I was having an argument on Wikipedia with articles regarding to Korea, such as Gwangju and so forth, that I created an article called "No Gun Ri" to talk about that. For those who don't know, No Gun Ri was a kind of My Lai incident of the Korean war - hundreds of Korean refugees were massacred by US troops. Actually - they were ordered to do so, from on up high, as such things usually go. With the My Lai's and the Abu Ghrabi's, the government and army usually goes after the Lt. Calley's and Lynddie England's, when in actuality the Wheeler/Wallola operation Calley was on had been ordered from up high, as had Abu Ghraib. From the time of Napoleon on, rank-and-file troops disobeying orders and not killing innocent civilians is what has saved countless lives. The orders to commit atrocities usually come from the highest levels, of course, leaving themselves plausible deniability. This applies to all countries. Usually I like to focus on the truly evil people like Karl Rove, instead of something that might lay a guilt trip on some troops from the Korean war, I did it more to tee off Wikipedia's reactionaries than anything.
So anyhow, I created an article on No Gun Ri -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri . On July 11th, someone began white-washing the article. One change he made is to say it was not US policy to shoot civilian refugees in Korea. But it was - the ultimate proof, written orders exist to show this, not to mention testimony of Americans, as well as testimony from Koreans. Thus was changed. As were other things, someone attempted to whitewash the whole thing.
Their IP address was 214.13.216.142. For some reason I became curious who was doing this, so I did a PTR lookup of them. The PTR said the edit came from "n-mnstci-142.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil". When I saw "mil" I knew it was US military. When I saw CentCom I thought - hey, that's the CentCom I saw in the movie "Control Room". They were the people spinning the Iraq war for the world news media. What was mnstci though I wondered? I did some checking and found out - " Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq". The United States Central Command's Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq. These are the people trying to rewrite the online, collaborative encyclopedia, trying to write this well-documented incident from memory. Then I changed the page back - and he changed it back to his version. So now I'm having a tug-of-war with this person, who I am paying tax dollars to, so he can try to propagandize me, and remove any mention of something bad the US army did over half a century ago. I find this incredible.
When I walk to the train station from work, I see people in camouflage holding rifles, I see several uniformed police officers walking with a German shepherd (and what do you think that reminds me of?) - it looks exactly what it looks like in the banana republics I have travelled to. Now they're talking about building manufacturing "free trade zones" in the US - even more like a banana republic. 43% of the world's military spending is by the US. The UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and Japan combined only spend 30% of the world's total military spending. And the US's GDP is (slightly) below that of the European Union - and Russia, China and Japan are not in the EU.
I think the day will come when we, the average working people, will get our country back, but it will take a lot of work, and it will probably be a big wreck (and have made the rest of the world somewhat wrecked) by the time Bush and his funders are finished playing with their toy soldiers. And I still can't believe I'm paying someone to rewrite history like this. Why can't the US be giving money to someone doing health care or food in Africa, instead of some guy in Iraq trying to cover up old US massacres, so as to allow the potential for US massacres? I hoep to see a change in tides in the coming years.
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