Zaterdag 27 juli 2019 stelde Ian Buruma in The New York Times:
At the end of 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States silenced the America Firsters. Churchill and Roosevelt drew up the Atlantic Charter, envisioning the world after Hitler’s defeat. It was marked by deeply internationalist ideas: cooperation between countries, free trade and political freedom for all.
Ruim twee jaar eerder, 9 juni 2017, oordeelde mijn oude vriend Ian in NRC Handelsblad:
de gevolgen van ‘America First’ zijn onverkwikkelijk. Het leiderschap van de VS had vele mankementen, zoals onbesuisde oorlogen en te veel steun aan ongure regimes in naam van de oorlog tegen het oprukkende communisme, of nu het terrorisme. Maar het had ook voordelen. Nooit hebben landen in Europa en Oost-Azïe zo lang in welvaart en vrede geleefd als onder Amerikaanse bescherming na 1945.
Als Buruma’s bewering waar zou zijn dat 'Churchill en Roosevelt' zich met hun ‘Atlantisch Handvest' de ‘wereld’ ‘voorstelden’ als één grote ‘samenwerking tussen landen, vrijhandel en politieke vrijheid voor iedereen,’ dan is de vraag waarom Washington en Wall Street in 1953 de democratie in Perzië vernietigden en een jaar later de democratie in Guatemala, en waarom, zoals de Amerikaanse historicus William Blum overtuigend aantoonde:
The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows:
* making the world safe for American corporations;
* enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress;
* preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;
- extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a ‘great power.’
This in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves, and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not.
The United States carried out extremely serious interventions into more than 70 nations in this period.
Een logisch redenerende journalist kan moeilijk volhouden dat het gewelddadig interveniëren in de interne zaken van soevereine staten, en het vernietigen van de democratie elders, manifestaties zijn van ‘samenwerking tussen landen’ en ‘politieke vrijheid voor iedereen,’ de vermeende grondbeginselen van het Atlantisch Handvest. Ik ben het volledig eens met mijn liberale vriend Ian dat het ‘leiderschap van de VS vele mankementen,’ bezit, ‘zoals onbesuisde oorlogen en te veel steun aan ongure regimes in naam van de oorlog tegen het oprukkende communisme, of nu het terrorisme.’ Ik ben het zelfs eens met Buruma’s stelling dat deze ‘mankementen’ tevens ‘voordelen’ hadden, dat wil zeggen: voor het rijke Westen. Buruma gaat echter de fout in wanneer hij beweert:
Nooit hebben landen in Europa en Oost-Azïe zo lang in welvaart en vrede geleefd als onder Amerikaanse bescherming na 1945.
Deze bewering demonstreert hoe wezenlijk een mainstream-opiniemaker de werkelijkheid kan verdraaien zonder dat zijn kwaliteitspubliek of de westerse mainstream-intelligentsia hem hiervoor op de vingers tikt. Laat ik beginnen met het Oost-Aziatische land Noord Korea. Bekend is dat:
The United States Air Force (USAF) carried out an extensive bombing campaign against North Korea from 1950 to 1953 during the Korean War. It was the first major bombing campaign for the USAF since its inception in 1947 from the United States Army Air Forces. During the campaign, conventional weapons such as explosives, incendiary bombs, and napalm destroyed nearly all of the country's cities and towns, including an estimated 85 percent of its buildings. Deaths among the civilian population have been estimated at approximately one million people, a number comparable to or greater than the toll from the World War II bombing of Germany (400,000 to 600,000 civilian deaths) and Japan (330,000 to 900,000 civilian deaths).
Dat hier onmiskenbaar sprake was van Amerikaans genocidaal geweld blijkt tevens uit het volgende:
The first bombing attack on North Korea was approved on the fourth day of the war, 29 June 1950, by General Douglas MacArthur immediately upon request by FEAF's commanding general, George E. Stratemeyer. MacArthur's order preceded the receipt of an order of President Harry Truman to expand air operations into North Korean areas… ‘burn and destroy as a lesson any other of those towns that you consider of military value to the enemy.’ The same evening, MacArthur's chief of staff told Stratemeyer that the firebombing of Sinuiju had also been approved. In his diary, Stratemeyer summarized the instructions as follows: ‘Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target.’ Stratemeyer sent orders to the Fifth Air Force and Bomber Command to ‘destroy every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village.’
On 5 November 1950, General Stratemeyer gave the following order to the commanding general of the Fifth Air Force: ‘Aircraft under Fifth Air Force control will destroy all other targets including all buildings capable of affording shelter.’ The same day, twenty-two B-29s attacked Kanggye, destroying 75% of the city.
In the wake of the Kanggye attack, FEAF (USAF Far East Air Force svh) began an intensive firebombing campaign that quickly incinerated multiple Korean cities…
On 17 November 1950, General MacArthur told U.S. ambassador to Korea John J. Muccio, ‘Unfortunately, this area will be left a desert.’ By ‘this area’ MacArthur meant the entire area between ‘our present positions and the border.’
In May 1951, an international fact finding team from East Germany, West Germany, China, and the Netherlands stated, ‘The members, in the whole course of their journey, did not see one town that had not been destroyed, and there were very few undamaged villages.’
On 25 June 1951, General O'Donnell, commander of the Far Eastern Air Force Bomber Command, testified in answer to a question from Senator John C. Stennis (‘North Korea has been virtually destroyed, hasn't it?’): ‘Oh, yes; […] I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name... Just before the Chinese came in we were grounded. There were no more targets in Korea.’
In June 1952, as part of a strategy to maintain ‘air pressure’ during armistice negotiations, FEAF's Fifth Air Force selected seventy-eight villages for destruction by B-26 light bombers.
In August 1951, war correspondent Tibor Meráy stated that he had witnessed ‘a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital.’ He said that there were ‘no more cities in North Korea.’ He added, ‘My impression was that I am traveling on the moon because there was only devastation — every city was a collection of chimneys.’
Napalm was widely used. In John Ford's 1951 documentary, ‘This is Korea,’ footage of napalm deployment is accompanied by a voice-over by John Wayne saying, ‘Burn 'em out, cook 'em, fry ‘em'; the New York Herald Tribune hailed ‘Napalm, the No. 1 Weapon in Korea.’ Winston Churchill, among others, criticized American use of napalm, calling it ‘very cruel,’ as the US/UN forces, he said, were ‘splashing it all over the civilian population,’ ‘tortur[ing] great masses of people.’ The American official who took this statement declined to publicize it.
At the conclusion of the war, the Air Force assessed the destruction of twenty-two major cities…
The bombing campaign destroyed almost every substantial building in North Korea. The war's highest-ranking U.S. POW, U.S. Major General William F. Dean, reported that the majority of North Korean cities and villages he saw were either rubble or snow-covered wasteland. North Korean factories, schools, hospitals, and government offices were forced to move underground. In November 1950, the North Korean leadership instructed the population to build dugouts and mud huts and to dig underground tunnels, in order to solve the acute housing problem.
USAF General Curtis Lemay commented, ‘We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too.’ Pyongyang, which saw 75 percent of its area destroyed, was so devastated that bombing was halted as there were no longer any worthy targets. By the end of the campaign, US bombers had difficulty in finding targets and were reduced to bombing footbridges or jettisoning their bombs into the sea…
Tonnage Dropped: Korea vs. World War II and Vietnam War
The U.S. dropped a total of 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm, on Korea. By comparison, 503,000 tons were dropped in the Pacific theater during World War II, 864,000 tons were dropped on North Vietnam through 31 December 1967 during Operation Rolling Thunder, and 500,000 tons were dropped on Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.
In contrast to the detailed calculations of civilian casualties that followed the strategic bombing campaign against Japan, in North Korea the USAF assessed the extent of area destroyed by bombing on a city-by-city basis, but not did not estimate casualties resulting from the bombing campaign. General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, stated, ‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population of [North] Korea…’ Applied to the population of North Korea, 9,726,000 in 1950, the estimate of 20 percent would imply a death toll of approximately two million.
The most fully documented and recent estimate of North Korean civilian deaths comes from the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset, developed by researchers at the Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). Assessing a variety of sources, the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset researchers concluded that the ‘best estimate’ of civilian deaths in North Korea was 995,000, with a low estimate of 644,696 and a high estimate of 1.5 million.
Desondanks beweerde Ian Buruma anno 2017 in NRC Handelsblad:
Nooit hebben landen in Europa en Oost-Azïe zo lang in welvaart en vrede geleefd als onder Amerikaanse bescherming na 1945.
Volgende keer meer voorbeelden van de misdadige leugenachtigheid van Ian Buruma, die vanwege zijn vermeend ‘kosmopolitisme’ in 2008 de Erasmus Prijs ontving van het Nederlands establishment.
Willie and the Hand Jive
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