KOREA/NORTH KOREA

KIM PETERSEN—During the US-UN-China-Korean war the US destroyed crops, food reserves, and the energy grid when it attacked the DPRK – actions designed to cause food shortages. It was war in which the US used biological and chemical weapons. US military commanders had even sought permission to use nuclear weapons. The US caused enormous destruction during the war on the peninsula, a war that some claim was started by the US and the Republic of Korea (ROK). There had been several ROK troop incursions into the North preceding the DPRK invasion that began on 25 June 1950.

A B ABRAMS—An example of such an incident was in April 1946, when approximately U.S. personnel in three trucks attacked the Nakamura Hospital in Omori district. The soldiers raped over 40 patients and 37 female staff. One woman who had given birth just two days prior had her child thrown on the floor and killed, and she was then raped as well. Male patients trying to protect the women were also killed. The following week several dozen U.S. military personnel cut the phone lines to a housing block in Nagoya and raped all the women they could capture there – including girls as young as ten years old and women as old as fifty-five.

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.