Mainstream Media: From Korea on down through Vietnam and today’s wars, it’s been all Fake News.

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or many years now the US government has had the best of relations and profitable trade with the Communist Government of Vietnam, the very same Vietnamese government it tried to overthrow for 30 years during the administrations of 6 US presidents, taking the lives of 7 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians[1] with twice as many millions maimed, mutilated and deformed, not to mention the lives of invaders, 58,220 from the USA, 75,581 French, 4,407 South Koreans, 500 Thai, 351 New Zealanders. The cost for Americans was more than one trillion dollars (2017 equivalent worth) – the financial loss to the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodian is usually of little interest to the invaders.[2]

Brig Gen. Telford Taylor, US Chief Counsel, addressing the court during the Nuremberg trials. Taylor published his views in a book entitled Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy in 1970. He argued that by the standards employed at the Nuremberg Trials, U.S. conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia was equally criminal as that of the Nazis during World War II. For this reason, he favored prosecuting U.S. aviators who had participated in bombing missions over North Vietnam.

The amount of bombs dropped by Americans on the innocent citizens of tiny French Indochina was more than twice the amount of bombs dropped in Europe, Africa and Asia during the Second World War, and this includes bombs  dropped on the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong by American hero Senator John McCain, who proudly ran for president on his military record in spite of Nuremberg Counsel for Prosecution General Telford Taylor having said he would have been proud to have prosecuted US flyers shot down while bombing in Vietnam.[3] 

Toward the end of his life, MLK was beginning to transcend the purely racial aspect of his titanic struggle. At that point the system began to regard him as a serious existential threat.

“The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, for nine years we vigorously supported  France in its effort at reconquest of her former colony. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we were paying almost the full costs of this tragic [French] attempt at recolonization.

“We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men – children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals… children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food, children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have destroyed their land and their crops. we poison their water as we kill a million acres of their crops. as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees… they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically, primarily women and children and the aged, as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs…”we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.”[4]

Because at the time everyone was used to hearing mainstream media fake news about Vietnam, King’s angry truthful news sermon shook the world.  Newspapers outside the US ran the headline in large bold print, KING CALLS U.S. GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN WORLD, but US fake news media vilified King as an ‘unpatriotic traitor’ [5] frightening African Americans in the civil rights movement led by King. [6]

Fake News-producing CBS, NBC, ABC, eventually joined by Fox, CNN and PBS along with New York Times led print media have conspired for a half century to make sure no mention is ever made of Martin Luther King’s 1967 earth-shaking sermons Beyond Vietnam[4] and Why I am Against the War in Vietnam in which King had condemned his government as ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world for its atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945 meant to maintain unjust predatory overseas investments, and held all Americans responsible for being unwilling to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the overseas profits US atrocities protect.’[4] News-falsifying mainstream media blocks the memory of King’s anti US government nightmarish sermons with over the top lavish amounts of programing praising to heaven King’s civil rights speech “I Have a Dream” during the March on Washington four years earlier when the US invasion of Vietnam had not yet quite reached genocidal proportions.

Corporate monopoly-owned fake news generating mainstream sources of 98% of all entertainment and information have had no problem faking Americans out of awareness of the indisputable and monstrous truths noted in the opening paragraphs of this essay. 

 Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark feels that if the earlier US genocidal destruction of Korea and corporate media role in portraying it as noble and necessary had been investigated, there is good chance that America’s second and greater genocidal destruction in Vietnam might not have been pulled off.

Clark

Ramsey Clark (left) points out that US media repressed the history of the 1905 US colonial crime of recognizing Korea as territory of Imperial Japan in return for Japan recognizing US right to own the Philippines,[8] and that US media sanitized the American invasion and brutal occupation after WWII as if Korea was Japanese territory and not a country to liberate. 

US-installed tyrant Rhee

Subsequently, the mainstream media did not report that US State Department officials, arriving in Korea with the US Army disbanded the government of the Korean People’s Republic installed a week earlier on September 6, in Seoul by delegates from local peoples’ offices elected in all provinces throughout the peninsula, formed when Japan announced intention to surrender (August 10). These State Department officials proceeded without any Korean authorization whatsoever to immediately cut Korea into two parts to be occupied by US and Soviet troops, establishing a military government, flying dependable rightwing despot Syngman Rhee (right) in from Washington DC (in General MacArthur’s private plane), eventually installing him as president of a separate South Korea Government that included collaborators with the Japanese, and outlawed all strikes, declaring the KPR and all its activities illegal and began a deadly terror of persecution of members of the disallowed Korean Peoples Republic, communists, socialists, unionists and anyone against the partition and demanding an independent Korea. Instead of reporting the above, US mainstream media reported only insidious fake news about all nations ruled by communist parties. From 1946 to 1949 mainstream news hid from its audiences that US in effect declared war on the popular movement of Korea south of the 38th Parallel and set in motion a repressive campaign dismantling the Peoples’ Committees and their supporters throughout the south, becoming massively homicidal as Rhee’s special forces and secret police took the lives of some 100,000 men, women and children as documented recently by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the National Assembly of the Republic of (South) Korea in 2001. On the Island of Cheju alone, within a year, as many as 60,000 of its 300,000 residents were murdered, while another 40,000 fled by sea to nearby Japan some two years before the Koreans from the north liberated the South from a hated and genocidal regime. [UN sources and Wikipedia]

1950, June 28 —North Korea’s army swept down and unified the peninsula in five short weeks (except for the US Navy defended port city of Pusan); with little resistance from South Korea’s ROK military as most of its soldiers either defected or went home. Koreans had themselves reunited the nation America had criminally divided. Fake news justified a second US invasion and bombing of every city and town flat, both in the South and in the North, killing three million Koreans in the their own beloved country. This set the pattern of media-preached patriotic insanity about protecting American freedom, that would make the same patriotic insanity digestible when years later America murdered millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians in their own beloved countries.

1953-2013 — The US using its control over international financial institutions and its power over the financial policies of most of the nations on Earth, keeps in place economy crippling sanctions and trade blockades (only loosening them slightly from time to time in attempts to halt the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea production of nuclear weapons as it faces a US, constantly condemning it in intense belligerency, massively armed with ever new nuclear weapons. (US sanctions obviously violate Principle VI c. Crimes Against Humanity: “inhuman acts done against any civilian population.”)

The height of Trump’s ‘dangerous unpredictability’ saw Trump defending his respect of President Putin. When challenged by his interviewer with, “But Putin is a killer!” Trump answered, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump later added, “I was against the invasion of Iraq – a lot of people were killed.” “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” In December of 2015, Trump had told MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ “I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so you know. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, a lot of killing, a lot of stupidity.”

Quickly kicked to the curb by Obama. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., the former pastor of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. speaks at the Detroit NAACP’s 53rd annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner Sunday, April 27, 2008. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

If the investors in WMD and profitable genocide on Wall Street don’t shut this ‘wildly crazy’ president up, people might get the idea that all the regime change death and destruction starting with Korea were as US Congressman Ron Paul said over and over again during presidential candidate debates in 2012, “illegal, unconstitutional and a horrific loss of life.”