> WW News Service Digest #112
>
> 1) Secrets of a cave: Hidden history of Korean War
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 2) Review: War, lies & videotape
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 3) More Pentagon drug peddling
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 4) Workers around the world: 6/15/2000
> by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the June 15, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>SECRETS OF A CAVE: HIDDEN HISTORY OF KOREAN WAR
>
>By Deirdre Griswold
>Tae Won Valley, south Korea
>
>On a peaceful spring day when the acacia trees are
>blooming and green leaves and grasses shimmer in the
>sunshine, it is hard to imagine what this valley was like
>in the summer of 1950. During those opening months of a
>ferocious war, there was fighting all over.
>
>Many of the fallen are buried in hillside graves that are
>carefully tended to this day.
>
>Tourists could drive right through here without having to
>think about the past. They probably wouldn't know that this
>valley's name--Tae Won--means suppressed rage and sorrow,
>and that it describes the feelings of many of the people
>living here.
>
>Now imagine that the tourists make a wrong turn and
>somehow wind up on the narrow road that leads to an
>abandoned cobalt mine outside the village of Kyengsan. Far
>up the hillside is an opening to a dangerous vertical
>shaft. But they'd be safe because the gaping hole is
>covered by a rusty old metal grating.
>
>Lower down, they'd find an entrance to a cave. If the
>tourists are curious, they might duck under the rock
>overhang at the entrance and peer into the inky blackness.
>And if they don't mind dirtying their shoes, or have
>brought along rubber boots and a good flashlight, they
>could ignore the cold, dripping water and slog through the
>slippery mud some 100 feet to the back of the cave, where
>it meets the bottom of the vertical shaft.
>
>And then they might begin to appreciate the horrors of the
>Korean War.
>
>NOT JUST A MILITARY CONFLICT
>
>That war was not just a military conflict between two
>armies of vastly unequal technology and resources. It was a
>continuation of the Korean people's struggle for national
>liberation--which had been going on since Japanese colonial
>rule.
>
>On the part of the United States capitalist government,
>which had rounded up a "coalition" of nations to send token
>numbers of troops so that Washington's war could be called
>a "United Nations police action," it was a war to
>consolidate its economic hold over Asia. Many GIs had just
>paid with their lives for these rich men's ambitions in
>World War II.
>
>For the Koreans, the war was also a class struggle by the
>workers and peasants. They had borne the brunt of Japan's
>brutal colonial oppression, which started in 1910. They had
>been used as slave laborers and "comfort women" during
>World War II. When that war ended, the anti-Japanese
>liberation army led by Marshal Kim Il Sung took power in
>the north of Korea, with the support of the Soviet Red
>Army.
>
>This revolutionary force carried out a sweeping social
>reorganization, taking power and property away from the
>landlords and merchants who had collaborated with Japanese
>rule and setting up a democratic people's republic.
>
>But south of the 38th parallel, the U.S. forces that
>rushed in to fill the vacuum left by Japan's surrender
>actually re-armed Japanese soldiers who had been disarmed
>by the people. Their task was to prevent revolution. Their
>allies were the landlords and merchants who had
>collaborated with colonialism.
>
>This was a time when capitalist rule had been weakened in
>Asia by the collapse of the Japanese empire and the rise of
>communist-led revolutionary movements in China, Vietnam and
>Korea.
>
>PREPARATION FOR A NEW WAR
>
>>From 1945 to 1950 was a tense time on the Korean
>peninsula.
>
>The country was divided for the first time in its history.
>Families were separated as the demilitarized zone became
>transformed into a bristling rampart between two opposing
>armies.
>
>High officials of the U.S. government, including the
>notorious war hawk John Foster Dulles, came personally to
>the DMZ for photo opportunities to prepare the U.S.
>population for a new war.
>
>In June of 1950 that war broke out. By the time it ended
>three years later, 3 million Koreans, thousands of Chinese
>volunteers and 55,000 U.S. troops had been killed.
>
>When the war started, many people in the south of Korea
>welcomed the troops from the north as their liberators,
>despite all the demonizing propaganda they had heard for
>five years. They saw the war as the completion of the great
>anti-colonial struggle started in the 1930s against Japan.
>They gave food and drink to the partisans in the mountains.
>
>Their enemies were the invading forces from the United
>States, whose pose as "liberators" was now unmasked.
>
>It was in the opening months of that war, from the end of
>July to some time in August, that the peace was shattered
>in the farming villages of Tae Won Valley. The area was
>sympathetic to the north--or at least the U.S. military
>command thought it was.
>
>Soon the jails of Taegu city were full of members of the
>political opposition. The U.S.-puppet dictator Syngman
>Rhee, who 10 years later was overthrown in a nationwide
>uprising, had set up an organization--Bo Do Yun Maeng, or
>the National League to Provide Guidance--to seek out those
>accused of being "subversives" and hand them over to the
>police.
>
>Today, an Investigations Committee and a Committee of
>Victims' Families are finding out what happened to the
>people who disappeared in that period. Since Jan. 26 of
>this year, they have operated a center in Taegu to receive
>information.
>
>Just to make such inquiries is dangerous. The head of an
>earlier investigations committee, Lee Bong Yon, served
>eight years in jail for his efforts. Attempts to get the
>south Korean government to release secret documents have
>been futile.
>
>Yoo Yoon Ham, president of the Committee of Victims'
>Families, says that for many years "we were accused of
>being communist sympathizers, so we couldn't speak out."
>But now people are coming forward with what they know.
>
>TRAIL LEADS TO THE MINE
>
>The trail leads to the old cobalt mine near Kyengsan.
>
>Chae Sim Ho of the Investigations Committee says some
>3,000 to 3,500 people were massacred there. Some were
>political prisoners who had been held in Taegu Prison under
>a preventive-detention law dating back to Japanese
>occupation.
>
>But this was 1950, and the United States was now occupying
>south Korea. It was the Pentagon, under Gen. Douglas
>MacArthur, that had taken for itself overall operational
>command of all military actions and was therefore
>responsible for the deeds of the south Korean army.
>
>A few survivors managed to tell the story of the mine. And
>it has been known in the villages ever since.
>
>The prisoners were taken by soldiers of the south Korean
>army to the top of the vertical shaft, eight of them tied
>together, and shot. Their bodies then fell down the mine
>shaft.
>
>"It was a convenient place to kill," Chae told a
>solidarity delegation May 17 as they looked down the old
>shaft. The group was visiting Korea at the invitation of
>the National Alliance for Democracy and Reunification of
>Korea. "They didn't have to dig. And when, after days of
>killings, they began to run low on bullets, they would
>shoot just one or two. Since the prisoners were tied
>together, they would all fall down the shaft.
>
>"Lee Won Chik was a well-known labor leader at that time.
>They couldn't find him so they killed his wife. Lee was
>later arrested and served 11 years. After he got out of
>jail, he was killed in a suspicious car accident. His son
>is alive now and remembers all this."
>
>The delegates went to the cave below the mine shaft. An
>altar was placed at the entrance. Burning incense, food and
>drink were set out to soothe the spirits of the massacre
>victims. Before entering the cave, each visitor knelt and
>performed a ceremony of respect for the dead.
>
>Then they pulled on high rubber boots. "Watch your heads,"
>the guides warned. Stooping double and sliding through clay
>and mud, they made their way to the back of the mine.
>
>Their flashlights lit up a great pile of rocks. And
>something else.
>
>Human bones lay on and under the rocks. An old skull
>stared into space.
>
>No one could speak for a long time. In this country where
>graves are tended so carefully, it was especially shocking
>to think of all the years these remains had lain in their
>mass grave. Intimidation had prevented the survivors from
>trying to find and bury the bodies of their loved ones.
>
>Several young Koreans from the United States wept quietly
>as the group filed out of the mine.
>
>The Kyengsan cobalt mine is just one site. There are 10
>more in Kyungsang Province alone, according to the newly
>formed investigating committees that are uncovering
>massacres by U.S. and south Korean troops during the war.
>
>This grim history is now fueling a resurgence of struggle
>for acknowledgment of these massacres and other crimes,
>compensation for the survivors and victims' families, and
>the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea.
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
>copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
>changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
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>
>
>
>Message-ID: <002e01bfd581$48d24320$0a00a8c0@home>
>From: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [WW] Review: War, lies & videotape
>Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 17:49:43 -0400
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
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>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the June 15, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>WAR, LIES & VIDEOTAPE:
>HOW MEDIA MONOPLY STIFLES THE TRUTH
>
>By Ellen Catalinotto
>
>The growing monopolization of the media and their
>promotion of the agenda of the transnational corporations
>that own them are analyzed in "War, Lies & Videotape: How
>Media Monopoly Stifles Truth."
>
>This fascinating collection of articles, many taken from
>papers presented at a May 1998 conference on the media in
>Athens, explores the way corporate news has become merged
>with entertainment, public relations and advertising, while
>all standards of objective journalism are discarded.
>
>What are the consequences of media monopolies molding
>people's perceptions of the world and of themselves for the
>purpose of creating compliant consumers of both products
>and ideologies? How can the exploited and marginalized
>fight back against corporations that seek to privatize
>truth?
>
>Peter Phillips, assistant professor of sociology at Sonoma
>State University and coordinator of Project Censored, wrote
>in 1996: "Twenty-two years ago there were approximately 50
>media corporations that dominated the U.S. news services.
>Today that number is less than a dozen."
>
>Phillips also noted that 90 percent of the 155 people who
>make up the boards of directors of the 11 media monopolies
>are white males, mostly men who inherited their money.
>"Democracy to the media elite," he wrote, "means freedom to
>economically exploit, freedom to move money anywhere in the
>world, and freedom to present their own ideological
>messages."
>
>Sara Flounders of the International Action Center stressed
>that those who have great corporate fortunes to protect
>also "control and own communication, information and
>culture." She noted that General Electric and Westinghouse,
>the two biggest military weapons manufacturers, own much of
>the U.S. media.
>
>"It is no accident," Flounders said, "that these giant
>weapons contractors use the media as the public-relations
>arm for their primary product: war and the weapons of war."
>
>One section of the book addresses the media's role in the
>war in the Balkans. In it, Diana Johnstone of Covert Action
>Quarterly wrote that "even journalists or media outlets
>that are characterized as `alternative' are not necessarily
>free from a society's dominant interpretation and dominant
>ideology.
>
>"Just as the `civilizing mission' of bringing Christianity
>to the heathen provided a justifying pretext for
>imperialist conquest in the past, today the protection of
>`human rights' may be the cloak for a new type of
>imperialist military intervention worldwide."
>
>Johnstone points out that a U.S. public-relations firm,
>Ruder Finn, "was retained by Albanians and Croatians to
>advance their cause."
>
>THE HIDDEN STORIES
>
>This book includes a chapter written by Jean-Bertrande
>Aristide, former president of Haiti. Aristide, elected by a
>massive majority in 1990, was perceived as a threat to
>business interests, who proceeded to discredit him via the
>media.
>
>Aristide emphasized "the great untold news story of the
>century: The poor are getting poorer; the rich are getting
>richer, at a pace unprecedented in history."
>
>This viewpoint is supported by Michael Parenti in his
>article entitled "Media Evasion." He wrote that when
>addressing issues such as increasing poverty in the
>developing world, "little is said about how the social
>order is organized and whose interests prevail. Let's say,
>we tried to explain that wealth and poverty exist together
>
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