Tag: Nuclear War

While the liberal blogosphere and mainstream media obsessed about Julian Assange (He’s just like us bloggers and reporters, only way sexier!), and devoted any left-over time to DADT (1100 Americans might have to change careers!), meanwhile in the cold hard world that mostly doesn’t give a fuck about symbolic issues…

North and South Korea have lurched to the brink of nuclear war.

An unofficial US envoy visiting North Korea has warned that the situation on the peninsula is a “tinderbox”. The envoy, Bill Richardson, made the comments after talks with officials in Pyongyang, whom he asked to exercise “extreme restraint”.

He said he had urged them to let South Korea go ahead with planned live-firing exercises on an island which was shelled by the North last month.

North Korea has warned it will launch “unpredictable self-defensive strikes” if the drill goes ahead on the island of Yeonpyeong, which lies close to the disputed inter-Korean western maritime border.

I belong to the generation that had school drills for the Big One.  Many of us can remember the look of terror in the eyes of our parents as we sat around the TV watching President Kennedy announce the “quarantine” of Cuba on October 7, 1962.

Will the world’s families once again feel that horrible terror?

(cross-posted on dKos)

Original article, subheaded The Mindlessness is Total, via counterpunch.com.

Pervez Musharraf, the puppet installed by the US to rule Pakistan in the interest of US hegemony, resigned August 18 to avoid impeachment.  Karl Rove and the Diebold electronic voting machines were unable to control the result of the last election in Pakistan, the result of which gave Pakistanis a bigger voice in their government than America’s.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.  You can read him regularly at counterpunch.com and antiwar.com.  He’s become one of the sane voices on the right (not that he doesn’t have tons to answer for being a member of the Reagan administration).  If you don’t read Roberts, you should!

Original article by John Pilger via socialistworker.org and originally published in the Guardian.  Subheaded: A look at the “progression of lies” surrounding the August 6, 1945, dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima provides insight into how those lies are being repeated for new wars today.