@Amanda Matthews

only the US, which previously bombed the impoverished country flat, lacks the same excuses for being backward and affected by a brutally inflicted country-wide disaster killing 20% of the population and flattening all infrastructure.

A justifiable fear within an already terrorized, double-decimated, violently impoverished and shell-shocked culture fosters repression here - while the pathological greed of the US PTB increasingly inflicts repression world-wide.

www.newsweek.com/us-forget-korean-war-led-crisis-north-592630

What War With North Korea Looked Like in the 1950s and Why It Matters Now
By Tom O'Connor On 5/4/17 at 9:23 AM

The brutality of the Korean War has largely been overlooked by U.S. history, but the conflict has long shaped Washington’s troubled political relationship, or lack thereof, with North Korea. As President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threaten to ignite a new battle in the region, the scars of the past seem to resonate more powerfully in the Korean Peninsula than in the West.

During the course of the three-year war, which both sides accuse one another of provoking, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin. (In contrast, the U.S. used 503,000 tons of bombs during the entire Pacific theater of World War II, according to a 2009 study by The Asia-Pacific Journal.) In a 1984 interview, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, claimed U.S. bombs “killed off 20 percent of the population” and “targeted everything that moved in North Korea.” These acts, largely ignored by the U.S. collective memory, have deeply contributed to Pyongyang’s contempt for the U.S. and especially its ongoing military presence on the Korean Peninsula.

“Most Americans are completely unaware that we destroyed more cities in the North than we did in Japan or Germany during World War II.... Every North Korean knows about this, it’s drilled into their minds. We never hear about it,” historian and author Bruce Cumings told Newsweek by email Monday. ...

...The origins of the war have also been obscured in the West. Korea was divided in 1945 following the defeat in World War II of the Japanese Empire that occupied the peninsula. The territory was split between the Soviet Union in the north and the U.S. in the south. The victorious superpowers of World War II once fought alongside one another, but quickly became rivals based on opposing ideologies. Traditional U.S. accounts of the conflict begin with the North Korean army storming South Korean positions in June 1950 under the command of current leader Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, and his Soviet allies. It is important to note, however, that this offensive was preceded by the harsh repression of leftists by the right-wing, U.S.-backed government of South Korean President Syngman Rhee in the 1940s. ...

...After the war, North Korea’s characterization of the U.S. as evil imperialists on the verge of invading was further corroborated in Pyongyang’s view by U.S. interventions against Communist powers in Vietnam and Grenada and later against Middle Eastern leaders in Iraq and Libya. North Korea’s answer was to develop a nuclear deterrent, a program begun sometime in the 1980s under Kim Il Sung and steadfastly pursued by his heirs in the face of near unilateral condemnation abroad, which extends to Pyongyang’s traditional ally, China. ...

... Frequent characterizations of Kim Jong Un, like his father and grandfather before him, as an irrational despot or even cartoonish, quirky leader have persisted “because it’s easier,’ according to Town, than grasping the nuanced reality of a conflict in which things were rarely black-and-white. Since the Korean War ended more than a half century ago, North Korea’s poor human rights record and military expansion have received extensive media coverage, while Kim Jong Un’s efforts to stabilize the economy have gone relatively underreported. ...

Regarding the above, we can see how such inflicted appalling cruelty would affect the culture and how such inflicted and total destruction would impede progress.

Below, we see examples of enacted cruelty upon the most vulnerable by the same PTB, at home, where there has never been an invasion or any realistic threat of one, try as propaganda might to make it appear that such hazards 'forced' attacks/invasion/'regime change'/electoral meddling in other people's governments and countries, to profit corporate interests/billionaires bleeding the world for personal power and profit toward a micromanaged global hegemony.

And as horrendous as the various abuses may be of various governments abroad, (many claims made by the propagandists of the would-be invaders of multiple resource-rich/'geo-politically' important countries having been proven untrue) the odds are pretty good that, were the torture-promoting US PTB's to invade and occupy, as bad or worse would be inflicted - and almost certainly on a much larger scale. No problem with the Saudi's, either, as we know. But while the US still has the death penalty and no problem in killing even the belatedly-proven innocent or mentally incapable, the death penalty in, say, Syria is a problem requiring regime change.*

This following is very old, from 2004 - and either more's coming out or it's worsened since, as brutality becomes increasingly 'normalized' and such tortures inflicted by prison guards as scalding prisoners - even to death - in hot showers adjusted to allow for illegally hot temperatures, have been revealed.

(But in recent years, I've had a problem with searches showing only older stuff in sensitive areas and searches have been worsening to uselessness in some areas...)

https://www.hrw.org/news/2004/05/13/prisoner-abuse-how-different-are-us-...

May 13, 2004 8:00PM EDT
Prisoner Abuse: How Different are U.S. Prisons?

The sadistic abuse and sexual humiliation by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison has shocked most Americans—but not those of us familiar with U.S. jails and prisons. In American prisons today, wanton staff brutality and degrading treatment of inmates occur across the country with distressing frequency.

The Pentagon has said it wants to send more people to Iraq who have U.S. prison experience. But before it does, it should look closely at the human rights records of their prisons.

A federal judge in 1999 concluded that Texas prisons were pervaded by a “culture of sadistic and malicious violence.” In 1995, a federal judge found a stunning pattern of staff assaults, abusive use of electronic stun devices guns, beatings, and brutality at Pelican Bay Prison in California, and concluded the violence “appears to be open, acknowledged, tolerated and sometimes expressly approved” by high ranking corrections officials.

In recent years, U.S. prison inmates have been beaten with fists and batons, stomped on, kicked, shot, stunned with electronic devices, doused with chemical sprays, choked, and slammed face first onto concrete floors by the officers whose job it is to guard them. Inmates have ended up with broken jaws, smashed ribs, perforated eardrums, missing teeth, burn scars—not to mention psychological scars and emotional pain. Some have died.

Both men and women prisoners—but especially women—face staff rape and sexual abuse. Correctional officers will bribe, coerce, or violently force inmates into granting sexual favors, including oral sex or intercourse. Prison staff have laughed at and ignored the pleas of male prisoners seeking protection from rape by other inmates. ...

...Just this January, a videotape at a California facility captured two officers beating and kicking two inmates. One officer struck an inmate approximately twenty times in the face; another officer is shown kicking a handcuffed inmate in the head.

When Florida inmate Frank Valdez died in 1999, every rib in his body was broken, his corpse bore the imprint of boot marks, and his testicles were badly swollen; guards admitted having struggled with him, but denied they had used excessive force. They claimed most of his injuries had been “self-inflicted.”

In Maricopa County, Arizona, a sheriff who dresses male jail inmates in pink underwear introduced live “jail cam” broadcasts on the internet in 2000. Three cameras covered the holding and searching cells of the jail, including shots of strip searches, inmates bound in “restraint chairs,” and even, for a while, unobstructed views of women using the toilet. The broadcasts ended up being copied onto web porn sites.

Even detained children and youth are not immune from staff brutality and abuse. They too are kicked, beaten, punched, choked, and sexually preyed upon by adult staff. The Maryland State Police recently filed criminal assault charges against staff at a youth facility in Maryland because of an incident in which one guard restrained a youth while the three others kicked him and punched him in the face. In January 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice reported on terrible conditions at Arizona’s juvenile detentions centers, including sexual abuse of the children by staff members (and fellow inmates) that occurs “with disturbing frequency” and a level of physical abuse that is ”equally disturbing.”

When the news about Abu Ghraib broke, the Bush administration tried to suggest it was the work of a few rogue officers. But in over two decades of monitoring prisons in the United States and around the world, Human Rights Watch has learned that abusive officers do not operate in a vacuum. More typically, a culture of brutality has developed in which correctional officers know they can get away with excessive, unnecessary, or even purely malicious violence. In such prisons, senior officials have failed to communicate unequivocally—through training, staff supervision, investigations, and discipline—that abuse will not be tolerated.

The failures of senior prison officials in the United States are compounded, as in Abu Ghraib, by the absence of external scrutiny. Prisons are closed institutions from which the press, human rights groups, and members of the public are typically excluded. Independent expert inspections yielding public findings are rare, and usually occur only after the situation has become so bad that inmates have filed a lawsuit.

Perhaps if photos or videotapes of abuse in U.S. prisons were to circulate publicly, Americans would be galvanized to protest such treatment as they have the treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Absent such graphic and unavoidable evidence, it is all too likely that abuse will continue to be a part of many prison sentences.

The following is from 2011; for quite some time, it's been becoming more and even more difficult to search for and find previously seen articles in 'sensitive' areas which are recent and describe the nightmare better...

https://www.alternet.org/story/151732/21st-century_slaves%3A_how_corpora...

21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor
In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit.
By Rania Khalek / AlterNet
July 21, 2011

There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally stripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately relegated to second-class citizens. They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to no wages. This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight.

They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where we cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st century. ...

...The CEPR study observes that US prison rates are not just excessive in comparison to the rest of the world, they are also "substantially higher than our own longstanding history." The study finds that incarceration rates between 1880 and 1970 ranged from about "100 to 200 prisoners per 100,000 people." After 1980, the inmate population "began to grow much more rapidly than the overall population and the rate climbed from "about 220 in 1980 to 458 in 1990, 683 in 2000, and 753 in 2008." ...

...Michelle Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow that more black men "are in prison or jail, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850." Higher rates of black drug arrests do not reflect higher rates of black drug offenses. In fact, whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales at roughly comparable rates.

Incentivizing Incarceration

Clearly, the US prison system is riddled with racism and classism, but it gets worse. As it turns out, private companies have a cheap, easy labor market, and it isn’t in China, Indonesia, Haiti, or Mexico. It’s right here in the land of the free, where large corporations increasingly employ prisoners as a source of cheap and sometimes free labor.

In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit. By dipping into the prison labor pool, companies have their pick of workers who are not only cheap but easily controlled. Companies are free to avoid providing benefits like health insurance or sick days, while simultaneously paying little to no wages. They don’t need to worry about unions or demands for vacation time or raises. Inmates work full-time and are never late or absent because of family problems.

"If they refuse to work, they are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen privileges" along with "good time credit that reduces their sentences,” reports Chris Levister. To top it off, Abe Louise Young reports in The Nation that the federal government subsidizes the use of inmate labor by private companies through lucrative tax write-offs. Under the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), private-sector employers receive a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they employ as a reward for hiring “risky target groups” and they can "earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to target group workers." ...

...The exploitation of prison labor is by no means a new phenomenon. Jaron Browne, an organizer with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), maps out how the exploitation of prison labor in America is rooted in slavery. The abolition of slavery dealt a devastating economic blow to the South following the loss of free labor after the Civil War. So in the late 19th century, "an extensive prison system was created in the South in order to maintain the racial and economic relationship of slavery," a mechanism responsible for re-enslaving black workers. Browne describes Louisiana’s famous Angola Prison to illustrate the intentional transformation from slave to inmate:

“In 1880, this 8000-acre family plantation was purchased by the state of Louisiana and converted into a prison. Slave quarters became cell units. Now expanded to 18,000 acres, the Angola plantation is tilled by prisoners working the land—a chilling picture of modern day chattel slavery.” ...

... Unfortunately, convict leasing was quickly replaced with equally despicable state-run chain gangs. Once again, stories of vicious abuse created enough public anger to abolish chain gangs by the 1950s. Nevertheless, the systems of prisoner exploitation never actually disappeared.

Today’s corporations can lease factories in prisons, as well as lease prisoners out to their factories. In many cases, private corporations are running prisons-for-profit, further incentivizing their stake in locking people up. The government is profiting as well, by running prison factories that operate as "multibillion-dollar industries in every state, and throughout the federal prison system," where prisoners are contracted out to major corporations by the state.

In the most extreme cases, we are even witnessing the reemergence of the chain gang. In Arizona, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” Joe Arpaio, requires his Maricopa County inmates to enroll in chain gangs to perform various community services or face lockdown with three other inmates in an 8-by-12-foot cell, for 23 hours a day. In June of this year, Arpaio started a female-only chain gang made up of women convicted of driving under the influence. In a press release he boasted that the inmates would be wearing pink T-shirts emblazoned with messages about drinking and driving.

The modern-day version of convict leasing was recently spotted in Georgia, where Governor Nathan Deal proposed sending unemployed probationers to work in Georgia's fields as a solution to a perceived labor shortage following the passage of the country’s most draconian anti-immigrant law. But his plan backfired when some of the probationers began walking off their jobs because the fieldwork was too strenuous.

There has also been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors’ prison, which should serve as an ominous sign of our dangerous reliance on prisons to manage any and all of society’s problems. According to the Wall Street Journal, "more than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can't or won't pay to be jailed." They found that judges "signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties." It appears that any act that can be criminalized in the era of private prisons and inmate labor will certainly end in jail time, further increasing the ranks of the captive workforce. ...

...Some of the largest and most powerful corporations have a stake in the expansion of the prison labor market, including but not limited to IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. Between 1980 and 1994 alone, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Since the prison labor force has likely grown since then, it is safe to assume that the profits accrued from the use of prison labor have reached even higher levels.

In an article for Mother Jones, Caroline Winter details a number of mega-corporations that have profited off of inmates:

“In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria's Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace 'Made in Honduras' labels on garments with 'Made in the USA.'"

According to Winter, the defense industry is a large part of the equation as well:

“Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers' uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have 'produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)' and 'wiring harnesses for jets and tanks.' In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractorMicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.”

Oil companies have been known to exploit prison labor as well. Following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers and irreparably damaged the Gulf of Mexico for generations to come, BP elected to hire Louisiana prison inmates to clean up its mess. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the nation, 70 percent of which are African-American men. Coastal residents desperate for work, whose livelihoods had been destroyed by BP’s negligence, were outraged at BP’s use of free prison labor.

In the Nation article that exposed BP’s hiring of inmates, Abe Louise Young details how BP tried to cover up its use of prisoners by changing the inmates' clothing to give the illusion of civilian workers. But nine out of 10 residents of Grand Isle, Louisiana are white, while the cleanup workers were almost exclusively black, so BP’s ruse fooled very few people.

Private companies have long understood that prison labor can be as profitable as sweatshop workers in third-world countries with the added benefit of staying closer to home. Take Escod Industries, which in in the 1990s abandoned plans to open operations in Mexico and instead "moved to South Carolina, because the wages of American prisoners undercut those of de-unionized Mexican sweatshop workers," reports Josh Levine in a 1999 article that appeared in Perpective Magazine. The move was fueled by the state, which gave a $250,000 "equipment subsidy" to Escod along with industrial space at below-market rent. Other examples listed by Gordon Lafer in the American Prospect include Ohio's Honda supplier, which "pays its prison workers $2 an hour for the same work for which the UAW has fought for decades to be paid $20 to $30 an hour. Konica, which has hired prisoners to repair its copiers for less than 50 cents an hour. And in Oregon, where private companies can “lease” prisoners at a bargain price of $3 a day."

Even politicians have been known to tap into prison labor for their own personal use. In 1994, a contractor for GOP congressional candidate Jack Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and remind voters he was pro-death penalty. After winning his campaign, he claimed to have no knowledge of the scandal. Perhaps this is why Senator John Ensign (R-NV) introduced a bill earlier this year to "require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week." After all, The New York Times reminds us that "creating a national prison labor force has been a goal of his since he went to Congress in 1995."

In an unsettling turn of events lawmakers have begun ditching public employees in favor of free prison labor. The New York Times recently reported that states are "enlisting prison labor to close budget gaps" to offset cuts in "federal financing and dwindling tax revenue." At a time of record unemployment, inmates are being hired to "paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees." In Wisconsin, prisoners are now taking up jobs that were once held by unionized workers, as a result of Governor Scott Walker’s contentious anti-union law. ...

... As unemployment on the outside increases, so too will crime and incarceration rates, and our 21st-century version of corporate slavery will continue to expand unless we do something about it.

So underpaid Americans are, and long have been, publicly subsidizing 'legalized' slavery for Corporate America, in The Land of The Free-For-All - and may will the richest man win!

America first needs regime change by her people and the establishment of democracy, before a government finally of, by and for the people can work out when and how it's actually appropriate to step in to actually help those in other sovereign countries who actually require humanitarian (not corporate-take-over) assistance.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HLjC53emUM

Assad Destroys US Reporter In Interview Exposes Zionist Propaganda
Matthew North
Published on 7 Jul 2017

In a recent interview held in Damascus, a US news reporter grilled Syria's President Bashar al-Assad with a barrage of questions surrounding allegations of human rights abuses and war crimes against the Syrian government, in a tense interview that at times saw Assad seemingly catch the Yahoo News reporter off guard with his sharp responses.

Source: Syrian Arab News Agency

Date: 10 February, 2017

The London ophthalmologist is actually pretty bright, for being merely an ignorant and bloodthirsty desert savage a doctor working with identifying and curing eye diseases, although medical school and such a career just might be demanding of a few brights after all - despite propaganda to the contrary.

He and his (once-British, now Syrian) wife are hated by TPTB and must be deposed for trying to improve the living standards of their people rather than bleeding them for The Right Corporate interests, of course. That's the unforgivable thing for the US/British PTB - anything else goes, as we know. Except withholding any of their own land from the Likud.

#2.1.1.2

North Korea prison camps very much in working order

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/north-korea-prison-camps-...

Life inside a North Korea labour camp: ‘We were forced to throw rocks at a man being hanged’

Defector confined in Yodok concentration camp for 10 years

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/north-korea-forced-labour-...

The horrifying truth about life in North Korea

http://www.news.com.au/travel/world-travel/asia/the-horrifying-truth-abo...

North Korea SHOCK photos: What life is really like behind Kim Jong-un's iron curtain

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/886793/North-Korea-shock-photos-Kim...

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/657313/north-korea-war-kim-j...

Former guard reveals what life is like at a North Korean prison camp

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/dprk-north-korea-south-pri...

Yeah, it sounds like a lovely place to live. /s