(hình bên: Picaso diễn đạt vụ Tàn Sát Thường Dân tại cuộc chiến Triều Tiên)
Huyền thoại “chiến đấu vì tự do dân chủ” của lính Mỹ sau 1945, cho đến nay vẫn được tô vẽ trơ trẽn, bất chấp sự kiện lịch sử. Obama kế tục sự trơ trẽn bịp bợm này trong cái gọi là ngày kỷ niệm cuộc đình chiến chiến tranh Triều Tiên, để tiếp tục trâng tráo ca ngợi sự hoang tưởng về nỗ lực chiến đấu vì tự do của những tên lính Mỹ, hay đúng ra là lực lượng quân đội sát nhân tàn bạo!
Cuộc chiến “Triều Tiên” được “chính sử” ghi nhận là do Bắc Hàn hiếu chiến tấn công “miền đất tự do” Nam Hàn. Sự thật, Lý Thừa Vãn và Mỹ lập kế hoạch tiến chiếm Bắc Hàn, kế hoặch bị lộ và Bắc Hàn, Trung Cộng buộc phải ra tay trước, trước khi Nam Hàn Lý Thừa Vãn và Mỹ khởi động chiếm thượng phong! (tham khảo bài viết ở dưới). Cũng như giờ đây người ta cũng đã có đủ bằng chứng rằng Mỹ, Roosevelt đã gài thế buộc Nhật phải tuyệt vọng tấn công Trân Trâu Cảng để kéo người Mỹ ủng hộ Mỹ tham chiến để khống trị toàn cầu với hai quả bom nguyên tử giết hàng trăm ngàn thường dân vô tội không “cần thiết” để thử nghiệm tác dụng và dằn mặt cả thế giới! Cũng như “chính sách Hướng Về Đất Tổ, Cương Quyết Bắc Phạt” của đám miền Nam, không đủ và không được Mỹ cho phép tiến hành, chứ không phải là “miền Nam tự vệ”! Và có khác gì sự kiện Colin Powell trơ trẽn chưng “bằng chứng vũ khí nguyên tử” của Iraq Sadam Hussein giữa LHQ!!! (có ai đòi người viết chưng bằng chứng trích dẫn “tố cáo Mỹ” cái tội này không nhỉ?)
Và cũng như chính sử Miền Nam ghi rằng “quân dân Miền Nam yêu cầu Mỹ đến cúu giúp miền Nam tự vệ” nhưng thật sự chính Mỹ ngang nhiên bước vào miền Nam và dí súng bắt “miền Nam đón chào”! Và cái gọi là “tiền đồn tự do miền Nam” cũng chi là một cái xóm nhỏ độc tài của đám dân cựu nô lệ của Pháp!
Ỏ đây, cần phải khẳng định để chặn đứng một ngụy luận mặc nhiên rằng đối nghịch với đen tự nhiên là trắng! Thực tế dĩ nhiên không nhất thiết như thế. Hay nói thẳng ra kẻ thù của những tên trộm cướp không nhất định đều phải là người lương thiện! Mà thường vẫn là những tên tồi bại bất lương hơn! Thí dụ như Mafia và bọn Cảnh Sát nhà nước!
Các chế độ độc tài khuynh hữu tay sai do Mỹ dựng nên và bảo vệ cũng không phải là đối chứng hay lý cớ chính đáng hóa cho những chế độ khuynh tả cộng sản độc tài bạo ngược trắng trợn hơn ở phía đối nghịch. Tất cả đều minh chứng cái gọi là “nền dân chủ gián tiếp hay đại biểu” mà cả hai bên của chủ nghĩa Nhà Nước Quốc Gia tận dụng chỉ là huyền thoại bao phủ xương máu số phận bất hạnh của những nhóm dân với nền dân trí lạc hậu để thao túng theo bản năng man rợ quyền lực chính trị mà thôi. Cả hai cũng chỉ là một bàn tay sắt, kẻ bạo ngược với mức độ gian ngoan sẽ bọc thêm cái vỏ nhung xanh của “dân chủ đại diện”
Đó chỉ là sự kiện nhỏ của một hành động lịch sử! Vấn đề phải xét rộng hơn, nền tảng hơn từ chính gốc:
Tính trơ trẽ mặt dầy hiện nay của nhà nước Mỹ, chỉ có công dân Mỹ thứ thiệt mới có khả năng vạch trần nó giữa công chúng thế giới như Edward Snowden đang thực hiện!
Thế nhưng đừng mong đợi báo chí chính qui, đại học chính qui và chính sử thừa nhận những dữ kiện (facts) rõ ràng này! Chúng nó sẽ vẫn trơ trẽn mặt dầy cứ rỉ rả và già mồm với châm ngôn: cứ nói láo, nói nhiều lần, lập đi lập lại, thì với đám quần chúng lười biếng tham khảo, sợ kiến thức, và mê giải trí tầm phào kia sẽ trở thành sự thật, sự kiện lịch sử.
Và đám khoa bảng trong các “viện nghiên cứu” sẽ tiếp tục cấu víu so sánh trong các “luận án chính trị, tác phẩm sử học” trong mục tiêu lôi kéo đánh lạc hướng con người vào cái bẫy “tranh luận” đúng sai giữa các “thể chế” chính trị đỏ xanh, để vô hình chung, dù bênh bên này hay chống bên kia, cũng phải rơi vào sự thừa nhận vai trò chủ thể của thuyết “quốc gia nhà nước” (statism).
Những cái tên thể chế như Cộng Hòa, Quân Chủ, Tự Do, Cộng Sản, XHCH, Nhân Dân v.v có khác nhau danh xưng, nhưng cái ruột vẫn là quyền lực hàng dọc theo một định chế thẳng đứng với phương pháp cai trị tùy nghi khác nhau, nhưng tuyệt đối và gian trá bạo ngược như nhau khi bị thách thức bởi những con người yêu công lý và tự do đích thật.
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Who Really Started the Korean War?
The sixtieth anniversary of the “end” of the Korean war saw President Obama attempt to rescue that classic example of interventionist failure from history’s dustbin. Addressing veterans of that conflict, he declared:
“That war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When 50 million South Koreans live in freedom, a vibrant democracy…a stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North, that is a victory and that is your legacy.”
This is a fairytale: it wasn’t a victory, or even a tie: the US public was disenchanted with the war long before the armistice, and Truman was under considerable pressure at home to conclude an increasingly unpopular conflict. As for this guff about “democracy”: whatever the US was fighting for, from 1950, when the war broke out, to 1953, when it ground to a halt, democracy hardly described the American cause.
We were fighting on behalf of Syngman Rhee, the US-educated-and-sponsored dictator of South Korea, whose vibrancy was demonstrated by the large-scale slaughter of his leftist political opponents. For 22 years, Rhee’s word was law, and many thousands of his political opponents were murdered: tens of thousands were jailed or driven into exile. Whatever measure of liberality has reigned on the Korean peninsula was in spite of Washington’s efforts and ongoing military presence. When the country finally rebelled against Rhee, and threw him out in the so-called April Revolution of 1960, he was ferried to safety in a CIA helicopter as crowds converged on the presidential palace.
The mythology that has coagulated around the Korean war is epitomized by Obama’s recent peroration, a compendium of uplifting phrases largely bereft of any real history. When history intrudes, it is seen only in very soft focus. The phrase “Korea reminds us” recurs throughout, like the refrain of a pop song, but nowhere does this anonymous presidential speechwriter remind us of the origins of this war. How did it come about?
The standard neocon-cold war liberal line is that the North Koreans, in league with Moscow and Beijing, launched a war of aggression on June 25, 1950, when North Korean troops poured across the disputed border. What this truncated history leaves out is that, in doing so, they preempted Rhee’s own plans to launch an invasion northward. As historian Mark E. Caprio, professor of history at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, points out:
“On February 8, 1949, the South Korean president met with Ambassador John Muccio and Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall in Seoul. Here the Korean president listed the following as justifications for initiating a war with the North: the South Korean military could easily be increased by 100,000 if it drew from the 150,000 to 200,000 Koreans who had recently fought with the Japanese or the Nationalist Chinese. Moreover, the morale of the South Korean military was greater than that of the North Koreans. If war broke out he expected mass defections from the enemy. Finally, the United Nations’ recognition of South Korea legitimized its rule over the entire peninsula (as stipulated in its constitution). Thus, he concluded, there was “nothing [to be] gained by waiting.”
The only reason Rhee didn’t launch an attack was due to American reluctance to supply him with the arms and aid he would need: war, when it came, would be on America’s terms, and our leaders had good reason to think it would come sooner rather than later. Washington’s policy was to keep Rhee supplied with just enough arms to control the South. There is also evidence for Congressman Howard Buffett’s contention that the secret testimony before Congress of CIA director Admiral Hillenkoeter proved US responsibility for the war.
Buffett, Republican anti-interventionist from Iowa, went to his grave demanding the declassification of that crucial testimony: alas, to no avail. And yet what we do know is this: the US government had ample warnings of the pending North Korean invasion, via intelligence reports sent to top cabinet officials well before the June 25 commencement of large-scale hostilities. Yet Washington took no action, either diplomatic or otherwise, to deter the North Koreans.
On the other side of the equation, the Communist world was divided on the Korea question, with Stalin skeptical of Kim il Sung’s assurances that his forces would achieve victory in three days. Russian policy was: military aid, yes – Soviet intervention, no. China’s Mao, on the other hand, offered his support – which wasn’t actually forthcoming, however, until the US entered the war and advanced into North Korea itself.
Neither Stalin nor President Harry Truman were particularly eager to see the conflict erupt, although both may have considered it inevitable. In which case it was convenient, for propaganda purposes, to be able to portray the enemy as having fired the first shot.
As to who did in reality fire that shot, Bruce Cumings, head of the history department at the University of Chicago, gave us the definitive answer in his two-volume The Origins of the Korean War, and The Korean War: A History: the Korean war started during the American occupation of the South, and it was Rhee, with help from his American sponsors, who initiated a series of attacks that well preceded the North Korean offensive of 1950. From 1945-1948, American forces aided Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do – where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US-backed forces.
Rhee’s army and national police were drawn from the ranks of those who had collaborated with the Japanese occupation during World War II, and this was the biggest factor that made civil war inevitable. That the US backed these quislings guaranteed widespread support for the Communist forces led by Kim IL Sung, and provoked the rebellion in the South that was the prelude to open North-South hostilities. Rhee, for his part, was eager to draw in the United States, and the North Koreans, for their part, were just as eager to invoke the principle of “proletarian internationalism” to draw in the Chinese and the Russians.
Having backed the Maoists during World War II, in cooperation with the Soviet Union, the US had already “lost” China, and Truman was determined not to “lose” Korea, too. In spite of the fact that he had ample warning of the North Korean offensive, the President used this “surprise attack” to justify sending American troops to Korea to keep Rhee in power, and in doing so neglected to go to Congress for approval – or even give them advance notice.
Republicans were outraged: Sen. Robert A. Taft and others denounced this usurpation of Congress’s constitutional duty as a dangerous precedent that would come back to haunt us – as it surely did in Vietnam, and continues to do so to this day. In the months prior to the war, anti-interventionist Republicans in Congress had succeeded in defeating the administration’s $60 million aid package to the Rhee regime (by one vote!), but this was later reversed on account of pressure from the well-funded China Lobby. Now Truman had sent our troops to fight in a foreign war as if he were a Roman emperor ordering his legionnaires into Gaul.
In defense of the administration, the liberals came out in support of the war, with The Nation and The New Republic leading the charge: the antiwar Republicans were “isolationists” and their alliance with “legalists,” sniffed TNR, revealed a natural affinity, while progressives were burdened with no such sentimental attachments to the Constitution. The editor of The Nation red-baited Col. Robert McCormick‘s fiercely conservative Chicago Tribune for being on the same side as the American Communist Party. What’s interesting is that the CP’s former fellow-travelers, such as Henry Wallace, Corliss Lamont, and the principals of the Progressive Party – which had run Wallace for President with fulsome Communist support – rallied behind Truman, reveling in the idea of a UN-sponsored war on behalf of “collective security.” Obama, it seems, commands a similar ability to inspire the left to throw its vaunted antiwar credentials overboard.
Sixty years after the non-ending of the Korean war – there is, to this day, no peace treaty – the lesson of that conflict is not, as Obama insisted in his speech, that “the drawdown after the end of World War II left us unprepared,” but that involvement in other peoples’ civil wars is never to our benefit, or theirs. Sixty years have passed, and US troops are still in South Korea, defending a country well-prepared to take care of itself – sitting ducks if the North Koreans should ever launch an attack. Having stifled every effort at peaceful reunification – including a promising effort during the Bush era – Washington continues to enable the Korean standoff, and in doing so perpetuates the North Korean regime, one of the worst, if not the worst, in the world.
North Korea is dangerously unstable, with a significant movement within the military against the rule of Kim Jong-un, the third member of the IL Sungist dynasty to take the reins of power. There have been episodic reports of gun battles between rival military units, and this, combined with North Korea’s dire economic straits, has the potential to spark an explosion sooner or later – and inevitably draw in the South. Having isolated the North Koreans, who have in turn isolated themselves, the West has limited its ability to have much of an effect on the ground.
The two Koreas are very different, opposites in many ways, but one thing unites them: an intense nationalism. This same nationalism resents the US presence, whatever the pretext, and will one day find expression in a successful national reunification. Until that day, the unfinished war and its consequences will continue to be a thorn in our side.
US: Support for Latin American dictators
Tim Brown refused to sign a lying US government document. John Heelan comments: “I applaud Tim’s principled stand on the matter, it was extremely brave of him considering the US history of supporting right-wing dictatorships in Central and South America in support of American commercial interest in those countries (such as mining companies and United Fruit) , such as:
El Salvador (General Maximilio Hernández- 1932)
“A failed uprising organized by EI Salvador’s Communist Party founder, Farabundo Marti, six weeks after Hernandez Martinez had seized power in a 1931 coup, sparked the General’s crackdown on “communists.” “Roadways and drainage ditches were littered with bodies,” writes Raymond Bonner. “Hotels were raided; individuals with blond hair were dragged out and killed as suspected Russians. Men were tied thumb to thumb, then executed, tumbling into mass graves they had first been forced to dig.” U.S. warships were stationed off-shore, ready to send in Marines to aid the General in case he ran into serious opposition.Hernandez Martinez was run out of the country in 1944, but his memory was celebrated as recently as 1980, when the Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez Brigade carried out a series of death-squad assassinations of prominent Salvadoran leftists. Farabundo Marti, killed during the purge, has also left a legacy: the rebels currently fighting the U.S. backed government of El Salvador call themselves the FMLN, the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front”
Nicaragua (The Somozas)
“The Marines invaded Nicaragua in 1912 and stayed until 1933, fighting but never defeating the revolutionary Augusto Sandino. They created the Nicaraguan National Guard and installed Anastasio Somoza Garcia in power. Then Sandino, who had signed a truce and put down his arms, was assassinated by Somoza. In 1935, General Smedley Butler, who led the Marines into Nicaragua, said: “[I was] a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the banks. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism – I helped purify Nicaragua for [an] international banking house.” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it another way. “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
Guatemala
“A Christian has to walk around with his Bible and his machine gun,” said born-again General Efrain Rios Mont, military ruler of Guatemala from March 1982 to August 1983. Rios Mont was one in a long series of dictators who ran Guatemala after the Dulles brothers and United Fruit, backed by the CIA, decided that elected President Jacob Arbenz held the country “in the grip of a Russian-controlled dictatorship” and overthrew the country’s constitutional democracy in 1954. The succession of corrupt military dictators ruled Guatemala for over 30 years, one anti-communist tyrant after another receiving U.S. support, aid, and training”
Honduras (Roberto Suazo Cordova)
Honduras was the original “Banana Republic,” its history inextricably intertwined with that of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company, but in 1979, when Anastasio Somoza was overthrown in Nicaragua (see card 7), Honduras got a new nickname: “The Pentagon Republic.” In 1978 Honduras received $16.2 million in U.S. aid; by 1985 it was getting $231.1 million, primarily because President Suazo Cordova, working with U.S. Ambassador John Dmitri Negroponte and Honduran General Gustava Alvarez, allowed Honduras to become a training center for U.S. funded Nicaraguan contras. General Alvarez, who according to Newsweek, “doesn’t care if officers are thieves, as long as they are virulent anti-communists,” assisted in training programs and founded a special “hit squad,” the Cobras. Victims of the Cobras were stripped, bound, thrown into pits and tortured. The Reagan Administration claimed ignorance of these human rights violations, but U.S. advisors have admitted knowledge”
Panama (General Manuel Noriega)
“The U.S. command post for covert Latin American operations is located in the Canal Zone where a series of figurehead presidents, some backed by General Manual Noriega, have involved Panama in U.S. intelligence operations. Noriega first met with then CIA Director George Bush in 1976 while Noriega was collecting $100 thousand a year as a CIA asset.Their friendly relationship persisted even after Noriegas’ drug dealing was revealed by a 1975 DEA investigation. During the Reagan era, Noriega collaborated with Oliver North on covert actions against Nicaragua, training contras and providing a trans-shipment point for CIA supported operations that flew weapons to the contras and cocaine into the U.S.” (source for above comments: http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/CentralAmerica.html)
This of course does not include Pinochet, (Chile) or Batista (Cuba). (I also think that Castro should be arraigned in the International Criminal Court for the repressive tactics of his regime over the last 50 years.)”
Ronald Hilton – 8/3/03
11 Latin American Dictators | ![]() |
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Bloody Legacy of the SOA: At least 11 dictators have been trained at the School of the Americas since it opened in 1948.
GEN Leopoldo Galtieri, GEN Juan Melgar Castro, GEN Efrain R?os Montt, GEN Manuel Noriega, GEN Policarpo Paz Garc?a, GEN Guillermo Rodriguez, GEN Hugo Banzer Su?rez, GEN Omar Torrijos, GEN Juan Velasco Alvarado, GEN Roberto Viola, GEN Guido Vildoso Calder?n, |