<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div><span>Thanks. It's basically how Chomsky refers to class warfare from the top down. Elites dismiss the Marxist notion of class struggle, but they persistently engage in it. This "vulgar" in the sense of simplistic and crude class warfare.<var id="yui-ie-cursor"></var></span></div><div><br><blockquote style="padding-left: 5px; margin-top: 5px; margin-left: 5px; border-left-color: rgb(16, 16, 255); border-left-width: 2px; border-left-style: solid;"> <div style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> <div style="font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div dir="ltr"> <div class="hr" style="margin: 5px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: 0px; line-height: 0; font-size: 0px;" contenteditable="false" readonly="true"></div> <font face="Arial" size="2">
<b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> David Johnson <dlj725@hughes.net><br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> David Green <davegreen84@yahoo.com> <br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:42 AM<br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [Peace-discuss] Guest commentary<br> </font> </div> <div class="y_msg_container"><br><div id="yiv9697789084">
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<div><b><font face="Arial">Good article David !</font></b></div>
<div><b><font face="Arial"></font></b> </div>
<div><font face="Arial"><b>I am a little puzzled by this statement towards
the end ; " </b> American elites, who are at heart vulgar
Marxists." ???</font></div>
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<div><font face="Arial"><b>David Johnson</b></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial"> </font></div>
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<div style="font: 10pt/normal arial; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;">----- Original Message ----- </div>
<div style="background: rgb(228, 228, 228); font: 10pt/normal arial; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"><b>From:</b>
<a title="davegreen84@yahoo.com" href="mailto:davegreen84@yahoo.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:davegreen84@yahoo.com">David
Green</a> </div>
<div style="font: 10pt/normal arial; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"><b>To:</b> <a title="peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net" href="mailto:peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net">peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net</a>
</div>
<div style="font: 10pt/normal arial; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"><b>Sent:</b> Sunday, August 11, 2013 9:29
AM</div>
<div style="font: 10pt/normal arial; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"><b>Subject:</b> [Peace-discuss] Guest
commentary</div>
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<div><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">This commentary appeared in this
morning's News-Gazette--<var id="yiv9697789084yui-ie-cursor"></var></font></font></div>
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<div><b><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">
The history of the Korean War is distorted and exploited for political
ends</font></font></b></div>
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<div align="center" class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">David Green</font></font></div>
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<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><font face="Calibri"><font size="3">Recent commemorations of the 60</font><font size="2"><sup>th</sup></font><font size="3"> anniversary of the end of the
Korean War have evoked standard rhetoric and rationalizations regarding the
righteousness of the United States’ role in that conflict. From President
Obama to columnist Max Boot to a local veteran writing on these pages, the
slaughter that the war entailed—at least 2 million soldiers and civilians
dead—is retroactively and perversely justified by South Korea’s subsequent
economic development and North Korea’s ongoing misery, respectively equated
with what is called freedom or lack thereof.</font></font></div>
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<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">This hindsight is contrived and morally specious;
as a tool of political propaganda by Obama, it is one of many examples of
cynical exploitation of militaristic sentimentality by our current Aggressor
in Chief. The historical narrative that is determined by Obama’s political
opportunism is empty of serious content and critique, as one would expect by
this master of fraudulent, manipulative, and hollow
rhetoric.</font></font></div>
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<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">Historian Gabriel Kolko perceptively wrote in
<i>Main Currents in American History </i>(1976):</font></font></div>
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<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 10pt;"><font face="Calibri"><font size="3"><i>The Korean War was essentially the
internationalization of a civil conflict that had begun in 1945 immediately
after Korea’s liberation from Japan and the artificial partition, which the
United States imposed in August 1945. The totalitarian regime </i>(beginning
under Syngman Rhee in 1945 and ending not until 1987) </font><i><font size="3">that the U.S. funds left the nation in constant turmoil, with
guerilla warfare within the south itself and increasingly large scale combat
between the two sections along the 38</font><font size="2"><sup>th</sup></font><font size="3"> parallel in the year before the
north autonomously made the decision to reunify the nation in June 1950.
Divorced from the preceding five years of history, theories on the origins
of the Korean War become a part of the Cold War’s
mythology.</font></i></font></div>
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<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">Part of what Kolko refers to is Rhee’s recruitment
of those South Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese (who were
notorious for recruiting thousands of Korean women into sexual slavery)
during the occupation (1910-45), and the subsequent murder by Rhee’s forces
of up to 100,000 leftist and nationalist South Korean dissidents from
1945-48—with the help of their American sponsors. </font></font></div>
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<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">This American support for formerly
collaborationist and authoritarian elements was parallel to support for
collaborationist and fascist forces in Greece and Italy against former WWII
resistance and leftist fighters during that same period, always fraudulently
justified by the Soviet threat. This strategy also foreshadowed American
support for the ruthless authoritarian puppet Diem in South Vietnam against
his own indigenous revolt, leading to a genocidal American war (1962-75)
that is increasingly distorted and rationalized by politicians, including
Obama, as living memories fade and opportunism knocks.</font></font></div>
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<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">The Korean War was a result of the imperial
strategies of the U.S. and Soviet Union, as well the Chinese revolution.
Nevertheless, President Truman had the options of either actively promoting
a unification agreement or leaving Korea to its own civil war, which would
not likely have been joined by either the Soviet Union or China. Instead he
chose American aggression—aggravating the subsequent loss of life,
destroying the entire country, essentially leveling every structure in North
Korea, committing war crimes by bombing dams in North Korea when there was
nothing else left to destroy, and risking nuclear war. </font></font></div>
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<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">It is to Truman’s credit that he resisted Douglas
MacArthur’s lunatic proposal to use nuclear weapons against China and fired
the megalomaniac general. However, it is to his discredit that his decision
to use anti-communism to justify American militarism and imperialism set in
motion foreign policies that have come to deadly and destructive global
fruition for six decades. As communist enemies have been conveniently and
disingenuously replaced by Muslims, the Orwellian basis of American
militarism has been revealed as part and parcel of the aggressive ambitions
of American global capitalism and multinational corporations—all, not
incidentally, to the detriment of American workers and our own freedom and
democracy, as can be plainly seen now more than ever.</font></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"></font></div>
<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">The Truman administration had momentous decisions
to make in this period from 1945 to 1953. American workers, accustomed to
full employment and labor activism during WWII, demanded a welfare state;
unions were empowered to aggressively support such ambitions, and strikes
were frequent. These ambitions were consciously subverted by massive
government spending justified by military rather than social goals, now
known as “military Keynesianism.” Corporate propaganda dominated the media
and education in the 1950s. An extraordinary and ongoing climate of fear was
created and persists among the population of a country that has no natural
enemies and hasn’t been invaded in 200 years. Moreover, a massive
military-industrial complex that remains unaccountable to the American
people was perpetuated.</font></font></div>
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<div class="yiv9697789084MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><font size="3"><font face="Calibri">The global and neoliberal legacy of the Truman era
has elevated the South Korean working class while decimating the American
working class. But since our own Civil War, the American working class has
always been the primary threat to and enemy of American elites, who are at
heart vulgar Marxists. As long as American workers continue to fight wars
for global corporate capitalists, they will continue to lose in their own
struggle for freedom and
prosperity.</font></font><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div>
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