The Truth Lies Somewhere Outside The Media.

 

         I know we can never accept what we read in our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, but there is also what they fail to mention, that can be as dangerous as the vomit they spew out.

       This article from Real News24. makes very interesting reading, but it should not surprise you, we are fed propaganda, not news.

         You wouldn’t know it if you were to turn on your television every day or simply skim the media’s headlines, but North Korea has continuously offered to freeze its nuclear program. The very threat we are continuously told to fear could be immediately neutralized but is instead repeatedly rejected by the United States.

      However, prominent media outlets such as the Washington Post continue to tell a different story, namely that:

“[North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un] has shown no interest in talks — he won’t even set foot in China, his biggest patron. Even if negotiations took place, the current regime has made clear that ‘it will never place its self-defensive nuclear deterrence on the negotiating table, as one envoy recently put it.”

As the Intercept explains, this is a false assertion:

        “There’s, of course, a significant difference between North Korea saying it will never negotiate to halt or eliminate its nuclear weapons program, and that it will never negotiate as long as the U.S. continues to threaten it…The reality is that North Korea is saying that, under certain conditions, it will put its nuclear weapons on the table.” [emphasis added]

         Not only does the media continue to misinform the public on this issue, but as Noam Chomsky explained in an interview with Democracy! Now, the United States continues to categorically reject North Korea’s proposal:

        “There is one proposal that’s ignored. You see a mention of it now and then. It’s a pretty simple proposal. Remember the goal is to get North Korea to freeze its weapons systems – weapons and missile systems. One proposal is to accept their offer to do that. Sounds simple, they’ve made a proposal – China and North Korea – proposed to freeze the North Korean missile and nuclear weapons systems and the U.S. instantly rejected it. And you can’t blame that on Trump, Obama did the same thing, a couple of years ago. The Same offer was presented – I think it was 2015 – the Obama administration instantly rejected it.”

       Why would they do that? Why fear North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities but then reject a proposal to freeze their production? As Chomsky explains further:

       “The reason is that it calls for a quid pro quo. It says in return the United States should put an end to threatening military maneuvers on North Korea’s borders, which happen to include under Trump, sending of nuclear-capable B-52s flying right near the border. Maybe Americans don’t remember very well but North Koreans have a memory of not too long ago when North Korea was absolutely flattened – literally – by American bombing. There was literally no targets left.” [emphasis added]

       In the early 1950s, the U.S. relentlessly bombed North Korea, destroying over 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, 600,000 homes, and eventually killing off as much as 20 percent of the country’s population. As the Asia Pacific Journal has noted, the U.S. did, indeed, drop so many bombs that they eventually ran out of targets to hit and bombed the irrigation systems, instead:

         “By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.” [emphasis added]

        Despite the people and leadership of North Korea knowing this history and the history of other like-minded states who became easy targets for the U.S. military upon dismantling their weapons programs, North Korea is still to this day offering this proposal to freeze its program.

As the Intercept explained at the end of August:

          “North Korea’s proclamations have been closely tracked by Robert Carlin, currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and formerly head of the Northeast Asia Division in the State Department’s intelligence arm. Carlin has visited North Korea over 30 times.

         “Via email, Carlin described how it is difficult but critical to accurately decode North Korean communications. ‘Observers dismiss as unimportant what the North Koreans say,’ Carlin writes, and ‘therefore don’t read it carefully, except of course if it is colorful, fiery language that makes for lovely headlines. Some of what the North says is simply propaganda and can be read with one eye closed. Other things are written and edited very carefully, and need to be read very carefully. And then, having been read, they need to be compared with past statements, and put in context.’”

       The media’s insistence that North Korea will never give up its weapons systems is completely disingenuous when one reads the entire context of the statements offered by Kim Jong-un’s government. On July 4, Kim’s statement read as follows:

         “[T]he DPRK would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case nor flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering the nuclear force chosen by itself unless the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK are definitely terminated.” [emphasis added]

Quid pro quo.

        This is a deal-breaker for the U.S. even though it would undoubtedly diffuse the entire situation and provide the region with at least a brief period of stability.

            The U.S., together with South Korea, simulates an invasion of North Korea every year. In Donald Trump’s first six months in office, he dropped over 20,650 bombs in approximately seven countries, which killed thousands of civilians. By comparison, Kim Jong-un bombs the ocean.

      No matter how objectively you look at it, North Korea has a genuine reason to want to be prepared in the face of American aggression. But a military strike option to counter any potential North Korean threat is not the only option and, further, is almost certainly the worst option on the table.

         After the failures and crimes of U.S. politicians and the military in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan — to name a few — we should be demanding that our world leaders try the diplomatic option advanced by the North Korean regime to the fullest extent in order to avoid a potential nuclear holocaust and the deaths of millions of innocent civilians.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Some Thoughts On Trump.

 

       I don't as a rule write about individual leaders, I view them all just as necessary cogs in the capitalist juggernaut, assistants to the financial Mafia, get rid of that economic system and the leaders will probably disappear with the system. I am, however, a great admirer of Frankie Boyle, a Glasgow comedian, I love his style of humour, and his outspoken manner, and though he is expert at making people laugh, he also makes people think, and he is not afraid to make his views known. This latest piece by him sums up a lot of what most of us are thinking.

        It’s impossible to imagine what it’s like to be killed in a nuclear explosion, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I think it will probably involve being blasted over quite a large distance, and at a surprising height, while simultaneously having all your skin burnt off. I know we think of it as being an instant death, but there’s every chance that there will be a few seconds where you’ll be sailing out of your local school catchment area, at a height of about a hundred feet or so, as some sort of screaming skeleton. Maybe you will get to see your family melt before the blast picks you up, and your final memory will be of their faces devolving into cubism. Or maybe it’s more like being smashed to pieces by a wave of rubble. After all those years of driving into town to go to work, or go shopping, your city centre will finally be coming to you, moving at several thousand miles an hour, and hotter than Venus in July.
        Donald Trump got himself into yet another war of words with North Korea after they test fired a missile that went over Japan. In a war of words you do not want to be on Trump’s side: a man who speaks like he’s on shuffle and has a smaller vocabulary than an upturned calculator. It’s incredible to see the US take the moral high ground about, of all things, nuking Japan. Bear in mind that Japan is a country that specialises in wooden buildings with paper walls. It’s odd to think that as millions of people hunkered down in their paper houses during a potential nuclear attack, they were still safer than the many thousands of people in the UK living in high rise social housing.
Trump is like a fat bee bashing around inside a greenhouse repeatedly failing to understand why the world doesn’t work as he thought it did. The chances of this unrepentant lunatic starting World War III are surely very high. Often, when I hear Trump talk even the most egregious garbage about wanting to strip people of their healthcare, or exile children, I’m actually just glad that he’s talking about the future, weighing his words like I would those of a possible suicide.
This is a man who obsesses over winning, and uses success as his single metric for evaluating humanity, who has become the key player in a game which it is impossible too win. Who would win in an all out conflict with North Korea? My best guess is a guy in Tokyo who knows how to catch and roast rats, who owns a shopping trolley and has the entrepreneurial flair to get out into the smoking rubble of his city and begin trading his rodents on sticks for essential items. A UN expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations told the media that Trumps latest intervention on sanctions was, ‘an exceedingly silly thing to say’. We can only assume he’s had that statement prepared for the last two years and since writing it has thought about pressing the send button a couple of hundred times a day.
          Trump isn’t a military man, and salutes troops in a way that makes Benny Hill look like Stalin. I hate the way that “draft dodger’ is thrown at Trump as an insult. I mean, if you want to insult a guy who looks like God twisted some haemorrhoids into a balloon animal, why pick one of the few moments that he behaved rationally? Some take comfort in the fact that a triumvirate of US generals have essentially annexed military policy. In many ways, the concentration of power into the hands of Generals Mattis, Kelly and McMaster is the only thing worse than Trump.
           It’s impossible to have been in an institution like the US army your whole life without having internalised a worldview that believes complex international relationships are best handled through the medium of high explosives. In their own way, their worldview will be as limited as those priests who live in the catacombs under the Vatican who can see in the dark and have five hundred words for a child’s bottom. The US military view is one that sees existence as a permanent war for resources. A huge reason for elite climate change denial is that it collapses the American worldview. If you allow that climate change is real, the war for resources is two dying men in a locked room fighting over a live hand-grenade. It’s also a worldview of permanent escalation. In the aftermath of a college shooting, we always laugh at the wing-nut who calls for more guns on campus. Yet that’s actually a pretty tight metaphor for US foreign policy, one where the US is both the wing-nut, and the shooter.
          If I might make one suggestion to the North Koreans, please don’t drop bombs indiscriminately upon the USA. There are specific targets you should hit that would upset the President the most and, luckily for your bombing crews, they’ve all got his name written on them in fifty foot high letters.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Dollar, Built On Blood.

 

 The bringer of democracy!!

      How can you in a sane and rational manner justify the total destruction of two countries which have never invaded or attacked you? Iraq and Syria are now fields of ruin, swamps of blood, filling the air with the stench of violent death. So we the moral and righteous West, decided that Saddam and Assad were bad men, therefore justifying the deaths of countless thousands of innocent people, and the displacing of millions, creating an endless flow of miserable, traumatised refugees fleeing death and destruction and ending up either drowned in the Mediterranean, or in concentration camps across Europe.  

      The UK has played a brutal and savage pivotal part in this modern Dante's Inferno. This country, weighted down with austerity, has seen fit to spend billions of pounds on this blood soaked imperialist resource grab, we have to accept, that is all this is about. During our "difficult times" when we the people of this country were seeing our social services being decimated, wages slashed, and benefits cut, with the cry, "we can't afford these thing", our beloved lords and masters saw fit to spend more than £30 billion on destroying Iraq, with all the misery, death and destruction that that entailed.

      Not content with that, our blood soaked parasitic masters decide to go gung-ho into Syria. To date our cash strapped loving, caring, people's government, this year alone, (2017) has  unloaded 216 bombs and missiles on that unfortunate country of Syria. Each of these implements of death costing between £22,000 to £800,000, not counting the cost of getting them there and then deploying them. Of course all of them will be replaced, with the arms industry rubbing its sweaty hands in glee, and praying that the war continues or intensifies. 

      What we have done to the Syrian people is dwarfed by that malevolent cabal that is American imperialism. In 2016 alone, the US dropped 12,192 bombs in Syria and 12,095 in Iraq, according to the American think tank Council on Foreign Relations. 

       What do you honestly think has been the outcome of all this lavishly expensive, death and destruction, what has it done for the people of that region? The only gainers in this human tragedy, has been the large Western corporations, mainly the arms industry and the oil and gas industry, not forgetting the financial Mafia. We pay for it in austerity, the people of the region pay for it in misery, blood and death.
     Not satisfied with their blood fest, in the Middle East, that brain dead, moronic psychopath, who sits at the helm of the world's largest and most dangerous war machine, narcissistic Trump, is bellowing about a nuclear attack on North Korea. A country, that as far as I am aware, has never attack any other country on the planet. Though it is one of only three countries in the world where the central bank is not controlled by the dollar. In 2000 there were seven, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and Iran. Now there are only three, Iran, North Korea and Cuba. Could that be a reason why they are classified as "evil" countries. Of course China is also a state owned Bank, but that is a bigger fish, but no doubt the "evil" propaganda will continue, keeping it as the demon, until such times as the dollar monster sees fit to take it out. The strength of the dollar is built on blood.

 Packed with the gifts of democracy.

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THE USUAL CORPORATE IMPERIALIST HYPOCRISY.

      Once again we see the West talk with forked tongue. It preaches democracy in the Middle East while backing the Muslim Brotherhood in both Syria and Egypt, of course, hypocrisy is standard for imperialism. In recognising the "rebels" in Syria it will see the demise of the Assad regime, another regime that wouldn't play ball with the Western corporate world. Any nation that doesn't allow the mighty dollar to dominate their country is demonised and enters the "axis of evil", marking them out as "to be sorted".  Iraq and Libya have been sorted, Syria is almost sorted, that leaves Iran and North Korea to be brought to chaos, allowing the mighty dollar to walk in and make a killing. (literally and figuratively). What probably saves North Korea, for the time being, is its big pal, China, though as the West becomes more desperate, that may not put them off forever. The Western corporate world can gain from war and chaos.

From CounterPunch, a little more detail on the West's relations with the Muslim Brotherhood.

     The complexities of the Arab Spring and the struggle for political freedom throughout the Arab world should not obscure what has now become an absolutely essential understanding for all anti-imperialists: the Muslim Brotherhood is one of the most powerful weapons of the Western ruling class in the Muslim world. While that may be a difficult pill for some to swallow for emotional or psychological reasons, one need look no further than the insidious role the organization is playing in Syria and the abuses of power and human rights of the government of Egypt. In the US-NATO sponsored war against the Assad government, the Muslim Brotherhood has emerged as the leading western-sanctioned force, the avant-garde of the imperialist assault. While, in Egypt, President Morsi and the Brotherhood government seek to destroy what had been, little more than a year ago, the promise of the revolution.

Read the full article HERE:

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WHAT CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY?

      Western mainstream media is always on about the nasty North Korean regime and how it's people are not as happy as those lucky South Korean people who live in a wonderful "capitalist democracy". If only the North Korean's could see how wonderful things are in the South they would want the same.!!

     This is a video of the happy South Korean people celebrating their democracy during a strike called by one of its trade unions. It seems that we have to search far and wide to find a "capitalist democracy" where the people are not on the streets in confrontation with the system. Europe in turmoil, America Occupy Movement, the Middle East, the Far East and Asia, they all know the system stinks, is immoral, unjust and is corruption personified.

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