STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
North Korea Nuclear Hoax Heightens Alternative Media Skepticism
By Daily Bell Staff - March 10, 2016

Kim Jong-un orders North Korea’s nuclear arsenal on standby Kim Jong-un’s bombastic statement came after the UN security council’s adoption of tough new sanctions on Pyongyang. –UK Telegraph

Some of the biggest fear-based propaganda swirls around the nuclear resources of the modern age.

For instance, North Korea claims to have a new-type “large-caliber multiple launch rocket system.”

However, the Telegraph article reports that “experts are divided” about the country’s ability to mount warheads on “working missile delivery system.”

North Korea feeds the fear. Now it has released photos of Kim looking at a mock up of miniaturized atomic bomb — “a small, silverish globe with a ballistic missile or a model ballistic missile in the background.”

According to Reuters, South Korea disputed the North’s claim regarding miniaturized warheads. The alternative media weighed in skeptically as well.

The Daily Sheeple posted an article entitled, “Guess It’s Supposed To Be Scary, But Kim Jong-Un Just Looks Stupid Posing With This Supposed Mini Nuke.”

… We live in an age of the perpetual war on terror, but a more appropriate name would be the “War of Terror” because the biggest weapon used in it is fear.

At this point, pictures like this one just look downright silly. They look like they should be part of a caption-of-the-week contest and not real life … That didn’t stop this story from being plastered all over the mainstream U.S. media, though.

Internet skepticism evolves.

Nuclear debunking has become so strident that the well-known alternative website DarkMoon attacked the “No Nuclear Bombs conspiracy theory” last August. The idea was that such speculation is poisoning alternative media credibility.

An excerpt:

We would then have to believe that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was essentially a bogus organization. For if there are no nuclear weapons, there would be no raison d’être  for the IAEA. Its 22 member states, its Board of Governors, and its countless inspectors in numerous countries would all be engaged in fraudulent activities.

Political analyst Franklin Ryckaert, in a few choice words, has dismissed the above conspiracy theory as worthless trash. He points out correctly:

The political implications of atomic bombs being a fraud would be enormous.  It would mean not only that the US had cheated the world, but also that the UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel had been cheating the world in a similar way …

Occam’s Razor would suggest that none of this nonsense is possible.

And yet … an open minded person looking at films of nuclear bomb testing from the 1940s via YouTube might conclude that at least some of the footage was falsified. YouTube narratives increasingly attack the small amount of historical documentation available regarding the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Questioning such events is both ludicrous and infuriating for many, but the US military has often lied about its military operations.

The war in Vietnam, for instance, started because the administration lied about a North Vietnamese attack at sea. And evidence has emerged that FDR was well aware that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor.

It’s not just nuclear information. NASA has been extraordinary clumsy in handling historical space exploration documentation. This fuels the suspicion of some.

For instance, the agency claimed it lost images of the original moon landing but then suddenly found them again and released them in a colorized and “enhanced” form.

In this Internet era, more and more is being questioned. And as the tide of skepticism surges, governments and bureaucracy increasingly fight back with censorship and worse.

Various EU countries are attempting to criminalize questioning of official narratives and France has already done so.

Meanwhile, in the US, those who believe in the nation’s founding documents are increasingly singled out as suspicious persons by such agencies as Homeland Security.

We wrote recently that the mainstream media tended to play up North Korea as a rogue state in order to distract from the West’s own judicial and economic transgressions.

But some of North Korea’s claims – and the hyper-nuclear claims of other states – are so exaggerated that they are difficult for anyone to believe.

Rather than fearing debunking of almost any sort, we should welcome it. When our perceptions of reality are incorrect, we are likely to reach incorrect conclusions. Respectful, determined questioning can provide us with meaningful answers.

Conclusion: It is truth that gives us the best way of utilizing “human action,” which is perhaps our most precious resource. Knowledge is power. Seek it always, even if it proves disturbing to some, including yourself.

Featured image from the front cover of the Rodong Sinmun, March 9, 2016

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