Stephen Sefton, May 23rd 2022
In earlier articles and videos I've noted that faithful reporting in North America and Europe, has effectively collapsed, not just in news media but also on the part of academics and NGOs as well as institutions like the United Nations or the European Union. And I've argued that the main role of these kinds of information outlets, especially as regards foreign affairs, has for a long time been the formation and consolidation of false beliefs that eventually become false memories rendering policies serving the West's ruling classes' interests more plausible than they would otherwise be.
The Korean war offers a concrete example of how in relation to those events seventy years ago Western elite dominated information outlets have fabricated a completely phony reality that the vast majority of people in North America and Europe take as being true. Practically every Western information outlet on the Korean war states as a matter of categorical historical fact that, on June 25th 1950, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea launched an unprovoked, surprise attack against South Korea.
In fact, South Korean president Syngman Rhee after taking power via the US-rigged electoral charade of 1948 and supported by US President Truman and General MacArthur, commander of US military occupation forces, made repeated calls for a military attack on the north. From 1949 up until June 1950, US controlled South Korean forces made over 2000 incursions and attacks across the 38th parallel. On June 19th 1950, President Truman's adviser John Foster Dulles made a speech to the South Korean parliament promising unqualified military support, suggesting that the US would support an attack on North Korea.
US controlled forces in southern Korea were fully ready to attack the north when Dulles spoke. US military forces throughout the region were put on full combat alert. On June 23rd, the US directed southern forces began a massive artillery barrage along most of the 38th parallel. On June 25th, they began their attack crossing over 2km into northern Korea towards Chorwon and Kimchong and north of the Ongdin peninsula.
That same day forces of the Democratic People's Republic counterattacked, pushing back the South Korean invading forces and pressing on towards Seoul. These events have ever since been falsely portrayed by the Western powers as a savage, unexpected, unprovoked attack by the DPRK against a peaceful and unprepared South Korea.
Similarly it was not until over fifty years later that the No Gun Ri massacre, over three days in July 1950, of many hundreds of Korean civilians, by gun fire from US ground troops and aircraft, came to light thanks to genuine research by US reporters determined to establish the truth despite repeated Pentagon denials. The massacre was just one of many incidents resulting from genocidal official US policy targeting Korean civilians fleeing from the fighting at the time.
The parallel in our times is clear in both these aspects. The military offensive by the allied forces of the Russian Federation and the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples Republics was a response to heavy bombardments clearly prefacing a major Ukrainian military offensive as the latest stage of an eight year war by Ukraine, supported and supplied by the US and its NATO allies, during which Ukrainian forces killed around 14000 of their own people.
Likewise, overwhelming testimony from people in Donbass shows that NATO-trained Ukrainian armed forces, dominated by Nazi sympathizers, have, like their forebears, systematically used local civilians and civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals as cover for their military operations and murdered many people believed to be Russian sympathizers. These actions have caused a much higher level of civilian deaths and casualties than would otherwise have been the case in the course of conventional fighting respecting civilian non-combatants.
Even so, Western information outlets invariably describe the war in Ukraine as an unprovoked Russian invasion against a peaceful Ukraine when in fact Ukraine has been an increasingly aggressive US protectorate since the 2014 coup d'etat. Just as in South Korea after 1948, the US and its allies have dramatically built up the country's military offensive capacity, including illegal biological warfare facilities, with the self-evident objective of threatening both the Donbass republics and Russia.
The systematic misrepresentation of the Korean War over more than fifty years confirms how a primary function of Western reporting of all kinds has long been to contribute to creating false beliefs and ultimately false memories so as to justify anti-humanitarian, anti-democratic policies of the West's ruling elites. Now, Western reporting on the Ukraine is doing so taking advantage of Western corporate media and internet monopolies and also consistent overtly prejudiced reporting of events by Western dominated international institutions.
The progressive disappearance of genuine reporting from most Western information outlets ever since the end of Word War Two is now accelerating. Domestically, the West's ruling elites are intensifying their long standing psychological warfare policies against their own peoples so as to try and slow down the collapse of their accustomed power, control, influence and prestige.
Overseas, they deploy relentless comprehensive psychological warfare against any government or political movement that resists them. Everyone reporting independently from countries targeted by the US and its allies can testify to this and to the false beliefs promoted in the West about those countries and their governments. Perhaps we can look at a few examples another time.