[Peace-discuss] Guest commentary

[David Green]

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.


>________________________________
> From: David Johnson <dlj725 at hughes.net>
>To: David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com> 
>Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:42 AM
>Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Guest commentary
>  
>
>
> 
>Good article David ! 
>  
>I am a little puzzled by this statement towards 
the end  ; "  American elites, who are at heart vulgar 
Marxists." ??? 
>  
>David Johnson 
>  
>----- Original Message -----  
>>From: David  Green  
>>To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net  
>>Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2013 9:29  AM 
>>Subject: [Peace-discuss] Guest  commentary 
>>
>> 
>>This commentary appeared in this  morning's News-Gazette-- 
>>  
>>  
>>                         The history of the Korean War is distorted and exploited for political  ends 
>> 
>>>David Green  
>>>Recent commemorations of the 60thanniversary 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.  
>>>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.  
>>>Historian Gabriel Kolko perceptively wrote in Main Currents in American History (1976):  
>>>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 (beginning  under Syngman Rhee in 1945 and ending not until 1987) 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 38thparallel 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.  
>>>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.   
>>>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.  
>>>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.   
>>>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.  
>>>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.  
>>>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.
>>> 
>>
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