If too many Donbassers relocate into Russia, then Putin’s plan (to use Donbassers to de-elect the nazis from power in Ukraine) won’t be able to succeed,” said Zuesse.

The future of Donbass also reminds me of the West’s “country-which-shall-not-be-named” - Republika Srpska of the former Yugoslavia. That area has been screwed up by the West nearly as badly as Afghanistan, and I cannot expand more on that here, but what does this screwing up mean for those living in Republika Srpska? It means being consigned to poverty and being a pawn (perhaps for decades), much like Donbass may be.

Srpska is basically a card which Belgrade can use to lord over the West: “Stop trying to ruin us, or we’ll annex Srpska”. Being a tool will not serve Donbassians any more than it has served those in Srpska, where poverty is rampant and reconstruction has been the least able to get off the ground in the former Yugoslavia region.

If Putin was a socialist - if he cared more about Ukrainians and was willing to risk Russia’s standing more - I believe he would have made more of a stink about the leaks. Unlike the leaders of the USSR, Putin does not really stand on moral-political grounds - he mainly gets vocal about sovereignty. Zuesse echoed this idea when I asked him how Russia can “win” in Ukraine, much as they have helped “win” in Syria:

“In my personal opinion, Putin has done everything exactly correct, but with only one possible exception, which — because everything else has been SO correct that he’s probably right about that one too: my preference would have been for Putin publicly to challenge the lies from Obama and the rest of the West,” Zuesse told me. “That recording is a smoking gun on a coup in process, if ever there was one….”

So what are we up against, in terms of trying to get the snipers’ confessions out to the general public?

Quite a lot, according to Zuesse, who was the first to be on top of this Italian report. He said his email list for his articles is a Who’s Who of all the top English-language Mainstream Media, as well as all the top leftist media sites…and they all passed. (All except a handful of sites including The Greanville Post, of course, which has always published Zuesse and given him a place of distinction and a logobanner.—Ed)

“My email list includes some of the individuals who own or control major mainstream and many minor ‘alt-news’ US news media, plus top editors and producers, plus many prominent writers and reporters about international affairs. A few leading foreign news media also are included. So, at the highest levels at each of the network and cable news operations and each of the top national newspapers, and each of the top serious magazines, and each of the top online news-sites, there are plenty of individuals who receive each of my reports, and each report links to only the highest quality, most reliable, source for each contentious allegation, and this makes as easy as possible for each of these people to check and verify any contentious allegation that is made.

Those people all choose to keep this information to themselves. A few have privately indicated to me that their career would be at risk if they were to do anything to indicate to others in their organization that something from me should be published. Even at the top executive levels, these people fear losing their jobs,” said Zuesse.

As a journalist, all I can say is: “Yes, unfortunately….”

One thing to keep in mind is this: Who cares about Ukraine, besides those in the region?

When was the last time an attempted coup ever caused an election to be lost in the West?

The West sponsors coups all the time, and the voters in the Western imperialist nations behind them could not care less, so why would they start with Ukraine? The only exception to this was Vietnam.

This is not necessarily cruelty or even arrogance, I believe, but apathy and self-centredness - they have their own problems to consider. It also definitely shows what happens to a culture which accepts Nali-ism and capitalism, instead of the all-embracing tenets of socialism.

Above all, what Zuesse stressed there to me was that ethnic cleansing is going on, being ignored and is being supported by Western media and governments.

Secondly, he stressed that there is no clear Western policy on Ukraine…except for destabilization. Creating chaos is, in fact, a definite policy - it preserves the status quo and makes “stable” countries stronger by comparison.

Thirdly, only Russia has enough skin in the game to care about Ukraine, and they are the only country with the means to do much about it.

But does Russia want to get involved in open war against the Ukrainian coup regime? Would that be successful and would the collateral damage make it even worth it?

Sowing chaos is extremely effective, but not for the 99% Ukrainians.

Kudos to the Italian reporters who broke this story. Other than Mr. Zuesse and his reports for The Greanville Post, all I have been able to find in English has been some articles from the Center for Research on Globalization. When the Mainstream Media refuses to discuss it, all you can do to help is repost what you find….

NOTE: The Greanville Post has covered this important story extensively, please see the following sample of articles https://www.greanvillepost.com/?s=maidan+massacre+snipers
and specifically this one: 

The “Snipers’ Massacre” in Kiev—Another False Flag?
Click here to read it

is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television. 

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Could USA Do Worse To Korea Than Last Time? N. Korean Joy To Have Nuclear Deterrent Understandable

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By Jay Janson
RESIDENT HISTORIAN
first posted Oct 10, 2017 • reposted May 26, 2021

PRECIS
History of genocidal crimes against Koreans in their own beloved country by the USA before and after it became the sole world superpower as a result of the Second World War, a conflict which could not have happened without mega enormous investment in, and joint venturing by US corporations and banks in building impoverished Nazi Germany up to world #1 military force. Why there is joy for having a nuclear deterrent becomes obvious.
—The Editor
—The Editor
 

With seconds to live, a South Korean accused of collaboration or sympathy with the North or an independent Korea, looks at the camera in a testimony that the presstitutes of the Western media have buried for generations. The South Korean regime installed by the Americans committed—along with US troops—unspeakable atrocities on the civilian population, Hundreds of thousands were murdered just in the South in pacification campaigns at which the US army and the CIA were already developing an expertise.

 

1871, June 10 — Adm. Rodgers, commanding five warships and a landing party of over 1,230 men armed with Remington carbines and Springfield muskets attack Choji Fortress of Kanghwa-do, and proceed to occupy the whole island (116.8 sq mi), killing 350 Korean defenders of the island while losing only three of their own, withdrawing to China when the Korean army sends in reinforcement armed with modern weapons. This war known in Korea as Sinmi-yangyo and as the 1871 US Korea Campaign in America.2 

Theodore Roosevelt has historically received a good press because of his fight against the Robber Barons and other popular gestures, including the creation of national parks, and supposed conservationism, but his lust for animal killing and brutal imperialist attitudes certainly cast a pall on his image. From its birth as independent nation, hard-core imperialism has been a trait of US leaders in an unbroken chain of shame and criminality.

1905 — US President Theodore Roosevelt cuts all relations with Koreans, turns the American legation in Seoul over to the Japanese military, deletes the word “Korea” from the State Department’s Record of Foreign Relations and places it under the heading of “Japan,” approving of what will be a brutal, too often murderous, forty year occupation, during much of which, Koreans are forbidden even to speak their language; an unconstitutional act of the US president, said to have been in exchange for acceptance of the continuing US occupation of the Philippines by Japan, recognized as a half-brother empire of the European colonial powers.3

.
1918 — President Woodrow Wilson officially recognizes Korea as territory of the Japanese Empire, refuses to receive delegations from Korea and Vietnam demanding restoration of sovereignty, delegations mistakenly hopeful for Wilson having proclaimed before both houses of Congress, as an addendum to his ‘Fourteen Points“ of a day earlier, “National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. Self determination is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action…. that peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even the great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power; but that all well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them;” a promise become known in the third world as an infamous, cruel and preposterous lie (the Japanese occupiers were deadly in punishing all those involved in the country-wide March 1st Korean Independence Movement).
.
1945, September 8 — US State Department officials arrive in Korea with the US Army, disband the government of the Korean People’s Republic created September 6, in Seoul, by delegates from local peoples’ offices from all provinces throughout the peninsula formed when Japan announced intention to surrender (August 10), proceed without any Korean authorization whatsoever, to immediately cut Korea into two parts to be occupied by US and Soviet troops and establishing a military government, flying in from Washington DC (in General MacArthur’s private plane), Singman Rhee, to head it; eventually installing him as president of a separate South Korea Government that will include collaborators, and will outlaw all strikes, declare the KPR and all its activities illegal and begin a deadly terror of persecution of members of the disallowed Korean Peoples Republic, communists, socialists, unionists and anyone against the the partition and demanding an independent Korea.4
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1946-1949 — The US in effect declares war on the popular movement of Korea south of the 38th Parallel and sets in motion a repressive campaign dismantling the Peoples’ Committees and their supporters throughout the south, becoming massively homicidal as Rhee’s special forces and secret police take the lives of some 200,000 men, women and children as documented recently by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the National Assembly of the Republic of (South) Korea; on the Island of Cheju (Jeju) alone, within a year, as many as 60,000 of its 300,000 residents are murdered, while another 40,000 fled by sea to nearby Japan some two years before the Koreans from the north invade the South. [Wikipedia]

Even South Korean media cannot or will not entirely suppress the truth—

The Jeju massacre in film.  South Korean Director O Muel occupies a rare place in Korean cinema, being one of the very few filmmakers creating works about Jeju Island. All of his previous films were shot on his native Jeju, in Jeju dialect, featuring the lives of people living on the island. O’s latest film “Jiseul,” however, is an artful, grim piece about a horrific historical event on the island. Unveiled to the press on Sunday as part of the Busan International Film Festival, it tells the story of a group of some 120 villagers who hid from soldiers in a cave during the 1948 Jeju Massacre. The historical event resulted in the death of some 30,000 islanders as the government sought to quell an uprising led by a small group of communist insurgents. (Source: The Korea Herald)

.
1950, June 28 — The US attacks by, air, sea and land, aiming at the southward invading army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North), which nevertheless unifies the peninsula in five short weeks (except for the US defended port city of Pusan); with little resistance from South Korea’s ROK military as most of its soldiers either defect or go home; over the next three years US will commit dozens of high death toll documented atrocities (some recently apologized for) as American planes level to the ground almost every city and town of any appreciable size in the entire peninsula, north and south, in the end threatening to drop the atomic bomb, and be charged with germ warfare by some not easily dismissed sources.
 
1953-2013 — The US using its control over international financial institutions and its power over the financial policies of most of the nations on Earth, keeps in place economy crippling sanctions and trade blockades (only loosening them slightly from time to time in attempts to halt the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea production of nuclear weapons as it faces a US, constantly condemning it in intense belligerency, massively armed with ever new nuclear weapons. (US sanctions obviously violate Principle VI c. Crimes Against Humanity: “inhuman acts done against any civilian population.”)
.
1945-2013 — The US Government, under control of its speculative investment banking elite, uses the gigantic world-wide reach of its likewise controlled US media cartel to manufacture an upside-down reality regarding US business and government intentions in Korea (and elsewhere), by blocking, slanting, omission, disinformation, misinformation and a virulent demonization of a nation once bombed flat, twice over, by US war planes; a six-decade propaganda campaign surely prosecutable as a media crime against peace under Principle VI c. of the universally signed on to Nuremberg Principles in the UN Charter.5
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2010 May — An example of ‘sentence 8’ is the Russian Navy derided, and Chinese government ignored story of a old North Korean torpedo having cut in half a modern South Korean warship in an area where days before, US-ROK live fire exercise war games were menacingly taking place off the coast of North Korea; detailed investigation by Japanese found that a US minesweeper, known to have left the day before, might have been practicing with the newest US spider mine weapon, entirely capable, as most modern mines are indeed capable of, blowing a small warship into two pieces; though a discredited and fabulous US accusation, this media doctored widely broadcasted UN backed accusation has however, become accepted as fact by most of the entire Western media audience and will continue on into the future as the truth until the day it can no longer be of interest).6
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2013 and 2017 — A second example of US media crimes against peace, is the present startling situation, as offered in US TV and print media exactly the same as in 2013, namely, that of the somewhat tiny nation, North Korea (size of US State of Pennsylvania), threatening the greatest military power the world has ever seen, possessing tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, with a nuclear attack, not for the sake of the bravely warning of its defense and retaliation power to ward of a feared attack from US planes and ships which periodically fire heavy weapons of mass destruction within earshot of its capital Pyongyang as part of frequent military exercises off its coast; the whole world is constantly ‘informed’ of what a madcap menace its leader is, by a Pentagon fed US media, which at the same time is justifying US bombings, invasions, occupations of some three dozen other small nations. In 1913 the North Korea leader Kim Jong-il received the same treatment in the cartelized US media as his young son Kim Jong-un receives today. 
.
Your author, having Korean family and having lived and worked in Seoul for some seven years, admits to puzzlement that the Chinese and Russian governments have kowtowed once again to the now waning superpower in approving sanctions on North Korea even while knowing the effect of those sanctions on the North Korean economy will cause suffering for Korean people and hardly affect the lives of their leaders. This reminds of the case of the Chinese and Russian governments not using their Security Council veto to block the ‘No Fly Zone’ destruction of wealthy and prosperous Libya by the colonial powers. Chinese and Russian intelligence surely knew that there was no uprising of the Libyan people, as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy confessed one month before Gadaffi’s assassination[7] when nearly one million Libyans, out of a total population of six million wildly demonstrated with a mile long green flag for Libya’s revolutionary socialist Arab Jamahiriya‎ while listening to Gadaffi’s encouraging speech from a secret location as British and French warplanes bombed Tripoli nearby[8] (of course never reported in criminal Western media). 
.
In going along with sanctioning a fellow member of the United Nations for gaining a defensive capability against nuclear threats of the superpower made by both President Truman[9] and the Eisenhower administration[10] before those of President Trump, China and Russia must be deeming it safer to  play along and allow the superpower to strut a bit more before they find an appropriate moment to lower the economic boom on the superpower’s fake trillions of dollars, which will as well end USA’s still overwhelming military superiority.
 
End Notes

  1.  

  2. During the last years of the Joseon Dynasty, Korea’s isolationist policy earned it the name the “Hermit Kingdom”, primarily for protection against Western imperialism before it was forced to open trade beginning an era leading into Japanese colonial rule. A Brief History of the US-Korea Relations Prior to 1945, Korea Web Weekly [↩]

  3. Diplomacy That Will Live in Infamy, New York Times, James Bradley, 12/5/2009. See also the

    Taft-Katsura Agreement    . [↩]

  4. The Unknown Truth About Korea: U.S. Sanctioned Death Squads and War Crimes, 1945-1953, S Brian Willson. [↩]

  5. Manufacturing Consent, Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky. Obama Calls on U.N. to Punish North Korea Over Rocket, but WHO PUNISHES THE U.S.? Commercial media feeding frenzy on the space missile launch by North Korea at the same time whipping up fear of Iran. Obama has harsh words for North Korea, as earlier for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Venezuela and Iran, which received a kind invite to talk mixed in with such severe public criticism as to make the invitation unacceptable. So far, Obama, both as president and as commander-in-chief belies change to serious diplomacy. [↩]

  6. N. Korean Torpedo Accusation Fizzles: Strong Probability of US Mine Strike Investigated

    The self-righteous scowling countenance of Mrs. Clinton reminded us of a serious Colin Powell pointing to photos of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction trucks, of Adelai Stevenson’s photo evidence that planes that bombed Cuba were not U.S. planes, of Robert McNamara on the Gulf of Tonkin attack on innocent U.S. warships, of the John Foster Dulles proving that communists, not capitalists, were out to conquer the world.

    See also Kim Petersen, “Independent Media as Mouthpiece for Centers of Power,” Dissident Voice, 28 May 2010.

    NY Times, AP Consistently Leaving Out Debunking Info on “N. Korean Torpedo’ Claim. 

7.        Neither would conglomerate US media ever report that only one month BEFORE Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's gloating and bragging as having had a hand in Gadaffi's (brutal) death, long term Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had made an abject belated public confession, speaking before Italian reporters regarding huge Italian protests against NATO's war on Libya and its current relentless terror bombing during a strike for better work conditions in Rome in which the cry of union members was, "There is a silent massacre going on in Libya!" and "Don't let Sirte, Bani Walid and Sebha become the new Fallujah or the new Guernica".  Berlusconi, also known to own ninety percent of Italian media, confessed as follows: "Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi hasn't been the victim of a popular uprising!" That is the conviction of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who had been a friend of Gaddafi till Italy became one of the leading countries behind NATO's war against Libya in March spoke as follows: "This has nothing to do with a popular uprising. The Libyan people love Gaddafi, as I was able to see when I went to Libya", Berlusconi said on Friday during a party meeting in Rome. He said he suspects there was a plot against Gaddafi..

"Powerful people decided to give life to a new era by trying to oust Gaddafi," Berlusconi said, according to Italian news agency ANSA. Earlier, in July, Berlusconi already said he was against NATO intervention in Libya but "had to go along with it", therewith exposing the fragility of the alliance trying to murder Gaddafi.  He added: "What choice did I have considering America's pressure, President Georgio Napolitano's stance, and the Parliament's decision?" [Berlusconi says Libyans love Qaddafi: as Italians protest against NATO, Voltairenet.org www.voltairenet.org/article171382.html]    

8.        Your author shall never forget seeing on a European news site, an overjoyed Saif Gaddafi elated, smiling happily, trilled, relieved, convinced that the nightmare was over because a million, or more Libyans in a total population of little more than six, were wildly demonstrating with green flags for Gaddafi and their Jamahiriva or green book government on the outskirts of Tripoli even as NATO warplanes bombed within earshot. His elation was contagious, and for a moment or two I too naively thought yes, they would have to stop bombing for this overwhelming evidence that it was wrong. 

Then I remembered the incredible seeming omniscient ability of Western media to blackout news. Of course, with world opinion always in it craw, 'mainstream media' simply never reported these massive demonstrations for Gaddafi and against the US NATO UN sponsored continuous bombing then already at this juncture three and half months long. (Non-Western media covering the demonstrations did note that the bombings of Tripoli "had declined since the rise of the marches in Tripoli with a shift to increased bombing of other parts of Libya.") .

www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3lJAbRkzQ4 November 30: On this day in 1950, President Harry S. Truman announces during a press conference that he is prepared to authorize the use of atomic weapons in order to achieve peace in Korea. At the time of Truman’s announcement, communist China had joined North Korean forces ... This Day In History, The History Channel. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/truman-refuses-to-rule-out-atomic-weapons 10.  New York Times, June 8, 1984,

U.S. PAPERS TELL OF '53 POLICY TO USE A-BOMB IN KOREA
By BERNARD GWERTZMAN

WASHINGTON, June 7— Documents released today give details on a decision by President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Administration in 1953 to use atomic bombs in North Korea and Communist China, if necessary, to end the Korean War. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/08/world/us-papers-tell-of-53-policy-to-use-a-bomb-in-korea.html

A P P E N D I X
How US propaganda permeates everything and pollutes the minds of even those who should know better.
Douglas MacArthur and US imperialism whitewashed in films

Peck as MacArthur in disgraceful 1977 film.

has been the object of several hagiographic films designed to make him look as a sort of flawed hero, himself a victim of political chicanery, eventually forcing his retirement.
..
Three films deserve mention. The first, MacArthur (1977), enlisted the services of none other than Gregory Peck, a lifelong liberal Democrat who had actually opposed the blacklist and the HUAC hearings. Peck’s participation in this film confirms how little major celebrities understand about the real nature of American power. 

The second feature, directed by a Briton, Terence Young, perhaps even more notorious than the previous one, was called Inchon. The most memorable aspect of this film is that it managed to convince Laurence Oliver to play MacArthur. The Wiki provides useful information:

[3][4][5] Moon was involved with the film’s production from the very beginning.[6] Ishii, a member of the Unification Church in Japan and a friend of Moon, served as the film’s producer; and Moon, although credited as “Special Advisor on Korean Matters”, contributed $30 million to Ishii’s film production company One Way Productions.[6][7][8] Moon initially did not want the public to know that he was behind the financing of the film and its production.[4] Ishii said he was instructed by God to make the film.[7] Additional funding was provided by Robert Standard, the associate producer and a member of the Unification Church of the United States.[6]

Reviewers at the time gave it consistently bad reviews and later commentators including Newsweek, TV Guide and Canadian Press have classed Inchon among the worst films of all time.

While Peck’s participation in the first film could be attributed to the perennial propaganda fog and knee-jerk chauvinism that envelops all Americans, including of course liberals, Olivier left no doubt as to his clearly unethical motives. In an interview he was refreshingly honest about his motives. Again the Wiki:

[3]

Olivier researched the role by traveling to Norfolk, Virginia to visit the MacArthur Museum, and speaking with Alexander Haig, who had served as aide-de-camp to MacArthur.[11] Haig told Olivier that MacArthur’s voice sounded like W. C. Fields, and Olivier tried to imitate this.[5] He enjoyed working with accents, and obtained recordings of MacArthur’s voice. He was interested in various inconsistencies in these recordings, and especially in the difference in vowel sounds made by MacArthur.[3] During filming, the makeup process for Olivier took two and a half hours, but after it was complete, he thought he neither looked like himself nor like General MacArthur.[11]

The 72-year-old Olivier, who had been in poor health for years, suffered during filming in Seoul because of the summer heat. Director Terence Young recalled that between takes Olivier lay on a cot, virtually immobile with pain and exhaustion, but that when needed “he dropped fifty years and stepped forward without complaint”.

This shameful film also featured celebrity stars like Jacqueline Bisset, Ben Gazzara, Richard Roundtree, and Toshiro Mifune, all probably motivated for the same reason as Olivier, money, and a lack of scruples or total indifference to what the Korean War was all about. 

The third and last film meriting mention in this dishonor roll is Operation Chromite.

Operation Chromite (2016) , intended as war epic, latest propaganda effort again chiefly financed by the South Koreans. Stars clueless “action star” Liam Neeson as MacArthur

Providence, which bills itself as “A JOURNAL OF CHRISTIANITY & AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY. What follows is truly Orwellian, so brace yourselves. It is nonetheless an interesting insight into this kind of mentality, still extremely common in the US and other corners of the world. Let’s call it “Christian imperialism”.  Declares critic Mark Tooley:

“North Korea’s Soviet backed invasion was brazen aggression that threatened the still embryonic post WWII liberal order that the U.S. had hoped to orchestrate through the United Nations. The UN role in defending South Korea was an early and still rare instance of multilateral defiance of aggression. Inchon, which routed North Korea after its near complete occupation of the South, was America’s greatest military victory in Korea and MacArthur’s greatest personal triumph.

About the Author
 JAY JANSON, spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh, and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, "killed by the Americans" they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance.. Read other articles by Jay.

News

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Make every homeless tranny

gender comfortable!

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

WANTED: MEDIA FELONS
All abject servants of the plutocracy

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Julian Assange’s Victory

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S MEDIA MONOPOLY IS UP TO YOU.

embassy

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hroughout history, dark and reactionary forces have always attempted to control the world; by violence, by deceit, by kidnapping and perverting the mainstream narrative, or by spreading fear among the masses.

Consistently, brave and honest individuals have been standing up, exposing lies, confronting the brutality and depravity. Some have fought against insane and corrupt rulers by using swords or guns; others have chosen words as their weapons.

Many were cut down; most of them were. New comrades rose up; new banners of resistance were unveiled.

To resist is to dream of a better world. And to dream is to live.

The bravest of the brave never fought for just their own countries and cultures; they fought for the entire humanity. They were and they are what one could easily define as “intuitive internationalists”.

Julian Assange, an Australian computer expert, thinker and humanist, had chosen a new and mostly untested form of combat: he unleashed an entire battalion of letters and words, hundreds of thousands of documents, against the Western empire. He penetrated databases which have been storing the evidence of the most atrocious crimes the West has been committing for years and decades. Toxic secrets were exposed; truths revealed. To those who have been suffering in silence, both face and dignity were finally returned.

Julian Assange was a ‘commander’ of a small team of dedicated experts and activists. I met some of them, and was tremendously impressed. But no matter how small in numbers, this team has been managing to change the world, or at least to give the Western public an opportunity to know, and consequently to act.

After WikiLeaks, no one in New York, Berlin, London or Paris has any right to say “we did not know”. If they do not know now, it is because they have decided not to know, opportunistically and cynically.

Julian Assange and his comrades published all that the West was doing to the Afghan people, as well as to those suffering from neo-colonialism and imperialism all over the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

What is it that the critics of Wikileaks are holding against Mr. Assange? That the snitches and the agents of the Western empire got ‘exposed’? Is the world expected to feel pity for them? Are tens of millions of victims supposed to be forgotten just so that the members of the Western intelligence services and their lackeys could feel safe and protected?

*

A few days before this essay went to print, Julian Assange was cynically betrayed by a country which used to be governed by a socialist administration, and which gave him political asylum and citizenship, both. Its current ruler, Lenin Moreno, will be judged extremely harshly by history: he’ll be remembered as a man who began dismantling the socialist structure of Ecuador, and who then literally sold (to the twisted British and US judiciary systems) a man who has already sacrificed more than his life for the truth as well as for survival of our planet.

As the Metropolitan Police dragged Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London into a van, the entire world could catch a glimpse of the naked essence of the Western regime; the regime in action – oppressive, gangrenous, murderous and vindictive.

But we should not forget: the regime is not doing it because it is confident and strong. It is actually terrified. It is in panic. It is losing. And it is murdering, wherever it feels ‘vulnerable’, which is, all over the world.

Why? Because the millions, on all continents, are waking up, ready to face Western terror, ready to fight it, if there is no other way.

It is because they now know the truth. It is because the reality cannot be hidden; the brutality of Western global dictates is something that no one can deny any longer. Thanks to the new media in countries that have managed to free themselves from Western influence. And of course, thanks to heroes like Julian Assange, and his comrades.

*

Julian Assange has not fallen. He was stabbed, betrayed. But he is here, he is alive, with us; with the millions of those who support him, admire him, and are grateful to him for his honesty, courage and integrity.

He confronted the entire Empire; the most powerful, evil, destructive and brutal force on earth. And he managed to damage its secret organizations, consequently spoiling some of the plans, therefore saving lives.

All this can be considered a victory. Not the final victory, but a victory nevertheless.

By arresting Assange, the empire showed its weakness. By dragging him from the embassy into a police van, it has admitted that it already has begun sewing its own funeral gown.

About the Author
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. [/su_box]




Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report