RES: a trip to North Korea

Apsken at aol.com Apsken at aol.com
Sun Apr 23 15:48:09 PDT 2000


Brad DeLong wrote,


> I thought that the CWIHP had new information about Commie germ
> warfare charges--internal Kremlin documents saying that they were
> false...

Nonsense. It was U.S. scientists who documented the germ warfare conducted by "United Nations" forces, and who published their findings in a U.S. journal (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, if memory serves), and who were prosecuted for that publication by the Eisenhower U.S. government. Brad is just doing as he always does, regurgitating any anticommunist claim no matter how groundless, as when he libeled Dalton Trumbo here some time ago, but timed his post inconveniently to coincide with Murray Kempton's refutation in The Nation that very week. It is interesting to me that liberals like Brad are so passionate in their anticommunism that the facade of "rights" (of scientists to publish the results of their research without fear of prosecution, in this instance) are not even worth a tip of the hat if it distracts from the mantra, and the mantra itself disdains evidence as unworthy.

Yes, Korea would surely be better off today if it had been unified under communism (in the immediate postwar era, that would have been a coalition government, similar to Vietnam before the French attempt at reconquest, not a Stalinist monolith). No doubt Brad has a crib sheet to guide him in diverting attention from Syngman Rhee's tyranny, and has no time to read, say, The Hidden History of the Korean War by I.F. Stone, but it isn't true that people who worship other gods than Brad's are crazy.

As long as I could remember, East Germany was similarly trashed by U.S. "scholars" and reporters. I was genuinely surprised, when I visited the GDR in 1979, and each year after that until 1991, to discover that all of those attacks were lies (and with the exception of prerecorded denunciations of the Stasi, never of the BRD's secret police nor the West's Berufsverbot policy, the old propaganda is today an embarrassment to those who promoted it). If Korea ends up being unified on terms dictated by the powerful South, as Germany was by the West, I think conditions in the North will probably deteriorate for workers and women, just as they have in Eastern Germany.

Ken Lawrence



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