The Hidden Truth: The Rising Tide of “Global Racism” and Xenophobia
| February 3, 2015 | 8:22 pm | Analysis, International | Comments closed
Global Research, February 02, 2015
Based on polarizing events during the first month of 2015, it would appear that racism around the world may be increasing. Anti-Moslem demonstrations have taken place throughout Europe. Just one day prior to the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, a Guardian article opened with it has been a grim start for 2015 as far as European tolerance is concerned, noting three mosques in Sweden set on fire during the week preceding the false flag terrorism in France. During the month prior to Hebdo, two-thirds of the Moslem association buildings in Sweden had been vandalized.
Three days before the Paris attack, a record turnout of 18,000 people in Dresden and other German cities marched in a Pegida rally demonstrating against Moslem immigration. Every Monday since last October growing crowds representing Pegida have taken to the streets in Germany in reaction to the influx of Middle Eastern and Arab immigrants into their country. It appears that xenophobia is on the rise in Europe and elsewhere around the globe. But before believing all the mainstream media hype, in both Sweden and Germany there were even larger counterdemonstrations advocating racial and religious acceptance, inclusion and tolerance. So fortunately not everyone is so dumbed down and easily manipulated by the lies and propaganda reported by mainstream media.
20 million Moslems reside in the 28 nations that comprise the European Union. Their share of the total population in Europe has grown from 4% in 1990 to 6% in 2010. And in 2030 Moslems are expected to make up 8% of the continental population. These figures documenting their growing presence in recent months and years has caused a backlash of increasing native ethno-Europeans expressing anti-Moslem sentiments through public protests, hate crimes and rising popularity of anti-immigration political parties and organizations. A recent poll of various countries in Europe indicates that the people overestimate the number of Moslems actually in their country. For instance, French respondents guessed that 31% of the French population is Moslem when in actuality only 7.5% are. Germans believed 19% of its populace were Moslem instead of the actual 5.8% and Americans estimated 15% of people in the US are Moslem when they actually represent just 1%.
These distorted perceptions that their countries have been invaded by darker skinned Islamic foreigners originating from North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia have given rise to a growing anti-Moslem movement determined to take back their homeland. In reaction to the Sharia patrols enforcing Islamic custom in Muslim populated areas of London, white street thugs have begun springing up in the UK calling themselves Christians as they parade through the Moslem neighborhoods reasserting both their turf and will to show UK Moslems who their real boss and owners are.
Add to this dangerous mix the deceptive ploy to paint all Arabs, Moslems and Middle Easterners as potential terrorists and you have a growing number of gullible people and nations on a witch hunt using these groups as a convenient scapegoat. When in fact the true reality is the war on terror was a creation invented by the true axis of evil the US Empire-NATO-Israeli-Saudi planet-killing machine as really a war against Islam. From 9/11 to Hebdo to the latest Islamic State beheadings, the so called terrorists are mere mercenary stooges, hired guns to do the evil bidding of the true terrorists lurking inside the evil axis governments of the West. Through false-flag lies, they’ve effectively manipulated a sizeable portion of both European and North American populations into believing that the Muslim cultural and ethnic influence in the West has somehow defiled the white purity of Christian homogeneity that’s been the sole dominator for so many centuries. Hence in these post-9/11 years religious and ethnic tolerance has been somewhat strained as tensions between in-group Christian natives and out-group Moslem arrivals have risen, particularly in Europe where far more Moslems live.
Mainstream media feed both Europeans’ and North Americans’ fears and biases against Moslems by constantly hyping up inflated dangers that Islamic extremists pose to their safety. Out of a total of 152 acts of terror reported by Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement agency, only two in 2013 were religiously motivated by Moslems, the rest were carried out by Ethno-nationalists and separatists. Among the most deadly in European history, killing 77 in Norway in 2011 was the terror committed by a Christian extremist. Though both Europeans and Americans are regularly led to believe that Moslem terrorists are responsible for the terrorism on their soil, in reality over 90% of these acts were committed by non-Moslems. But this nonstop infusion of lies and distortions becomes the negative propaganda by which the US-NATO-Israeli Empire enflames and propagates its war of terror against both its citizens and especially against the entire Moslem world.
Last week world leaders gathered in Prague for the Holocaust Commemoration and to discuss the growing anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia in Europe. 70 years after the Jewish concentration camps were liberated, another wave of ethnic prejudice and hatred has resurfaced in Europe. The apartheid Israeli governments hardline policy against Palestinians and Netanyahu’s agenda toward ethnic cleansing in Gaza as demonstrated by last summer’s bloodbath has resulted in much of the world turning more openly against Israel. Though the blowback for its inhumane mistreatment toward 5 million indigenous Muslim Arabs whose land was brutally and criminally stolen is manifesting through a growing number of nations, like France recently calling for recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state, it also is giving rise to increasing anti-Semitism. Just as the brutal aggression of the US Empire has caused many around the world to hate the United States and its people, as the US partner-in-crime, hatred toward Israel and its people even extending to Jews living outside Israel is a regrettable consequence underscoring the importance of differentiating between the American and Jewish people and their tyrannical murderous governments.
Mounting effects from globalization, polarization, incessant war, widespread economic instability, rising poverty and resultant impoverishment amongst a growing number of the current 7.2 billion earth inhabitants has caused millions of humans to move to other global regions in search of opportunity for a better life. North America has been the historic receptacle for those from around the world determined to make a better life for themselves. With one in seven humans in the world currently going to bed hungry each and every night, trying to seek a more stable, comfortable life elsewhere is a natural consequence. And with the hungry outnumbering those living in both Europe and North America, it comes as no surprise that people would gravitate to where severe hunger and abject poverty may not be the everyday norm. Historically, migrations from economically struggling Third World nations to more prosperous First World nations have been an increasing global trend over the last century. From the Migration and Globalization report:
Today, the number of people living outside their country of birth is larger than at any other time in history. International migrants would now constitute the world’s fifth most populous country if they all lived in the same place. The number of people living outside their nation of origin has risen from 120 million in 1990 to an estimated 215 million in 2012.
As we enter 2015’s Black History month in the United States, racial tensions driven primarily by increased incidence of white police murdering unarmed African Americans has caused widespread protests last year in places like St. Louis and New York. Consistent failure of local authorities to hold trigger-happy militant white police officers accountable in a number of high profile incidents has only aggravated and reinforced public perception that racism is still thriving in America, particularly in its militarized law enforcement. In 2012 there were 312 extrajudicial killings of African Americans, the Trayvon Martin case being the most publicized where killer George Zimmerman walked free. With even more blacks killed in the last two years, that number has jumped to more than one a day.
At about one million – more than in slavery in 1850 – black men represent half the US prison population. At only 5% of the world population, the US holds 25% of the world’s imprisoned population, far exceeding any other nation. 70% of US inmates are either Hispanic or African Americans, while near half the prison population is serving time for drug-related, nonviolent offenses. The gross injustice of the court system that so widely discriminates against persons of color blatantly proves that institutional racism remains a pervasively embedded fact in the US. Racial disparities in the US are looming larger all the time, showing the rest of the world that the US consistently mistreats and discriminates against humans of color around the globe.
Additionally, the unprecedented soaring disparity rate between the rich and the poor further demonstrates that America is neither the land of opportunity nor land of the free. A decimated middle class makes it a land of the .05% haves and the 99.5% have-nots.
The continuing uninterrupted flow of illegal aliens from Mexico and especially Central America pouring into the US and the federal governments utter inability and/or unwillingness to address the problem through immigration reform again has only increased friction between races. The US war on drugs is a war against people of color. While nearly a million are locked away behind bars on nonviolent drug charges, the US government continues bilking multi-billions off its international drug trafficking, using offshore money laundering through large US banks. The US pours billions of taxpayer dollars into supporting corrupt brutal regimes around the world responsible for partnering with drug cartels that together kill thousands of its own citizens. And we wonder why so many from south of the border are crossing north of the border.
The eye-opening reality of how the US government is making our world far less secure while far more armed and dangerous for all of us on earth has produced a mounting crisis in confidence and distrust amongst the US population toward its nation’s abysmally poor leadership in both its incompetent president and totally inept Congress. In recent years, approval ratings have sagged and hovered near all-time lows. A year ago 76% of Americans had no faith in their government. More United States citizens are recognizing that their needs and interests are clearly not being met by their elected representatives who increasingly answer to the needs and interests of a corporate oligarchy confirmed by results of a joint Princeton-Northwestern study released last spring.
Perhaps the biggest single factor behind both the global inter-mixing of ethnic groups as well as the escalating racial and ethnic conflicts is the designed agenda of the globalists orchestrating and ushering in their New World Order. For centuries, the ruling elite in Europe and North America have purposely caused countless wars, conflict, strife and destruction by utilizing the age-old strategy of divide and conquer. For a hundred years, the globalists have viewed the biggest obstacles to their one world government to be nationalism and religion. Additionally, moves to regionalize merging blocs of nations like the European Union are a principal strategic process toward materializing the New World Order. The WTO, NAFTA and the various international “free” trade agreements also merging regional economic interests act as major steppingstones toward increasing centralized banking control facilitated by a one world government.
In more recent years, attacks on individualism, the American family and the middle class have also been added to the NWO list of enemies. The globalist goal is to lower the standard of living by bankrupting America and Europe to that of the Third World nations through a systematic pattern of globalization, privatization, indentured servitude, war, destabilization, austerity and impoverishment.
Just over two decades ago David Rockefeller addressing the UN revealed the NWO objective:
We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis… and the nations will accept the New World Order.
By repeating lies often enough to convince people they’re true, the powers-that-be systematically use propaganda, disinformation and false-flag crises to constantly create designated enemies by demonizing any individuals, groups and nations that resist its predatory clutches, refusing to submit to US global hegemony. That’s why groups like Moslems and nations like Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea have historically been targeted in the US imperialistic crosshairs for attack either through military means or economic sanctions.
By pitting different races, classes, religions, nationalities and ideologies against each other, both domestically and abroad, human history has consisted of centuries of relentless, unending violence and bloodshed. Utilizing this same insidious, divide and conquer Modus Operandi, the ruling elite has been victimizing humans doomed to repeatedly reliving the same bloody history in an infinite, never-ending do-loop of destruction and despair. The true instigators and perpetrators of so much untold theft, death and destruction are those elite puppet masters operating behind the scenes, resolutely, busily promoting the New World Order complete with one centralized government, a single currency and a microchip implanted in every human subject that serves the privileged ruling elite. This absolute control over the surviving human population left on earth that’s not already been eugenically culled and destroyed by war, disease and pestilence is totalitarianism at its demonic worst.
It is up to us as human beings to see through the oligarchs’ sinister divide-and-conquer formula that brainwashes people into hating, blaming and killing others. Until we realize that it is not a particular nation, or racial group, or religious group that is our enemy, but the ruling elite that are pulling all the murderous strings that is the true enemy of humankind, we will forever be locked in chains. Only in mindful awareness and unified solidarity can the true enemy of life be challenged and overcome. Fear, ignorance, complacency, denial and passivity will assure their victory and the very destruction of all that we hold scared. We as a human race must recognize the real truth and act now against the psychopathic rulers whose national leaders and corporate CEOs are merely their ineffectual errand boys and girls, employed to do their diabolical bidding. Both the puppet masters and their puppets are guilty of betraying the human race and their treasonous evildoing must be opposed and defeated since the very survival of planet earth is precariously hanging in the balance.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled Dont Let The Bastards Getcha Down. It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.
Copyright © 2015 Global Research
WFTU in solidarity with workers in US oil refineries
| February 3, 2015 | 8:18 pm | International, Labor, National, USW, WFTU | Comments closed

03 Feb 2015

The World Federation of Trade Unions representing 90 million workers in 126 countries across the worlds expresses its internationalist solidarity to the workers in US refineries who are on strike struggling for better salary, safety at work and improved collective agreement.

In their first wide-scale strike since 1980, workers have stopped work in many refineries since Monday, February 2nd 2015 as per the call of the United Steelworkers Union on the basis that negotiations between US refiners and union have failed to reach an agreement by Sunday.

The deal would form the baseline for additional talks between companies and local unions, and cover 30,000 workers at 230 refineries, oil terminals, pipelines, and petrochemical plants.

USW represents workers at 65 fuel-making plants around the U.S. which it says account for nearly two-thirds of the country’s refining capacity.

According to USW the plants where workers will strike include: LyondellBasell Industries’ plant in Houston, Texas; Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s complex in Deer Park, Texas; Marathon Petroleum

Corp.’s sites in Galveston, Texas City and Catlettsburg, Ky; and three Tesoro facilities in Washington and southern California.

The World Federation of Trade Unions joins its voice with the struggle of the workers in the oil refineries in all parts of production despite of working relation status and calls the Employers and Management to accept their fair demands.

The WFTU reaffirms its commitment for the unity of the workers struggle organized or unorganized for the end of contractualization, for better working conditions, health-care and better salaries for all as well as safety at work-place.

THE SECRETARIAT

Bernie Sanders Storms The Supreme Court to Stop the Koch Brothers Theft of Democracy
| February 2, 2015 | 7:11 pm | Bernie Sanders, political struggle | Comments closed
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/10/08/bernie-sanders-storms-supreme-court-stop-koch-brothers-theft-democracy.html

Tuesday, October, 8th, 2013, 5:28 pm

At a rally outside the Supreme Court, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) took on the Koch brothers and said, “Freedom of speech does not equal freedom to buy the United States government.”

Video:

Sen. Sanders said,

In the long history of our country people have fought and died for democracy. Democracy means one person, one vote. The fact that all of us have the opportunity to be involved in the political process to stand up for what we believe in. Three years ago, or so the Supreme Court decided that corporations are people. They decided that through independent expenditures billionaires could spend unlimited sums of money to impact elections.

Let me say one word to you right now about how relevant that is. As all of you know, the government of the United States shut down. Hundreds of thousands of workers are suffering, millions of people are not getting the services they need. Right now, as we speak, in the House of Representatives there are people who are being threatened that if they vote for a clean CR to open the government without destroying the Affordable Care Act then huge sums of money will be spent against them in the next election.

We are living in a society where a handful of people with incredible sums of money, folks like the Koch brothers and others, are undermining what this democracy is supposed to be about. The bottom line here is that if we do not want to move this nation to an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires can determine the outcome of these elections, then it is imperative not only that we overturn Citizens United, but that we put a lid on how much people can contribute in elections.

Freedom of speech, in my view, does not mean the freedom to buy the United States government

Sen. Sanders was present at the Supreme Court to hear oral arguments in the case of McCutcheon vs. FEC. The Supreme Court will deciding the fate of the caps that limit how much donors can give to candidates and political organizations during a two year election cycle later in this term.

If the Supreme Court rules the caps unconstitutional, it will allow conservative billionaires to spend even more money in their attempt to execute a hostile takeover of the United States government.

The case is so dangerous to our democracy that President Obama weighed in on it today. The president called for spending limits in our elections, and spoke about the role that the conservative billionaires have played in shutting down the government.

Sen. Sanders is fighting the good fight, and if Americans want to know why the government is shutdown, all they have to is follow the money. Government shutdowns are bad, defaults are worse, but these tactics are nothing compared to the damage that the current Supreme Court is doing to our democracy.

Support striking workers in Houston
| February 1, 2015 | 9:00 pm | Labor, Local/State | Comments closed
USW Strike Rally @ Lyndondellbasell Tower Building
Tuesday, February 3, 2105
9:45 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.
Downtown Houston
1221 McKinney Street
Houston, Texas 77010
Wear Your Union Colors
Show Your Support for the Striking Workers!
Where We Stand
| January 29, 2015 | 10:10 pm | Analysis, National, Network of Communist Clubs, Party Voices | Comments closed

http://mltoday.com/where-we-stand?utm

Network of Communist Clubs (NCC)
Political Declaration
January 8, 2015
 
At a meeting in Pittsburgh on August 16, 2014, a group of Communist men and women, Black, white, and Latino, formed a Network of Communist Clubs (NCC). In so doing, we subscribe to the following ideas and principles. We invite those who share these ideas to join us to create local Communist clubs and develop a new Communist party with a program for the 21st century.
 
1. The social, political, and economic problems that plague the majority of the US people are ultimately rooted in the system of private ownership, corporate accumulation of wealth, class rule, and savage selfishness: capitalism.

The most transparent expression of this unjust system is the division of our society into two major classes: those who must seek employment to live and those who employ and exploit the others.

The underlying class contradictions of capitalism have not changed since capitalism appeared on the world stage. The world is entering a period when these contradictions are becoming more and more evident. The divisions between rich and poor in the world, most strikingly seen in the United States, become ever wider. The effects of pollution and climate change are growing. The climate crisis adds another powerful argument to the case for the transition from capitalism to socialism – human survival.

2. We live in the era of imperialism and resistance to it. Imperialism is capitalism in its monopoly stage. The U.S remains militarily the strongest imperialist country on the planet, though capitalism still develops unevenly, and other countries and blocs economically challenge the US.

Imperialist exploitation, occupation, and war dominate despite the fact that most nations have freed themselves from direct colonial control.   While most nations have freed themselves from being controlled outright, imperialist states still rule other nations through colonialism. This includes the US, which holds Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and US Virgin Islands under colonial subjugation.

Nevertheless, the resistance to US domination is increasing in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The class struggle in the US and the European Union promises to intensify.

3.   The science of Marxism-Leninism and its concepts of class struggle, state-monopoly capitalism and imperialism remain the best guide to understanding our world. Socialism — that is, a society based on productive property democratically owned and controlled by the workers for the benefit of all people — remains our goal, and the Leninist prescription of a “party of a new type” remains the best guide for successful struggles against capitalism.

4. The election of an African-American President convinced some that we had entered a “post-racial” era in which a person’s race was socially irrelevant and no longer played a role in determining their life chances. However, the racist legacy of slavery, genocide, and Jim Crow continues in the form of mass incarceration, Stand Your Ground laws, attacks on public education, the War on Terror, deportation, and other ongoing and increasing attacks on working people of color.

We believe compensatory actions, affirmative actions are essential elements on the path to erasing the legacy of slavery and the national oppression that came in its wake. Contemporary racism is not only a historical legacy; it is sustained by the drive for corporate superprofits.

Racist oppression diminishes the health, safety, income, and overall well-being of people of color. It pits white workers against workers of color, and stokes antagonisms among racially oppressed workers of different races and ethnicities. Yet, racism not only harms people of color, but also harms white workers who are encouraged to blame racial minorities for problems that are caused by capitalism and that can only be solved through the self-activity of a working class united across all ethnic, racial, religious, and national lines. The struggle against racism thus remains a central task of Communists, one inextricably tied to workers’ struggle in their own class self-interest.

Racial and national oppression started with the arrival of capitalism to these shores and the treatment of the Native American peoples. It will not end until the reasons for it are abolished. Genocide is not too strong a word for the treatment of Native American peoples.

5. As residents of the main imperialist power, U.S. Communists have a special obligation to fight against the military interventions, electronic spying, CIA operations, drone attacks, torture, and other affronts to peace and human dignity conducted by the U.S. Government. For the same reason, we have a special obligation to build international solidarity with Communists and others abroad fighting for peace, workers power, national sovereignty and socialism.  The War on Terror, like the big lie of the “Soviet Threat“ before it, is used to justify US aggression and boundless military spending.

6. The struggle for workers’ interests and workers’ power remains the fulcrum for changing the world. The cutting edge of this struggle remains the trade unions. Communists must not only resist the erosion of collective bargaining and union rights but must struggle within the trade unions for a program of class struggle unionism. Our notion of class struggle unionism does not concede the employers’ right to a profit. Nor does it separate the struggle of members for a contract from the larger issues that impact the community, the nation, or the world.

7.  The institutions of modern-day US capitalism — the criminal-justice system, the media, cultural production, the party system — tighten the grip of Wall Street and create profound crises for the rest of us. Millions now see that the two-party system sustains corporate power and is an impediment to majority rule. Democracy requires building political independence of the two-party system.

8. In an era of deteriorating economic conditions, cutbacks in education, health and social services, environmental crisis, and rising Right-wing and religious fundamentalist ideologies, class struggle takes various forms. Communists not only need to join these struggles, but also bring to them a class perspective. This includes the struggles of women, members of the LGBTQ community, students, the aged, and immigrants. It also includes the struggles to preserve the environment and protect privacy, voting rights, civil liberties, and to create a health care system that serves people, not profits.

Oppression in the US takes many forms. The largest category of special oppression is women who still earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. The gap is much greater for African-American and Latina women. The oppression they suffer is not only economic. The continuing attack on the reproductive rights of women particularly affects working class and women of color. Therefore, we recommit ourselves to significantly increase the fight for women’s equality.

9. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist countries represented the greatest setback in the history of workers’ and peoples’ struggles. Though these countries were not without problems, the Soviet Union represented the strongest curb on imperialism, the greatest support for the economic well being of workers everywhere in the world, and the greatest aid to countries and movements struggling for national independence and socialism. The collapse of the Soviet Union has caused many Communists or former Communists to become confused, cowardly and ashamed of their own history.

10. The Communist Party USA, in spite of its glorious history and many decent members, has irretrievably lost its way. It has abandoned most of its former ideology and organization, forsaken the struggle against racism and international solidarity, eschewed change in the trade unions and action in the streets, and tried to channel all discontent into support for the Democratic Party.

11. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, as people’s economic uncertainty and suffering increase, the Right wing may continue to grow, but we believe one of the reasons for its influence is the lack of a Left-wing alternative. The best answer to the unrelenting rightward drift by the Democratic Party and much of the leadership of the trade unions and other organizations is to rebuild a real Left movement and political independence around such issues as peace, ending racist oppression, economic justice, environmental protection, and class-struggle trade unionism.

12. As Lenin taught, and the history of the Communist movement has proven, the two greatest impediments to successful struggle are opportunism (giving up principles for short-term gain) and sectarianism (a dogmatic unwillingness to work with others because of differences). We believe that resolving differences in tactics is achieved through engagement with others in the crucible of struggle.

For more information contact: TCC.NCC2014@gmail.com

Framing the DPRK: the US Still Cannot be Rational
| January 29, 2015 | 9:59 pm | Analysis, DPRK, International | Comments closed

The US Still Cannot be Rational when Dealing with North Korea

http://mltoday.com/framing-the-dprk-the-us-still-cannot-be-rational?utm

By Stansfield Smith

January 13, 2015

When it comes to North Korea, for the US government and its media, time stands still. They remain fixated in the 1950s Joe McCarthy worldview: the Red-Yellow peril, a monster capable of unimaginable evil, threatens our civilization and freedoms.North Korea’s Kim family is presented as three reincarnations of a Communist Dr. Fu Manchu.

Jakob Petterson recently wrote in MRZine Imperialism and The Interview: The Racist Dehumanization of North Korea: “The news media, for their part, abandon all journalistic integrity when reporting on the DPRK. On a regular basis, respected and widely read publications publish baseless, sensationalist, and racist stories about the country. Many of these stories are easily sourced to satirical sites — others to right-wing Fox News-esque South Korean newspapers.

Stories that hundreds of thousands of people read include Kim Jong-Un feeding his uncle to 120 starving dogs, forcing all North Korean men to get his haircut, and sending the DPRK soccer team to work in the coal mines after failing in the World Cup — stories which were all fake.” http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/pettersson271214.html

The US now makes a racist comedy about murdering a foreign head of state, and with a straight face, calls it an issue of “artistic” freedom. Obama showed himself happy to push this line, and pressed for its distribution after Sony withdrew it. What war hysteria would grip the US political elites if Putin endorsed a Russian comedy about murdering Obama, or if Iran made one about killing Netanyahu!

Deliberately unmentioned in the noise around North Korea is the long history of US intervention in Korea. In 1945, the US, divided the Korean peninsula in two, with no Korean input, even though Koreans were allies in the struggle against the Japanese occupation.

The US then pushed for separate elections in the South in 1948, and then invaded the country to back its ruthless dictator Syngman Rhee. During most of the Korean War, the United States held near-total aerial superiority, which it used, according to General Curtis LeMay, to kill one quarter of the north’s population, and to raze every city and structure in the north. An estimated four million Koreans have been killed, seventy percent of whom were civilians.

In spite of that genocide, Koreans fought on, inflicting on the US its first post-World War II defeat. In the US the war is referred to as “The Forgotten War,” whereas in North Korea, no one is able to forget. The inflammatory twist to the comedy, The Interview, blowing the head off evil enemy No. 1 Kim Jong Un, came from the CIA. An email from Sony’s senior vice president Marisa Liston, indicated that it came from Sony through the intelligence agency. “They mention that a former CIA agent and someone who used to work for Hilary [sic] Clinton looked at the script.”

Sony CEO Michael Lynton reveals that he checked with ” someone very senior in State” who, confidentially, encouraged him to finish this film representation of the assassination of a living head of state, a first in U.S. film history. http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2014/12/sony-hack-state-department-recruit-studio-chiefs-battle-terrorism/ Sony emails also show that Ambassador Robert King, incredibly enough, called “U.S. Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights” provided advice on the film. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/18/exclusive-sony-emails-say-studio-exec-picked-kim-jong-un-as-the-villain-of-the-interview.html

Who knows if King was instrumental in bringing the report to the UN Security Council that claimed North Korean prison guards were accused of cooking a prison inmate’s baby and feeding it to dogs, a story reminiscent of those the Nazis spread about Jews. Other abuses claimed to have taken place in North Korean prisons sound identical to what we have learned of US conduct in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

This so-called UN “Report of the commission of inquiry on human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” asserted: “These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, forcible transfer of populations…. a socioeconomically and physically segregated society… Violating the right to food, which were applied for the purposes of sustaining the present political system…. The State has consistently failed in its obligation to use the maximum of its available resources to feed those who are hungry. Military spending – predominantly on hardware and the development of weapons systems and the nuclear programme – has always been prioritized.” And so on.

Clearly, anyone with knowledge of US history and society today, knows this report could be written about the US, footnoted with abundant verifiable examples. Not to mention of its barbarity overseas.

Needless to say, the UN has not conducted a “commission of inquiry” on the United States’ own human rights situation. The political purpose of the Korea report, to smear the DPRK, is evident in that it makes no mention of US barbarity during its invasion of Korea, nor of US sanctions on North Korea, even those blocking international food aid in times of starvation.

Jimmy Carter had the honesty to say, “We’ve been destroying the economy of North Korea for 64 years. We’ve done everything we could to prevent their having a healthy economy…. I’ve been there several times, out into the rural areas where people live, and see horrible starvation because we refuse to give them any food assistance, even our surplus food.” http://news.yahoo.com/katie-couric-interviews-former-president-jimmy-carter-200847726.html

After Sony was hacked and embarrassed by what was revealed, the FBI quickly determined, based on secret information only they possess and cannot share with us (for our own safety) that the DPRK was behind this evil deed.

Then, Obama denounced North Korea and declared there will be consequences for threatening our freedoms and national security. It is remarkable how fast they operated here, compared to the laboriously slow – and unfinished – process the US government took over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, or the case of Troy Davis.

And let’s recall that North Korea has been dubbed a “black hole” by former CIA director Robert Gates, and “the longest-running intelligence failure in the history of espionage” according to ex-CIA Seoul station chief and former U.S. ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg. http://kpolicy.org/stranger-than-fiction-the-interview-and-u-s-regime-change-policy-toward-north-korea/?utm_source=Democracy+was+murdered&utm_campaign=Jan52015&utm_medium=email#_ednref4

A variety of computer analysts have disputed the claim that North Korea was involved in the hacking, but the Obama administration brushed it off with claims of safeguarding their “sensitive information” that allegedly proves North Korea’s guilt.

In response to the US accusations, The Korean Central News Agency of the DPRK said on December 20, http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm “They, without presenting any specific evidence, are asserting they can not open it to public, as it is ‘sensitive information.’ Clear evidence is needed to charge a sovereign state with a crime….We propose the U.S. side that we conduct a joint investigation into the case, given that Washington is slandering Pyongyang by spreading unfounded rumors.”

A sensible request. They add, “We have a way to prove that we have nothing to do with the case without resorting to torture as the CIA does.” But it was beneath the dignity of civilized and freedom-loving America to even respond. The story given to us by the corporate U.S. media was clear: North Korea was responsible for the hack because the government said it was.

More than a few have noted the similarity of Obama’s story of North Korean hacking to Lyndon B. Johnson’s concocted Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to sharply escalating the disastrous Vietnam war, and to Colin Powell’s just-so story to the United Nations Security Council about Saddam Hussein’s hidden stashes of chemical weapons, which led to the present disastrous wars in the Middle East.

While claiming to be indignant about threats to the internet, in a move that only US does not find to be utter hypocrisy, the US then proceeded to disrupt North Korea’s internet system and cell phone service.

President Obama then escalated that unjustified provocation by imposing new sanctions on North Korea, which the Treasury Department claimed was a response to that country’s “efforts to undermine U.S. cyber-security and intimidate U.S. businesses and artists exercising their right of freedom of speech.” Lost on them is that the US that is doing exactly this, to North Korea. And meanwhile, the actual guilty party, a woman ex-employee of Sony, gets off scott free. Such is the manner the US government “protects” our internet freedoms. http://boingboing.net/2015/01/02/obama-administration-north-ko.html

One leading cybersecurity firm, Norse Corp., said Monday it has narrowed its list of suspects to a group of six people — including at least one Sony veteran with the necessary technical background to carry out the attack, according to reports…Kurt Stammberger, senior vice president at Norse, said he used Sony’s leaked human-resources documents and cross-referenced the data with communications on hacker chat rooms and its own network of Web sensors to determine it was not North Korea behind the hack. “All the leads that we did turn up that had a Korean connection turned out to be dead ends,” he said.

The information found by Norse points to an employee or employees terminated in a May restructuring and hackers involved in distributing pirated movies online that have been pursued by Sony, Stammberger told Bloomberg. http://nypost.com/2014/12/30/new-evidence-sony-hack-was-inside-job-cyber-experts/

Obama in his last press conference of the year, did use the occasion to push for the release of this racist comedy The Interview, using this issue to divert attention from the recently released report on CIA torture and his own refusal to prosecute the US terrorists-in-chief. The US then moved to reinstall North Korea on its “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list.

Simultaneous with Obama press conference attacking the DPRK, in actual real news from Korea, unmentioned here, the South Korean government banned the United Progressive Party, the only party advocating peace, reunification, and social justice, claiming “it was under orders from North Korea to subvert the South Korean state through violent revolution.”

Sometimes North Korean editorials go over the top, as the December 27 one after Obama held a news conference and pushed for the release of the film belittling North Korea and assassinating Kim Jong Un: “Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest.” Yet US leaders themselves have a long history of habitually depicting North Koreans in a racist and sub-human manner.

The DPRK statement did go on to say:

“We’d like to ask if somebody made a film concerning terror, and if somebody intends to instigate terror, can Obama talk about freedom of expression and value of modern civilization?

“We take this opportunity to clearly announce once again: the hacking attack on Sony Pictures has nothing to do with us. We make it clear that our target is not such individual corporations as Sony Picture but the US imperialist brigands who keep a grudge against our entire nation.

“If the US intends to insist that we are the hacking attackers they must present evidence now. But the United States unconditionally connects the disastrous hacking attack with us, without evidence [and] without clear grounds. Actually, the big United States shamelessly began to obstruct the internet operations of major media of the DPRK.

“We have already warned them not to act in the way of shaking a fist after being hit by somebody.

“Of course, we do not expect our warning would work on the brigands because it is the United State that makes the truth recognized by all people into a falsehood, triggers wars of aggression, and unhesitatingly intervenes in the internal affairs of a sovereign state if it is to satisfy their aggressive ambitions…

“It [was] none other than the United States that ignited an aggressive war in Korea…[that] triggered off the aggressive Vietnamese war and that conquered Iraq, by fabricating a groundless conspiratorial farce, called ‘removal of weapons of mass destruction.’ If the US persists in American-style arrogant, high-handed and gangster-like arbitrary practices despite [the DPRK’s] repeated warnings, the US should bear in mind that its failed policies will face inescapable deadly blows.”

These are words that would strike one as worth consideration, if it were not that the US public remained so mired in Joe McCarthy’s worldview on Korea, where we are still the world good guys, and they, the evil red-yellow peril, are so evil that no one dare murmur that North Korea be taken seriously.

A shorter version of this article recently appeared in Counterpunch. Stansfield Smith went on a delegation to the DPRK in March 2013, and has written several articles on his visit.

Marx Engels Collected Works
| January 28, 2015 | 10:16 pm | Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, Readings | Comments closed
karl marxengelsA friend told me you can access 49 of 50 of the Marx Engels Collected Works and download them onto your iPad or computer at http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/04/29/copyright-controversy-over-marx-engels-collected-works/