I wrote:
>
> John Marchioro writes:
>
> > Sorry, Alan, but that is not good enough.
And Alan replied:
> Sorry, I don't understand. Good enough for what? Good enough to keep me from
> getting thrown off of not_honyaku? You seem to be threatening to try to do
> so.
Fear not, Alan, I would not dream of having you thrown off the list, I am sure
we would all sorely miss the comic relief you afford us with your posts.
No, it is rather that you just engaged again in that post, and stupidly so
after being forced to admit that it is in fact YOU who is the gullible consumer
and purveyor of foreign propaganda, in the gutter tactics that started this
exchange in the first place, namely, you have resorted to McCarthyite attacks
yet again. Well, I hardly expect an apology from someone like you, who screams
"Commie!" or "Traitor!" in a knee-jerk fashion whenever he is challenged in an
argument about the facts. But if you think that you are going to blithely
charge people here with having swallowed pro-terrorist propaganda hook, line
and sinker and go unchallenged, guess again.
I then urged Alan:
> > Go back and re-read the exchange about North Korea. I did not say anything
> > on the list about my trip.
And, straining at gnats once more, Alan responded as follows:
> The only details about your trip that you were eager and willing to share
> was when you decided to regurgitate the obvious North Korean propaganda
> about "only 3 buildings were left standing in Pyongyang" at the end of the
> war. And you even challenged us to prove that it was not propaganda.
>
> This lie is clearly contradicted by the work by Cumings that you yourself
> cite.
>
> This is exactly why I assert that you have been brainwashed or subjected to
> mind control through the agency of that British tour company by whom you
> were bamboozled into thinking that you cannot share the facts of your own
> objective experiences in North Korea.
>
> You were clearly eager to believe and spread the exaggerations fed to you by
> your North Korean tour guides.
Alan, I am going to go easy on you here, and just advise you to read some of
Cumings' work. As he notes (see the introduction to the first volume of his
study of the origins of the war, or the general book he co-authored with Jon
Halliday as a companion to the Thames TV documentary for which Cumings was the
academic consultant 20 years back), the vast majority of the North Korean
population was living underground or in caves by 1953 as a direct result of the
air war! We even bombed the dikes to create a famine there, conduct for which
in a comparable instance Seyss-Inquart was hung at Nuremberg (have a look at
the official US Air Force history of the war, Alan, it is all there, and the
authors even gloat about it). And that is not North Korea propaganda, it is the
facts, and Cumings' work documents it great detail.
You clearly have still not learned your lesson, Alan. Read a serious book or
two before pronouncing on a matter. People might start taking you seriously if
you do.
And I wrote about Alan's reaction to Bruce Cumings' article, which I posted
here:
> > You gagged on the article, called it propaganda, and so on.
>
And Alan replied:
> Yes, I was too hasty to dismiss the article but then I did go back and read
> it.
You may have read it, but you apparently did not learn anything from it, or you
would not have written the nonsense cited above. Read it again, repetition may
help.
Finally, the reason why the members of our and other tour groups were asked by
Koryo Tours, the British tour company in question, not to write an account of
our visit to North Korea is that this company does not want someone like me to
write a harsh account of life in North Korea, since it does not want its cozy
little arrangement with the regime there to be canceled. If you do not
understand that, Alan, you not only do not understand communism, you don't
understand capitalism either.
Tedious, Alan, tedious.
John Marchioro
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for
their messages. The list owner does not review messages, and accepts no
responsibility for the content of messages posted.
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
