GI War Experiences Nostalgia In Mindboggling Ignorance Of Participation In Crimes Against Humanity
By Jay Janson
08 December, 2013
Countercurrents.org
Any US veteran by googling the history of the country he or she invaded, can know of any prosecutable crimes against humanity he or she might have been involved in. Critical to stopping the centuries of genocidal wars invested in by the speculative investment banking industry, are the lawsuits for compensation for wrongful death, injury, destruction of property and theft of natural resources that will make war unprofitable. The nostalgia of elderly veterans looking back on months or years of their youth spent in US military uniform fighting in some exotic smaller nation thousands of miles from home is certainly not uncommon. Far less common are US veterans who fully realize the immeasurable soul-twisting suffering caused by their shooting and bombing in someone else's beloved country; invariably, a country already having been made poor a century earlier by the plundering of speculative colonial investment banks which invested similar military occupation.
The warm camaraderie felt among army buddies in danger can be a fond memory of men who afterward pass civilian lives in cold competition in a corporate ruled society naively believing the lies told them in war promoting conglomerate owned media.
However, for a minority of veterans of America's dozens of murderous, criminal, illegal undeclared, unconstitutional and often even genocidal invasions, the memories of what they did to the indigenous population of fellow, albeit different looking, human beings haunts them. For these veterans, there is also a bitter memory of a camaraderie betrayed by their own officers, their commander-in-chief, congressmen, senators, media, families, clergy and perhaps worst of all, by their teachers graduated from citadels of learning and knowledge, the universities, whose professors are by trade responsible for knowing the documented facts that could have exposed the lies they were sent to kill and die for in unintended disservice to their fellow Americans.
Today, Dec. 7, world news media reported that the American veteran who had been held prisoner in North Korea for more than a month was headed back home to the United States after his release by the government, which cited his “sincere repentance” for his acts against Koreans in Korea.
News item of a week earlier, November 30, 2013: North Korea Releases a Video of a U.S. Veteran Confessing to ‘Hostile Acts’ Kcna/Agence France-Presse New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/world/asia/north-korea-accuses-detained-us-veteran-of-war-crimes.
"BEIJING — North Korea has accused an American veteran of war crimes and on Saturday released a video of him confessing to what it said were “hostile acts” during the Korean War and while he was visiting the country in October."
“As I killed so many civilians and K.P.A. soldiers and destroyed strategic objects in the D.P.R.K. during the Korean War, I committed indelible offensive acts against the D.P.R.K. government and Korean people,”
"In the [videoed] apology, [US Veteran] Mr. Newman describes how he wanted to meet “surviving soldiers and pray for the souls of the dead soldiers” from the unit he worked with."
(Your author, who has Korean family, notes, chillingly, the absence of any intention to pray as well for the souls of the "civilians and K.P.A. soldiers he later apologized for killing.)
The Times article continued, "The veteran, Merrill Newman, 85, of Palo Alto, California ... a retired technology executive and a world traveler, went to North Korea on a trip organized by a licensed tour group to fulfill a longtime desire to return to the Korean Peninsula, his family said".
Your author, (with Korean family), would like to point out something critical to the survival of Mankind from the centuries of genocidal wars invested in by the speculative investment banking industry. The sixty-eight years of the undeclared wars on former colonies, as well as the centuries of declared wars, will need to be understood before Mankind can make them unprofitable by an eventual precedence of imprisonment of investors in war, and seizure of assets to pay compensation for wrongful deaths in the millions, injuries in the tens of millions, massive destruction of property and theft of natural resources.
With today's computer search engines, elderly reminiscing ex-US Army Officer Newman could, with an hour or so of Googling Korean history, have informed himself of the same Korea history your author re-offers excepts of to his readers here below. A good deal the documented facts in this article's, published earlier this year by Dissident Voice, can be found quite simply on Wikipedia, the on line free encyclopedia. Tens of thousands of veterans of US military action in Korea are long aware of participation in prosecutable crimes against humanity.
Prosecutable US Crimes against Humanity in Korea
by Jay Janson / March 30th, 2013 Dissident Voice
...
1945, September 8 — US State Department officials, arrive in Korea with the US Army, disband the government of the Korean People’s Republic created September 6, in Seoul, by delegates from local peoples’ offices from all provinces throughout the peninsula formed when Japan announced intention to surrender (August 10), proceed without any Korean authorization whatsoever, to immediately cut Korea into two parts to be occupied by US and Soviet troops and establishing a military government, flying in from Washington DC (in General MacArthur’s private plane), Singman Rhee, to head it; eventually installing him as president of a separate South Korea Government that will include collaborators, and will outlaw all strikes, declare the KPR and all its activities illegal and begin a deadly terror of persecution of members of the disallowed Korean Peoples Republic, communists, socialists, unionists and anyone against the the partition and demanding an independent Korea. [The Unknown Truth About Korea: U.S. Sanctioned Death Squads and War Crimes, 1945-1953, S Brian Willson ]
1946-1949 — The US in effect declares war on the popular movement of Korea south of the 38th Parallel and sets in motion a repressive campaign dismantling the Peoples’ Committees and their supporters throughout the south, becoming massively homicidal as Rhee’s special forces and secret police take the lives of some 200,000 men, women and children as documented recently by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the National Assembly of the Republic of (South) Korea; on the Island of Cheju alone, within a year, as many as 60,000 of its 300,000 residents are murdered, while another 40,000 fled by sea to nearby Japan some two years before the Koreans from the north invade the South. [Wikipedia]
1950, June 28 — The US attacks by, air, sea and land, aiming at the southward invading army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North), which nevertheless unifies the peninsula in five short weeks (except for the US defended port city of Pusan); with little resistance from South Korea’s ROK military as most of its soldiers either defect or go home; over the next three years US will commit dozens of high death toll documented atrocities (some recently apologized for) as American planes level to the ground almost every city and town of any appreciable size in the entire peninsula, north and south, in the end threatening to drop the atomic bomb, and be charged with germ warfare by some not easily dismissed sources.
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong's Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Kerala, India; Minority Perspective, UK; Dissident Voice, Uruknet; Voice of Detroit; Ethiopian Review; Palestine Chronicle; India Times; Ta Kung Bao; China Daily; South China Morning Post; Come Home America; OpEdNews; HistoryNews Network; Malaysia Sun; Mathaba; Vermont Citizen News have published his articles; 300 of which are available at: click http://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html ; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign: (King Condemned US Wars) http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/ and website historian of Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/ featuring a country by country history of US crimes and laws pertaining.
Comments are moderated