It’s
sort of silly that it matters. The United States bombed North Korea
flat with ordinary, non-bioweapons bombs. It ran out of standing
structures to bomb. People lived in caves, if they lived. Millions
died, most of them from regular old non-scandalous but mass-murderous
bombs (including, of course, Napalm which melts people but doesn’t
give them exotic diseases). North Koreans to this day live in such
terror of a repetition of history that their behavior is sometimes
inexplicable and bewildering to Americans whose knowledge of history
comes from watching game shows.
Yet
there is something powerful in its impact on self-deluded believers
in the goodness of U.S. wars about the fact that the United States
tried to spread diseases like bubonic plague in North Korea. So, it’s
worth spreading awareness that this indeed happened. A great help in
that project has just been provided by Jeffrey Kaye, who has just
posted online an important report that has been largely unavailable
for decades.
The
report was produced in 1952 at the request of the North Korean and
Chinese governments by a commission that included prominent
scientists from Sweden, Brazil, France, and Italy, and was headed by
Sir Joseph Needham, one of the most prominent and respected British
scientists ever. (His New York Times obituary doesn’t say whether
the commission’s conclusions were accurate. His Independent
obituary suggests that the commission got it right. His WikiPedia
entry predictably announces that the commission was completely wrong,
and backs this up with that popular WikiPedia citation: “citation
needed.”) Yeah, it just became even more badly needed.
The
report that Kaye has made available to us is thorough and
well-researched, and it concludes that indeed the U.S. used germ
warfare. It played a very minor role in the mass-slaughter. But it
played a role.
More:
Comments
Post a Comment