Why are so few willing to discuss real historical events?

[eyeball]

While I reject Omar Chomsky's notions that the US led West is the most evil empire ever, you must admit we did some evil ***, including terrorizing civilian populations.

Military and political leaders - no matter what their nationality - do not rise to the top through honesty. You give these leaders the "benefit of the doubt"? Now that's what I call naive!

Yeah you really see that being expressed during the grief-fest that follows an attack - when the nation's brain gives way to the heart and ordinary bleeding hearts are despised for hating our freedoms and being with the Jihadists. It's almost funny.

[TimG]

If not "war crime", what term do you propose for the unnecessary killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians?

A tragic error in judgement. Part of the issue is I do not see bombing of cities during a war to be inherently wrong. Whether people want to admit it or not, wars cannot happen without the support of the civilian population and that makes cities and their infrastructure legitimate targets when a full scale war engaged.

That said, indiscriminate bombing is wrong when is not connected to the need to end the conflict or when it harms the long term reconciliation between parties. Incidentally, this is why the American leadership consciously decided to not bomb Kyoto or other cities with huge cultural significance.

Edited April 2, 2015 by TimG

[Je suis Omar]

I used to be something of a voracious reader back in the day when WW2 was more recent than it now is. I can tell you that idea was never even expressed, much less was it popular, back in the day. The Japanese were ferocious in how they resisted, and self-sacrifice was considered the honorable thing to do. Even civilians thew themselves off cliffs to avoid the shame of surrendering. Taking Japan by infantry assault would have cost the allies a tremendous amount of casualties, and there is no moral imperative to accept that on behalf of an enemy who will not surrender.

You got USA propaganda with all barrels, Argus, because the USA controlled the narrative like it always has.

---------------------

Excerpts from:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-korean-atrocity-forgotten-us-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity/5335525

Noam Chomsky provides a more dramatic description of the situation: When US forces entered Korea in 1945, they dispersed the local popular government, consisting primarily of antifascists who resisted the Japanese, and inaugurated a brutal repression, using Japanese fascist police and Koreans who had collaborated with them during the Japanese occupation. About 100,000 people were murdered in South Korea prior to what we call the Korean War, including 30-40,000 killed during the suppression of a peasant revolt in one small region, Cheju Island.

...

The official story is that the Korean War began when the Soviet-backed North invaded the South on June 25, 1950. The US then came to the Souths aid. As is the case with most official US history the story is incomplete, if not downright false. Korea: Division, Reunification, and US foreign Policy notes: The best explanation of what happened on June 25 is that Syngman Rhee deliberately initiated the fighting and then successfully blamed the North. The North, eagerly waiting for provocation, took advantage of the southern attack and, without incitement by the Soviet Union, launched its own strike with the objective of capturing Seoul. Then a massive U.S. intervention followed.

[Je suis Omar]

See the following. It provides a good example of how badly the USA has twisted the historical record to cover up its massive war crimes, its incessant terrorism. That terrorism has continued against numerous small countries around the globe - Cuba and Korea are two excellent examples.

The Korean War: The Unknown War. The Coverup of US War Crimes

By Sherwood Ross

Global Research, March 16, 2011

16 March 2011

Region: Asia

Theme: Crimes against Humanity

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-korean-war-the-unknown-war-the-coverup-of-us-war-crimes/23742

[Je suis Omar]

TimG: A tragic error in judgement. Part of the issue is I do not see bombing of cities during a war to be inherently wrong. Whether people want to admit it or not, wars cannot happen without the support of the civilian population and that makes cities and their infrastructure legitimate targets when a full scale war engaged.

-----------------

Is this justification for the 911 attacks on New York?

[TimG]

Is this justification for the 911 attacks on New York?

I was not aware of the fact that the US was at war with Afghanistan at the time. If it was then the subsequent invasion was more than justified as retaliation.

You also ignored the caveats I added in the next paragraph: it must be connected to the desire to end the active conflict. 9/11 started the conflict and that makes it not justified.

Edited April 3, 2015 by TimG

[Je suis Omar]

For those who believe in the myth of a benevolent Uncle Sam, read about it from a man who knows, a man who has the necessary moral grounding to make an escape from the amoral government that was his employer.

The CIA and the Gulf War

by John Stockwell

A speech delivered on 1991-02-20 at the

Louden Nelson Community Center, Santa Cruz, California

http://www.serendipity.li/cia/stock2.html

You've got to understand that the United States is and has always been a war-loving nation, a warring nation. But one with a smile. We've learned how to put a twist on it so we can feel good about doing what other nations have done that we consider to be evil.

[Argus]

You got USA propaganda with all barrels, Argus, because the USA controlled the narrative like it always

has.

Lucky for us geniuses like you, with your special sites that have the 'real news' are clear sighted

enough to see through all that.

Noam Chomsky provides a more dramatic description of the situation: When US forces entered Korea in 1945, they dispersed

the local popular government, consisting primarily of antifascists who resisted the Japanese,

There was no local popular government. You're talking about Lyuh Woon-hyung, who, with some others,

proclaimed themselves the government in September before being booted out by the US in October prior to

holding elections. He had close ties among the communists, and, for some reason, the US distrusted that.

There is no evidence he or they ever resisted the Japanese other than him printing a picture of a Korean

athlete at the Berlin olympics without a Japanese flag.

The official story is that the Korean War began when the Soviet-backed North invaded the South on

June 25, 1950. The US then came to the Souths aid. As is the case with most official US history the

story is incomplete, if not downright false. Korea: Division, Reunification, and US foreign Policy notes:

The best explanation of what happened on June 25 is that Syngman Rhee deliberately initiated the fighting

and then successfully blamed the North. The North, eagerly waiting for provocation, took advantage of the

southern attack and, without incitement by the Soviet Union, launched its own strike with the objective

of capturing Seoul. Then a massive U.S. intervention followed.

You simply choose to believe whatever story you can get your hands on which makes the communists look

good and the US look bad. The South had almost no real army, with no heavy weapons and no air force

specifically because the US did not want them to try to initiate a war with the north. The North Korean

invasion was not exactly spur of the moment, but was heavily planned, with massive numbers of trucks,

armor and supplies there to support the advance south.

The official story is not always a lie, you know, no matter how desperately you want to disbelieve it.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Argus

[Argus]

See the following. It provides a good example of how badly the USA has twisted the historical record to cover up its massive war crimes, its incessant terrorism. That terrorism has continued against numerous small countries around the globe - Cuba and Korea are two excellent examples.

The Korean War: The Unknown War. The Coverup of US War Crimes

By Sherwood Ross

Global Research, March 16,

Sherwood Ross is a wack job and Global Research is the home of wack jobs and fruit loops. You'll need to do better than finding wack jobs for cites.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Argus

[Je suis Omar]

[ name=carepov" post="1043311" timestamp="1428001987]

However, you could also write volumes about American led positive deeds. In many cases, American actions were unprecedentedly good.

That is simply not true, Carepov. The USA doesn't do things for altruistic reasons. Try to describe the good things the USA has done. You'll find it's not the easy task you think it is.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Je suis Omar

[Je suis Omar]

Carepov wrote: As I mentioned, the very lens by which we are judging the West (International Law, UDHR, the UN itself...) would not exist without US leadership.

-------------

Another urban fairy tale, I'm afraid, Carepov.

The United States versus

the World at the United Nations

by William Blum

America, we have all been taught for half a century, is the leader of "The Free World". If this is so, it's proper to ask: Where are the followers? Where is the evidence that Washington's world view sways the multitude of nations? To enlist support for its wars in Korea, Vietnam and in the Gulf, the United States had to resort to a lot of bribery and threats. At the United Nations, the US has, with noteworthy regularity, been on the minority side in voting on resolutions. The table below shows a portion of this pattern.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/USvsWorldUN_WBlum.html

[Je suis Omar]

Sherwood Ross is a wack job and Global Research is the home of wack jobs and fruit loops. You'll need to do better than finding wack jobs for cites.

You didn't even read the article, Argus. And you pretend that you are interested in honesty.

The Korean War, a.k.a. the Unknown War, was, in fact, headline news at the time it was being fought(1950-53). Given the Cold War hatreds of the combatants, though, a great deal of the reportage was propaganda, and much of what should have been told was never told. News of the worst atrocities perpetrated against civilians was routinely suppressed and the full story of the horrific suffering of the Korean peoplewho lost 3-million souls of a total population of 23-million has yet to be told in full. Filling in many of the blank spaces is Bruce Cumings, chair of the Department of History at the University of Chicago, whose book The Korean War(Modern Library Chronicles) takes an objective look at the conflict. In one review, Publishers Weekly says, In this devastating work he shows how little the U.S. knew about who it was fighting, why it was fighting, and even how it was fighting.

Though the North Koreans had a reputation for viciousness, according to Cumings, U.S. soldiers actually engaged in more civilian massacres. This included dropping over half a million tons of bombs and thousands of tons of napalm, more than was loosed on the entire Pacific theater in World War II, almost indiscriminately. The review goes on to say, Cumings deftly reveals how Korea was a clear precursor to Vietnam: a divided country, fighting a long anti-colonial war with a committed and underestimated enemy; enter the U.S., efforts go poorly, disillusionment spreads among soldiers, and lies are told at top levels in an attempt to ignore or obfuscate a relentless stream of bad news. For those who like their truth unvarnished, Cumingss history will be a fresh, welcome take on events that seemed to have long been settled.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-korean-war-the-unknown-war-the-coverup-of-us-war-crimes/23742

[carepov]

[ name=carepov" post="1043311" timestamp="1428001987]

However, you could also write volumes about American led positive deeds. In many cases, American actions were unprecedentedly good.

That is simply not true, Carepov. The USA doesn't do things for altruistic reasons. Try to describe the good things the USA has done. You'll find it's not the easy task you think it is.

You are as biased as the most extreme pro-Americans. Trying to be more objective would greatly improve your credibility.

[carepov]

A tragic error in judgement. Part of the issue is I do not see bombing of cities during a war to be inherently wrong. Whether people want to admit it or not, wars cannot happen without the support of the civilian population and that makes cities and their infrastructure legitimate targets when a full scale war engaged.

That said, indiscriminate bombing is wrong when is not connected to the need to end the conflict or when it harms the long term reconciliation between parties. Incidentally, this is why the American leadership consciously decided to not bomb Kyoto or other cities with huge cultural significance.

OK. I don't fully agree but I can see your point.

[Je suis Omar]

You are as biased as the most extreme pro-Americans. Trying to be more objective would greatly improve your credibility.

The easy test would be to describe some events that illustrated that the USA does good things. Checking the historical record would help.

[Je suis Omar]

A tragic error in judgement. Part of the issue is I do not see bombing of cities during a war to be inherently wrong. Whether people want to admit it or not, wars cannot happen without the support of the civilian population and that makes cities and their infrastructure legitimate targets when a full scale war engaged.

That said, indiscriminate bombing is wrong when is not connected to the need to end the conflict or when it harms the long term reconciliation between parties. Incidentally, this is why the American leadership pconsciously decided to not bomb Kyoto or other cities with huge cultural significance.

A full on admission that you support war criminals, Tim. You are describing what is well known to be a war crime. This is one the USA has often used, in their typical hypocritical fashion , to condemn others when they have been throughout their history serial attackers against civilians.

Did you develop this caring attitude towards the world's poor as a defence for USA war crimes and terrorism?

[Je suis Omar]

You are as biased as the most extreme pro-Americans. Trying to be more objective would greatly improve your credibility.

"The US intervened in the Philippines to "uplift and christianize" the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries. We cannot disregard the historical record and talk about an ideal world. It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is."

- Noam Chomsky

[Je suis Omar]

In the following event in Indonesia, described by Noam Chomsky, below, the US State Department supplied their own list to death squads and then checked off names as people were killed. This is typical of the good the USA has done throughout its long sordid history.

"The most important victory, in fact, was in Indonesia. In 1965 there was a military coup, which instantly carried out a Rwanda-style slaughter, and it's not an exaggeration. Rwanda-style slaughter, which wiped out the only mass-based political organization, killed mostly landless peasants, and instituted a brutal and murderous regime. There was total euphoria in the United States. So happy, they couldn't contain it. When you read the press, it was just ecstatic. It's kind of suppressed now because it doesn't look pretty in retrospect, but it was understood. Years later, McGeorge Bundy, who was the national security advisor, recognized that, he said, and I think he's right, the U.S. should have stopped the war in Vietnam in 1965, because we basically won. By 1965 South Vietnam was largely destroyed, most of the rest was going to quickly be destroyed, and we had saved the major prize, Indonesia. The rot wasn't going to spread to Indonesia after this delightful Rwanda-style slaughter."

- Noam Chomsky

[Je suis Omar]

US & UK genocide in Indonesia

-------------------------

...

Sukarno could be a democrat and a demagogue. For a time, Indonesia was a parliamentary democracy, then became what he called a 'guided democracy'. He encouraged mass trade unions and peasant, women's and cultural movements. Between 1959 and 1965, more than 15 million people joined political parties or affiliated mass organisations that were encouraged to challenge British and American influence in the region. With 3 million members, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world outside the Soviet Union and China. According to the Australian historian Harold Crouch, 'the PKI had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organisation defending the interests of 'the poor within the existing system'. It was this popularity, rather than any armed insurgency, that alarmed the Americans. Like Vietnam to the north, Indonesia might 'go communist' .

In 1990, the American investigative journalist Kathy Kadane revealed the extent of secret American collaboration in the massacres of 1965-66 which allowed Suharto to seize the presidency. Following a series of interviews with former US officials, she wrote, 'They systematically compiled comprehensive lists of communist operatives. As many as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured.' One of those interviewed was Robert J Martens, a political officer in the US embassy in Jakarta. 'It was a big help to the army,' he said. 'They probably killed a lot of people and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.' Joseph Lazarsky, the deputy CIA station chief in Jakarta, said that confirmation of the killings came straight from Suharto's headquarters. 'We were getting a good account in Jakarta of who was being picked up,' he said. 'The army had a "shooting list" of about 4,000 or 5,000 people. They didn't have enough goon squads to zap them all, and some individuals were valuable for interrogation. The infrastructure [of the PKI] was zapped almost immediately. We knew what they were doing . . . Suharto and his advisers said, if you keep them alive you have to feed them.'

Having already armed and equipped much of the army, Washington secretly supplied Suharto's troops with a field communications network as the killings got under way. Flown in at night by US air force planes based in the Philippines, this was state-of-the-art equipment, whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Agency advising President Johnson. Not only did this allow Suharto's generals to co-ordinate the killings, it meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in and that Suharto could seal off large areas of the country. Although there is archive film of people being herded into trucks and driven away, a single fuzzy photograph of a massacre is, to my knowledge, the only pictorial record of what was Asia's holocaust

The American Ambassador in Jakarta was Marshall Green, known in the State Department as 'the coupmaster'. Green had arrived in Jakarta only months earlier, bringing with him a reputation for having masterminded the overthrow of the Korean leader Syngman Rhee, who had fallen out with the Americans. When the killings got under way in Indonesia, manuals on student organising, written in Korean and English, were distributed by the US embassy to the Indonesian Student Action Command (KAMI), whose leaders were sponsored by the CIA.

On October 5, 1965, Green cabled Washington on how the United States could 'shape developments to our advantage'. The plan was to blacken the name of the PKI and its 'protector', Sukarno. The propaganda should be based on '[spreading] the story of the PKI's guilt, treachery and brutality'. At the height of the bloodbath, Green assured General Suharto: 'The US is generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing.'' As for the numbers killed, Howard Federspiel, the Indonesia expert at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1965, said, 'No one cared, as long as they were communists, that they were being butchered. No one was getting very worked up about it.'

The Americans worked closely with the British, the reputed masters and inventors of the 'black' propaganda admired and adapted by Joseph Goebbels in the 1930s. Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the Ambassador in Jakarta, made his position clear in a cable to the Foreign Office: 'I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.' With more than 'a little shooting' under way, and with no evidence of the PKI's guilt, the embassy advised British intelligence headquarters in Singapore on the line to be taken, with the aim of 'weakening the PKI permanently' .

MORE AT,

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pilger_John/Model_Pupil_TNROTW.html

[carepov]

The easy test would be to describe some events that illustrated that the USA does good things. Checking the historical record would help.

I would be interested if you could describe some of these things. Also, as I've asked earlier, when you are judging the American Empire, which empire(s) are you comparing it to?

[Je suis Omar]

I would be interested if you could describe some of these things. Also, as I've asked earlier, when you are judging the American Empire, which empire(s) are you comparing it to?

That's precisely the point, Carepov, one can't locate in the historical record events where the USA has been a force for good.

We don't compare John Gotti to Al Capone or Al Capone to Whitey Bulger to determine who was the worst gangster.

"Others committed crimes too" isn't a defence for anyone's crimes.

[carepov]

That's precisely the point, Carepov, one can't locate in the historical record events where the USA has been a force for good.

Are you saying that America deserves no credit for any of the progress seen in the last 100 years?

[Je suis Omar]

Are you saying that America deserves no credit for any of the progress seen in the last 100 years?

No, that would be patently false. There are many individual Americans who have done much good.

America deserves no credit for advancing freedom and democracy, for being a savior of the oppressed. Ask yourself, "in how many poor countries that the USA has invaded was democracy established and in those same countries how many were brutal right wing dictators?"

The USA has been nothing but a bully towards the poor countries of the world, the ones that can't defend themselves. The amount of wealth that the USA has stolen from these poor is incalculable.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Je suis Omar

[carepov]

No, that would be patently false. There are many individual Americans who have done much good.

America deserves no credit for advancing freedom and democracy, for being a savior of the oppressed. Ask yourself, "in how many poor countries that the USA has invaded was democracy established and in those same countries how many were brutal right wing dictators?"

The USA has been nothing but a bully towards the poor countries of the world, the ones that can't defend themselves. The amount of wealth that the USA has stolen from these poor is incalculable.

America is made up of many individual Americans.

[Je suis Omar]

America is made up of many individual Americans.

No doubt, Carepov, and I dare say many caring, balanced, loving people. This doesn't in any way diminish the fact that the USA, as controlled by a relatively small select group, has been for its entire history a predatory, terrorist rogue nation.

"Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment."

Tom Engelhardt