Strange Bedfellows: North Korea Tensions Escalate

The Best of Caleb Maupin series continues this week on "Strange Bedfellows" with Part 5.

The #ColdWar between capitalism and communism got very hot when the #KoreanWar erupted in 1950. Few living Americans know much about that war, which aborted Korea’s revolution, gave the U.S. a military and economic foothold in the Far East, and was used to justify the anti-communist crusade.

Three million North Koreans and one million South Koreans are estimated to have died in the conflict, along with nearly a million Chinese and 54,000 U.S. soldiers. It is an unfinished war, with a heavily militarized truce hanging by the thread of a cease-fire between North and South.

Anxious questions have been sparked by recent war games involving #NorthKorea and #SouthKorea, the latter backed by U.S. warships, air power, and the nearly 30,000 troops still based in the South. U.S. corporate media, following the State Department and Pentagon line, blame the hair-raising brinkmanship on maniacal, paranoia-fueled aggression by the North.

In reality, the North has every reason to be paranoid, with the long-standing hostility of the U.S. now ramped up by the reckless military confrontational maneuvers and hostile acts of the US and its vassal forces.

#Pyongyang has once again rejected any dialogue and stated that it is not interested in any contact or dialogue with the US as long as it maintains “its hostile policy and confrontational line.”

“The more dangerous the U.S. threat to the #DPRK gets, the stronger backfire the U.S. will face in direct proportion to it,” it said.

Meanwhile, mainstream media in the U.S. is demonizing North Korea once again, setting the stage for military escalation.

CNN recently ran a story about Olivia Natasha-YuMi, a 15 year-old North Korean girl who has a popular YouTube channel, calling her a “propagandist” the North Korean regime and warning CNN viewers that “these North Korean YouTubers are NOT what they seem!”

CNN implied very strongly in their article that #YuMi’s channel should be censored by YouTube, and taken down entirely. The counter-propaganda campaign evidently worked.

Google, which owns YouTube, confirmed the removal of her channel in June, stating that it took this action in compliance with U.S. sanctions and trade restrictions related to North Korea. The company did not specify how the channels violated these policies, however.

The Korea Communications Standards Commission, the #ROK’s internet censorship body, reportedly blocked all three channels within South Korea at the request of the National Intelligence Service, but the channels initially remained available in other countries.

We take a look at YuMi’s videos to find out why the U.S. government finds this wholesome North Korean teenager so threatening to our national security interests, and discuss the demonization of North Korea with our guest, RT reporter @CalebMaupinTV .

Watch more of this series in my Caleb Maupin playlist on YouTube (unless they ban me, again, too!)

Support the show at http://StrangeBedfellowspodcast.com

Many thanks to the Maverick News Network for hosting this program.
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