Western media set up North Korea for war
Kim Jong-un, the young leader of North Korea
Finian Cunningham.- Western so-called news media coverage of the escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula is like watching a cross between a bad James Bond movie and a cheap horror flick about flesh-eating zombies.
It would be funny if the danger of war was not so serious and imminent. The disturbing direction of the Western media coverage is to set up North Korea – a poor impoverished country – for an all-out military attack by the world’s nuclear superpower psychopath – the United States.
Paradoxically, this danger is being incited by “news” corporations that pompously claim to be free-thinking bastions of independent journalism, when in reality they are nothing more than progenitors of the worst kind of pulp fiction.
Kim Jong-un, the young leader of North Korea who took over from his late father in 2011, is being cast as an insane villain whose Western media persona resembles that of a putative Doctor Evil. His projected character is fit for a role in an early 007 movie.
Days ago, Kim was reported as threatening “preemptive nuclear war” against South Korea and its patron the United States. How evil!
Scarcely mentioned were the facts that Kim was forced into this position of making a staunch defense of his country, under immense pressure of relentless imperialist aggression. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has been slapped with yet more US-led sanctions aimed at ostracizing the country from any international contact.
It’s the equivalent of solitary confinement of a prisoner, subjected to sensory deprivation. But this is torture of an entire nation with no reprieve.
Yes, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear weapons test in mid-February.
This was after the US tightened the thumb-screws with yet more sanctions; and after years of Washington refusing to reciprocate with a negotiated settlement to end more than six decades of crippling trade embargoes in addition to the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation against North Korea following the 1950-53 war with its American-backed Southern neighbor.
No other country has been threatened with nuclear Armageddon as often as North Korea – and always by the US – for more than 60 years.
Western media have now highlighted the North Korean leader ordering his massed troops to prepare for “wiping out” a South Korean island by turning a craggy maritime outpost into “a sea of flames.”
Do you see the innuendo here? Wiping out an island? Well, Kim must be an insane megalomaniac, right?
The island in question is the disputed territory of Baengnyeong, which is actually located off the North Korean mainland, but which the US forced into South Korea’s possession following the 1950-53 war. It has been used since, provocatively, as a staging post for American surveillance and forward planning for attack against North Korea.
No doubt the island will be used this week during the US perennial war planning maneuvers that simulate the invasion of North Korea, but which Washington euphemistically calls “defensive measures.”
Befitting the caricature of arch-villain, photographs and footage have abounded in Western media showing Kim Jong-un clad in black long overcoat and black gloves, peering through binoculars apparently towards South Korean and American forces across the Demilitarized Zone of the 38th parallel.
Just in case the Western public fail to pick up on the demonic Dr
Evil caricature, there is another sub-plot being instilled – the North Korean flesh-eating zombies.
In recent weeks, there has been a rash of stories regurgitated by the same Western media of outbreaks of cannibalism among the allegedly starving people of North Korea. These stories of cannibalistic gore and nihilism have not just been printed by the voyeuristic tabloid gutter press. They have also been published prominently by supposed quality outlets, such as Britain’sSunday Times and Independent, as well as one of America’s paper of record, The Washington Post.
Significantly, these macabre stories began circulating in Western media outlets at the end of January – some two weeks before North Korea conducted its underground nuclear explosion.
That suggests that the flesh-eating horror claims in North Korea are the work of a Western intel psychological campaign aimed at adding pejorative technicolor to the present crisis.
It makes for difficult reading. Not because of the alleged gruesome details, but because these stories are so obviously concocted and regurgitated in reflex manner by supposed news organizations. The horror claims all come from one source: allegedly an undercover team of journalists from an outfit called the Asia Press, based in Japan, who were allegedly spirited secretly into North Korea and allegedly interviewed various anonymous farmers and Communist party officials.
It’s so bad you could not make it up.
Yet the Western media presses have gone into overdrive to pump out these unconfirmed and unverifiable accounts of purported bloodcurdling cannibalism among the North Korean population.
In one version published by Britain’s Daily Mail, the headline runs, “North Korean parents ‘eating their own children’ after being driven mad by hunger in famine-hit pariah state.”
Daily Mail readers are told of how starving adults are kidnapping and murdering children. One man was allegedly executed by firing squad after his wife found out that he had killed their young daughter and son “while she was away on business;” when she returned to the starving family homestead her husband greeted her with the welcome news that “they had meat” to eat.
In another ghoulish tale, printed as serious news, an elderly man is reported to have dug up the graves of his grandchildren and eaten their rotten flesh.
The truly disturbing thing about these reports is that not only are they sordid sensationalism passed off as credible reports by supposedly serious news organizations, but worse is that this propaganda is apparently believed by droves of the Western public who read or watch such media. Check out some of the readers’ comments below the stories printed in the above mentioned media and you will find all sorts of denunciations of North Korea and its “sick people.”
But it’s not the people of North Korea who are depraved: it’s the Western media and their gullible subscribers who indulge in this odious character assassination of an entire nation.
The Western media coverage of North Korea recalls stories of babies being ripped from hospital incubators by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, which was a crucial tipping point for Western public opinion to support the American-led war on Iraq in 1991. More than a decade later, the same Western media ran scare stories of weapons of mass destruction that paved the way of the American genocide in Iraq from 2003-2012.
The same Western propaganda press repeats endless claims about “sinister Iranian nuclear ambitions” that serve to justify a criminal American-led trade embargo on Iran that may result in a US/Israeli military attack on the Islamic Republic.
The same Western propaganda press is now doing the same hatchet job on North Korea. A nation of flesh-eating zombies led by an evil personality cult who wants to blow up islands? “Yeah, go on Chuck, nuke those mothers!”
The Western public are being played like fools to go along with the most depraved behaviour of military barbarism – a nuclear superpower itching to destroy an impoverished nation that threatens no-one.
Truly, Western imperialist reality is more perverse and sick than the Western fiction.
Finian Cunningham via PRESS TV
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Korea Crisis: US criminal propensity justifies North Korea’s nukes
DPR-Korea´s Military on Highest Alert – Massive US-Led Military Exercise prompts Mobilization
North Korea Nuclear Test: Diplomatic Tensions and Hypocrisy
Putting the Squeeze on North Korea: Heightened Tensions threaten Security.
Those hysterical claims about North Korean cannibalism are very amusing and smell like the work of Anglo-American “psyops” agents who have been snorting too much CIA crack cocaine during the coffee breaks. ;-)
What is even more amusing is how many Americans and Westerners not only believe in this propaganda but revel in it–despite its ludicrousness.
This is not merely because they are “misled” or “brainwashed” but because of another issue that NO ONE wants to talk about: a thinly disguised (racist) belief in Western and American moral supremacy.
Deep down, Americans and Europeans embrace any type of propaganda against “enemy” nations because they have a deep-seated pathological need to feel superior to them and also to channel their hatred towards designated enemies.
You could call this America’s Orwellian-style Two Minutes of Hate.
Dear Tet. You are making and excellent point with the Orwellian “Two Minutes of Hate”. I also agree about the point you are making about racism, but would add to that, that much of the racism is also socially engineered. A look at which Hollywood movies are being produced with sponsorship of the US Department of Defense or any of the US Military Services is enough to make the point. Movies which represent the USA, its military services and US foreign policy and military adventurism in a positive light are sponsored. Beside that, Hollywood also plays a role at denigrating “the enemy”. A study by the Arab US-American scholar Dr. Jack Shaheen, Hollywood movies from the oldest black and whites to the latest Block-Buster movies until 2001 has shown, that more than 30 % of all Hollywood movies in one way or the other denigrated Arabs. IT would be interesting to replicate Dr. Shaheen´s study but document how Asians are represented in Hollywood movies. If you are interested, my article ” Palestine Israel, History and Theirstory ” contains useful links, also to the book and movie by Dr. Jack Shaheen, called “Real Bad Arabs “. Best regards and thank you for reading nsnbc international. Christof Lehmann – editor.
http://nsnbc.me/2011/11/13/palestine-israel-history-and-theirstory/
I have heard of Shaheen’s work. However, I don’t think that social engineering (like media propaganda) is the entire story. It is only the tip of the iceberg. This type of indoctrination would not work unless there were a pre-existing racist belief in American/Western moral supremacy to begin with.
For the USA, American national identity is based upon the idea of American Exceptionalism–the delusion that the USA was divinely chosen as a “shining city on hill” and that the USA is the Land of the Free, Beacon of Liberty, etc.
Moreover, the Western Civilizing Mission and White Man’s Burden have been defining ideologies of the West for centuries. Today, dogma like “defending freedom, democracy, and human rights” as well as the sinister “Responsibility to Protect” are but the modern incarnations of these supremacist beliefs.
At base, the West believes it has a moral right to inculcate into those barbaric and savage “wogs” the supposed virtues of Western civilization–whether through the use of modern day missionaries (like non-governmental organizations) or through war.
Regarding the depictions of Asians, Orientalism has been the lens through which the West constructs and paints the East–from West Asia to East Asia–as documented by people like Edward Said.
Considering the rapid deterioration of international law since 2001 – actually since Yugoslavia, and considering the fact that the ICC has not only failed to bring justice, but has been transformed into an instrument for criminal enterprise ( simplified but non the less true) – also considering that UNGA Resolutions pertaining media are utterly neglected, not enforced, or violated with impunity (ICC), and recognizing the enormous power of mass persuasion which mass media have,- I am convinced that the only way to remedy the situation with the abuse of media to justify or manufacture consent for war crimes, would be the establishment of an international bureau for peace and justice – based on existing international law, but not with one world court – what we need is an international bureau to investigate war crimes, prepare prosecutable cases, then send them to nations who have signed a treaty with the bureau, so that each nations prosecutor can issue arrest warrants for war criminals, arrest them, prosecute and if guilty sentence and incarcerate them. It would be necessary that the treaty includes mutual guaranties in cases where “bully nations” threaten if one of “theirs” is arrested or incarcerated. .