KOREA/NORTH KOREA

T.P. WILKINSON—My point is that among other things the term “cold war” has developed the connotations which continue its deceptive intent. The term is commonly understood as an undeclared state of war waged by two parties: hence the Soviet Union was considered by liberals as a co-belligerent. The US war against the Soviet Union was concealed. This was historically significant since the newly adopted UN Charter forbade aggressive war. Therefore the “cold war” denied the Soviet Union the claim in the UN that it was being attacked. It also permitted the US to present any Soviet aid to countries the US invaded as quasi-war justifying the US intervention. Even Soviet foreign aid could be defined as war.

Independent journalist Max Parry joins PressTV to discuss the current maneuvering between the US and North Korea, and the latter’s year-end deadline to break the US-induced stalemate on the process of diplomatic normalisation.

RAINER SHEA—In living memory, the people of North Korea have endured an act of violence that’s equivalent to the Holocaust. When the U.S. partnered with the right-wing south Korean dictator Syngman Rhee to provoke the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea into war, the Americans took an approach to warfare that amounted to crimes of genocide under international law. By carpet bombing all the major cities in North Korea without exception, burning down every town in North Korea, and committing atrocities like pouring gasoline down air ducts and burning North Korean children alive, American troops killed 1.55 million innocent North Korean civilians. This amounted to a population loss of about one-fourth for north Korea.

KONSTANTIN ASLOMOV—Kim acknowledges that his decision to become a spy forced him to “undergo many internal conflicts,” however, even before that, out of mere curiosity (?), he began to collect information which could be of interest to foreign intelligence. And then everything that could be useful was transferred to the curators: public moods, movements of the armed forces and their military preparation, the nuclear programme, especially the databases of the North Korean nuclear physicists.

Up to the end of the eighteenth century China was a great and well-ordered Empire to whom the people of Asia looked up as the fountainhead of civilisation. There followed a century of decay, but during the last 30 years there has been a crisis of rejuvenation, culminating two years ago in the recovery by China of her former proud position with prestige enhanced by an officialdom that is completely incorruptible and an army under perfect discipline. All this is familiar to those who deal with Far Eastern affairs, but any American who states these facts is in danger of being labelled Communist and being made the victim of a witch-hunt.