Faked and baked 'news' promoting mainstream American media has maximized world attention on the ongoing negotiations between American President Donald Trump and Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong-Un in Singapore. In American media the United States of Americans is identified as heroic and the North Korea of Koreans is identified as something beyond the pejorative, a terrible place and communist no less.
Though it probably matters very little that the First World audience of American entertainment and news conglomerates mostly accepts hook line and sinker, criminal media characterization of the two nations Trump and Kim represent, let us hope a good part of majority humanity in the Third World remembers at least some of the real history of American and North Korean behavior in Korea. It is to the Third World that one must look for the salvation of the specie homo sapiens. Nobel Prize in Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz says that this shall be "The Chinese Century." Whenever there are critical negotiations with Americans it can plausibly be a matter of life and death that the nations involved in negotiating be honestly identified.
If not openly stated, it should be kept in mind during the negotiations in Singapore that Americans are indelibly identified as having long begun a holocaust for the three nations of French Indochina, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the name of anti-communism about the same time as its second invasion of Korea for the same openly declared reason, anti-communism.
The North Koreans can be clearly identified as having invaded South Korea on June 25th, 1950, as the forces of South Korea's unloved leader Syngman Rhee immediately collapsed, several crack units of the South Korean military defecting to the North, while South Korean police and soldiers who remained loyal to Syngman Rhee devoted nearly as much time and energy to hunting down and murdering Rhee's domestic political opponents--perhaps as many as 100,000 of them, just during the summer of 1950--as they did to defending their country from the North Korean attackers. [see documentation by the South Korea Truth and Reconciliation Commission further down in this essay]
The North Koreans completed their occupation of Seoul in just four days. In less than a month, North Korean forces gained control of almost the entire country, with South Korean troops--and their American allies, just beginning to arrive in Korea--confined to a small area around Pusan, at the very southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. In less than a month the North Koreans had reunified their country.
During the first American invasion, Americans had unceremoniously cut Korea in two, overthrown a democratically elected Korean government the departing Japanese had allowed to be formed, declared US military law, and eventually installed in the south what would be the mass murderous dictatorship of Syngman Rhee (who was flown in from Washington in General MacArthur's plane)."
For further identification of past American behavior in Korea, we can turn to an unlikely US source, the criminal media-giant all-wars-promoting Washington Post newspaper, which in 2015 published former Post reporter, Blaine Harden's piece on its opinion page:
The U.S. War crime in 1950 North Korea Won't Forget. Quote:
"The story dates to the early 1950s, when the U.S. Air Force, in response to the North Korean invasion [of what had been the southern part of their own country], " bombed and napalmed cities, towns and villages across the North. It was mostly easy pickings for the US Air Force, whose B-29s faced little or no opposition on many missions. The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America's own leaders. "Over a period of three years or so, we killed off -- what -- 20 percent of the population," Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed "everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another." After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.
Although the ferocity of the bombing was criticized as racist and unjustified elsewhere in the world, it was never a big story back home. U.S. press coverage of the air war focused, instead, on "MiG alley," a narrow patch of North Korea near the Chinese border. There, in the world's first jet-powered aerial war, American fighter pilots competed against each other to shoot down five or more Soviet-made fighters and become "aces." War reporters rarely mentioned civilian casualties from U.S. carpet-bombing."
It is still the 1950s in North Korea and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on," says Kathryn Weathersby, a scholar of the Korean War. "People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened. There is real value in understanding this paranoid ["paranoid"?] mind-set. It puts the calculated belligerence of the Kim family into context. It also undermines the notion that North Korea is merely a nut-case state...
Since World War II, the United States has engaged in an almost unbroken chain of major and minor wars in distant and poorly understood countries. Yet for a meddlesome superpower that claims the democratic high ground, it can sometimes be shockingly incurious and self-absorbed. In the case of the bombing of North Korea, its people [Americans] never really became conscious of a major war crime committed in their name." [The Washington Post, March 24, 2015]
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