Rixon Stewart
They say that the spoils of war go to the victors and that
includes the opportunity to rewrite history from the victor's point of
view. This is particularly true of World War II where for the last fifty
years one overall theme has dominated; namely that the allies were the
good guys in contrast to the Germans who were Nazi war criminals. But was
this really the case? Was the distinction so clear-cut or have we allowed
Allied propagandists to reshape our view of history? Until recently anyone
who questioned this standard interpretation was immediately labeled a
"revisionist" or worse still a "Nazi": as happened to British historian
David Irving recently. Yet with the passage of time a new perspective is
beginning to emerge, one that is not so clear-cut in its distinction
between good and bad.
When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the American Military Governor,
General Eisenhower, sent out an "urgent courier" with instructions making
it a crime punishable by death to feed German prisoners. It was even a
capital offence to gather food together in one place to take to prisoners.
The message reads in part: ".Under no circumstances may food supplies be
assembled among the local inhabitants in order to deliver them to
prisoners of war. Those who violate this command and nevertheless try to
circumvent this blockade to allow something to come to the prisoners place
themselves in danger of being shot."(1)
This was no idle threat. On July 31st 1945 Agnes Spira was shot by French
guards at Dietersheim for taking food to prisoners. In effect this was a
deliberate policy to starve the German prisoners of war. Many prisoners
and German civilians saw American guards burn food that had been brought
to the prisoners. According to one former prisoner who described it
recently: "At first, the women from the nearby town brought food into the
camp. The American soldiers took everything away from the women, threw it
in a heap and poured gasoline over it and burned it." (2)
In the chaos and confusion that followed Germany's defeat at the end of
the Second World War literally millions of Germans died. In an
unprecedented humanitarian disaster an estimated sixteen million ethnic
Germans fled their ancestral homelands in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia
and other parts of Eastern Europe to Germany. These were mostly women,
children and elderly men who took to the open road before the advancing
Red Army. Of these Canadian historian James Bacque estimates that between
two and six million died in the process (3). Millions more died in Germany
itself through a combination of disease, exposure and starvation, produced
and compounded by deliberate Allied policies.
According to Bacque between 1941 and 1950 around one and a half to two
million German prisoners of war died. Whilst a further five million seven
hundred thousand German civilians died between 1946 and 1950, largely,
Bacque maintains, as a result of Allied policy. In all Bacque's estimates
that between nine and half and fourteen million ethnic Germans, German
prisoners of war and civilians were to die in these iniquities. Part of
the blame for this can be laid at the feet of Josef Stalin who, through
his propaganda minister, Ilya Ehrenburg, actually encouraged the rape and
degradation of the German civilian population.
"Kill, kill, you brave Red Army soldiers, kill. There is nothing in the
Germans that is innocent. Obey the instructions of comrade Stalin and
stamp the fascistic beast in its cave. Break with force the racial
arrogance of the German women. Take them as your legal loot. Kill, you
brave Red Army soldiers, kill!" Ilya Ehrenburg 1945.
Ironically, Ehrenburg was Jewish, and Stalin married to a jewess, .
However it was not only the Germans who suffered at the hands of Stalin's
victorious army, Russians did too; in particular the large Russian émigré
population in Europe was to experience the depredations of the advancing
Red Army. And in this regard the Russian Army was to receive help from an
unlikely quarter. In an episode of infamy that has largely been ignored by
the Western powers and their lapdog media Stalin was helped in an
operation that has become known as one of history's darkest episodes of
betrayal: "Operation Keelhaul." Sources 1) Crimes and Mercies by James Bacque. 2) Ibid. 3) Ibid.
A US guard
looks over fenced off holding areas, holding thousands of German
prisoners, exposed to elements.
"Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the
French Army casually annihilated one million [German] men, most of them in
American camps . . . Eisenhower's hatred, passed through the lens of a
compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps
unequalled by anything in American history . . . an enormous war crime."
-- Col. Ernest F. Fisher, PhD Lt.
101 st Airborne Division, Senior Historian, United States Army
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?id=136
The Unknown Truth About Korea: U.S. Sanctioned Death Squads and War
Crimes, 1945-1953
by S. Brian Willson
2001
The mostly unknown record of the brutal U.S. occupation and subsequent
control of Korea following the Japanese defeat in August 1945, and the
voluminous number of war crimes committed between 1950 and 1953, have been
systematically hidden under mountains of accusations directed almost
solely against the "red menace" of northern Korea. The Korean War itself
grew out of U.S. refusal to allow a genuine self-determination process to
take root. The Korean people were exuberant in August 1945 with their new
freedom after being subjected to a brutal 40-year Japanese occupation of
their historically undivided Peninsula. They immediately began creating
local democratic peoples' committees the day after Japan announced on
August 14 its intentions to surrender. By August 28, all Korean provinces
had created local peoples' offices and on September 6 delegates from
throughout the Peninsula gathered in Seoul, at which time they created the
Korean People's Republic (KPR).
The United States had a different plan for Korea. At the February 1945
Yalta conference, President Roosevelt suggested to Stalin, without
consulting the Koreans, that Korea should be placed under joint
trusteeship following the war before being granted her independence. On
August 11, two days after the second atomic bomb was dropped assuring
Japan's imminent surrender, and three days after Russian forces entered
Manchuria and Korea to oust the Japanese as was agreed to avoid further
U.S. casualties, Truman hurriedly ordered his War Department to choose a
dividing line for Korea. Two young colonels, Dean Rusk (later to be
Secretary of State under President's Kennedy and Johnson during the
Vietnam War) and Charles H. Bonesteel, were given 30 minutes to resolve
the matter. The 38th parallel was quickly, and quietly, chosen, placing
the historic capital city of Seoul and 70 percent, or 21 of Korea's 30
million people in the "American" southern zone. This was not discussed
with Stalin or any other political leaders in the U.S. or among our
allies. Surprisingly, Stalin agreed to this "temporary" partition that
meant the Russians already present in the country would briefly occupy the
territory north of the line comprising 55 percent of the peninsular land
area. On August 15, the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK)
was formed and on September 8, 72,000 U.S. troops began arriving to
enforce the formal occupation of the south.
The Korean People's Republic officially formed just two days prior to
the first arrival of U.S. forces was almost immediately shunned by the
U.S. who decided its preference was to stand behind conservative
politicians representing the traditional land-owning elite. The U.S.
helped in the formation on September 16 of the conservative Korean
Democratic Party (KDP), and brought Syngman Rhee to Korea on General
MacArthur's plane on October 16 to head up the new party. Rhee, a Korean
possessing a Ph.D. from Princeton (1910) and an Austrian wife, had lived
in the United States for more than 40 years. To his credit he had detested
the Japanese occupation of his native country, but he hated the communists
even more. Just before Rhee arrived to begin efforts to consolidate his
power in the south, long-time resistance fighter Kim Il Sung returned from
exile to begin his leadership in the Russian occupied north. As a
guerrilla leader Kim had been fighting the Japanese occupation of China
and Korea since the early 1930s.
Rhee and his U.S. advisers quickly concluded that in order to build
their kind of Korea through the KDP they must definitively defeat the
broad-based KPR. While Kim, with the support of the Russian forces in the
north, was purging that territory of former Japanese administrators and
their Korean collaborators, the USAMG was actively recruiting them in the
south. In November the U.S. Military Governor outlawed all strikes and in
December declared the KPR and all its activities illegal. In effect the
U.S. had declared war on the popular movement of Korea south of the 38th
Parallel and set in motion a repressive campaign that later became
excessively brutal, dismantling the Peoples' Committees and their
supporters throughout the south.
In December 1945 General John R. Hodge, commander of the U.S.
occupation forces, created the Korean Constabulary, led exclusively by
officers who had served the Japanese. Along with the revived Japanese
colonial police force, the Korean National Police (KNP), comprised of many
former Korean collaborators, and powerful right-wing paramilitary groups
like the Korean National Youth and the Northwest Youth League, the
U.S.Military Government and their puppet Syngman Rhee possessed the armed
instruments of a police state more than able to assure a political system
that was determined to protect the old landlord class made up of rigid
reactionaries and enthusiastic capitalists.
By the fall of 1946, disgruntled workers declared a strike that spread
throughout South Korea. By December the combination of the KNP, the
Constabulary, and the right-wing paramilitary units, supplemented by U.S.
firepower and intelligence, had contained the insurrections in all
provinces. More than 1,000 Koreans were killed with more than 30,000
jailed. Regional and local leaders of the popular movement were either
dead, in jail, or driven underground.
With total U.S. support Rhee busily prepared for a politically division
of Korea involuntarily imposed on the vast majority of the Korean people.
Following suppression of the October-December insurrection, the Koreans
began to form guerrilla units in early 1947. There were sporadic
activities for a year or so. However, in March 1948, on Korea's large
Island, Cheju, a demonstration objecting to Rhee's planned separate
elections scheduled for May 1948 was fired upon by the KNP. A number of
Koreans were injured and several were tortured, then killed. This incident
provoked a dramatic escalation of armed resistance to the U.S./Rhee
regime. The police state went into full force, regularly guided by U.S.
military advisors, and often supported by U.S. military firepower and
occasional ground troops. On the Island of Cheju alone, within a year as
many as 60,000 of its 300,000 residents had been murdered, while another 40,000 fled by sea to nearby
Japan. Over 230 of the Island's 400 villages had been totally scorched
with 40,000 homes burned to the ground. As many as 100,000 people were
herded into government compounds. The remainder, it has been reported,
became collaborators in order to survive. On the mainland guerrilla
activities escalated in most of the provinces. The Rhee/U.S. forces
conducted a ruthless campaign of cleansing the south of all dissidents,
usually identifying them as "communists," though in fact most popular
leaders in the south were socialists unaffiliated with outside "communist"
organizations. Anyone who was openly or quietly opposed to the Rhee regime
was considered suspect. Therefore massive numbers of villagers and farmers
were systematically rounded up, tortured, then shot and dropped into mass
graves. Estimates of murdered civilians range anywhere from 200,000 to
800,000 by the time the hot war broke out in June 1950.
The hot war allegedly began at Ongjin about 3 or 4 A.M. (Korean time)
June 25, 1950. Just how the fighting started on that day depends on one's
source of information. It is mostly irrelevant, since a civil and
revolutionary war had been raging for a couple of years, with military
incursions routinely moving back and forth across the 38th parallel.
http://www.brianwillson.com/awoltruthkor.html
What Is the German Holocaust?
One of 18 "execution photos" taken of some of the 1,800 Korean
civilians/political prisoners removed from the Taejon Prison in early
July 1950, suspected of having "socialist or communist" sympathies,
immediately prior to their execution by South Korean police acting
under orders from Syngman Rhee in concert with U.S. military officers.
Photo taken by U.S. Major Abbott, Army Liaison Officer, with a Leica
camera, developed and printed by attaché office staff. Lt. Col. Bob E.
Edwards, the U.S. Army Attaché in charge of documenting the
executions, was quoted as saying, "General treatment of Prisoners of
War after evacuation from front has been good." Photo from U.S.
National Archive collection.
U.S. military officers overseeing South Korean executions of
civilians "suspected of collaborating" with the "communists," near Taegu, South Korea, April 1951. Photo taken by U.S. Korean Military
Advisory Group (KMAG) and reproduced from U.S. National Archives.
The world gets crazier and crazier everyday, doesn't it? The world that many
of us thought was there, isn't. The bottom has dropped out of everything. The
illusions have been revealed, we have found out who has been pulling the strings
behind the scenes. Millions have lost their jobs, have mortgage
problems, credit card issues, credit repair problems and
foreclosure. What can be
done? Amazingly, we have been mislead. We have been taught that we can control
government by voting. The founder of the Rothschild dynasty, Mayer Amschel
Bauer, told the secret of controlling the government of a nation over 200 years
ago. He said, "Permit
me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its
laws." Get
the picture? Your freedom hinges first on the nation's banks and money system.
It's all about 'commerce'. Freedom is connected with Debt Elimination for
each individual. Not only does this end
personal debt, it places the people first in line
as creditors to the National Debt ahead of the banks. They don't wish for
you to know this. It has to do with recognizing WHO you really are in A
New Beginning: A Practical Course in Miracles, an informational study. Is
your credit rating bad for reasons that seem out of your control? There are
ways of credit repair,
so you can men those broken fences too. Do you want to keep your children protected
from outside forces, there are ways of protecting
your children. Do you want
to keep your sons and daughters free from 'the draft'? Check this out.
Disclaimer - The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The myriad of facts, conjecture, perspectives, viewpoints, opinions, analyses,
and information in the articles, stories and commentaries posted on this site
range from cutting edge hard news and comment to extreme and unusual perspectives.
We choose not to sweep uncomfortable material under the rug - where it can
grow and fester. We choose not to censor skewed logic and uncomfortable rhetoric.
These things reflect the world as it now is - for better and worse. We present
multiple facts, perspectives, viewpoints, opinions, analyses, and information. If
you have more information on a certain subject that verifies it, challenges
it or make a comment on it, please e.mail
us.
Journalism is (or used to be) the profession of gathering and presenting a broad panorama of news about the events of our times and presenting it to readers for their own consideration. We believe in the intelligence, judgment and wisdom of our readers to discern for themselves among the data which appears on this site that which is valid and worthy...or otherwise. See full legal disclaimer
 |
|
