> The collectivization of agriculture? Kronstadt? The disbanding of the
> constituent assembly? Still earlier, when Trotsky read the riot act to
> Martov and the Mensheviks in the immediate aftermath of the October
> Revolution?[1]
>
> If there is one lesson, I think it is the absolute priority of a free press
> and political democracy. Roads to Utopia that do not start with speeches
> and debates appear to have a very high probability of leading to the
> Revolution Betrayed instead--to the Great Terror or the Cultural Revolution
> or Tuol Sleng or to whatever
(and I fear that it has been very bad) has
> been happening in North Korea for the past fifty years.[2]
>
Why? Better be careful, Kim jong-il might just show up on the shores of S.F. Bay with his father's bulldozers..
ever heard of Operation Hudson Hope?
ever wondered why every major building in North Korea is built to withstand atomic blasts?
The N. Koreans did indeed ,largely by themselves, build something from nothing:
" The subsequent flash floods scooped clean 27 miles of valley below, and the plunging flood waters wiped out supply routes[etc.]...THe Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of rice has for the Asian--starvation and slow death." --NY Times June 20, 1953.
" Everything that moved in N.Korea was a military target, peasants in the fields often were machine-gunned by pilots, who I, this was my impression amused themselves to shoot targets which moved...I witnessed a complete devastation between the Yalu river and the capital... there were no more cities in N.Korea... we travelled in moonlight, so my impression was that I am travelling on the moon, because there was only devastation... Every city was only a collection of chimneys, I did not know why houses collapsed and chimney's did not, but I went through a city of 200,000 inhabitants and I saw thousands of chimneys and that--that was all." --Tibor Meray, war correspondent in N.Korea and veteran of 1956 Hungarian uprising.
"We slipped a note kind of under the door of the Pentagon and said, "Look let us go up there and burn down five of the biggest towns in N.Korera--and they're not very big-- and that ought to stop it." Well, the answer to that was four or five screams-- "You'll kill a lot of non combatants" and "Its too horrible." Yet over a period of three years or so we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.. Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening--a lot of people can't stomach it" -- General Curtis LeMay April 28, 1966
"--the air war nonetheless leveled North Korea and killed millions before the war ended. From early November 1950 on, MacArthur ordered that a wasteland be created between the front and the Chinese border, destroying from the air every 'installation, factory, city and village" over thousands of square miles of North Korean territory. On November 8, seventy B-29's dropped 550 tons of incendiary bombs on Sinioju, "removing it from off the map"; a week later Hoeryong was hit with Napalm 'to burn out the place"; by November 25 "a large part of the North-West area between Yalu River and southwards to enemy lines was more or less burning" Soon the area would be a "wilderness of scorched earth"" --Bruce Cumings -Origins of the Korean War p753.
" Smoke from flaming huts and villages has filled the valleys in the vicinity of Tangyang[sic] with smoke thousands of feet deep and blinded all my observations and createda flying hazard..Methodical burning of dwellings is producing hostile reaction.. People cannot understand why US troops burn homes when no enemy present.." --General Barr Jan 18 1951
"My youth has gone with thirty-six operations. I had a lot of laughter and hopes for the future. I had two hands with which I could play the accordion. all these that bomb took away from me.. I do not think there should be anymore victims like me in this world. Never again. Never again on this globe, a victim like me" -- North Korean survivor of direct hit by Napalm bomb.
"Ping Pong [P'yong yang, SP] had pretty much been destroyed..we did a lot of napalm work.. you came in on what was called a nape scape which is where you came in so low you were almost flying into the target that you were er going to put napalm on and er.." --John Glenn interview w/ B.Cumings
"These people,okay, they really hate us,like, they say imperialist this and atrocity that and ya know, they don't even let one newspaper into the country that you can read, like they just blab on in Korean on TV, Kim whathisname's face is everywhere, and they really hate us, I mean, they'd just like us to go take a flying leap, all of us, the whole country, a big flying leap." --American fim actor P'YongYang 1987. Quoted in B.Cumings -War and Television p 216.
"The storehouse and teh tunnel became the charnel houses into which some 400 women and children were herded in November 1950, kept without food and water for days...when they begged for water for teh children a big american came and threw buckets of shit on them. After a few days they were doused with gasoline and burned to death." --Bruce Cumings on memorial at Sinch'hon massacre site in North Korea. Ibid.
Sam Pawlett
Q: How do say Sabre plane in Korean? A: American imperialist plane.
"Learn to play the piano well." --Kim il Sung