WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #76,

 

76.  WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #76, June 1, 2022
Harms of US Wars.
North Korea: a favorable inside perspective.

Tom Dispatch, May 31, 2022.  Bearing Witness to the Harms and Sufferings of US Wars  Today, TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University's Costs of War Project, shines a light on the civilian suffering so many of us have long ignored and asks that we don't look away.  We must bear witness to lasting injuries and confront the suffering we caused the victims of US wars.    Nick Turse

 

 

“War as Terrorism:  Conflicts We Can't Win, Suffering We Don't See” By Andrea Mazzarino. Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures -- those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn't accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, war in children’s play took place only between soldiers. No civilians were caught up in it as "collateral damage." We kids had no way of faintly grasping that, in its essence, war actually involves civilian deaths galore. And why should we have? In that era when the only foreign conflict most of us knew about was the 1991 U.S. tromping of Iraq, mainly an air-power war from the American point of view, we certainly didn't think about what we would now call war crimes. It might have been cause for a therapy referral if one of us had taken a G.I. Joe and pretended to shoot a child, whether armed with a suicide bomb or not. Click here to read more of this dispatch.

 

“Contrary to Relentless Media Demonization, A Swiss Businessman Who Worked in North Korea For Seven Years Found Much To Like About the Country” By Jeremy Kuzmarov.  CovertAction Magazine.  May 05, 2022 1:44 pm.

In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page article titled “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.”

Co-authored by Pulitzer-winning correspondent David E. Sanger, the article cited satellite imagery and a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to argue that North Korea was continuing to secretly develop missiles in violation of the June 2018 Singapore agreement between Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

However, the prominently embedded satellite photo was actually dated March 2018—three months before Kim and Trump met in Singapore—and the missile bases presented as damning evidence of Kim’s duplicity had been known to South Korea for at least two years.

The Times’s deception is part of a larger media propaganda campaign against North Korea that has helped condition the U.S. public to accept draconian U.S. sanctions policies, the spending of billions of dollars per year beefing up the South Korean military, and the $7.1 billion Pacific Deterrence Initiative that includes a major naval build-up in the South China Sea.

Felix Abt was one of the first foreign entrepreneurs to work in North Korea, and the founding president of the first foreign chamber of commerce in North Korea, set up by a dozen resident foreign business people in 2005, and co-founder and director of the Pyongyang Business School.

He has just published a book entitled A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves and Nuclear Bombs? An Alternative Account to the Western Media’s Blinkered North Korea Portrayal, which debunks the media’s narrative of North Korea as a “monolithic gulag network filled with slaves” and a “hellhole…rife with suffering and starvation.” […]

The post Contrary to Relentless Media Demonization, A Swiss Businessman Who Worked in North Korea For Seven Years Found Much To Like About the Country appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.