U.S. ‘Totally Destroyed’ North Korea Once Before. Why?
Unknown to most Americans, the US ‘totally destroyed’ North Korea once before
In its Korean War bombing campaign, the US ‘burned down every town in North Korea’
Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 11:42 Updated: Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 11:56David McNeill in Tokyo11
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US president Donald Trump, speaking at the UN General Assembly, has said the United States will “totally destroy” North Korea if threatened. Video: The White House
Foreign tourists in North Korea are invariably steered to the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang, which documents the isolated nation’s crucible years: the 1950-53 war that split the Korean Peninsula in two.
Rural schoolchildren dressed in military uniform and wearing the bright red neckties of the Youth Revolutionary League listen wide-eyed as guides explain atrocities by the “US aggressors” committed during the war.
Many of these atrocities refer to what Blaine Harden, author and former Washington Post reporter, recently called a “long, leisurely and merciless” US bombing campaign: well over half a million tons of bombs dropped, napalm and chemical weapons deployed, cities levelled.
“Although the ferocity of the bombing was recognised as racist and unjustified elsewhere in the world,” says Harden, for many Americans it was just another conflict in a distant and poorly understood country, he concludes. Not for nothing is it called the forgotten war.
The result was perhaps three million dead and, the museum recalls, the first US armistice in history signed without a victory. In three years of fighting a single major city changed hands: Kaesong, which is now the last vestige of a once hopeful détente with the South.
Air Force general Curtis LeMay, head of the strategic air command during the Korean War, estimated that the American campaign killed 20 per cent of the population. “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea,” he said.
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‘Radioactive cobalt’
General Douglas MacArthur’s plan to win was a list of targets sent to the Pentagon, requesting 34 atomic bombs to create “a belt of radioactive cobalt across the neck of Manchuria so that there could be no land invasion of Korea from the north for at least 60 years”.
Air Force general Curtis LeMay, head of the strategic air command during the Korean War, estimated that the American campaign killed 20 per cent of the population
Out of the wreckage of that conflict – unresolved to this day – founder Kim Il-sung built his isolated state, squeezed to the north by an old enemy, China, and a new one, the American-backed South. Instead of nursery rhymes, schoolchildren were taught songs about the “American imperialist bastards” and their “lackeys” in Seoul and Tokyo.
Incursions by American spy ships and planes, and huge annual drills by the Americans and South Koreans that still practise invading the North and decapitating its leadership, have worsened the deep official paranoia.
This is the country that US president Donald Trump threatened to wreck in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
Not known for his deep reading of history, Trump may be unaware that the United States has in fact destroyed North Korea before. And with “next to no concern for civilian casualties, says Bruce Cumings in his book The Korean War: A History.
Amnesia
This amnesia is surely helping to fuel the current build up of tensions. A Gallup poll last week found that 58 per cent of Americans would support military action against North Korea if peaceful and diplomatic means fail.
Where the Americans have forgotten, however, the North Koreans are trained to remember.
North Korean high schools must set aside two rooms for the study of the lives of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il: The Benevolent Sun and the Dear Leader – revered grandfather and father of current leader Kim Jong-un – who defeated the “imperialists”.
Schoolchildren spend a sixth of their day in these rooms, surrounded by portraits and episodes from the struggle against the Americans and Japanese. Anecdotes from Kim Jong-il’s life recall the biblical tales of Jesus Christ as he walked among the people.
All this rarely gets a hearing in America. As Cumings recently noted: “All of our media appear to live in an eternal present, with each new crisis treated as sui generis.” But, he warns, “we forget at our peril” that bellicose threats against the North did not start this week.
- Topics:
- Bruce Cumings
- Curtis Lemay
- Donald Trump
- Douglas Macarthur
- Kim Il Sung
- Kim Jon Un
- General Assembly
- United Nations
- Youth Revolutionary League
- China
- North Korea
- Pyongyang
- Seoul
- Tokyo
- United States
Crimes of ZIonist Occupied Gov’t of U.S.A.:
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
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And you know, we have this mad guy [Kim Jong-un], I guess he’s mad, either he’s mad or he’s a genius, one or the other, but he’s actually more unstable, even than his father, …” (Donald Trump, August 2016 during election campaign)
What was indelible about it [the Korean War of 1950-53] was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States’ air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. …. (Bruce Cumings)
Trump believes that Kim Jong-un is crazy. Take him out.
The U.S. media concurs: the DPRK is a threat to US national security requiring a preemptive first strike THAAD missile attack in the name of “self defense”.
Who’s crazy? Kim or Trump? Never mind if it unleashes war with China and Russia.
According to the Heritage Foundation:
“The rogue regime in North Korea poses one of the most dangerous threats to U.S. national security interests. Pyongyang presents a multifaceted military threat to peace and stability in Asia as well as a global proliferation risk.
Pyongyang responds by saying that the US (including 29,000 troops stationed in South Korea) constitutes a threat to the DPRK’s national security, and they must defend themselves.
America, a threat to their national security?
They have no right to self defense.
The North Koreans are absolutely nuts.
Or are they?
General Curtis LeMay who coordinated the bombing raids against North Korea during the Korean War (1950-53) acknowledged that:
We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too.… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure? Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals (1988)
But it was all for a good cause, killing to preserve democracy.
The territories North of the thirty-eighth parallel were subjected to extensive carpet bombing and fire-bombing using napalm, which resulted in the destruction of seventy-eight cities and thousands of villages. As a result, almost every substantial building in North Korea was destroyed.
According to U.S. Major General William F. Dean:
“most of the North Korean cities and villages he saw were either rubble or snow-covered wastelands”.
According to award winning author and Vietnam war veteran Brian Willson:
“It is now believed that the population north of the imposed thirty-eighth Parallel lost nearly a third its population of eight to nine million people during the thirty-seven-month-long “hot” war, 1950-53, perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerence of another.”
Forget about crazy rogue leaders.
Put yourself in the shoes of North Koreans, they’re fellow human beings.
Every single family in North Korea has lost a loved one during the Korean war. Ask them: who is the threat to “Their National Security”. And its not over. The DPRK has been threatened with a US nuclear attack for more than sixty years.
Imagine what would happen if a foreign power had attacked America, all major cities had been destroyed and 20 percent of the US population killed. How would you feel?
That’s what happened to North Korea.
Spread American democracy. Kill the Communists.
Who’s the threat to Global Security, North Korea or the United States?
Trump is just as crazy as Kim Jong-un.
Moreover he doesn’t have an understanding of 20th Century history, nor is he able to comprehend the unspoken consequences of a first strike US led nuclear attack.
The World is at a dangerous crossroads. The architects of US foreign policy are insane.
In the words of Stephen Lendman, Trump wants to ignite Korean War 2.0, which inevitably would lead to military escalation beyond the Korean peninsula.
Pyongyang in rubble (1953)
This is not The Trump Tower in New York, it’s Pyongyang. Is this what Trump wants to destroy? Again?
Pyongyang rebuilt today
A chapter entitled
The Threat of Nuclear War, North Korea or the United States?
is contained in Michel Chossudovsky’s book entitled The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity
“While the Western media portrays North Korea’s nuclear weapons program as a threat to Global Security, it fails to acknowledge that the U.S. has being threatening North Korea with a nuclear attack for more than half a century.
Unknown to the broader public, the U.S. had envisaged the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea at the very outset of the Korean War in 1950. In the immediate wake of the war, the U.S. deployed nuclear weapons in South Korea for use on a pre-emptive basis against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in violation of the July 1953 Armistice Agreement.”
To order the Michel Chossudovsky’s book directly from Global Research click image.
America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.
This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.
It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.
The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”
