Revisiting History of Korea--Conclusion

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea between 1993 and 2003:

"From 1993 through 1994...the Clinton administration's Pentagon drew up Operations Plan 5027, designed to attack and destroy North Korea's nuclear facilities. It was estimated that such an attack could lead to full-scale war in which `as many as one million people would be killed, including 80,000 to 100,000 Americans...' When Seoul protested strongly and refused any part in the contemplated war, the United States was obliged to negotiate..."

"...William Perry, secretary of defense in the Clinton administration between 1994 and 1997, was appointed...to advise on North Korea policy. After an intensive, eight-month study and a visit to Pyongyang, his report cleared Pyongyang of suspicion over alleged secret nuclear development, confirmed that it had abided by the freeze.

"...The initial and crucial breaches were American ones. The introduction of nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula in the first place, the refusal to take seriously its obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty to `negotiate in good faith to achieve a precise result--nuclear disarmament in all its aspects' and the inclusion of North Korea on the nuclear target list were all breaches of the Non Proliferation Treaty. The United States was also in breach of the Agreed Framework by its dilatoriness at the planned light-water reactor site...

"...For more than a decade, the United States insisted that North Korea had `one, possibly two' nuclear weapons. In 2003, however, U.S. intelligence shifted to adopt the South Korean, Russian, and Chinese view: that it actually did not have any at all...

"...Until 2003 North Korea did not, apparently, actually enrich any uranium, much less produce any weapons. As for the Yangbyon reactor, the plutonium-generating program and the reactor waste pools were frozen, as promised, between 1994 and 2003..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 6

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea since the late 1950s:

"North Korea, the more industrialized region of the peninsula prior to the Korean War, surpassed the southern Republic of Korea in growth during the 1950s and 1960s...

"North Korea's uniqueness...lies first of all in the way it has...lived under the shadow of nuclear threat longer than any other nation. During the Korean War it escaped nuclear annihilation by the barest of margins...Just four years later, and in obvious breaach of the Armistice, the United States introduced nuclear artillery shells, mines, and missiles into Korea, and it added periodically thereafter to a stockpile kept adjacent to the Demilitarized Zone and designed to intimidate the nonnuclear North. When these nuclear weapons were finally withdrawn in 1991...the United States openly continued its rehearsals for a long-range nuclear strike on North Korea..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 5

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea during the early 1950s Korean War:

"...The UN forces flouted the rules of war by allowing or encouraging South Korean forces to engage in widespread massacres and torture, the details of which are as yet only slowly being revealed. The United States itself committed a series of war crimes, only partially acknowledged and never in any way expiated, by attacking civilian population centers, refugee columns, and the North's civil inrastructure including dams and food supplies (crimes for which German officers had been executed only a few years before)...

"...Between three and four million people died, most of them Korean civilians, and ten million were cut off from their families on either side of the cease-fire line. In proportional terms, North Korea suffered greater losses of population than either the Soviet Union or Poland in the Second World War. The American losses were long put at 54,000 men...but in 2000 these figures were mysteriously scaled back to 36,940, with the explanation that by a clerical error all U.S. military deaths during those years had been counted as Korean War deaths..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 4

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea during the early 1950s Korean War:

"...[U.S.]General Curtis LeMay...boasted later that `over a period of three years or so, we burned down just about every town in North and South Korea both..., we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes.' Attacks...also included a 500 bomber raid in June 1952 that destroyed a complex of hydroelectric power stations on the Yalu River, knocking out 90 percent of the country's remaining power supply; massive air assaults in July and August 1952 on Pyongyan, the heaviest bombing attack to that date in a capital, which drenched the city in napalm and produced a civilian death toll of 6,000; and finally, in May 1953, the bombing of the irrigation dams on which the agricultural infrastructure of the country depended. That raid was designed to starve the enemy into submission.

"...An overwhelming proportion of the [Korean] war's three to four million casualties were civilians...

"At the outbreak of war in 1950, one of the first acts of the [South Korean] Rhee regime was to order the execution of political prisoners, whose deaths were in due course attributed to atrocities by the incoming Northern forces...Declassified U.S. documents indicated that `more than 2,000' political prisoners were executed without trial in the early weeks, hundreds of them were taken out to sea from the port of Pohang and shot, their bodies dumped overboard...Throughout the country, according to Gregory Henderson, then a U.S. Embassy official in Seoul and later a prominent historian of Korea, probably over 100,000 people were killed without trial or legal warrant. Investigations into all this have scarcely begun...

"When Seoul was recaptured by U.S. and South Korean forces perhaps as many as 29,000 Koreans were executed on suspicion of collaboration with the North...The occupation of Pyongyang and many other cities and villages above the 38th parallel [by South Korean forces] was characterized by atrocities...According to one estimate, 150,000 people were executed or kidnapped...

"The official U.S. Army report at the end of the [Korean] war gave 7,334 as the figure for civilian victims of North Korean atrocities, a small fraction of those now known to have been executed by [government of South Korean leader] Rhee in the first moments of the war alone...

"...The Taejon Massacre...became the centerpiece of the U.S. case for North Korean brutality...A U.S. Army report on the massacre, including graphic photographs, was published around the world in October 1953...

"At Taejon, a town of about 160 kilometers south of Seoul, a massacre undoubtedly occurred...

"...It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the most brutal North Korean atrocity in the South was actually a Southern atrocity in a brutal ongoing civil war...

"...The figure of 1,800 massacre victims was given...Somebody--presumably in either the American military or government--seems to have made the decision to turn this into a Northern massacre, the characteristic, single atrocity of the entire war. The truth seems inescapable: The worst atorcity of the war was committed by forces acting in the name of the United Nations, and a concerted effort was then made to cover it up by blaming it on the North Korean enemy...

"...On the admission of [U.S.] General Ridgeway's Head Office, more POWs died in United Nations camps than in North Korean camps..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 3

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea after World War II in the late 1940s:

"In the Soviet zone...broadly popular social and economic reforms were implemented, including the purge of Japanese collaborators, land reform, the emancipation of women, and the transfer to public ownership of all Japanese assets...

"Widespread discontent...exploded on the island of Cheju, off [South] Korea's southern coast [in 1948-49]. As a result, between 10 and 25 percent of its 300,000 inhabitants were massacred, more than half of their villages burned, and the panoply of anti-guerrilla measures later developed to the full in Vietnam--herding of the population into strategic hamlets or fortified villages, destruction of crops, scorched earth, slaughter of villagers--put into operation...

"...Syngman Rhee...launched cross-border raids in 1949 to test Northern defenses...Stalin gave his consent to the invasion plans [of North Korean government leader Kim] only reluctantly, after forty-eight telegraphic pleas from Kim...

"...Through early 1950...Rhee grew even more strident in his calls for a `march' north to unify the country and his forces stepped up raids..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 2

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea after World War II in the late 1940s:

"With the announcement of the Japanese surrender, the capital, Seoul, was swept by joyful anticipation and a spontaneous network of popular local organizations, the `People's Committees,' emerged...The People's Committees were quickly banned...and the rich conservative and staunch anticommunist, Syngman Rhee, an emigre' Korean who had lived for decades in Washington, developing strong ties to conservative Americans, was imposed at the head of a new regime...

"[General] Hodge [the U.S. military commander]'s intelligence told him in February 1946 that leftist elements in the South would be bound to win any fair election, and in that same month a survey found that 49 percent of South Koreans felt that conditions were worse under the Americans than they had been under the Japanese.

"Those associated with the People's Committees...were...arrested or driven underground...The most prominent figure...seeking accommodation with the north, Yo Unhyong, was assassinated in July 1947...

"On November 11, 1947, Patrick Shaw, then head of the Australian diplomatic mission in Tokyo, described the situation in South Korea:

"`Real power is apparently in the hands of the ruthless police force which works at the direction of the G2 Section of the American G.H.Q....Korean prisons are now fuller of political prisoners than under Japanese rule. The torture and murder of the political enemies of the Extreme Right is apparently an accepted and commonplace thing.'..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 1

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following:

"Nearly 37,000 Americans, and an estimated three million Koreans, died in the Korean War of 1950-1953...

"...We now know that many of the greatest atrocities in that awful [Korean] war were committed by the South Koreans and the United States--at Nogunri, Taejon, and elsewhere--and then by the United States alone, when in its air campaign against the North it devastated dams, power stations, and the infrastructure of social life in breach of international law. In other words,...much of the terror was inflicted by the forces acting in the name of the United Nations...

"...The United States, to suit its global needs, divided a country that had been united for over a thousand years and whose culture and tradition were extraordinarily coherent...In the State Department an arbitrary line was drawn across the map at the 38th parallel, a geographical marker of no previous political or cultural significance, which had the effect of placing Korea's capital, Seoul, and most of its population under American influence...

"Koreans below the 38th parallel who welcomed liberation from Japanese imperialism...were forced instead to accept a subordinate state...The objectives of American policy-makers were...to establish a cooperative regime that would reflect U.S. strategic interests...Nationalist aspiration was anathema to the Americans and had to be crushed..."

47th Anniversary of JFK Assassination: Who Eliminated JFK?

(November 22, 2010 marks the 47th anniversary of the assassination of U.S. President Kennedy in Dallas Texas. The following item first appeared in the July 22, 1992 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown).

On October 13, 1964 the ex-wife of former CIA Covert Action Head Cord Meyer--Mary Pinchot-Meyer--"was shot twice, once in the head and once in the chest, with no apparent motive" and she and President Kennedy had been "involved at the time of the president's assassination," according to The Encyclopedia of American Scandal by George Kohn.

Coincidentally, in his book The Senator Must Die, former CIA contract agent Robert Morrow stated that shortly before Mary Pinchot-Meyer was eliminated, he met with a former Deputy Comptroller of the U.S. Treasury, Marshall Diggs, at Paul Young's Restaurant in Washington, D.C. According to Morrow, Diggs told him that Mary Pinchot-Meyer "claimed to my friend that she positively knew that company-affiliated Cuban exiles and the Mafia were responsible for killing John Kennedy." After speakingg with Diggs, Morrow "drove to New York and met with [then-Cuban Exile Leader] Kohly" and "after I told him the story of Mary Meyer, he looked very concerned."

According to Morrow, Kohly then said "just tell Diggs I'll take care of the matter" and "Then he told me to stay away from him and not tell anyone I had seen him or where he could be found." Coincidentally, a week after Morrow's meeting with Kohly in New York, Mary Pinchot-Meyer was eliminated.

Also, coincidentally, in his 1980 book, Conspiracy, Anthony Summers wrote:

"In 1978 I interviewed the son of the late Mario Kohly...The younger Kohly recalled opening a bottle of champagne at the news of President Kennedy's death and then calling his father. According to Kohly, `My father seemed elated and quite relievedl; he seemed more pleased, I would say, than surprised. I am sure he had knowledge of what really happened in Dealey Plaza. But, if you recall, everyone that has had knowledge ended up dead."

The same book also observed that Kohly's son quoted the deceased Cuban Exile Leader as saying "John Kennedy was a traitor...He was a Communist."

Former CIA contract agent Robert Morrow's book about RFK's elimination, The Senator Must Die, also stated the following:

"Bobby Kennedy suspected that a conspiracy involving CIA/Mafia-related people killed his brother.

"...On Aug. 19, 1977, I would seemingly have some confirmation of the Company's involvement in the President's assassination. I received a mysterious phone call to meet with the son of a former high-ranking member of the intelligence community.

"We met the following day for lunch. In our initial conversation, the young man claimed his father, an ex-Air Force colonel and others working for the Central Intelligence Agency had prior knowledge that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

"He also claimed that through his father, he learned that the CIA hierarchy had done everything in their power to thwart the Warren Commission investigation, including the suppression and destruction of evidence--evidence that could prove that a conspiracy existed.

"The intelligence officer's son...asserted that his father had been tied into organized crime and had been a bagman for at least one of the payoffs relating to the presidential assassination, transporting a large sum of money to Haiti for payoff purposes during the Summer of 1963...

Former CIA contract agent Morrow also included in his book an affidavit signed by former Reagan White House staff member Diane (Didi) Hess in Sept. 1977 in which Hess stated that she submitted to a taped interview with Morrow on Sept. 27, 1977 in order "to describe the circumstances surrounding the admissions" of a former Air Force Colonel to her "of his personal participation in the assassination conspiracy of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963" and "to state the desire" of this Air Force intelligence officer "to convey this information directly to the prooper authorities upon being granted immunity from prosecution."

According to Morrow, Hess "had lived with the intelligence officer's son over an extended period of time" and "she also told her story to the House Select Committee On Assassinations (HSCA)" during the late 1970s.

(Downtown 7/22/92)

George Bernard Shaw: On Using Writing & Poetry To Change Society

In 1895, the socialist writer and dramatist George Bernard Shaw indicated why great writers and great poets often attempt to use their writing as a tool for creating a new society:

"...If people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must. In short, what is forcing our poets to follow Shelley in becoming political and social agitators, and to turn the theatre into a platform for propaganda and arena for discussion, is that whilst social questions are being thrown up for solution almost daily by the fierce rapidity with which industrial processes change and supersede one another through the rivalry of the competitors who take no account of ulterior social consequences, and by the change in public feeling produced by popular `education' cheap literature, facilitated travelling, and so forth, the political machinery by which alone our institutions can be kept abreast of these changes is so old-fashioned, and so hindered in its action by the ignorance, the apathy, the stupidity, and the class feuds of the electorate, that social questions never get solved until the pressure becomes so desperate that even governments recognize the necessity for moving. And to bring the pressure to this point, the poets must lend a hand to the few who are willing to do public work in the stages at which nothing but abuse is to be gained by it..."

NYU Law School Prof Who Sentenced Lynne Stewart: His U.S. Attorney's Office/Columbia/Debevoise & Plimpton Connection

In July 2010, an NYU Law School adjunct professor named John Koeltl unconstitutionally sentenced U.S. civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart to 10 years in prison in the Southern District federal courtroom where Koeltl also is employed as a federal judge. Coincidentally, an Assistant U.S. Attorney since June 2000 in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District that prosecuted Lynne Stewart--a Columbia University Law School lecturer-in-law named Jonathan Kolodner--apparently worked for Judge Koeltl as his law clerk between August 1997 and August 1998.

Prior to being appointed to the federal judicial bench by U.S. Secretary of State Clinton's husband in 1994 (on the recommendation of a now-deceased former AIPAC-backed U.S. Senator named Daniel "Pat" Moynihan), NYU Law School Professor Koeltl worked for years as a corporate lawyer at the Debevoise & Plimpton corporate law firm in Manhattan. While working at Debevoise & Plimpton, Judge Koeltl apparently wrote, for example, legal briefs for Mobil Oil in the Raymond vs. Mobil Oil case, after Mobil Oil was sued for its alleged age discrimination policies. In addition, while working at Debevoise & Plimpton, Judge Koeltl also apparently attended a June 18, 1987 board of directors meeting of The Council for Tobacco Research--along with the top executives of tobacco companies like American Tobacco and Phillip Morris who sat on this apparently then-tobacco industry-dominated board.

Coincidentally, a member of Debovise & Plimpton's Litigation Department (whose aviation industry practice apparently handles litigation arising out of the September 11, 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center buildings)--a Debevoise & Plimpton Counsel named Suzanne Grosso--also used to work as a law clerk in the late 1990s for the judge who sentenced Lynne stewart to 10 years in prison.

Black Female Worker Jobless Rate: 12.7 Percent Under Obama

Between September and October 2010, the official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Black female workers over 20 years-of-age in the United States increased from 12.6 to 12.7 percent under the Democratic Obama Administration; while the unemployment rate for Black male workers over 20-years-of-age was still 16.3 percent, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The official unemployment rate for all Black workers over 16 years-of-age was still 15.7 percent in October 2010; while the jobless rate for Black youths between 16 and 19-years-of-age was still 48 percent in October 2010. Between September and October 2010, the number of officially unemployed Black female workers over 20-years-of-age increased from 1,143,000 to 1,168,000; while the number of jobless Black youths between 16 and 19-years-of-age increased from 298,000 to 334,000.

Between September and October 2010, the official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Latino or Hispanic workers in the United States also increased from 12.4 to 12.6 percent; while the official “not seasonally adjusted” rate for Latina or Hispanic female workers over 20-years-of-age increased from 11.1 to 11.7 percent between September and October 2010. The “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Latino or Hispanic youths between 16 and 19-years-of-age also increased from 31 to 31.6 percent between September and October 2010; while the “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for white youths increased from 23.4 to 23.6 percent during this same period. Between September and October 2010, the number of Latino or Hispanic workers with jobs in the United States decreased from 20,070,000 to 19,939,000, according to the “seasonally adjusted” data; while the number of officially unemployed Latino or Hispanic workers increased from 2,840,000 to 2,865,000.

The total number of officially unemployed workers in the United States increased from 14,767,000 to 14,843,000 between September and October 2010; while the “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for all U.S. male workers over 16-years-of- age was still 10.4 percent in October 2010. The official jobless rate for white male workers over 20-years-of-age in the United States was still 8.9 percent in October 2010, while the unemployment rate for white female workers over 20-years-of-age increased from 7.2 to 7.3 percent between September and October 2010. The official “seasonally adjusted” number of unemployed white female workers in the United States increased from 3,949,000 to 4,010,000 between September and October 2010; while the number of white male workers over-20-years-of-age with jobs dropped from 59,755,000 to 59,431,000 during this same period.

Between September and October 2010, the official jobless rate for all white workers over 16-years-of-age increased from 8.7 to 8.8 percent; while the unemployment rate for all U.S. workers remained at 9.6 percent. The total number of white workers with jobs decreased from 114,500,000 to 113,974,000 between September and October 2010; while the total number of unemployed white workers in the United States increased from 10,904,000 to 10,933,000 during this same period.

The official jobless rate for all Asian-American workers also increased from 6.4 to 7.1 percent between September and October 2010, according to the "not seasonally adjustated" data; while the total number of unemployed Asian-American workers increased from 463,000 to 519,000 under the Democratic Obama Administration during this same period.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ November 5, 2010 press release:

“…The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was about unchanged over the month at 6.2 million. In October, 41.8 percent of unemployed persons had been jobless for 27 weeks or more…

“Both the civilian labor force participation rate, at 64.5 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 58.3 percent, edged down over the month…

“About 2.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in October, up from 2.4 million a year earlier…These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey…

“Among the marginally attached, there were 1.2 million discouraged workers in October, an increase of 411,000 from a year earlier…Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them….

“Employment in manufacturing changed little in October (-7,000)…

“…Employment in construction, wholesale trade, transportation, information, and financial activities showed little change in October…

“…Employment in local government, excluding education, decreased by 14,000 over the month…The number of temporary decennial census workers fell by 5,000 in October…”

ZNet Editor Michael Albert: `Money Matters On The Left'

In his autobiography, Remembering Tomorrow, ZNet Editor Michael Albert indicated how foundation money and ultra-rich donors apparently exercise a special influence on the U.S. left's alternative media and Democratic Party-oriented political agenda:

"...We know that money matters in society, but we don't seem to realize that money matters on the Left...

"...The area I have some experience with, alternative media, is graphically if not universally donor, and donor dynamics, dominated. For example, The Nation was begun and financed by large donors who, at most points, occupied the key decision positions in the periodical. The same holds true for Monthly Review, Mother Jones, Utne Reader, In These Times, and New Left Review. In cases where the big donor didn't come abroad, it was generally the best fund-raiser or most financially connected participant who had the corner office. With our activist hats on we decry mainstream media for being owned and thus beholding to big money in its motivations and structural choices, but then, when we don our media hats, we construct operations no less beholden to big-money interests, but now via the largesse of donors rather than direct owners.

"When leftists I have known have talked about a major nonprofit--say the Ford Foundation--they...certainly haven't described an institution free of constraint...

"Mother Jones magazine was financed into existence by Adam Hochschild. Adam's money allowed MJ to do massive mailings over and over, to build up and maintain a readership. It turns out that Adam's money came from African mining...

"...Adam not only put his money into MJ but put himself into MJ too, in the corner office...But the salient point about Adam was the amount of cash he had available versus the amount that he made available. It seemed that Adam was richer than Adam would admit to himself. What he was giving, which was quite considerable by Left accounts, wasn't even denting his capacity. He was doing a fraction of what he might have done, given his actual resources...

"David Hunter...managed the Stern Foundation...I got an invitation to see David Hunter in New York City at the Stern Foundation offices...

"The meeting was held over lunch at the Harvard Club. We chatted a bit and Hunter asked to see our financial statement...

"Hunter told me...that he paid no attention to the actual numbers in such documents because he took it for granted that everyone asking for donations lied. He required the documents but he looked at them only to see if they were done prooperly...

"...You got Hunter's aid, and even more, you got aid from other donors, if they liked you, pure and simple...

In his autobiography, ZNet editor Albert also indicated how he apparently initially attempted to increase reader traffic on his ZNet website:

"...In the ZNet forum system, at its outset, I felt I had to do something to engender participation...To prod participation, I logged on with numerous false names, writing messages under each name, giving the system a flow of content that seemed to come from diverse people. I would engage in long debates, not only under my name, but also under four or five other names--including masquerading as two women..."

George Bernard Shaw: `On Newspaper Drama Critics'

As long ago as 1891, a socialist UK playwright and former UK drama critic named George Bernard Shaw indicated why many newspaper drama critics may not be really that qualified to evaluate the quality of the plays they review. In his 1891 appendix to The Quintessence of Ibsenism, for example, Shaw wrote:

"...In fact, the `dramatic critic' of a newspaper, in ordinary circumstances, is at his best a descriptive reporter, and at his worst a mere theatrical newsman. As such he is a person of importance among actors and managers, and of no importance whatever elsewhere. Naturally he frequents the circles in which alone he is made much of; and by the time he has seen so many performances that he has formed some critical standards in spite of himself, he has also enrolled among his personal acquaintances every actor and manager of a few years' standing, and become engaged in all the private likes and dislikes, the quarrels and friendships in a word, in all the partialities which personal relations involve, at which point the value of his verdicts may be imagined. Add to this that if he has the misfortune to be attached to a paper to which theatrical advertisements are an object, or of which the editor and proprietors (or their wives) do not hesitate to incur obligations to managers by asking for complimentary admissions, he may often have to choose between making himself agreeable and forfeiting his post. So that he is not always to be relied on even as a newsman where the plain truth would give offence to any individual...

"All this does not mean that the entire Press is hopelessly corrupt in its criticism of Art. But it certainly does mean that the odds against the independence of the Press critic are so heavy that no man can maintain it completely without a force of character and a personal authority which are rare in any profession, and which in most of them can command higher pecuniary terms and prospects than any which journalism can offer. The final degrees of thoroughness have no market value on the Press; for, other things being equal, a journal with a critic who is good-humored and compliant will have no fewer readers than one with a critic who is inflexible where the interest of Art and the public are concerned. I do not exaggerate or go beyond the warrant of my own experience when I say that unless a critic is prepared not only to do much more work than the public will pay him for, but to risk his livelihood every time he strikes a serious blow at the powerful interests vested in artistic abuses of all kinds (conditions which in the long run tire out the strongest man), he must submit to compromises which detract very considerably from the trustworthiness of his criticism. Even the critic who is himself in a position to brave these risks must find a sympathetic and courageous editor-proprietor who will stand by him without reference to the commercial advantage--or disadvantage--of his incessant warfare. As all the economic conditions of our society tend to throw our journals more and more into the hands of successful moneymakers, the exceeding scarcity of this lucky combination of resolute, capable, and incorruptible critic, sympathetic editor, and disinterested and courageous proprietor, can hardly be appreciated by those who only know the world of journalism through its black and white veil..."