Tag Archives: korea

Political Rants

Big week.

This has been one of those weeks, to be sure. A lot has happened and very quickly, so let me take these one at a time.

Cuba.  President Obama announced a reset of relations with Cuba this past Wednesday, an initiative that includes establishment of an American embassy in Havana and the release of the remaining members of the Cuban Five, as well as the return of Alan Gross. This somewhat surprising announcement was, of course, met with flaming hair by the conservative majority in Congress and by other longtime critics of the Cuban revolution. Marco Rubio, for instance, bemoaned the fact that the maximalist goals of conservatives were not realized on the first day of the new relationship.

Patience, Marco! The cause of neoliberalism is not yet lost. To listen to Obama’s defense of his decision, you would think the prime motivation for improved ties between the two countries is for the joys of capitalism to rain down on the hapless Cubans. God help them. Still, a pretty momentous day, to be sure.

What North Koreans find hard to forgetNorth Korea.  When you produce a movie that makes a joke out of the assassination of the leader of a garrison state, its back against the wall for decades, you should respect a negative reaction. Agents purportedly working for North Korea have threatened violence against theaters running “The Interview”, promising 9/11 type attacks, somewhat incredibly. SONY Pictures pulled the film, generating a mountain of criticism. An AP article suggested that SONY feared hostilities against Japan by a nuclear-armed North Korea.

This is pretty overblown. Rhetoric is one thing; credible threats are something else entirely. Pyongyang’s rants against the United States and its allies are delivered in the absence of any capability to act upon them. On the other hand, when our government states that “all options are on the table” with regard to North Korea, and when we conduct massive joint maneuvers with South Korea (including mock invasions of the North), we do so in the context of overwhelming power that has been exercised against the North Koreans in the past. Best to remember that their section of the peninsula was utterly destroyed by our military in 1950-53; not a single standing structure remaining by the time we were done, and deaths in the millions. That leaves a lasting impression.

Our media-driven culture emphasizes the crazy when it focuses on North Korea. And sure, they seem particularly crazy when you ignore the history. History doesn’t excuse malevolent behavior, but it does render it more comprehensible. At the very least, it enables you to understand why a comedy about assassinating their leader might, well, make them angry.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Ripped from the heads.

This is just another survey of current issues in the news – don’t mind me. Tired, can’t focus.

Best friend
Some best friend you got there, doggy.

The Koreas. Yes, there are two of them. And yes, there was a war. But that’s about all Americans know about the Korean peninsula except that “North Korea started the war!” and “Kim Jong Sombody is crazy!” Meanwhile, we are flying stealth bombers and stealth fighters and nuclear armed B52s over South Korea in ostentatious demonstrations of force, using some of the very same aircraft that once turned the North into an apocalyptic hellscape. Earth to Obama: There is no military solution to this problem. You’ve got a State Department full of diplomats – send a few over to fashion a treaty with the North, and this will stop being a problem.

K-9 abuse. A few weeks ago, when the latest gun nut incident took place in nearby Herkimer, the State Police used a dog to sniff out the suspect in an abandoned building. The dog was shot dead, as you may have heard. Since then there have been several news stories about K-9 patrols, how the police care about them, etc. Bullshit. These animals should never, ever be put in harm’s way in this manner. There was no reason to sacrifice that dog for the sake of capturing this suicidal dead-ender who had nowhere to go but jail or the grave. I think the police lose sight of the fact that, for all their utility, working dogs are dependent upon humans for their welfare. They are, in essence, like toddlers in that they are trusting, inquisitive, and unable to make their own decisions. They rely on us to keep them from needlessly sacrificing themselves.

Rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t allow a young child to do something, don’t ask a dog to do it either.

Debt Patrol. Egyptians may have thought things were going from bad to worse over the last couple of years. Now the IMF has pulled into town, and the likelihood is that their misery has just begun. Mubarak had already substantially “liberalized” the country’s economy. Now their foreign reserves are extremely low, thanks in part to years of political upheaval and disruptions in tourism and other industries. Next stop, the Bolivia / Argentina treatment. One would hope that, once they’ve endured some of that, they will follow South America’s lead and break free of the global neoliberal institutions of economic control that have led so many to the land of misery.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Short memory

North Korea has unilaterally withdrawn from its 1953 ceasefire agreement with South Korea, cutting the emergency hotline between the two halves of this divided peninsula. The move has been roundly condemned as provocative and an indication of increasing cravenness on the part of third-generation great leader Kim Jong Un, whose government recently tested a nuclear device. As reported on NPR and other major news networks, this behavior is portrayed as almost innate, not rooted in anything other than blind aggression and dogmatic fealty to the North’s longstanding cult of personality and garrison state mentality.

All they know of us.
All they know of us.

Now, it is true that the North Korean state is an ossified, garrison state, very oppressive – a dungeon, even. I can’t defend it. But they didn’t arrive at this state of affairs without prompting. There is one thing they want: a non-aggression treaty with the United States. Because the war of 1950-53 was fought with the U.S. more than with South Korea, and that was a war of genocidal proportions, particularly for the North. The U.S. unleashed everything short of nuclear weapons on the North during that period, until no standing structures remained north of the 38th parallel. This after years of oppressive U.S. occupation of the southern half of Korea, which itself followed more than three decades of Japanese occupation.

When North Koreans talk about destruction, they know the meaning of the word. It is not an abstraction for them. After all, they share Poland’s great misfortune of being geographically located between two great powers, frequently at odds. Worse yet, they became ground zero of a growing cold war that was never hotter than it was during that three year period in the Korean peninsula. If they have nuclear weapons, it’s because they don’t want to be attacked. And if they take exception to the annual mock-invasion of the north conducted by Washington and Seoul, it is because they have a deep memory of the devastation of sixty years ago.

In America, we haven’t forgotten the Korean War so much as simply never known it in the first place, except for the dwindling number of veterans who fought there. It’s high time we stopped acting like an aggrieved empire and found a way to settle this conflict … before it explodes again.

luv u,

jp