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Killing Hope

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History does not tell us what a Soviet Union, allowed to develop in a “normal” way of its own choosing, would look like today. We do know, however, the nature of a Soviet Union attacked in its cradle, raised alone in an extremely hostile world, and, when it managed to survive to adulthood, overrun by the Nazi war machine with the blessings of the Western powers. The resulting insecurities and fears have inevitably led to deformities of character not unlike that found in an individual raised in a similar life-threatening manner. — location: 149 ^ref-52510

In 1918, the barons of American capital needed no reason for their war against communism other than the threat to their wealth and privilege, although their opposition was expressed in terms of moral indignation. — location: 231 ^ref-25873

The assertion has been frequently voiced that the CIA carries out its dirty tricks largely in reaction to operations of the KGB which have been “even dirtier”. This is a lie made out of whole cloth. — location: 261 ^ref-34259

It is reminiscent of the 19th-century American South, where many Southerners were deeply offended that so many of their black slaves had deserted to the Northern side in the Civil War. They had genuinely thought that the blacks should have been grateful for all their white masters had done for them, and that they were happy and content with their lot. — location: 299 ^ref-12698

Samuel A. Cartwright argued that many of the slaves suffered from a form of mental illness, which he called “drapetomania”, diagnosed as the uncontrollable urge to escape from slavery. In the second half of the 20th-century, this illness, in the Third World, has usually been called “communism”. — location: 302 ^ref-36403

the conspiracy mentality of those in power—the idea that no people, except those living under the enemy, could be so miserable and discontent as to need recourse to revolution or even mass protest; that it is only the agitation of the outsider which misdirects them along this path. — location: 315 ^ref-16436

“We didn’t know what was happening”, became a cliché used to ridicule those Germans who claimed ignorance of the events which took place under the Nazis. Yet, was their stock answer as far-fetched as we’d like to think? It is sobering to reflect that in our era of instant world-wide communications, the United States has, on many occasions, been able to mount a large- or small-scale military operation or undertake another, equally blatant, form of intervention without the American public being aware of it until years later, if ever. — location: 346 ^ref-28955

“One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” — location: 363 ^ref-37060

So broad and deep is the denial of the American holocaust, I said, that the denyers are not even aware that the claimers or their claim exist. — location: 405 ^ref-23061

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly. — location: 544 ^ref-35541

“As an officer I am supposed to tell them, but you can’t tell a man that he’s here to disarm Japanese when he’s guarding the same railway with [armed] Japanese.” — location: 598 ^ref-51801

a combined force with the Burmese to overwhelm the Nationalists’ main base and mark finis to their Burmese adventure. Burma subsequently renounced American aid and moved closer to Peking. — location: 673 ^ref-59519

Several islands within about five miles of the Chinese coast, particularly Quemoy and Matsu, were used as bases for hit-and-run attacks, often in battalion strength, for occasional bombing forays, and to blockade mainland ports. — location: 677 ^ref-20051

Peking announced the capture and sentencing of the two men. The State Department broke its own two-year silence with indignation, claiming that the two men had been civilian employees of the US Department of the Army in Japan who were presumed lost on a flight from Korea to Japan. “How they came into the hands of the Chinese Communists is unknown to the United States … the continued wrongful detention of these American citizens furnishes further proof of the Chinese Communist regime’s disregard for accepted practices of international conduct.” — location: 688 ^ref-27096

Downey was not freed until March 1973, soon after Nixon publicly acknowledged him to be a CIA officer. — location: 693 ^ref-48766

Even after the formal training program came to an end, the CIA continued to finance and supply their exotic clients and nurture their hopeless dream of reconquering their homeland. — location: 724 ^ref-19700

The peoples of Korea and China have indeed been the objectives of bacteriological weapons. These have been employed by units of the U.S.A. armed forces, using a great variety of different methods for the purpose, some of which seem to be developments of those applied by the Japanese during the second world war. — location: 739 ^ref-40171

“At times the Communist Chinese leaders seem to be obsessed with the notion that they are being threatened and encircled.” — location: 763 ^ref-9337

the question of who fired the first shot on 25 June 1950 takes on a much reduced air of significance. — location: 1418 ^ref-21078

early in the morning of the 26th, the South Korean Office of Public Information announced that Southern forces had indeed captured the North Korean town of Haeju. — location: 1425 ^ref-26786

‘A big story has just broken. The South Koreans have attacked North Korea!’” — location: 1446 ^ref-55491

labor adviser attached to the American aid mission in South Korea, Stanley Earl, resigned in July, expressing the opinion that the South Korean government was “an oppressive regime” which “did very little to help the people” — location: 1460 ^ref-63983

only four countries of the Soviet bloc were members at the time, none on the Security Council. — location: 1495 ^ref-16316

Eisenhower later wrote in his memoirs that when he was considering US military intervention in Vietnam in 1954, also as part of a “coalition”, he recognized that the burden of the operation would fall on the United States, but “the token forces supplied by these other nations, as in Korea, would lend real moral standing to a venture that otherwise could be made to appear as a brutal example of imperialism” (emphasis added). — location: 1518 ^ref-64622

Rhee was soon maneuvered into a position of prominence and authority by the US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). In the process, American officials had to suppress a provisional government, the Korean People’s Republic, that was the outgrowth of a number of regional governing committees set up by prominent Koreans and which had already begun to carry out administrative tasks, such as food distribution and keeping order. The KPR’s offer of its services to the arriving Americans was dismissed out of hand. — location: 1525 ^ref-51793

USAMGIK was regulating Korean political life as if the country were a defeated enemy and not a friendly state liberated from a common foe and with a right to independence and self-determination. — location: 1537 ^ref-2199

While the Russians did a thorough house-cleaning of Koreans in the North who had collaborated with the Japanese, the American military government in the South allowed many collaborators, and at first even the Japanese themselves, to retain positions of administration and authority, — location: 1552 ^ref-26800

At the time of the outbreak of war in June 1950, there were an estimated 14,000 political prisoners in South Korean jails. — location: 1583 ^ref-5521

about six hundred men and women, young and old, were herded into a narrow valley and mowed down with machine guns by a South Korean army unit.” — location: 1586 ^ref-8621

if civilians could be mowed down in the South on suspicion of aiding (not even being) guerrillas—what about the North, where millions could reasonably be assumed to be Communists, or political militants? — location: 1600 ^ref-13314

US diplomat who served seven years in Korea in the 1940s and ’50s, has stated that “probably over 100,000 were killed without any trial whatsoever” by Rhee’s forces in the South during the war. — location: 1608 ^ref-56051

North Koreans, on several occasions, claimed that many American POWs also died in the camps as a result of the heavy US bombing. — location: 1636 ^ref-63391

several times as many Communist prisoners had died in US/South Korean camps—halfway through the war the official figure stood at 6,60043—though these camps did hold many more prisoners than those in the North. — location: 1638 ^ref-31754

as 30 percent of American POWs had collaborated with the enemy in one way or another, and “one man in every seven, or more than thirteen per cent, was guilty of serious collaboration—writing disloyal tracts … or agreeing to spy or organize for the Communists after the war.” — location: 1642 ^ref-43541

prisoners, as far as Army psychiatrists have been able to discover, were not subjected to anything that could properly be called brainwashing. Indeed, the Communist treatment of prisoners, while it came nowhere near fulfilling the requirements of the Geneva Convention, rarely involved outright cruelty, being instead a highly novel blend of leniency and pressure — location: 1660 ^ref-57315

the Army has not found a single verifiable case in which they used it for the specific purpose of forcing a man to collaborate or to accept their convictions. — location: 1663 ^ref-4084

some American airmen, of the 90 or so who were captured, were subjected to physical abuse in an attempt to extract confessions about germ warfare. — location: 1665 ^ref-41565

This argument seemed plausible to many of the prisoners. In general they had no idea that these bases showed not the United States’ wish for war, but its wish for peace, that they had been established as part of a series of treaties aimed not at conquest, but at curbing Red aggression. — location: 1674 ^ref-28373

How long would the United States refrain from entering a war being waged in Mexico by a Communist power from across the sea, which strafed and bombed Texas border towns, was mobilized along the Rio Grande, and was led by a general who threatened war against the United States itself? — location: 1686 ^ref-13759

“Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name.” — location: 1696 ^ref-19026

another pervasive Western belief—that it was predominantly Communist intransigence, duplicity, and lack of peaceful intentions which frustrated the talks and prolonged the war. — location: 1706 ^ref-59046

Once upon a time, the United States fought a great civil war in which the North attempted to reunite the divided country through military force. Did Korea or China or any other foreign power send in an army to slaughter Americans, charging Lincoln with aggression? — location: 1723 ^ref-41114

The 11 September terrorists had chosen symbolic buildings to attack and the United States then chose a symbolic country to retaliate against. — location: 13049 ^ref-23206

Since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed; 90-95% of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have been verifiably eliminated. This includes all of the factories used to produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and long-range ballistic missiles; the associated equipment of these factories; and the vast majority of the products coming out of these factories. — location: 13214 ^ref-16495

dismantled extensive nuclear weapons-related facilities. We neutralized Iraq’s nuclear program. We confiscated its weapon-usable material. We destroyed, removed or rendered harmless all its facilities and equipment relevant to nuclear weapons production.34 — location: 13219 ^ref-44157

From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair. — location: 13249 ^ref-36473

When will American wars of aggression, firing missles into the heart of a city, and using depleted uranium and cluster bombs against the population become completely discredited? They already have become such, but the United States, which wages war on the same scale other nations apply to mere survival, does not yet know it. Instead, it practices perpetual war for perpetual peace. — location: 13255 ^ref-24183