ABOVE: American innocents abroad. The MASH TV series was a huge comedy hit in the 1970s. As the Vietnam war raged, the show portrayed a bunch of charming, absolutely naive Americans acting like frat brothers at a MASH unit in Korea. Wittingly or unwittingly, MASH sanitized our presence in the peninsula, and in Asia and beyond, while keeping the truth of our horrific interventions well hidden behind a cascade of silly sitcom trivializations . A typical liberal Hollywood product, the furthest it went with its “radicalism” was to laugh like juveniles at the bumbling authority figures sprinkled throughout the plots. No one who ever watched this show could hope to gain any insight about what the US was really doing in Korea or Nam, but they could surely walk away with a sense of deep pride in the wonderful “goodness” of Americans.
Jay Janson
Trump calls mainstream reporters and commentators 80% liars. Blood soaked war-promoting CIA fed monopolized mainstream media accusing Trump supporters and allies of ‘fake news’ has backfired. Essay traces history of genocide-justifying media in America. Ramsey Clark expects eventual prosecution of media executives and media celebrities. Five Nazi media celebrities were convicted at Nuremberg. Two hanged.
Mainstream News: Fighting the Commies in Korea; USA Heroic in Vietnam; 15 Years No Victory, 7 Million Dead, wave after wave of monstrous falsifications and omissions of truth and context. Now Trump, seeking some rational detente with Russia, is being savagely attacked as a Russian agent. The “Free Press” Fake News machine is now paving the road to a nuclear war.
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or many years now the US government has had the best of relations and profitable trade with the Communist Government of Vietnam, the very same Vietnamese government it tried to overthrow for 30 years during the administrations of 6 US presidents, taking the lives of 7 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians[1] with twice as many millions maimed, mutilated and deformed, not to mention the lives of invaders, 58,220 from the USA, 75,581 French, 4,407 South Koreans, 500 Thai, 351 New Zealanders. The cost for Americans was more than one trillion dollars (2017 equivalent worth) – the financial loss to the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodian is usually of little interest to the invaders.[2]
The amount of bombs dropped by Americans on the innocent citizens of tiny French Indochina was more than twice the amount of bombs dropped in Europe, Africa and Asia during the Second World War, and this includes bombs dropped on the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong by American hero Senator John McCain, who proudly ran for president on his military record in spite of Nuremberg Counsel for Prosecution General Telford Taylor having said he would have been proud to have prosecuted US flyers shot down while bombing in Vietnam.[3]
“The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, for nine years we vigorously supported France in its effort at reconquest of her former colony. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we were paying almost the full costs of this tragic [French] attempt at recolonization.
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“We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men – children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals… children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food, children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have destroyed their land and their crops. we poison their water as we kill a million acres of their crops. as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees… they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically, primarily women and children and the aged, as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs…”we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.”[4]
Because at the time everyone was used to hearing mainstream media fake news about Vietnam, King’s angry truthful news sermon shook the world. Newspapers outside the US ran the headline in large bold print, KING CALLS U.S. GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN WORLD, but US fake news media vilified King as an ‘unpatriotic traitor’ [5] frightening African Americans in the civil rights movement led by King. [6]
Fake News-producing CBS, NBC, ABC, eventually joined by Fox, CNN and PBS along with New York Times led print media have conspired for a half century to make sure no mention is ever made of Martin Luther King’s 1967 earth-shaking sermons Beyond Vietnam[4] and Why I am Against the War in Vietnam in which King had condemned his government as ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world for its atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945 meant to maintain unjust predatory overseas investments, and held all Americans responsible for being unwilling to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the overseas profits US atrocities protect.’[4] News-falsifying mainstream media blocks the memory of King’s anti US government nightmarish sermons with over the top lavish amounts of programing praising to heaven King’s civil rights speech “I Have a Dream” during the March on Washington four years earlier when the US invasion of Vietnam had not yet quite reached genocidal proportions.
Corporate monopoly-owned fake news generating mainstream sources of 98% of all entertainment and information have had no problem faking Americans out of awareness of the indisputable and monstrous truths noted in the opening paragraphs of this essay.
Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark feels that if the earlier US genocidal destruction of Korea and corporate media role in portraying it as noble and necessary had been investigated, there is good chance that America’s second and greater genocidal destruction in Vietnam might not have been pulled off.
Ramsey Clark (left) points out that US media repressed the history of the 1905 US colonial crime of recognizing Korea as territory of Imperial Japan in return for Japan recognizing US right to own the Philippines,[8] and that US media sanitized the American invasion and brutal occupation after WWII as if Korea was Japanese territory and not a country to liberate.
Subsequently, the mainstream media did not report that US State Department officials, arriving in Korea with the US Army disbanded the government of the Korean People’s Republic installed a week earlier on September 6, in Seoul by delegates from local peoples’ offices elected in all provinces throughout the peninsula, formed when Japan announced intention to surrender (August 10). These State Department officials proceeded without any Korean authorization whatsoever to immediately cut Korea into two parts to be occupied by US and Soviet troops, establishing a military government, flying dependable rightwing despot Syngman Rhee (right) in from Washington DC (in General MacArthur’s private plane), eventually installing him as president of a separate South Korea Government that included collaborators with the Japanese, and outlawed all strikes, declaring the KPR and all its activities illegal and began a deadly terror of persecution of members of the disallowed Korean Peoples Republic, communists, socialists, unionists and anyone against the partition and demanding an independent Korea. Instead of reporting the above, US mainstream media reported only insidious fake news about all nations ruled by communist parties. From 1946 to 1949 mainstream news hid from its audiences that US in effect declared war on the popular movement of Korea south of the 38th Parallel and set 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 took the lives of some 100,000 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 in 2001. On the Island of Cheju alone, within a year, as many as 60,000 of its 300,000 residents were murdered, while another 40,000 fled by sea to nearby Japan some two years before the Koreans from the north liberated the South from a hated and genocidal regime. [UN sources and Wikipedia]
1950, June 28 —North Korea’s army swept down and unified the peninsula in five short weeks (except for the US Navy defended port city of Pusan); with little resistance from South Korea’s ROK military as most of its soldiers either defected or went home. Koreans had themselves reunited the nation America had criminally divided. Fake news justified a second US invasion and bombing of every city and town flat, both in the South and in the North, killing three million Koreans in the their own beloved country. This set the pattern of media-preached patriotic insanity about protecting American freedom, that would make the same patriotic insanity digestible when years later America murdered millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians in their own beloved countries.
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.”)
“In 1950 North Korea’s army swept down and unified the peninsula in five short weeks (except for the US Navy defended port city of Pusan); with little resistance from South Korea’s ROK military as most of its soldiers either defected or went home. Koreans had themselves reunited the nation America had criminally divided…But that process of self-liberation was not to last. Soon enough, behind the usual barrage of anti-communist hysteria, fake news justified a second US invasion and bombing of every city and town flat, both in the South and in the North, killing three million Koreans in the their own beloved country. How many Americans ever heard of that? That’s why the Korean War has been appropriately called, “the forgotten war.”
The height of Trump’s ‘dangerous unpredictability’ saw Trump defending his respect of President Putin. When challenged by his interviewer with, “But Putin is a killer!” Trump answered, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump later added, “I was against the invasion of Iraq – a lot of people were killed.” “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” In December of 2015, Trump had told MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ “I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so you know. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, a lot of killing, a lot of stupidity.”
If the investors in WMD and profitable genocide on Wall Street don’t shut this ‘wildly crazy’ president up, people might get the idea that all the regime change death and destruction starting with Korea were as US Congressman Ron Paul said over and over again during presidential candidate debates in 2012, “illegal, unconstitutional and a horrific loss of life.”
Post Script
End Notes:
1. This archival research peoples’ historian calculates 7 million as being on the conservative side. It includes what is labeled in Western histories as the First Indochinese War, created when American ships transported troops of the French Colonial Armed Forces back into the Vietnam it had left in the hands of Vichy French ally Japan. Truman betrayed the Vietnamese declaration of independence officiated at by an American colonel and a British major. 7 million figure includes the horrific toll of lives lost in Cambodia after American withdrawal from Vietnam that would have never occurred had the US never overthrown the neutral government of King Sihanouk and later carpet bombed the Eastern half of Cambodia.
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Unveiling The Monument But NOT King’s Condemnation Of U.S. Wars for Wall St. How do the vibrant with emotion eulogies of King’s daughter, sister, son, and two men who held the dying King in their arms (and went on to successful political careers), sound to the demonstrators of Occupy Wall St., when all mention of King’s condemnation of U.S. wars and the “unjust predatory investments they meant to maintain” is calculatedly omitted. “Silence is betrayal!” cried out King at Riverside Church in 1967.
Arundhati Roy: ‘Civil Rights Movement in US Has Become a War Supporting Movement’ Article bemoans how selective it is to bemoan the lack of civil rights, but only in America, and even for those Americans who return from willingly denying the very right to remain alive in their own beloved countries overseas.
Slogan ‘Black Lives Matter!’ Not Intended to Include ‘Black’ Lives Taken by GI’s Overseas ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement operates in blatant disbelief of Martin Luther King’s moral and entirely logical warning; ‘will be no progress on social justice issues at home while we go on killing the poor overseas at a such an enormous expenditure of social and financial resources that makes such progress at home impossible.’ Another example of American exceptionalism is Occupy Wall St. diverting attention from US wars.
Taft-Katsura Agreement. []
.
Readers may view a few of the non-Western reports with videos and photos and if interested read the full translation of Gaddafi’s long speech of July 1, 2011 and HUGE PRO GADDAFI RALLY IN TRIPOLI – RAW FOOTAGE, 7/2/2011, www.blacklistednews.com/?news_id=14505 or videos can be seen with Gadaffi addressing the multitude by hookup to remote location at www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSnlIlATIKw and www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3lJAbRkzQ4
Neither would conglomerated 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”.
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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!”
Berlusconi, 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. “Powerful people decided to give life to a new era by trying to oust Gaddafi,” Italian news agency ANSA. Earlier, in July, Berlusconi already had 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]
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Let the reader look at a peaceful and prosperous Libya, just five weeks before the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was urging the UN Security Council vote to bomb it, to the first week of February 2011, when the UN Quality of Life Index of 2010 had Libya ranked the 53rd highest nation, ahead of nine European nations (including Russia), a beautiful well kept Arab Socialist country, where everyone owned their own home, enjoyed free and modern health care, free good education up through PhD, a low infant mortality, the cheapest imaginable gasoline for cars – everyone was by law free from exploitation as even all wage labor was strictly forbidden in the Libyan constitution of a real decentralized democracy in which everyone participated at the local assemblies level where all issues of state concern were discussed before sending delegates to the central assembly of government in Tripoli. Political parties, or gangs of foreign backed profession politicians, were illegal.
For almost as long as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Gaddafi had been slandered in the world’s monolithic corporate powerful daily news media by innuendo and lies denigrating Gaddafi ever since 1969, when he led the bloodless revolution that replaced a British imposed King with a solid Arab socialist government. Using revenue from the oil that had been previously stolen by Britten and France, Gaddafi brought ht Libya up from the poorest to the most prosperous nation in Africa, and was building the largest Aquifer ever created. A great underground river was bringing water to Benghazi and greening the desert.
Gaddafi had revived Nkruma’s African Union and was funding organizations that were fighting against the genocidal machinations of continuing European exploitation of Africa through financing tribal strife as the colonial powers have always done. Gaddafi was blocking US military’s AFRICON penetration in North Africa. Highly dangerous for the US and European establishment, Libya had begun minting part of the 44 billion US$ in gold held in Libya’s State Bank, threatening the US dollar as world currency.
Gaddafi, whose position officially was Defender of the Revolution, had made himself a greater target of assassination and vilification than Fidel Castro was for the speculative investors in neocolonial plundering who dominate the planet. In addition, Gaddafi, by his recent apology to African leaders on behalf of Arab nations for past Arab involvement in the African slave trade had infuriated extremists in neighboring Arab nations tightly allied with, and serving the foreign policy of Western powers.
After forty years of building up Gaddafi as a villain and hateful brutal dictator worth assassination even at the cost of a hundred innocent Libyans as in President Reagan’s ordered criminal 1988 airstrike, an abysmally uneducated and diseducated American public and its propagandized allied citizens in Europe, were ready to believe whatever infantile lies US criminal media drummed up.
America’s CIA fed war establishment media had had little difficulty getting public opinion to accept their pinning the bombing of a Pan Am passenger plane on him. The world satellite audience of a CNN-New York Times led media cartel would never question the absurdity that a successful leader of a revolution that had saved tens of thousand of lives in bringing his once colonially impoverished people to have the best living standard in Africa, could have possibly have had an motive to order the mass murder of a plane load of innocent human beings. Gaddafi, in an unfortunate rush to see lifted the sanctions unjustly put Libyan oil for an unproven accusation, showed an amazing willingness to trust a Western court in an setup arena. The trial, according to the most highly placed legal authorities observing, was a travesty of justice. See [The case remains unsolved, as the man convicted died before his second appeal came up. See US News & World Report 1/2/2009 The Lockerbie Case by Nathan Thrall lockerbiecase.blogspot.com]
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JAY JANSON, who lived and taught in Korea for six years, is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents in 67 countries; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, Sweden, Germany Vietnam and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign: (King Condemned US Wars) http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/ and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/ featuring a country by country history of US crimes and laws pertaining. Jay spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, with Dan Tai-Son, Tchaikovsky Competition First Prize winner, 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, US 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 kind Buddhist equanimity. Jay can be reached at: tdmedia2000@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Jay http://dissidentvoice.org/author/jayjanson/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.
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