No, I don't think anyone will deny that barbarism has been cmmitted by
communist regimes. The point is more that barabarism tends to be the
result from policies that are motivated by upholding some ideology at
all costs. That can be communism, but also trying to prevent communism
from spreading at all costs.
The people responsible for acts of bararism are typically considered to
be mass murderers, but that's not a good description. From their point
of view they were doing their best to help humanity defeat evil, so
their mindset is not that of a typical mass murderer.
E.g. one the one hand you have the North Korean regime committing
brutal acts of violence, but then on the other side you had the US and
South Korea doing their best to stop North Korea, and they ended up
committing acts of barbarism too:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/AP_U.S._Okayed_Korean_War_Massacres_0705.html
SEOUL The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to
stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his
South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500
political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.
In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed,
photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions
by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have
killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually
without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.
Extensive archival research by The Associated Press has found no
indication Far East commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took action to
stem the summary mass killing, knowledge of which reached top levels of
the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was
classified "secret" and filed away.
Now, a half-century later, the South Korean government's Truth and
Reconciliation Commission is investigating what happened in that summer
of terror, a political bloodbath largely hidden from history, unlike
the communist invaders' executions of southern rightists, which were
widely publicized and denounced at the time.
In the now-declassified record at the U.S. National Archives and other
repositories, the Korean investigators will find an ambivalent U.S.
attitude in 1950 — at times hands-off, at times disapproving.
"The most important thing is that they did not stop the executions,"
historian Jung Byung-joon, a member of the 2-year-old commission, said
of the Americans. "They were at the crime scene, and took pictures and
wrote reports."
They took pictures in July 1950 at the slaughter of dozens of men at
one huge killing field outside the central city of Daejeon. Between
3,000 and 7,000 South Koreans are believed to have been shot there by
their own military and police, and dumped into mass graves, said Kim
Dong-choon, the commission member overseeing the investigation of these
government killings.
The bones of Koh Chung-ryol's father are there somewhere, and the
57-year-old woman believes South Koreans alone are not to blame.
"Although we can't present concrete evidence, we bereaved families
believe the United States has some responsibility for this," she told
the AP, as she visited one of the burial sites in the quiet Sannae
valley.
Frank Winslow, a military adviser at Daejeon in those desperate days
long ago, is one American who feels otherwise.
The Koreans were responsible for their own actions, said the retired
Army lieutenant colonel, 81. "The Koreans were sovereign. To me, there
was never any question that the Koreans were in charge," he said in a
telephone interview from his home in Bellingham, Wash.
The brutal, hurried elimination of tens of thousands of their
countrymen, subject of a May 19 AP report, was the climax to a
years-long campaign by South Korea's right-wing leaders.
In 1947, two years after Washington and Moscow divided Korea into
southern and northern halves, a U.S. military government declared the
Korean Labor Party, the southern communists, to be illegal. President
Syngman Rhee's southern regime, gaining sovereignty in 1948, suppressed
all leftist political activity, put down a guerrilla uprising and held
up to 30,000 political prisoners by the time communist North Korea
invaded on June 25, 1950.
As war broke out, southern authorities also rounded up members of the
300,000-strong National Guidance Alliance, a "re-education" body to
which they had assigned leftist sympathizers, and whose membership
quotas also were filled by illiterate peasants lured by promises of
jobs and other benefits.
Commission investigators, extrapolating from initial evidence and
surveys of family survivors, believe most alliance members were killed
in the wave of executions.
On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated
southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had
emptied the southern capital's prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing
the new occupation regime.
In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt.
Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then
happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan.
Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental
commander, determined to keep Busan's political prisoners from joining
the enemy, planned "to execute some 3500 suspected peace time
Communists, locked up in the local prison," according to the
declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan
Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.
Emmerich wrote that he summoned the Korean, Col. Kim Chong-won, and
told him the enemy would not reach Busan in a few days as Kim feared,
and that "atrocities could not be condoned."
But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan.
"Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation
became more critical," wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986. "Colonel Kim
was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he
would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the
prisoners with machine guns."
This passage, omitted from the published Army history, is the first
documentation unearthed showing advance sanction by the U.S. military
for such killings.
"I think his (Emmerich's) word is so significant," said Park Myung-lim,
a South Korean historian of the war and adviser to the investigative
commission.
As that summer wore on, and the invaders pressed their attack on the
southern zone, Busan-area prisoners were shot by the hundreds, Korean
and foreign witnesses later said.
Emmerich wrote that soon after his session with Kim, he met with South
Korean officials in Daegu, 55 miles (88 kilometers) north of Busan, and
persuaded them "at that time" not to execute 4,500 prisoners
immediately, as planned. Within weeks, hundreds were being executed in
the Daegu area.
The bloody anticommunist purge, begun immediately after the invasion,
is believed by the fall of 1950 to have filled some 150 mass graves in
secluded spots stretching to the peninsula's southernmost counties.
Commissioner Kim said the commission's estimate of 100,000 dead is
"very conservative." The commission later this month will resume
excavating massacre sites, after having recovered remains of more than
400 people at four sites last year.
The AP has extensively researched U.S. military and diplomatic archives
from the Korean War in recent years, at times relying on once-secret
documents it obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and
declassification reviews. The declassified U.S. record and other
sources offer further glimpses of the mass killings.
A North Korean newspaper said 1,000 prisoners were slain in Incheon,
just west of Seoul, in late June 1950 — a report partly corroborated by
a declassified U.S. Eighth Army document of July 1950 saying "400
Communists" had been killed in Incheon. The North Korean report claimed
a U.S. military adviser had given the order.
As the front moved south, in July's first days, Air Force intelligence
officer Donald Nichols witnessed and photographed the shooting of an
estimated 1,800 prisoners in Suwon, 20 miles south of Seoul, Nichols
reported in a little-noted memoir in 1981, a decade before his death.
Around the same time, farther south, the Daejeon killings began.
Winslow recalled he declined an invitation to what a senior officer
called the "turkey shoot" outside the city, but other U.S. officers did
attend, taking grisly photos of the human slaughter that would be kept
classified for a half-century.
Journalist Alan Winnington, of the British communist Daily Worker
newspaper, entered Daejeon with North Korean troops after July 20 and
reported that the killings were carried out for three days in early
July and two or three days in mid-July.
He wrote that his witnesses claimed jeeploads of American officers
"supervised the butchery." Secret CIA and Army intelligence
communications reported on the Daejeon and Suwon killings as early as
July 3, but said nothing about the U.S. presence or about any U.S.
oversight.
In mid-August, MacArthur, in Tokyo, learned of the mass shooting of 200
to 300 people near Daegu, including women and a 12- or 13-year-old
girl. A top-secret Army report from Korea, uncovered by AP research,
told of the "extreme cruelty" of the South Korean military policemen.
The bodies fell into a ravine, where hours later some "were still alive
and moaning," wrote a U.S. military policeman who happened on the scene.
Although MacArthur had command of South Korean forces from early in the
war, he took no action on this report, other than to refer it to John
J. Muccio, U.S. ambassador in South Korea. Muccio later wrote that he
urged South Korean officials to stage executions humanely and only
after due process of law.
The AP found that during this same period, on Aug. 15, Brig. Gen.
Francis W. Farrell, chief U.S. military adviser to the South Koreans,
recommended the U.S. command investigate the executions. There was no
sign such an inquiry was conducted. A month later, the Daejeon
execution photos were sent to the Pentagon in Washington, with a U.S.
colonel's report that the South Koreans had killed "thousands" of
political prisoners.
The declassified record shows an equivocal U.S. attitude continuing
into the fall, when Seoul was retaken and South Korean forces began
shooting residents who collaborated with the northern occupiers.
When Washington's British allies protested, Dean Rusk, assistant
secretary of state, told them U.S. commanders were doing "everything
they can to curb such atrocities," according to a Rusk memo of Oct. 28,
1950.
But on Dec. 19, W.J. Sebald, State Department liaison to MacArthur,
cabled Secretary of State Dean Acheson to say MacArthur's command
viewed the killings as a South Korean "internal matter" and had
"refrained from taking any action."
It was the British who took action, according to news reports at the
time. On Dec. 7, in occupied North Korea, British officers saved 21
civilians lined up to be shot, by threatening to shoot the South Korean
officer responsible. Later that month, British troops seized "Execution
Hill," outside Seoul, to block further mass killings there.
To quiet the protests, the South Koreans barred journalists from
execution sites and the State Department told diplomats to avoid
commenting on atrocity reports. Earlier, the U.S. Embassy in London had
denounced as "fabrication" Winnington's Daily Worker reporting on the
Daejeon slaughter. The Army eventually blamed all the thousands of
Daejeon deaths on the North Koreans, who in fact had carried out
executions of rightists there and elsewhere.
An American historian of the Korean War, the University of Chicago's
Bruce Cumings, sees a share of U.S. guilt in what happened in 1950.
"After the fact — with thousands murdered — the U.S. not only did
nothing, but covered up the Daejeon massacres," he said.
Another Korean War scholar, Allan R. Millett, an emeritus Ohio State
professor, is doubtful. "I'm not sure there's enough evidence to pin
culpability on these guys," he said, referring to the advisers and
other Americans.
The swiftness and nationwide nature of the 1950 roundups and mass
killings point to orders from the top, President Rhee and his security
chiefs, Korean historians say. Those officials are long dead, and
Korean documentary evidence is scarce.
To piece together a fuller story, investigators of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission will sift through tens of thousands of pages
of declassified U.S. documents.
The commission's mandate extends to at least 2010, and its president,
historian Ahn Byung-ook, expects to turn then to Washington for help in
finding the truth.
"Our plan is that when we complete our investigation of cases involving
the U.S. Army, we'll make an overall recommendation, a request to the
U.S. government to conduct an overall investigation," he said. Charles
J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang, The Associated Press
Citeren [email protected]:
Chris and Smitra are performing a collective filtering of history, in
which barbarism is merely a feature of "capitalism" while jolly,
socialists, are completely ignored because, if a socialist tortures,
or slaugters the innocent, that's different. Because they are
ultimately,, 'helping mankind.' Stalin and Pol Pot, and the Kim
dynasty of North Korea, and Mao's Great Leap Forward, were all
'undertandable excesses in desparate times' and so forth and so on.
This is the kind of thinking that most Leftists capitulated with,
when Stalin achieved his Pact of Steel with Herr Hitler from 1939-41.
Nobody has a higher body-count of the massacred, then the Left and
this is coming from someone who's blood relatives were slain by dear
Adolf. In fact, I am betting had not the Furher decided to turn
against his chum, Stalin (Dzugadashvilli) the socialists and the
national socialists would be fine friends. I would reccomend The
Bloodlands, as a history book of both Josep and Adolf, but there'd
be no readers here. Ideology rules all I suppose?
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris de Morsella <[email protected]>
To: everything-list <[email protected]>
Sent: Sun, Aug 25, 2013 2:37 pm
Subject: RE: The Nazi History of the Muslim Brotherhood
And yes half a century ago the CIA over through some 2 bit leaders
in Chile and Iran, big deal.
John you are either grossly ignorant of history, or squeeze it like
toothpaste through the aperture of your ideological point of view.
The actual historical facts are that both Chilean president Salvador
Allende and Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh were democratically
elected and popular leaders of their respective nations.
Your choice of words "2 bit leaders" actually says a lot about the
kind of person you are... a person who is cavalier with the facts and
who is prone to distort events to fit the ideological prism you
inhabit. I suppose the many thousands of people who were tortured to
death and dumped into the Pacific Ocean by Pinochets death squads
were just two bit people as well in your esteemed opinion.
Does your clearly self-evident and shockingly casual disregard for
the truth - when it comes to politics -- extend to everything you do
and say or is your willingness to lie and grotesquely mischaracterize
history, limited to the political and religious spheres of existence
and by some strange mechanism you are able to see things with a clear
and open mind in areas of discussion that do not involve your own
peculiar political beliefs?
-Chris
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Sunday, August 25, 2013 9:53 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: The Nazi History of the Muslim Brotherhood
On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 9:39 PM, Chris de Morsella
<[email protected]> wrote:
Fascism unlike Communism (at the level of lip service at least) never
preached a Universal Fascist state - an 1000 year Reich of one tribe
over other inferior races maybe, but that idea lacks universal appeal.
And lip service (who wouldn't want a workers paradise?) is the only
reason that today people would have far more sympathy for Senator
McCarthy if he'd gone after Neo-Nazis instead of Communists, and in
general lip service is the one and only reason Communism has always
seemed more respectable than Nazism even though it has caused at
least as much misery in the world. In the 30's Stalin murdered
millions of his own people and in the 20's Lenin forced people to
abandon their private farms and go to huge corrupt monumentally
inefficient collective farms with the result that millions died of
starvation; In the 50's Mao did the exact same stupid thing in China
in the name of communism and at least 30 million starved to death. In
the 70's in Cambodia the communists murdered a greater percentage of
their population than any regime in the history of the world. In the
90's in North Korea, a nightmare country as bad as anything George
Orwell could dream up, communism caused two million to starve to
death while South Korea, a country with the same culture and language
but without communism became a world economic powerhouse.
And yes half a century ago the CIA over through some 2 bit leaders in
Chile and Iran, big deal.
John K Clark
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