Atrocity fabrication and its consequences: how fake news shapes world order
by AB Abrams
Clarity Press,  £25

THIS remarkable book explores wars waged by Nato powers, and the atrocity fabrications which were part of the war preparations: the US aggressions against Cuba and Vietnam, the UN assault on Korea, Nato’s 1991 assault on Iraq, Nato’s wars against Yugoslavia, the 2003 war against Iraq, the USA’s ongoing conflict with North Korea, Nato’s attack on Libya, the assault on Syria, and the ongoing US conflict with China. 

Atrocity fabrications by Nato governments, by their media and by human rights “NGOs” provide the pretexts for the aggressions, paving the way for very real atrocities against the populations of the falsely accused states, which far exceed the depravity described in the fabricated narratives. There is a standard template to these fabrications — find an abuse, exaggerate it, extrapolate from it, build it up to end with the inevitable analogy to Hitler.

In US-occupied South Korea, government investigations years later proved beyond doubt that government forces killed between 600,000 and 1.2 million people in the years 1945-50. They killed hundreds of thousands more in the weeks after the war started.

US forces joined in the slaughter: “Orders were given for US personnel across the country to massacre South Korean civilians, which was confirmed by the accounts of war correspondents, Korean survivors, American perpetrators and years later by Pentagon archives.” US General Matthew Ridgway, the commander of all the United Nations forces in Korea, said that he himself had given orders in Korea to massacre refugees, firebomb civilian population centres across both Koreas, and ”kill everything in front of us, including women and children.”

The US ambassador to South Korea, John Muccio, told secretary of state Dean Acheson that Taiwanese overseers in the US-run POW camps holding captured Chinese troops “dominated proceedings through violent systematic terrorism and physical punishment of those choosing against going to Taiwan throughout both orientation and screening phases. Severe beatings, torture, some killings.”

Nato prepared its 1990s wars to destroy Yugoslavia by raising the cry of genocide. But, as the deputy chief of the Yugoslav desk at the State Department, George Kenney, said: “The US government doesn’t have proof of any genocide and anyone reading the press critically can see the paucity of evidence, despite interminably repeated claims and bloodcurdling speculation.” Bosnia’s president Alija Izetbegovic later admitted that the stories of Serb death camps had been fabricated with the aim of bringing about a Nato assault.

The Guardian, a leading proponent of the war, conceded in 2008 that “The ‘genocide’ in Kosovo was a complete fabrication, but it helped Blair and Clinton spin their narrative of a ‘humanitarian’ intervention, to cloak the real economic and strategic reasons for Nato’s military intervention.” As the Wall Street Journal noted in December 1999: “Nato stepped up its claims about Serb ‘killing fields’ essentially to divert attention away from its own killings.”

Nato carried out a 78-day bombing attack, starting on March 24 1999. This was a crime of aggression against a sovereign state, which is considered the supreme international crime.

Similarly, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was carried out without authorisation from the United Nations security council or the pretext of defence from an Iraqi attack, and was both a breach of the UN charter and an illegal act of aggression.

In the USA’s ongoing conflict with North Korea, defectors from that country concoct the most absurd stories of abuses. Shin Dong Hyuk’s fictitious “autobiography” has been translated into 27 languages and promoted worldwide. A UN report based its positions almost entirely on Shin’s claims. Years later, the book’s actual author, Blaine Harden, revealed that Shin had fabricated much of his story while the book was being drafted, as Shin later admitted.

No claim is too ludicrous: Park Yeonmi said that there were no words for “love” and “I” in North Korea when they speak the same Korean language as South Korea. She claimed to have crossed the entire Gobi Desert on foot, with six people including a baby, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, without any winter clothing and without a guide in a single day, and when asked how she achieved this impossible feat, replied that it was a miracle. Perhaps her $12,500 fee per speech is a miracle too? 

As the Washington Post’s Max Fisher wrote, when covering North Korea: “Almost any story is treated as broadly credible, no matter how outlandish or thinly sourced.” Anyone who dares to question these professional liars is routinely accused of endorsing the abuses — again, standard propaganda ploys. 

On Nato’s illegal assault on Libya in 2011, Abrams writes: “Western journalists on the ground reported that Western air and missile strikes were causing extremely high civilian casualties, far greater than the Libyan government had even been accused of causing, with civilian targets across the capital Tripoli such as universities and hotels bombarded repeatedly and very heavily.”

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, claimed that Colonel Gadaffi had supplied his troops with Viagra to commit mass rapes. UN investigators, journalists and human rights groups later concluded that the claim was wholly false. 

Eleven years later, UN special representative Pramila Patten tried to rerun this claim, claiming that Russian troops in Ukraine had been supplied with Viagra. Patten later admitted that the claim had been unevidenced and that monitoring teams had found “nothing about Viagra”.