There is a scary Fairy Tale going around. It's a story that assures
its listeners that we are too civilized to ever risk ending life on
Earth, as we know it.
Do not believe that Fairy Tale! Man is no more civilized today than
on that long ago day when Alley Oop first crawled out of his cave.
Only one thing separates today's Man from Alley Oop.
Nucs!(pronounced, Newks)
Carl Jarvis
On 5/13/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2017/05/12/nuclear-insanity-u-s-threatens-north-korea/
Nuclear insanity: U.S. threatens North Korea
/ 2 days ago
Nuke explosionBy JEFF MACKLER
In the days of my youth, our local peace group began its protests
against U.S. nuclear weapons—atomic bombs at that time—by marching
across the radius of total incineration, in our instance, the distance
from the Ohio-based Strategic Air Command (SAC) Wright Patterson Air
Force Base to a location nine miles away. Everything within that radius,
we proclaimed in 1959, with facts to prove it, would be totally
obliterated, pulverized, reduced to ashes should the area surrounding
the SAC base be hit by an A-bomb.
The A-bombs—the bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
1945—were soon supplanted by hydrogen or H-bombs, whose destructive
power was 5000 times greater. Scientists at that time warned that 10
such bombs dropped in key urban areas across the U.S. could obliterate
much of the U.S, population, while reducing the country to an
uninhabitable radioactive nightmare.
Today, there are many thousands of such weapons. If deployed, the insane
but not unthinkable obliteration of the earth’s people and much of
non-human life itself would be assured.
Yet this insanity is routinely contemplated by U.S. imperialism’s chief
representatives, whether they be Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Donald
Trump—none of whom has declared that the use of these doomsday weapons
is unthinkable. To the contrary, President Obama authorized the
development and production of a “modernized” nuclear weapons program at
a cost of $1 trillion over the course of the next 30 years.
Last month’s dropping on Afghanistan of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance
Air Blast (MOAB, nick-named by the sick-minded military bureaucrats,
“Mother Of All Bombs”) was a warning to North Korea and Syria that the
U.S. behemoth had new horrors to inflict on anyone who challenged
imperial prerogatives.
U.S. President Harry Truman, a “civilized” president from a middle-class
lineage, authorized the dropping of the two A-bombs, nick-named “little
boy” and “fat man,” on Japan. Some 250,000 people, almost all civilians,
were incinerated, with the rationale that this was preferable to a
land-based U.S. invasion of Japan, which Truman argued would have been
even more costly in terms of the loss of American lives.
Subsequently, historians have demonstrated that the U.S. was much more
concerned that their agreement with their Soviet Union wartime ally for
a joint U.S.-Russian invasion of the Japanese mainland would give the
U.S. a reduced postwar role in the occupation of conquered Japan. The
A-bomb amounted to a warning to the Soviet Union (which had no nuclear
weapons at the time) to stay out. Subsequent research also demonstrated
that the Japanese government had already accepted the basic surrender
terms demanded by the U.S. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated
nonetheless, a warning to the entire world.
In recent weeks, some 46 of the 47 major U.S. newspapers editorialized
in support of Trump’s bombing of Syria, without a shred of proof to
confirm Trump’s sarin gas allegations. (See Socialist Action’s statement
of the U.S. Syria bombing on p. 2) We hear few, if any, voices among the
nation’s ruling elite warning against the Trump administration’s nuclear
weapons arsenal or related war threats against North Korea. U.S.
imperialist wars, always justified in advance by the intense
demonization of its intended victims and associated pretexts justifying
war, are the rule in what passes for “our civilized nation.”
The colonial history of Korea
North Korea is once again in U.S. gunsights, including endless
caricatures of the “boy dictator” head of state, Kim Jong-un, not to
mention the never-denied U.S. cyberwar directed at North Korean military
installations. (North Korea is ruled by a repressive Stalinist regime
that oversees a fundamentally capitalist economy with the military
bureaucracy at its center, but it is the task of the Korean people, not
the United States, to overthrow it.)
What is left out of this warmongering hyperbole is the colonial history
of Korea, including the U.S. post-World War II occupation of the South,
where the vast majority opposed the U.S. occupier’s slaughter of the
social forces allied with the Korean Communist Party/Workers Party of
Korea.
From 1905 to 1945 Korea had been occupied by Japan, which sought its
permanent incorporation into the Japanese Empire, including the banning
of much of Korean culture and the Korean language itself. In opposition
to the Korean people, the U.S. occupiers in the South, as they did in
Vietnam, initially sought to maintain the previous Japanese-created
government infrastructure and personnel as well as the associated
semi-feudal social relations.
Korea’s post-World War II history is not qualitatively different from
Vietnam’s in many respects. The northern portion was liberated from the
Japanese occupation by the Soviet army, aided by the Korean resistance;
Vietnam was liberated by the Russian-allied Vietnamese Communist Party,
led by Ho-Chi-Minh.
After the war, the southern part of Korea, by “agreement” with the
Stalinized Russian CP, which subordinated support for national
liberation struggles to accommodation with imperialism to preserve the
privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy, was ceded to U.S. imperialism.
The latter immediately moved to wipe out the Korean Communist forces.
For most of South Korea’s history, the U.S. occupiers installed a series
of dictators, beginning with U.S.-educated Princeton graduate Syngman
Rhee in 1945. Rhee led the infamous Bodo League massacre or “summer of
terror” in 1950, which murdered 100,000 (some estimates put the number
at 200,000) Koreans charged with being “communist sympathizers” while
orchestrating the U.S.-backed South Korean Army’s incursions into the
North.
The insightful Washington, D.C. journalist I.F. Stone authored a
valuable book, “The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950-51,” that
refutes the U.S. McCarthy-era pretext that the Korean War began only
with the invasion of 50,000 North Korean troops. Actually, the attempt
by Northern forces to re-unify the country had great popular support in
the South.
That war saw U.S. and allied troops slaughter some 1.5 million Koreans
and Chinese, with the latter entering the war only after General Douglas
MacArthur, defying President Truman’s orders, crossed the Yalu River,
intent on invading China as well. Some convincing figures put the number
of Koreans and Chinese lost at more than triple this figure! U.S. troop
losses were 30,000.
As with the Vietnam War, which began little more than a decade later and
saw the U.S. murder 4 million Vietnamese, the Korean War was undertaken
by U.S. imperialism in the name an anti-communist crusade. The now
dominant post-World War II U.S. military power proceeded to extend its
imperial control around the world, including through the 1953 CIA coup
that overthrew the popular and elected government of Prime Minister
Mohammad Mosaaddegh in Iran and U.S. military support the same year to a
coup that installed a dictatorship in Guatemala, which slaughtered
400,000 indigenous peasants to defend “U.S. interests.”
In the U.S. during the same period, the McCarthy-era Cold War witch hunt
was launched, which sought to eliminate basic civil liberties and
imprisoned, in the name of “national security,” many those who refused
to repudiate their political ideas. Witch-hunting legislation aimed at
purging communists and socialists from the U.S. trade unions and from
public employment more generally was approved by compliant courts.
Today, the Trump administration’s dangerous saber-rattling has met with
across-the-board bipartisan support—this time with stated or implied
threats of war, if not nuclear war.
North Korea and Syria are placed front and center in the U.S. crosshairs
one day, while China and Russia are demonized and threatened the next.
Meanwhile, U.S. troops, overt and covert, are in combat throughout the
Middle East and beyond.
Out Now!
The antiwar movement’s historic demand, “U.S. Out Now!” has rarely been
more urgent. And we must add: “No to the Obama-era ‘Pivot to Asia,’”
where 60 percent of the entire U.S. armada is today stationed in the
Pacific region—armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. In addition, the
U.S. maintains almost 30,000 troops in South Korea, and regularly
threatens the North with aircraft flyovers and military exercises. The
antiwar movement must demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S.
military forces from Korea and the region. “Self-determination for all
oppressed nations!”
With regard to nuclear weapons, any sane movement must stand opposed to
their very existence, not to mention their deployment. We hear no U.S.
government objections today to the nuclear weapons of the U.S.-backed
Pakistani dictatorship, or to those of the murderous Indian regime of
the reactionary Narendra Modi, or to those of the racist, colonial
settler state of Zionist Israel. These repressive governments, we are
assured by U.S. imperialism, can be counted on to act responsibly! And
there is no mention in the corporate media that South Korea itself
stands awash with nuclear weapons in the hands of the still present U.S.
military.
The Trump administration, which has embraced authoritarian governments
the world over (Philippines, Saudi Arabia, India, etc.) as “friends and
partners who share the goal of fighting terrorism,” has made clear, as
in the past, that U.S.-backed dictators require no condemnation! In the
well-chosen words of an earlier U.S. imperialist president, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, referring to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He may be
a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
With regard to U.S. threats of war against North Korea, we must begin
our response to this existential threat to all humanity by demanding the
immediate, unconditional, and total abolition of U.S. imperialism’s
nuclear arsenal. This is the starting point of building a world free
from all nuclear weapons. We must reject any “rights” or justification
of U.S. imperialism in proclaiming itself the bully cop of the world.
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May 12, 2017 in Anti-War, East Asia, Trump / U.S. Government. Tags: Korea
Related posts
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