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talkpoliticsI mean not exactly "us", but the U.S. See, the North Korean people are deprived of many things. Freedom, you'd say. Sure, freedom. Also, food. (They do have plenty of weapons, though). But one thing is more abundant than anything else: propaganda. They start getting fed anti-US hatred from the cradle. They're taught to hate the "imperialist aggressor" in their guts from day one.
This propaganda functions flawlessly, because it feeds on the collective memory from the Korean war. It's a war that keeps defining the life and mindset of North Koreans to this very day. The fact that technically, the war ain't even over yet, is helping a lot in that respect, too. In fact, no peace treaty has ever been signed, there's just an armistice. Six decades of official war! Amazing.
Let me remind how it all started. On June 25, 1950, the NK army crossed the 38th parallel. With this invasion, they wanted to achieve the second unification of the Korean peninsula. To put it bluntly, North Korea was the one that started this war.
But when Donald Trump is now threatening in straight terms that NK would "face things it never thought possible", this is feeding pretty neatly into Kim's propaganda, and also giving more ammo to the collective memory about the events from six decades ago. And when US secretary of defense James Mattis is accusing the NK regime of "destroying its own people", the propaganda is eager to revive the painful national trauma.
Because the North Koreans have already suffered a mass annihilation once: between 1950 and 1953. The US bombers dropped tons of death over NK for three years back then. Completely disregarding the civil population, as Bruce Cumings testifies in his book The Korean War (he calls America's actions a war crime, plain and simple).
The US dropped more bombs and napalm over NK than in the entire WW2 battle against Japan. 20% of the entire NK population perished in those air strikes, Gen. Curtis LeMay attests (he was the commander of the US air force at the time). In a 1984 interview he noted that all NK cities were leveled to the ground by the US in one way or another. Also, some cities in SK, like Pusan. That one went down by mistake, a miscalculation. Friendly fire, you know.
Another notable person from that epoch, the then US secretary of state Dean Rusk who was responsible for East Asia during the Korean war, said that the US bombed everything and anything that moved beyond the 38th parallel. The US had complete domination in the sky, and they used it to turn NK into rubble. And in an 1954 interview, the allied forces commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur expressed his regrets that he hadn't received approval to carry out his plan of ending the war Japan-style, within just ten days.
That plan included dropping "between 30 and 50 nukes". What's more, MacArthur also wanted to turn the border between North Korea and China into an impassable death zone by covering it in a 5km belt of radioactive cobalt. The purpose was to prevent any sort of support to NK from China. Eventually, the UN and the US state department rejected the plan.
All these unpleasant historical facts may've long been forgotten in the West, because they're not taught in school. But in the minds of the North Koreans, they're pretty much alive to this day. These are massacres, war crimes. Like the one in No Gun Ree. As it transpired in 1999, US soldiers had slaughtered hundreds of civilians there who were fleeing from the war. Killing refugees. Because those were coming from a commie country.
The anti-communist witch-hunts in South Korea during and after the war were even deadlier. Right after the war broke out, thousands of real or perceived communists and NK sympathizers were rounded up and executed south of the border. The US officers knew full well what was happening, but they turned the other way. And because the reports and photos from those atrocities remained under wraps for decades, the truth only transpired in 2008. The so called The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea, assembled by former SK president Roh Moo-Hyun, estimates the number of victims to at least 100,000. North Korea was falsely blamed for the bulk of those atrocities. They did make similar purges on their territory, of course. But not those.
So keep all that in mind when you're thinking of the crazy North Koreans and their hatred of America.
This propaganda functions flawlessly, because it feeds on the collective memory from the Korean war. It's a war that keeps defining the life and mindset of North Koreans to this very day. The fact that technically, the war ain't even over yet, is helping a lot in that respect, too. In fact, no peace treaty has ever been signed, there's just an armistice. Six decades of official war! Amazing.
Let me remind how it all started. On June 25, 1950, the NK army crossed the 38th parallel. With this invasion, they wanted to achieve the second unification of the Korean peninsula. To put it bluntly, North Korea was the one that started this war.
But when Donald Trump is now threatening in straight terms that NK would "face things it never thought possible", this is feeding pretty neatly into Kim's propaganda, and also giving more ammo to the collective memory about the events from six decades ago. And when US secretary of defense James Mattis is accusing the NK regime of "destroying its own people", the propaganda is eager to revive the painful national trauma.
Because the North Koreans have already suffered a mass annihilation once: between 1950 and 1953. The US bombers dropped tons of death over NK for three years back then. Completely disregarding the civil population, as Bruce Cumings testifies in his book The Korean War (he calls America's actions a war crime, plain and simple).
The US dropped more bombs and napalm over NK than in the entire WW2 battle against Japan. 20% of the entire NK population perished in those air strikes, Gen. Curtis LeMay attests (he was the commander of the US air force at the time). In a 1984 interview he noted that all NK cities were leveled to the ground by the US in one way or another. Also, some cities in SK, like Pusan. That one went down by mistake, a miscalculation. Friendly fire, you know.
Another notable person from that epoch, the then US secretary of state Dean Rusk who was responsible for East Asia during the Korean war, said that the US bombed everything and anything that moved beyond the 38th parallel. The US had complete domination in the sky, and they used it to turn NK into rubble. And in an 1954 interview, the allied forces commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur expressed his regrets that he hadn't received approval to carry out his plan of ending the war Japan-style, within just ten days.
That plan included dropping "between 30 and 50 nukes". What's more, MacArthur also wanted to turn the border between North Korea and China into an impassable death zone by covering it in a 5km belt of radioactive cobalt. The purpose was to prevent any sort of support to NK from China. Eventually, the UN and the US state department rejected the plan.
All these unpleasant historical facts may've long been forgotten in the West, because they're not taught in school. But in the minds of the North Koreans, they're pretty much alive to this day. These are massacres, war crimes. Like the one in No Gun Ree. As it transpired in 1999, US soldiers had slaughtered hundreds of civilians there who were fleeing from the war. Killing refugees. Because those were coming from a commie country.
The anti-communist witch-hunts in South Korea during and after the war were even deadlier. Right after the war broke out, thousands of real or perceived communists and NK sympathizers were rounded up and executed south of the border. The US officers knew full well what was happening, but they turned the other way. And because the reports and photos from those atrocities remained under wraps for decades, the truth only transpired in 2008. The so called The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea, assembled by former SK president Roh Moo-Hyun, estimates the number of victims to at least 100,000. North Korea was falsely blamed for the bulk of those atrocities. They did make similar purges on their territory, of course. But not those.
So keep all that in mind when you're thinking of the crazy North Koreans and their hatred of America.
(no subject)
Date: 8/9/17 01:12 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8/9/17 06:29 (UTC)Anyhow, I don't get the navel gazing in this case. If Iraq was building a nuke and threatening the US, sure, there'd be a good reason to ask what we've done. North Korea teaches their population that the US started the Korean war, US soldiers drink human blood, and that an imminent US attack has only been held off for the past 65 years because of the Kim family. It really doesn't matter how humanely the US would have conducted the Korean war, they need an enemy and they'll make up whatever they need. If the US had stood by, let North Korea take over the South, subjecting a few tens of millions more people to what is the most odious government in the world, they might have picked Japan as the blood-drinking imperialist enemy, but they could just as easily have stuck with the US.
(no subject)
Date: 8/9/17 19:55 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8/9/17 21:35 (UTC)And those same people who'd call the USA doing that genocide would react like how they did to Russia bombing Syrian hospitals compared to the USA doing it: a Russian or Chinese annihilation of North Korea would be noble statesmanship by a civilized society, not a cold-blooded slaughter by an empire tired of an uppity tail trying hard to wag the dog.
(no subject)
Date: 8/9/17 21:38 (UTC)Making the largest empire the sole source of all evil avoids dealing with the ugly reality that the only thing that's really different is the USA has no real rivals worthy of the name and the end of the USSR destroyed the power of the narrative, so it's a colossus with feet of cotton candy.