Mehdi Hasan Quotes
Let's be clear: There is no doubt that the citizens of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea both fear and loathe the United States. Paranoia, resentment, and a crude anti-Americanism have been nurtured inside the Hermit Kingdom for decades.
Hasan, Mehdi. "Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason — They Remember the Korean War." The Intercept, 3 May 2017.
Because North Korea was at the time such a closed and paranoid dictatorship, that few in the West had ever even negotiated with the North Korean leadership and the press has no opportunity to report on it. Albright was one of the few people who actually negotiated with the North Koreans.
It is with this certainty that the Vice President led the effort to invade Iraq in a preemptory war. After the invasion it was discovered that Iraq did not have any nuclear weapons or any other WMDs. Further, Iraq had no WMD development program of any kind. The rationale for the Iraq War was nill.
This quotation had been considered by most scholars a relatively obscure paranoid rant of a right wing extremist. However, the fear had gained credence with the extreme right over the years and came into play again in the Barack Obama administration where many of the Tea Party adherents began stating that Koch’s warning had come to pass with President Obama as the covert communist, While few gave this any credence, it was honestly and firmly believed by a small minority of Americans.
Yale University had announced the discovery of a Norse map called the Vinland Map. It was an old Viking map that showed the East Coast of America and Canada as well as Greenland and Iceland. It purported to prove that the Vikings had been to America before Columbus. This was shocking and unbelievable to large numbers of Italian Americans many of whom lived in New York City. Most Italian Americans rejected the possibility that the map could be genuine, but there had to be a reason that it was forged. In the midst of the Cold War, there was an obvious villain and it did not take long before large numbers of people believed and repeated the headline. The quotation shows how rabid the anti-Communism of the Cold War was. The authenticity of the Vinland Map is still debated. Ironically, Columbus—the “discoverer” of America, never got to North America at all. He landed in and captured some islands in the Caribbean. The Daily News was then the largest circulation newspaper in the United States.
At the time, Pakistan was the only nuclear nation that was very unstable and full of terrorist groups which the government nor the military could control and in some cases even wanted to control. A takeover by militant Islamic terrorists was a possibility or the acquisition of one of the nuclear weapons byr terrorists was then a possibility. India, the United States, and other countries were very concerned.
The president was surprised by the rapid spread and expansion of the anti-war movement at the time was convinced that the communists were organizing the effort. After all the investigations and histories, it was an extremely fast growing movement—perhaps the first of the digital political movements as e-mail was one of the tools used in the universities where e-mail was then coming into use.
Mehdi Raza Hasan is a British-American political journalist, broadcaster and author.
