Updated: December 30, 2017
Most Koreans know their history very well, even if most Americans and most Australians and others do not. 

.

The ‘news’ media is largely to blame for this ignorance, with its simplistic and one-sided reporting. Owners of the media and the vested interests they represent profit more from the obscene business of war than from diplomacy and peace. Instead of believing the self-serving lies and propaganda of warmongers echoed by the mainstream ‘news’ media, do your own research. 
.

The Korean War did NOT start in 1950 with "North Korea invading South Korea", and “we” were NOT the “good guys”. Understanding the diabolical US-led crimes against Korea, at least from 1945 until today, should lead to empathy for the people of North Korea. This is an essential first step to a peaceful and sustainable solution to the Korean peninsula crisis.

.

There is no desirable military solution. 

Some enlightening reading:

How Cheney and His Allies Created the North Korea Nuclear Missile Crisis
By Gareth Porter, December 29, 2017. ~ MUST-READ!

“…North Korea reached agreements with both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations… a group of Bush administration officials led by then-Vice President Dick Cheney sabotaged both agreements…to curb North Korean nuclear and missile development…because those agreements would have been a political obstacle to fielding the group's main interest: funding and fielding a national missile defense system…that served only the interests of the powerful contractors behind it…”

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43048-how-cheney-and-his-allies-created-the-north-korea-nuclear-missile-crisis

The Problem is Washington, Not North Korea

By Mike Whitney

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/04/17/the-problem-is-washington-not-north-korea/

This Is What’s Really Behind North Korea’s Nuclear Provocations

It’s easy to dismiss Kim Jong-un as a madman. But there’s a long history of US aggression against the North, which we forget at our peril.

By Bruce Cumings

https://www.thenation.com/.../this-is-whats-really.../

The Mindless Hawkish Response to North Korea’s Missile Test

"Threatening North Korea with regime change... is one of the stupidest things the U.S. could do..."

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-mindless-hawkish-response-to-north-koreas-missile-test/

What the N. Korean “Crisis” Is Really About

By Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46997.htm

What Corporate Media Never Tells You About North Korea

By Joe Clifford

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46960.htm

NYT’s ‘Impossible to Verify’ North Korea Nuke Claim Spreads Unchecked by Media

http://fair.org/.../nyts-impossible-to-verify-north.../

Why Does North Korea Want Nukes?

By Paul Atwood

https://www.counterpunch.org/.../why-does-north-korea.../

Facts of the Korean War: UN Security Council, Instrument of US led Wars, Blatantly Biased Against North Korea

http://www.globalresearch.ca/facts-of-the-korean-war-united-nations-security-council-blatantly-biased-against-north-korea/5606825

How History Explains the Korean Crisis

August 28, 2017. Special Report: Many Americans simply view North Korea and its leaders as “crazy,” but the history behind today’s crisis reveals of a more complex reality that could change those simplistic impressions.

By William R. Polk

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/08/28/how-history-explains-the-korean-crisis/

“History of U.S. Sabotage of Korean Peace and Reunification”

By S. Brian Willson
“…The well documented but little publicly known historical record of the United States in Korea is nothing short of demonic and shameless… This pattern of U.S. behavior pre-dates the Cold War…”

http://www.brianwillson.com/history-of-u-s-sabotage-of-korean-peace-and-reunification/

Trump and the Geopolitics of Crazy

The Times They Are A-Changin’ in North Korea

By John Feffer. August 22, 2017.

” The United States has beaten its head against the wall of North Korea for more than 70 years, and that wall has changed little indeed as a result. The United States, meanwhile, has suffered one headache after another… It's way past time for the Trump administration to take a few aspirin and a few deep breaths, and seize this opportunity to talk with the North Koreans before both head and wall sustain irreparable damage.”

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176320/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_avoiding_war_with_pyongyang/#more

Why Trump Won’t Start a War With North Korea

By Mike Whitney. September 8, 2017.

“…The US already has the arrangement it wants on the Peninsula… North Korea agreed to end its nuclear weapons program in 1994 if the US met its modest demands?...The North kept its word, but the US didn’t. It’s that simple…It’s the same game Washington has been playing for the last hundred years…”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/08/why-trump-wont-start-a-war-with-north-korea/

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47771.htm


State of Fear: How History’s Deadliest Bombing Campaign Created Today’s Crisis in Korea
By Ted Nace
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/08/state-of-fear-how-historys-deadliest-bombing-campaign-created-todays-crisis-in-korea/

Why Does North Korea Hate Us?
By Robert C. Koehler
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47633.htm

The Social and Economic Achievements of North Korea. The DPRK Confronts Barbaric Actions by UN Security Council
By Carla Stea. Global Research’s correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y. (June 11, 2017)
“…History will condemn the current US-led United Nations assault on the DPRK as one of the greatest crimes of the twenty-first century… Upon my return, on May 25, 2017 from the DPRK, I was appalled by the totalitarian mind-set revealed by the fifteen members of the UN Security Council who supported the new Chapter VII Resolution 2356, increasing the strangling sanctions against the DPRK, a heroic , progressive, admirable people desperately trying to defend themselves from any repetition of the barbaric slaughter inflicted upon their nation, with the criminal collusion of the UN Security Council, during the first Korean War, 1950-1953. The unanimous support for the new sanctions by all 15 Security Council members is shameful. All fifteen members of the Security Council, including the United States, know, categorically, that the DPRK will not attack another country unless they are attacked first, or provoked intolerably….”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-social-and-economic-achievements-of-north-korea/5594234

Additional references:

Bruce Cumings, "A Murderous History of Korea", London Review of Books, May 18, 2017

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n10/bruce-cumings/a-murderous-history-of-korea?utm 

Tim Shorrock, "Diplomacy With North Korea Has Worked Before, and Can Work Again", The Nation, Sept. 5, 2017 

https://www.thenation.com/article/diplomacy-with-north-korea-has-worked-before-and-can-work-again/

Darrell Prince, "North Korea situation Sept 3, 2017: You catch more flies with honey, than vinegar"

http://thecallforunity.org/north-korea-situtation-sept-3-2017/

Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun. A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1997)

William Blum, from “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” - Chapter 5
“How is it that the Korean War escaped the protests which surrounded the war in Vietnam?…”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47825.htm

ABC: Understand the North Korean Crisis 

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/understand-the-north-korean-crisis/8881218

ABC: A history of North Korea

Rear Vision looks at the history of North Korea and in particular the history of the relationship between North Korea and the United States of America. 
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/north-korea/3352778

Read more by following my page on Facebook - Bruce McPhie

Trump Quietly Promises Billions in New Nuke Contracts

This could trigger a new arms race with Russia and China.

By SCOTT RITTER • September 1, 2017

“Baker Shot”, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear test by the United States at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Credit: U.S. Department of Defense/Public Domain.

“…America’s collective nuclear amnesia has led to the lessons of the past having been largely forgotten… 

The Trump administration has just announced that it is moving ahead with an Obama-era plan to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal, sprucing up the nuclear Triad with a new fleet of land-based missiles, missile-carrying submarines, and air-delivered nuclear weapons that will cost the American taxpayer well over $1 trillion in the coming years. 

The ostensible purpose behind this modernization effort is to maintain America’s nuclear deterrence capability for decades to come. 

The harsh reality, however, is that through this nuclear upgrade, America is simply repeating the mistakes of the past, building weapons whose precision and speed will trigger a new arms race with Russia and China as they seek to match this new American capability with weapons designed to sustain their version of nuclear deterrence.  

Mutually assured destruction (MAD), once relegated to the trash bin of history, has had new life breathed into it. 

This time there is no foundation of arms control in place to limit the insanity—the ABM treaty is a thing of the past, and America today hides behind the false promise of a missile-defense shield that has questionable utility against a North Korean madman armed with a handful of missiles, let alone a Russian or Chinese military armed with hundreds. Disarmament talks with Russia—once a hallmark of the Trump foreign-policy vision—are stillborn...  

American tanks patrol the Polish frontier opposite their Russian counterparts, while U.S. and Russian warplanes share the skies over Syria, and play cat and mouse over the Baltics. 

Into this volatile mix, President Trump now wants to deploy a new generation of nuclear weapons that any enemy possessing a modicum of strategic insight would have no choice but to view as possessing genuine first-strike capability. 

Given the enhanced performance of these weapons, there will be no “fail safe” mechanism to limit the scope and scale of inadvertent use. There won’t be time for military officers to call home with a furtive warning of impending doom… 

Today Americans are unable or perhaps unwilling to hold their elected leaders responsible as they play nuclear Russian roulette—a game as avoidable as it is insane.

---

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.  He is the author of Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War (Clarity Press, 2017).

READ the complete article:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/trump-quietly-promises-billions-in-new-nuke-contracts/

WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath

Friday, October 09, 2015

By Robert Naiman, Verso Books | Book Excerpt

Syrian soldiers and children at a checkpoint in the besieged and devastated city of Homs, Syria, March 23, 2014. For both sides of Syria's civil war, Homs, a central Syrian crossroads with a diverse prewar population of 1 million, is crucial to the future. (Sergey Ponomarev / The New York Times)

In 2010, WikiLeaks became a household name by releasing 251,287 classified State Department cables. Now, a new book collects in-depth analyses of what these cables tell us about the foreign policy of the United States, from authors including Truthout staff reporter Dahr Jamail and our regular contributors Gareth Porter, Robert Naiman, Phyllis Bennis and Stephen Zunes.

"The essays that make up The WikiLeaks Files shed critical light on a once secret history," says Edward Snowden. 

The following is Chapter 10 of The WikiLeaks Files:

"...History shows that public understanding of US foreign policy depends crucially on assessing the motivations of US officials. It is likely inevitable as a result that US officials will present themselves to the public as having more noble motivations than they share with each other in private, and therefore that if members of the public had access to the motivations shared in private, they might make different assessments of US policy. This is a key reason why WikiLeaks' publishing of US diplomatic cables was so important.

The cables gave the public a recent window into the strategies and motivations of US officials as they expressed them to each other, not as they usually expressed them to the public. In the case of Syria, the cables show that regime change had been a long-standing goal of US policy; that the US promoted sectarianism in support of its regime-change policy, thus helping lay the foundation for the sectarian civil war and massive bloodshed that we see in Syria today; that key components of the Bush administration's regime-change policy remained in place even as the Obama administration moved publicly toward a policy of engagement; and that the US government was much more interested in the Syrian government's foreign policy, particularly its relationship with Iran, than in human rights inside Syria...

Knowing that the US never really abandoned a regime-change policy in Syria informs our understanding of the question of US military intervention in Syria today. It shows us that the US is not an innocent victim of circumstance, having to consider the use of force because diplomacy has been exhausted; rather, the US faces a situation that it helped create, by pursuing regime change for years and never fully switching to diplomacy."

READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE, AND READ/POST PUBLIC COMMENTS: 

http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/33180-wikileaks-reveals-how-the-us-aggressively-pursued-regime-change-in-syria-igniting-a-bloodbath

Philippine: Western Media is Distorting Reality, People and Army Unite to Battle “ISIS”.

By Andre Vltchek

“…The Western establishment media and various servile NGOs (including those which are “defending human rights” in several rebellious and independent-minded countries) consistently demonize President Duterte, an anti-imperialist, progressive leader who enjoys well over 80 percent approval rating.

It is no secret in the Philippines there are two distinct factions inside the military – one supports the president and his drive for independence from the West. The other, which is trained and often corrupted by Washington and other Western capitals, would love to see him go….

Before President Duterte came to power little over one year ago, social situation in many parts of Mindanao was desperate and therefore there was at least some support for radical ‘solutions’. Since then, however, things changed dramatically.

Healthcare, education and public housing are improving. Indiscriminate mining by multi-national companies has been deterred. People here; as well as in almost all other parts of the Philippines finally feel hopeful and optimistic about their future. This converts into great support for both the government and the military…

A month ago I wrote an essay exposing the complex network of Western-sponsored terrorism in Asia (“Washington Jihad Express: Indonesia, Afghanistan, Syria and Philippines”). 

I argued that in the 1980’s, Indonesian and Malaysian jihadists, indoctrinated by the Southeast Asian brand of extreme anti-Communism, went to fight in Afghanistan against the socialist governments of Karmal, and then Mohammad Najibullah, with the ultimate goal of destroying the Soviet Union.

Hardened and further brainwashed, they returned home to Southeast Asia, participated in several ethnic strives and pogroms (including those in Ambon and Poso), and then, in order to ‘bridge the generational gap’, embarked on the coaching of a young generation of terrorists, who eventually ended up fighting in Syria and recently in the Philippines…

In the Indonesian city of Bandung, Prof. Iman Soleh, a professor at the Faculty of Social and Political Science (University of Padjadjaran- UNPAD) offered his take on why the West is now so obsessed with destabilizing and smearing the Philippines and its current rebellious administration:

“Since World War Two, the U.S. was afraid of so-called ‘domino effects’. Among other things that are now happening in the Philippines under president Duterte, the government is curbing activities of the multi-national mining conglomerates, and the West cannot accept that. Philippines are putting its environmental concerns above the short-term profits! For the millions of left-wing activists here in Indonesia and all over Southeast Asia, President Duterte is a role model.”

It is no secret that the West punishes such ‘bad paradigms’ brutally and decisively.

Prof. Soleh continued:

“I think all that is happening is not just to ‘destabilize’ the Philippines, but also because the country has conflict areas that could be ‘nurtured’. The best example is the predominantly Muslim island of Mindanao, vs. the rest of the Philippines, which is predominantly a Catholic country…”

The West is regularly using ‘jihad,’ directly and indirectly, to destabilize socialist, anti-imperialist, and just patriotic countries and governments. In the past, it managed to ruin countries like Afghanistan, Indonesia (1965) and Syria. Many believe that the Philippines is the latest addition to the ‘hit-list.’…

As Drei Toledo, a prominent Philippine journalist, educator and pro-Duterte activist, originally from Mindanao, explained:

“The reason why the West is hostile toward President Duterte is simple: he is working hard to reach a peace agreement with China, a country that is seen by Washington as its arch-enemy. Another ‘adversary of the West,’ Russia, is admired by Duterte and increasingly by his people. Recently, Russia and the Philippines signed a defense agreement. The president is also forging close ties with Cuba, particularly in the area of health…

Before Duterte became our President, poverty by design in Philippines was restored and perpetuated by the U.S. and Malaysia-controlled Cojuangco-Aquino clan. Foreign and local entities that have long benefited financially from Philippines being a weak state are now threatened overwhelmingly by President Duterte’s unifying agenda to create a socialist system in the Philippines.”…

Marawi is just one new chapter in the already long book of horrors of brutal religious terrorist acts, most of them directly or indirectly triggered by Western imperialism.

In the first wave of its fight again the secular socialist Muslim governments, the West destabilized Iran, Egypt and Indonesia. Then came the Afghanistan ‘gambit’, followed by the arch-brutal destruction of Iraq and Libya. Then it was Syria’s turn. ‘Jihad’ is consistently used against Russia, China as well as the former Central Asian Soviet republics.

All this I described in my 840-page book: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”, but one can never write fast enough and fully catch up with the crimes committed by the West. 

It is often easy to pinpoint Western involvement in the religious conflicts, particularly in such places as Afghanistan and Syria. In the Philippines, the link is still indirect, well concealed, but it certainly exists. 

To rebel against the Western Empire is always a costly and bloody affair. It often leads to coups sponsored by Washington, London or Paris, and even to direct military conflicts, interventions and full-scale wars…

No matter what the West and local corporate media are saying, most Filipinos know: this is their struggle; this is their president and their military fighting against something extremely foreign, violent and dreadful.”

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries...

Read the complete article, and read/post interesting public comments:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47527.htm