Rachel Maddow Is Setting You Up... to Go Along With a Very Possible Nuclear War Against North Korea, If or When Trump’s “Negotiations” Fail
June 4, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Friday, June 1, a top North Korean official, Kim Yong-chol, made a surprise visit to the White House to meet with Donald Trump about the on-again, off-again U.S.-North Korea summit meeting.
That night on the “liberal” MSNBC, Rachel Maddow devoted the first 24 minutes of her show to “sounding the alarm” about the situation.
Rachel Maddow Gives You the Liberal Whitewash: Oh-So-Innocent and Well-Meaning America Up Against Those Wily, Brutal Koreans
Did she situate the summit in the 60-plus years of U.S. aggression against North Korea, including killing three million people in the 1950-53 Korean War? Did she remind people of Trump’s repeated threats to “destroy” North Korea, while demanding it disarm? Did she analyze the Trump/Pence regime’s fascist “Make America Great Again” agenda of global domination that’s driving it toward war? Did she mention the warning by former U.S. national foreign policy adviser Victor Cha that a failed summit may “take us closer to war,” a war which would almost certainly be launched by the U.S. with one of its traditionally phony pretexts1—a war which could kill an estimated 300,000 people in the first few days if it stayed non-nuclear, a million the first day if it went nuclear, and have possibly humanity-ending consequences if it escalated beyond the Korean Peninsula?
No. Maddow didn’t say a word about any of these defining realities in this extremely dangerous situation. Instead, she spent her entire segment schooling her audience on the “grave dangers” that North Korea, especially its spymaster Gen. Kim Yong-chol, posed to America, the globe’s most ruthless nuclear power and imperialist bully!
Maddow told her audience that Kim Yong-chol may look like a harmless old man, but he is actually North Korea’s “top-ranked spy,” someone who has built “the world’s most elite hacking and cyber-espionage” power, one which has broken into Sony Pictures and global banks. She sounded the alarm that the “devious” Kim Yong-chol may even have stolen U.S. secrets during his Oval Office visit: Did he “have equipment” with him? Did he ask to see Trump’s phone? On top of all this, Maddow warned, Kim Yong-chol is a general in North Korea’s military, and “there are all the killings.” All this, she made clear, was in service of a terrible “dictatorship.”
Maddow didn’t warn people that Trump might use the summit to justify war if North Korea doesn’t capitulate, claiming he’d walked the last mile for peace and now had no choice but to wage war. Instead, she worried that Trump may be backing off “maximum pressure”—i.e., crippling sanctions—on North Korea. She actually in effect creates public opinion for a “tougher, more confrontational” stance!
There IS Danger... in How Rachel Maddow Is Training You to Think!
What was the message—the indoctrination—in Maddow’s 24-minute indictment? That Trump is getting played by the ruthless, evil geniuses who run North Korea, and putting “our country” at risk. In this worldview and mind-set, America is the well-meaning if often naïve good guy and North Korea is yet another devious “alien” evil-doer.
Get fucking real! North Korea is run by an oppressive regime that has nothing to do with revolutionary communism. But you could multiply its crimes and those it’s been accused of 10,000 times—even a million times!—and you still wouldn’t come close to what THIS ruling class, including its CIA spymasters—have done around the world!2 (And by the way, how did it happen that Maddow didn’t mention that the person Kim was negotiating with was Mike Pompeo, fanatical fascist and former head of the CIA, whose crimes no other spy agency in the world even comes close to?)
Why Rachel Maddow Trains You to Think Like an American
For Rachel Maddow—and for the ruling class liberals in the Democratic Party for whom she basically speaks—opposition to Trump must remain within the confines of what is good for this system. Maddow’s line on this show in fact follows closely that of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, who worries that Trump is too eager “to strike a deal” and will end up with “a bad one, not a strong one.3 At the heart of this system is the domination of the entire world by the U.S., in league with and competition against its rival imperialists. Rachel Maddow and those for whom she speaks do oppose Trump—as someone who endangers that system. Hence, for her, all opposition to Trump must be done within the confines and on the terms of what serves that system. This is gone into very deeply in Bob Avakian’s speech on the Trump/Pence regime, and we urge you to check out this excerpt. Much as she would howl and object if you said this to her, she basically shares the mind-set of “America First”—this just saturates the whole episode of her show—but wants to pursue this domination in a different way.
If you follow MSNBC and if you follow the Democratic Party (of which it is a virtual wing), this is where you will—once again—end up: going along with “our country” in another vicious and unjust war against another oppressed nation.4
STOP THINKING LIKE AMERICANS!! START THINKING ABOUT HUMANITY!
1. The phony U.S. pretexts include the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident when the U.S. claimed, falsely and without any evidence, that North Vietnam had attacked the U.S. fleet—and then used that as pretext for massive deployment of U.S. troops in southern Vietnam; the inundation of the media with false “news” about Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait in 1990—a lie that served to justify an invasion shortly afterward and a war that killed 200,000 in Iraq; the massive propaganda campaign about nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” possessed by the Saddam Hussein regime that served to justify a blitzkrieg-type invasion of Iraq in 2003 and U.S. occupation that brought immense horrors to the people of Iraq. For more on these and other U.S. pretexts, see “BEWARE: Incidents, Pretexts and Traps” at revcom.us. [back]
2. Read the American Crime series at revcom.us for ongoing documentation of America’s great crimes. [back]
3. Schumer is also demanding that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un’s likeness be removed from the commemorative coin being made to memorialize the summit: “Kim Jong-Un’s face has no place on this coin,” Schumer said. “He is a brutal dictator.” Schumer has no problem with Trump’s image being on the coin. [back]
4. See “How the Democratic Party—the Supposed Vehicle for the Oppressed—Has Carried Out Vicious Slaughter Around the World AND Within the U.S.” which documents some of the imperialist wars of mass murder waged by Democratic presidents, and how the Democrats lined up with George W. Bush to attack and occupy Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003).[back]
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