Threatening War, Seeking Peace

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice.

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/10/omni-north-korea-anthology-8-october-12.html

(#1 July 19, 2012; #2 April 13, 2012; #3, Jan. 19, 2016; #4, Feb. 10, 2016; #5, March 12, 2016; #6, July 9, 2017; #7, October 29, 2017).

What’s at stake:  “Throughout [post-WWII] there was a huge invisible lacuna in the official imagination: thinking about how to make peace.  That is what a Cold War is about; even though we are at peace we do not think about preserving peace, but about making war.  Perhaps it is easier, because making war depends precisely on technical skills with material objects, whereas making peace means dealing with fellow human beings.  Not so easy.  Not as satisfying, if domination is the objective.”  Diana Johnstone in From Mad to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning by Paul H. Johnstone (pp. 29-30).

THREATENING WAR, DEMONIZINGTHE ENEMY
[See OMNI’s anthologies on the Ukraine War v. Putin.] 
The Way Arms Races Happen and WWIII Might: Expanding Brinkmanship

IGNORANCE AND BIGOTRY SUSTAINING HOSTILITIES

[I have fallen behind in reporting on NK, whose official designation as an enemy nation by the US threatens the planet.   Will one of you take my place?  Someone who wants to advocate for peace with NK and to ban nuclear weapons.   I have lots of excellent articles for #9.   Or choose the topic you are most interested in—Israel/Palestine, climate chaos, US fascism, overpopulation, etc?  –Dick]

NK ANTHOLOGY #1:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2012/07/omni-north-korea-newsletter-1.html

NK #2:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2012/04/omni-north-korea-newsletter-2.html

NK #3:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/01/north-korea-newsletter-3-january-19-2016.html

NK #4:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/02/north-korea-newsletter-4-seeing-enemy.html

NK #5:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/07/omni-north-korea-newsletter-5-march-12.html

NK #6:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/07/omni-north-korea-newsletter-6-korean-war.html

NK #7:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/10/omni-north-korea-newsletter-7-october.html

NK #8: 

CONTENTS NK ANTHOLOGY #8

2024
Gerald Sloan.  “Joint Military Maneuvers.” 
Dae-Han Song.  “Peace in Korea and Northeast Asia Now!”  https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/
2022
Kim Tong-Hyung.  NK Nuclear Weapons Development, Testing.
Jeremy Kuzmarov.  “A Swiss Businessman” Seeing NK from Inside.
UFPJ.   Urgent Call for Peace Treaty to End Korean War.
2017

Three Examples Mainstream Media (MM)/ADG REPORTING on NK.  ZOOMinKorea.  Trump Admin.’s THAAD a Preemptive First Strike Weapon v. ABM Treaty.
Bruce Cumings.  Recounts NK History and US Provocations.
Mehdi Hasan.  “Why Do North Koreans Hate Us?”    Memory!
Ann Wright.   Visit to NK with Code Pink.
2016
US Military-Industrial-Nuclear Complex plus US Provocations.

SOURCES
[Only one of these sources can be labeled “mainstream media,” and that one was selected to illustrate how mm misreport NK.  This list illustrates one aspect of what my annotated bibliographies titled “control of information in the US”: JRB, Control of Information in the U.S. and Control of the Media in the U.S.]                  

Felix Abt
CovertAction Magazine
The Intercept
Korea Peace Now
mronline.org
Monthly Review
NADG
The Nation
Nukewatch Quarterly
Gerald Sloan
Space Alert!
UFPJ
Women Cross DMZ
Ann Wright
ZOOMinKorea
Contents NK Anthology #7

TEXTS NORTH KOREA ANTHOLOGY #8

US NUCLEAR WAR PREPARATION: From North Korea’s Nuclear Mouse 2016 to NK’s Ballistic Missiles

“JOINT MILITARY MANUEVERS”

By Gerald Sloan (2017)

Our muscle-flexing with South Korea

is like jabbing a stick in an anthill

then killing the terrified insects.

North Korea has not forgotten

our bombing their dams (a war crime)

in the early ‘fifties, then gleefully

celebrating as their rice paddies

washed away, their primary food

supply. We desperately must justify

our obscenely bloated war machinery. 

2024   

“Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand: Peace in Korea and Northeast Asia Now!” by Dae-Han Song.  Monthly Review (July-August 2024).  (Jul 01, 2024).   https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/

Topics: Geography  History  Imperialism  Inequality  Movements Places: Americas  Asia  korean-peninsula  United States

[This major scholarly article (over 500 Notes), that attempts to understand NK as their leaders understand it, might seem baffling to US readers,  accustomed as we are to a demonized NK.  Anyone growing up in the US anti-communist propaganda regime will find section after section of the article a shock their inculcated system of assumptions regarding that nuclear nation.   –Dick]

On September 9, 1945, US service men looked upon the lowering of the Japanese flag and then saluted the hoisting up of the US flag in its stead in Seoul, South Korea in front of what used to be the office of the Japanese governor-general. This marked the beginning of the US military occupation of what would become South Korea, despite the Korean Peninsula having been a non-combatant. Image credit: Oh Seok-min, “U.S. military releases photos of colonial Japan’s surrender ceremony in 1945,” Yonhap News Agency, September 9, 2020.

Dae-Han Song is the head of the Contents Team for the Seoul-based International Strategy Center and a member of the No Cold War collective.

In his New Year’s address on January 15, 2024, North Korean Workers’ Party Chairman Kim Jong-un proposed removing from North Korea’s socialist constitution the notions of South and North Koreans as compatriots and the pursuit of peaceful reunification.¹ Furthermore, he argued that North Korea’s education should teach students that South Korea is the North’s main enemy state.² While denying that this was an announcement for reunification through preemptive attack, Kim stated that if war broke out, North Korea would occupy, subjugate, and reclaim South Korea.³ This speech severed ties with the more than thirty years of peaceful reunification pursued by North Korea’s two previous leaders.

Since the early 1990s, North Korea has sought the normalization of relations with the United States and peaceful reunification with South Korea. During that time, inter-Korean relations ebbed and flowed. But North Korea’s changed inter-Korean policy moves away from peaceful reunification and toward war in the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia.

If we are to chart our way back to peace, we must understand the motivations that led to such a shift and the historical and geopolitical processes that have led us to our current moment: the failed peace negotiations with the United States, the historical and social limits of South Korean politics, and the intensifying polarization of Northeast Asia due to U.S. military escalation.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously said that “power concedes nothing without a demand.”⁴ Peace movements must organize around a common set of demands against war: opposing the U.S. military escalation that is dividing the region into camps; overcoming the structural limitations of South Korea that keeps it dependent upon the United States; and coalescing frontline struggles within South Korea and the region into a common struggle against U.S. military escalations.

Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s Address

The 2024 New Year’s speech triggered alarm, including among longtime North Korea experts Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, who penned an article, “Is Kim Jong Un Preparing For War?”⁵ In his speech, Kim had shifted toward open hostility by recommending the state remove language asserting that South and North Koreans are “80 million compatriots,” as well as the phrase “independence, peaceful reunification and great national unity” from North Korea’s socialist constitution. Instead, he recommended instilling the “firm idea that ROK [the Republic of Korea] is their [North Korean people’s] primary enemy state and invariable principal enemy.”⁶

The tone was a marked shift from the approach taken by the state over the past three decades. For reunification, Kim envisioned “completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annex [sic] it as a part of the territory of our Republic in case of [sic] a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula.” While severing fraternal relations, he clarified that the goal is not a “preemptive attack for realizing unilateral ‘reunification by force of arms.’” In effect, while he did not rule out reunification through war, he was also not proposing it. This sentiment of breaking ties but not declaring war is buttressed by the fact, often left out in the media, that over two-thirds of the speech focused on building up North Korea’s economy, as the “supreme task…is to stabilize and improve the people’s living as early as possible.” These are hardly the words of someone mobilizing for impending war.⁷

Yet, this shift in North Korea’s policy is also not simply a codification of the current status quo. If war is not around the corner, it is on the horizon. As Professor Jung-chul Lee of Seoul National University points out, we cannot really know the full meaning of these declarations given the current state of the world, the region, and the hardline administration of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.⁸  Conflict erupting between China, the United States, and Taiwan could destabilize the Korean Peninsula. Furthermore, as the United States is bogged down in regional wars and conflicts—particularly in Ukraine and Israel’s ongoing attacks against Gaza—miscalculations or escalating responses by Yoon and Kim have the potential to ignite war in the region.

Extricating ourselves from the current situation must start with understanding the motivations behind the speech. Kim’s remarks at the December 27, 2023, Ninth Plenary of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea provides some context for understanding them. Kim stated that South Korea’s status as a “colonial pawn of the United States” makes it an inappropriate counterpart to discuss “reunification.”⁹  Furthermore, he stated that, regardless of which party is in power, South Korea’s policy of reunification has always been one of reunification through absorption and the collapse of North Korea.¹⁰ If these are the stated causes for North Korea’s shift in policy, we must look at how we got to this point. To understand, we must look back to the causes and dynamics that brought us to the situation today.

North Korea-U.S. Negotiations Collapse Again

The collapsed Hanoi Summit in 2019 marks a decisive point in shifting North Korea’s strategy. The summit was one of a long string of failed peace negotiations with the United States that started with the thawing of the Cold War in the 1980s as North Korea shifted its U.S. policy from confrontation to engagement. Revisiting the ebbs and flows of the negotiation process reveals that North Korea earnestly pursued peace with a vacillating United States, whose geopolitical stratagems and imperialist ideology not only sapped its commitment to the process, but often also actively derailed it. The book Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program by Hecker, nuclear scientist, former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a longtime expert on North Korea’s nuclear weapons, offers valuable insights into the historical context of and motivations behind the negotiation process.

One of the most important elements in comprehending the negotiation process is understanding North Korea’s paradoxical pursuit of peace with the United States through nuclear bombs. This shift was precipitated by the thawing of the Cold War, which risked leaving North Korea isolated: China normalized relations with the United States and then—despite North Korea’s strong opposition—with South Korea.¹¹ In 1988, North Korean leadership presented a plan for peaceful unification that included a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, disarmament, and peace between North and South Korea. In exchange for respecting its autonomy, North Korea would “let bygones be bygones” and “continue to work towards improving relations” with the United States.¹² North Korea’s shift in its U.S. policy from confrontation to engagement was a significant change given North Korea’s animosity toward the primary role of the United States in dividing the Korean Peninsula, as well as its near carpet bombing of North Korea.¹³ Furthermore, by 1992, the North was even secretly willing to accept “continuing US military presence on the Peninsula as a hedge against expanded, potentially hostile, Chinese or Russian influence.”¹⁴ Much like North Korea had played the Soviet Union and China against each other, in the post-Cold War era, when ideological bonds were weakened, North Korea was hoping to do the same with the United States as a new balancing force.¹⁵

North Korea’s approach was to normalize relations with the United States from a position of strength and not of weakness. Thus, it pursued a dual-track strategy of diplomacy and nuclear weapons “to hedge against failure in one track or the other.”¹⁶ When diplomacy failed or stalled, North Korea would switch to developing its nuclear weapons. Its survival would be ensured, whether through peace or a nuclear deterrent. Furthermore, the nuclear track could pressure the United States to return to the diplomatic track.¹⁷ As longtime North Korea experts Carlin and John Lewis observed, the best way for the United States to denuclearize North Korea would have been to “make room for the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] in an American vision of the future of Northeast Asia.”¹⁸ One such close moment was the October 2000 joint communiqué to fundamentally improve relations that emerged from U.S. President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework.¹⁹

Clinton’s “Grand Bargain”

In 1994, the Korean Peninsula was one decision away from being engulfed in a catastrophic war. Faced with the possibility that North Korea was extracting fissile material from its spent nuclear rods to produce plutonium bombs, Clinton contemplated the possibility of a preemptive strike against North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor. The latter would have triggered a North Korean attack upon South Korea; the ensuing conflict was expected to kill one million people.²⁰ Former president Jimmy Carter’s visit with Chairman Kim Il-sung averted catastrophe and opened negotiations to the 1994 Agreed Framework. This “grand bargain” would normalize diplomatic and economic relations through the phased dismantling of the Yongbyon reactor and its replacement with two light-water nuclear ones.²¹ Heavy fuel oil would be provided during the transition.

North Korea froze operation of its graphite-moderated reactors, accepted the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring, and cooperated in the safe storage of its spent fuel. In 1998, U.S. officials stated to Congress their satisfaction with North Korea’s fulfillment of the agreement.²² The United States, however, offered neither “formal assurances, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons” nor delivered on the construction of its light-water reactors.²³ As early as December 1996, a Republican-dominated Congress blocked the Clinton administration from meeting its obligations; Congress was waiting for North Korea to collapse.²⁴ It was likely during this time, in the late 1990s, when the United States appeared split on fulfilling its obligations, that North Korea started its uranium enrichment insurance policy: a second, more technologically sophisticated (but easier to conceal and expand) path toward a nuclear bomb. In 1998, with the Agreed Framework “moribund,” North Korea launched a missile over Japan.²⁵ Despite the provocations (or, more likely, because of them), the United States and North Korea salvaged the Agreed Framework and achieved the October 2000 joint communiqué to “build a new relationship free from past enmity.” When Clinton left office, North Korea was “at the bottom of the list of future security problems for the United States.”²⁶

George W. Bush: Neocon Regime Change. . . .  

Obama’s Strategic Neglect. . . .

Neocons Derail Trump’s RapprochemenT. . . .

Bi-Partisan Pax Americana

Neoconservatives, including Robert Joseph and Bolton, have done the most to derail negotiations with North Korea. Many of these neoconservatives were associated with the Project for the New American Century, the founding principles of which espouse “American military preeminence” to consolidate its “global leadership” in the post-Cold War moment so that it can “maintain American security and advance American interests” through a “foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad.”⁴⁹ Given its impetus to challenge not just the “regime hostile to our interests” and to U.S. “values,” neoconservative policy was, from the outset, incompatible with North Korea’s dual-track approach for co-existence on an equal footing. Even as denuclearization took place, Bush accused North Korean leadership of being tyrants and dictators. For an ideology that aggressively, albeit selectively, and militarily pushes and enforces U.S. values, such labels are more than words; they are the future justifications for war and intervention.⁵⁰

Yet, it was not simply the neoconservatives that impeded negotiations with North Korea; liberal hawks also did. Even as the Clinton administration engaged with North Korea, it labeled the country one of the “backlash states” that “threaten the democratic order being created around them.”⁵¹ Liberal hawks, including under the Obama and Joe Biden administrations, might differ on the means, but the Democratic Party and its foreign policy advisors are part of the same military-industrial complex and foreign policy network that extends the Monroe Doctrine of U.S. domination globally.⁵²

The Center for a New American Security, a think tank replete with officials from the Clinton, Obama, and current Biden administrations, not only receives funding from major weapons manufacturers, it also reflects much of the same rhetoric as the Project for the New American Century.⁵³ In the center’s first report, The Inheritance and the Way Forward, written by Michèle Flournoy (Obama’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy) and Kurt Campbell (architect of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” and Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State), affirms the same commitment to the United States being “the preeminent leader in the international community” so that it can “protect or advance our interests in a globalized world,” even as it restrains the more aggressive impulses of the neoconservatives.⁵⁴

If North Korea viewed denuclearization as part of a larger normalization process with the United States, the United States, even in the most fruitful years under the Clinton administration, viewed negotiations not as a way to establish peace with North Korea, but as a way of disarming it. It is worth pointing out that while the world needs denuclearization, in practice, this has simply meant preventing small countries from going nuclear, while the nuclear powers, including the only country to use nuclear bombs twice, keep their vast arsenal.

Furthermore, any observer of U.S. foreign policy can infer that while friends can become foes, foes rarely become friends—unless they agree to house the U.S. military. After all, despite (or perhaps because of) having given up its nuclear weapons in 2003, Libya was attacked eight years later by NATO.⁵⁵ Today, the Biden administration contains the same liberal hawks, notably Antony Blinken and Campbell, who were a part of Obama’s failed “strategic patience.” . . . .  MORE

Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand

If the South Korean movements for peace can be classified as either those pursuing peace or those pursuing reunification, then each has approached the problem of peace too generally (peace in broad strokes) or too locally (peace focused on the inter-Korean process). Today, both approaches need to come together into a coherent movement that encompasses broader universal demands to build solidarity across the region, as well as being informed by the specific geopolitical realities confronting Koreans.

Revisiting North Korea’s assessment of the situation provides a start for re-engagement with North Korea in a peace-based process. If North Korea has rejected peaceful reunification with a South Korea that is under the heavy influence of the United States and is seeking reunification based on absorption and designating North Korea the main enemy, then the key for improving conditions is a South Korea that has restored its self-determination, one that seeks peaceful engagement respectful of North Korea’s system and does not push a hostile policy. There must be, in effect, a South Korea with the independence and willingness to engage meaningfully with the North.

Yet, neither these nor the necessary broader regional peace can be achieved by standing on the sidelines of history. If South Korea is to play its role in bringing peace to Korea and the region, then its peace movements need to come together to pressure its government to rise up to the task. Discussion, debate, and mutual dialogue must allow us to come up with a common banner for peace, justice, and people’s well-being. In that spirit, I present the following demands to catalyze conversation:

1.     Peace in the Korean Peninsula. The tensions and instability of the unfinished Korean War have plagued the lives of Koreans and their neighbors. Peace in the Korean Peninsula must be achieved not by pressuring and isolating North Korea, which not only violates its sovereign right to exist, but also justifies and fuels North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. The only path to peace in the Korean Peninsula is through the normalization of relations that guarantee North Korea’s security. At its core, the United States must be pressured to normalize diplomatic and economic relations with North Korea.

2.     Peace in the Taiwan Strait. A historical and legal basis exists in which Taiwan is part of China as one country. Nonetheless, Taiwan’s period of political separation from the People’s Republic of China has resulted in the creation of its own institutions. It is also clear that Taiwan, situated barely one hundred miles from mainland China, is a red line for China in terms of its security concerns. Their differences must be resolved peacefully lest we have a war that would be catastrophic not just for China, Taiwan, and the United States, but also for the Korean Peninsula and for Japan, which would likely be dragged into it.⁷¹

3.     Northeast Asia Peace Community. While peace in the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait are key components for peace in Northeast Asia, peace in Northeast Asia is also key for peace in the Korean Peninsula. The division of the region into two separate camps strains regional stability and lays the tinder for open conflagration.

4.     Fight social problems and climate change, not war. South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are all experiencing various levels of social problems, from low birth rates to an aging population. Furthermore, the world is faced with the climate crisis. Military spending diverts resources and energy that should be going to improve people’s livelihoods, as well as both mitigating and adapting to a world being reshaped by a rapidly changing climate.

How do these translate into demands?

1.     We must oppose the joint U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) and South Korean war games that escalate inter-Korean tensions. While labeled as routine, these exercises mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their accompanying weaponry, including nuclear capable aircraft to practice the leadership decapitation, nuclear strike, and full-scale invasion of North Korea near its own waters.
  In a moment of unintended empathy, military strategists pointed out the dangerous nature of war games aimed at China that might serve as cover for an actual invasion of Taiwan.⁷² Likewise, the U.S.-South Korea large-scale military exercises disrupt North Korea’s economy by forcing it to mobilize its full military in response. Some of the greatest overtures the United States has made include pausing these war games. When George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and Trump paused the USFK and South Korean war exercises, North Korea responded with diplomatic overtures. Pausing the military exercises to decrease tensions does little to threaten USFK and South Korean war readiness. Furthermore, we must pause all the other war games that are escalating tensions in the region and the world such as the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise.

2.     We must recover wartime operational control. Currently, the United States Forces Korea holds operational control over both its own military and that of South Korea during wartime.⁷³ Regaining the authority to control its own troops during war would give South Korea greater independence and leeway on whether or not to participate in the U.S.-South Korea joint war games.

3.     We must dismantle security agreements like the American-Japanese-Korean trilateral pact, which trigger mirror accords between China, Russia, and North Korea. If the war in Ukraine was ultimately triggered by de facto NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, then the splitting of the region across the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula lays the conditions for regional conflict. We should also dispel all illusions that a multinational integrated missile defense system will make us impregnable to missiles. As the U.S. military understands it, the only “deterrent” is not a shield, but the threat of a counterforce (first strike), or, in the case of second strike capability, a massive nuclear counterattack. Interceptor missiles are useful in the first case, not the second. Much like the catastrophic impact of a levee that collapses under the growing weight of rising waters, this strategy works until mutual assured destruction is actually triggered.

4.     We must support each other’s struggles in the region. Such solidarity should not simply be centered on the struggle of one’s country, but on the larger struggle for peace in the region. It is easy to become absorbed in the immediate demands and fruits from one’s own struggle. Yet, peace in the region is interconnected and requires long-term vision and investment in strengthening our solidarity. This means actively participating in the struggles for peace across Northeast Asia, such as the annual May peace march in Okinawa, or other special anniversaries and occasions in the region, such as the anniversary of the June 15 Inter-Korean Summit.

5.     We must support struggles on the frontlines. While often war and militarization might appear to be abstract and distant issues, they are very concrete and immediate for those living in sites of struggle, such as near bases in Okinawa, or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense installation in Soseong-ri in South Korea, or the Naval Base on Jeju Island. Many of these struggles might have started from an immediate impact on people’s daily lives. Yet, they offer political exposure that transforms people into peace activists.

We are in perilous times. Our ability to find common ground, understanding, and agreement on tactical and strategic objectives will be crucial for achieving peace in the region, improving people’s lives, and addressing the planetary crisis.

Notes (Substantiation for all claims and comments)https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/

2022
[I add an occasional report from the ADG to remind us how the US mainstream media functions as an extension of US foreign policy.]

KIM TONG-HYUNG.   “ N. Korea: Nuclear strike is on table.”

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (1 May 2022).

. . .Kim’s threat to use his nuclear forces to protect his country’s ambiguously defined “fundamental interests” possibly portends an escalatory nuclear doctrine that could pose greater concern for South Korea, Japan and the United States, experts say.

North Korea has conducted 13 rounds of weapons launches so far this year, including its first full-range test of an ICBM since 2017, while Kim exploits a favorable environment to push forward its weapons program as the U.N. Security Council remains divided and effectively paralyzed over Russia’s war in Ukraine.

There are also signs that North Korea is rebuilding tunnels at a nuclear testing ground that was last active in 2017. Some experts say the North may try to conduct a new test sometime between the inauguration of South Korean President-elect Yoon Suk Yeol on May 10 and his planned summit with President Joe Biden on May 21 to maximize its political effect.

U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter said the United States was aware of reports that North Korea could be preparing to conduct a nuclear test, which she said would be deeply destabilizing for the region and undermine the global nonproliferation regime.  [Be informed about Obama $trillion redesigning US nuclear arsenal.  –D]

“We urge the DPRK to refrain from further destabilizing activity and instead engage in serious and sustained dialogue,” she said, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

WHAT’RE WE GOING TO DO WITHOUT A DEMON TO HATE?
Jeremy Kuzmarov.   “Contrary to Relentless Media Demonization, A Swiss Businessman Who Worked in North Korea For Seven Years Found Much To Like About the Country.”  CovertAction Magazine.  May 05, 2022 1:44 pm.

In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page article titled “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.”

Co-authored by Pulitzer-winning correspondent David E. Sanger, the article cited satellite imagery and a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to argue that North Korea was continuing to secretly develop missiles in violation of the June 2018 Singapore agreement between Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

However, the prominently embedded satellite photo was actually dated March 2018—three months before Kim and Trump met in Singapore—and the missile bases presented as damning evidence of Kim’s duplicity had been known to South Korea for at least two years.

The Times’s deception is part of a larger media propaganda campaign against North Korea that has helped condition the U.S. public to accept draconian U.S. sanctions policies, the spending of billions of dollars per year beefing up the South Korean military, and the $7.1 billion Pacific Deterrence Initiative that includes a major naval build-up in the South China Sea.

PEACE
“Tell Congress: It’s Time for Peace with North Korea.”  UFPJ (June 2022). 
Tensions between the U.S. and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or “North Korea”) are on the rise again. In recent weeks, North Korea has conducted missile tests, and the U.S. and South Korea have responded with missile of tests of their own. Moreover, a recent outbreak of COVID-19 in North Korea threatens a population that is already experiencing shortages of food and basic supplies. Today it’s as urgent as ever for the U.S. to work toward a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. A peace agreement would be a crucial step toward nuclear disarmament, and without it renewed military conflict could erupt at any moment. It would also help reunite thousands of families who have been separated for over 70 years. Call on Congress today to take action.

2017

Social Media and Public Ignorance 2017

ADG.  “Civility, Please.”   [Don’t be too critical.] “Last year, a Pew Research Center study found that 62 percent of Americans get their news from social media.  If the digital landscape has become a place of extremism and propaganda, fake news, trolls and beheadings, what hope is there that people will be properly informed?”  The Baltimore Sun  in NADG, “Civility, Please.”  [ A treasured subject for the US propaganda system is the evil of NK (one of the “nexus of evil”) versus virtuous, exceptional US.  Despite all of the evidence available through my seven anthologies on Korea and other sources that seek to see the world as other see it, and thereby to change our manner of thinking, our government continues its pro-war disinformation campaign filtered down to the public through the mainstream media and social media.  Why not?  The campaign is successful.  The US is not a dictatorship because its leaders see that’s not necessary.  –Dick]

Two Mor4e Examples of Mainstream Media (MM)/ADG REPORTING OF TRUMP Bellicosity

Trump Damages the Stock Market with his Incendiary Threats.

Jay and Crutsinger (AP).  “Stocks Up After N. Korea Cool-off.”  NADG (8-15-17).  The market “’reacted negatively to…Trump’s somewhat [?] incendiary comments about ‘fire and fury,’” but then “’the administration sort of walked back Trump’s comments.’”  Kim Jong Il may be crazy [untrue), but Trump provokes him with bellicose nuclear brinkmanship [true].                              

Dan Thomasson.  “Trump Puts the World at Risk.”  NADG (8-15-17).  Kim Jong Un is “a madman [false] with homicidal tendencies” and “pure military insanity,” but President Trump “provoked North Korean leadership into threats” of nuclear bombing Guam [true].   [Mainstream US media establishing a balance between Jong-Un and Trump.]   [See Cumings below esp.]

Controversial deployment of the U.S.’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system:   SURROUNDING RUSSIA AND CHINA, South Korean Resistance

“THAAD Will Not Protect South Korea.”  [Trump Admin.]

Published on March 29, 2017  by ZoominKorea  (also published in Space Alert)

https://koreaexpose.com/thaad-missile-defense-no-help-korea

Elderly women held up signs reading “Illegal THAAD, back to the U.S!” as they marched, leaning on walking frames for support. 

Soseong-ri, their small village in South Korea, has become the center of a fight that could lay the groundwork for U.S.-Korean relations under Seoul’s next government. On Mar. 18, 5,000 people from across South Korea gathered in the village to protest the controversial deployment of the U.S.’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system.  In July 2016, the US and South Korean governments announced plans to deploy the THAAD system in Seongju County, North Gyeongsang Province. But due to staunch opposition from local residents, the location was revised to a nearby golf course owned by the South Korean corporation Lotte, nestled between Soseong-ri in Seongju County and the city of Gimcheon.  Since Lotte handed its land over to the South Korean Ministry of National Defense on Feb. 27, Soseong-ri, just three kilometers from the golf course, has become the front line in the fight against the missile system. The deployment has already begun and the South’s defense ministry will soon transfer the land to United States Forces Korea (USFK). Residents of Seongju and nearby Gimcheon have vowed to reverse the deployment.  A “Peace Walk” in opposition to THAAD took place near the former Lotte Skyhill Seongju Country Club, the missile deployment site, on Mar. 18. 

Missile Defense Is No Defense
[the THAAD deployment in Seongju will not protect South Korean citizens and is not intended to; see below for explanation  –D]
THAAD, made by the U.S. weapons firm Lockheed Martin, stands for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. It consists of a radar, used to surveil the missile activity of so-called enemy countries and detect incoming missiles, and interceptor missiles, which — in theory — can be launched to shoot down incoming missiles in mid-air.

The THAAD deployment in South Korea is supposed to counter threats from the North, but it is not unique. The U.S. has missile defense systems installed all over the world, mainly in Eastern Europe and Asia, and it is clear from their locations that their deployments are aimed at creating a network surrounding China and Russia.

[ANALOGY, MISSILE DEFENSE, AND /PREEMPTIVE FIRST STRIKE ADVANTAGE]
If two adversarial countries have nuclear weapons, neither will attack the other, because it fears retaliation in the form of a nuclear counter-attack. Picture two people holding guns to each others’ heads. If one shoots first, the other will shoot back, and vice versa. The result is a perpetual standoff. This is known as mutually assured destruction, and proved an effective form of deterrence between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War.  But to return to our analogy: If one gunman renders the other unable to fire, nothing deters him from pulling the trigger of his own gun. This is the ultimate aim of missile defense — to gain first strike advantage by removing the enemy’s ability to retaliate. 

[US/SU ABM TREATY AND PRES. BUSH REPUDIATION OF IT, THREATENING NUCLEAR WAR] 
U.S. missile defense systems are dangerous precisely because they enable a preemptive nuclear strike. This is why some argue that such systems are, in fact, offensive. It is also why, in 1972, the US and the Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), which limited the development of missile defense systems by both countries. But in 2002, after thirty years of relative stability guaranteed by mutually assured destruction, former U.S. President George W Bush walked away from the ABM Treaty.  Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned antiwar activist who was present at the signing of the ABM Treaty, said:  When president Bush came into office, he said, ‘I’m getting out of the ABM Treaty.’ That was a key moment in the strategic equation, because the ABM Treaty was the main source of strategic stability.  China, Russia and North Korea have all declared a policy of no first use, i.e. they will not use their nuclear weapons offensively, but the US has not done the same and reserves the right of preemptive strike.

No Protection for South Korea
According to JJ Suh, professor of Politics and International Affairs at International Christian University in Japan, the aim of the THAAD deployment in Seongju is not to protect South Korean citizens at all: “This system is designed to work at higher altitudes, higher than 45 kilometers. But most North Korean missiles [that would be used against South Korea] are short-range missiles that would fly below 45 kilometers.”
The THAAD system, Suh said, serves U.S. strategic interests in the region: It can be… deployed against intermediate-range missiles from North Korea targeting Okinawa… or Guam. And so, it’s more plausible that the U.S. military wants to deploy the THAAD system in South Korea to protect [U.S.] soldiers and military assets in the region, rather than South Koreans in South Korea.

The THAAD radar, if stationed in South Korea, would also significantly expand the U.S.’s field of vision for spying on Chinese missile activity. For this reason, China has been staunchly opposed to the system’s deployment in South Korea.

[SK A PAWN FOR US GLOBAL AMBITIONS]
But the South Korean people may pay a steep price for hosting THAAD, warned missile defense expert and MIT professor Ted Postol. The system, he says, “will put South Korea in the path of a potential conflict between the U.S. and China. In the event of a confrontation between these two superpowers, China’s first target for a nuclear strike could be the THAAD radar in Seongju”. . . .  MORE [a major article: THAAD is unproven, extremely expensive, extremely dangerous to S. Korea, and extremely unstabilizing globally] https://koreaexpose.com/thaad-missile-defense-no-help-korea/

 Bruce Cumings .  “This Is What’s Really Behind North Korea’s Nuclear  Provocations.”  The Nation (MARCH 23, 2017). 

It’s easy to dismiss Kim Jong-un as a madman [as do the writers in the ADG above].   But there’s a long history of US aggression against the North, which we forget at our peril.

Threatening War, Seeking Peace

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice.

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/10/omni-north-korea-anthology-8-october-12.html

(#1 July 19, 2012; #2 April 13, 2012; #3, Jan. 19, 2016; #4, Feb. 10, 2016; #5, March 12, 2016; #6, July 9, 2017; #7, October 29, 2017).

What’s at stake:  “Throughout [post-WWII] there was a huge invisible lacuna in the official imagination: thinking about how to make peace.  That is what a Cold War is about; even though we are at peace we do not think about preserving peace, but about making war.  Perhaps it is easier, because making war depends precisely on technical skills with material objects, whereas making peace means dealing with fellow human beings.  Not so easy.  Not as satisfying, if domination is the objective.”  Diana Johnstone in From Mad to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning by Paul H. Johnstone (pp. 29-30).

THREATENING WAR, DEMONIZINGTHE ENEMY
[See OMNI’s anthologies on the Ukraine War v. Putin.] 
The Way Arms Races Happen and WWIII Might: Expanding Brinkmanship

IGNORANCE AND BIGOTRY SUSTAINING HOSTILITIES

[I have fallen behind in reporting on NK, whose official designation as an enemy nation by the US threatens the planet.   Will one of you take my place?  Someone who wants to advocate for peace with NK and to ban nuclear weapons.   I have lots of excellent articles for #9.   Or choose the topic you are most interested in—Israel/Palestine, climate chaos, US fascism, overpopulation, etc?  –Dick]

NK ANTHOLOGY #1:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2012/07/omni-north-korea-newsletter-1.html

NK #2:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2012/04/omni-north-korea-newsletter-2.html

NK #3:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/01/north-korea-newsletter-3-january-19-2016.html

NK #4:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/02/north-korea-newsletter-4-seeing-enemy.html

NK #5:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/07/omni-north-korea-newsletter-5-march-12.html

NK #6:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/07/omni-north-korea-newsletter-6-korean-war.html

NK #7:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/10/omni-north-korea-newsletter-7-october.html

NK #8: 

CONTENTS NK ANTHOLOGY #8

2024
Gerald Sloan.  “Joint Military Maneuvers.” 
Dae-Han Song.  “Peace in Korea and Northeast Asia Now!”  https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/
2022
Kim Tong-Hyung.  NK Nuclear Weapons Development, Testing.
Jeremy Kuzmarov.  “A Swiss Businessman” Seeing NK from Inside.
UFPJ.   Urgent Call for Peace Treaty to End Korean War.
2017

Three Examples Mainstream Media (MM)/ADG REPORTING on NK.  ZOOMinKorea.  Trump Admin.’s THAAD a Preemptive First Strike Weapon v. ABM Treaty.
Bruce Cumings.  Recounts NK History and US Provocations.
Mehdi Hasan.  “Why Do North Koreans Hate Us?”    Memory!
Ann Wright.   Visit to NK with Code Pink.
2016
US Military-Industrial-Nuclear Complex plus US Provocations.

SOURCES
[Only one of these sources can be labeled “mainstream media,” and that one was selected to illustrate how mm misreport NK.  This list illustrates one aspect of what my annotated bibliographies titled “control of information in the US”: JRB, Control of Information in the U.S. and Control of the Media in the U.S.]                  

Felix Abt
CovertAction Magazine
The Intercept
Korea Peace Now
mronline.org
Monthly Review
NADG
The Nation
Nukewatch Quarterly
Gerald Sloan
Space Alert!
UFPJ
Women Cross DMZ
Ann Wright
ZOOMinKorea
Contents NK Anthology #7

TEXTS NORTH KOREA ANTHOLOGY #8

US NUCLEAR WAR PREPARATION: From North Korea’s Nuclear Mouse 2016 to NK’s Ballistic Missiles

“JOINT MILITARY MANUEVERS”

By Gerald Sloan (2017)

Our muscle-flexing with South Korea

is like jabbing a stick in an anthill

then killing the terrified insects.

North Korea has not forgotten

our bombing their dams (a war crime)

in the early ‘fifties, then gleefully

celebrating as their rice paddies

washed away, their primary food

supply. We desperately must justify

our obscenely bloated war machinery. 

2024   

“Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand: Peace in Korea and Northeast Asia Now!” by Dae-Han Song.  Monthly Review (July-August 2024).  (Jul 01, 2024).   https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/

Topics: Geography  History  Imperialism  Inequality  Movements Places: Americas  Asia  korean-peninsula  United States

[This major scholarly article (over 500 Notes), that attempts to understand NK as their leaders understand it, might seem baffling to US readers,  accustomed as we are to a demonized NK.  Anyone growing up in the US anti-communist propaganda regime will find section after section of the article a shock their inculcated system of assumptions regarding that nuclear nation.   –Dick]

On September 9, 1945, US service men looked upon the lowering of the Japanese flag and then saluted the hoisting up of the US flag in its stead in Seoul, South Korea in front of what used to be the office of the Japanese governor-general. This marked the beginning of the US military occupation of what would become South Korea, despite the Korean Peninsula having been a non-combatant. Image credit: Oh Seok-min, “U.S. military releases photos of colonial Japan’s surrender ceremony in 1945,” Yonhap News Agency, September 9, 2020.

Dae-Han Song is the head of the Contents Team for the Seoul-based International Strategy Center and a member of the No Cold War collective.

In his New Year’s address on January 15, 2024, North Korean Workers’ Party Chairman Kim Jong-un proposed removing from North Korea’s socialist constitution the notions of South and North Koreans as compatriots and the pursuit of peaceful reunification.¹ Furthermore, he argued that North Korea’s education should teach students that South Korea is the North’s main enemy state.² While denying that this was an announcement for reunification through preemptive attack, Kim stated that if war broke out, North Korea would occupy, subjugate, and reclaim South Korea.³ This speech severed ties with the more than thirty years of peaceful reunification pursued by North Korea’s two previous leaders.

Since the early 1990s, North Korea has sought the normalization of relations with the United States and peaceful reunification with South Korea. During that time, inter-Korean relations ebbed and flowed. But North Korea’s changed inter-Korean policy moves away from peaceful reunification and toward war in the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia.

If we are to chart our way back to peace, we must understand the motivations that led to such a shift and the historical and geopolitical processes that have led us to our current moment: the failed peace negotiations with the United States, the historical and social limits of South Korean politics, and the intensifying polarization of Northeast Asia due to U.S. military escalation.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously said that “power concedes nothing without a demand.”⁴ Peace movements must organize around a common set of demands against war: opposing the U.S. military escalation that is dividing the region into camps; overcoming the structural limitations of South Korea that keeps it dependent upon the United States; and coalescing frontline struggles within South Korea and the region into a common struggle against U.S. military escalations.

Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s Address

The 2024 New Year’s speech triggered alarm, including among longtime North Korea experts Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, who penned an article, “Is Kim Jong Un Preparing For War?”⁵ In his speech, Kim had shifted toward open hostility by recommending the state remove language asserting that South and North Koreans are “80 million compatriots,” as well as the phrase “independence, peaceful reunification and great national unity” from North Korea’s socialist constitution. Instead, he recommended instilling the “firm idea that ROK [the Republic of Korea] is their [North Korean people’s] primary enemy state and invariable principal enemy.”⁶

The tone was a marked shift from the approach taken by the state over the past three decades. For reunification, Kim envisioned “completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annex [sic] it as a part of the territory of our Republic in case of [sic] a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula.” While severing fraternal relations, he clarified that the goal is not a “preemptive attack for realizing unilateral ‘reunification by force of arms.’” In effect, while he did not rule out reunification through war, he was also not proposing it. This sentiment of breaking ties but not declaring war is buttressed by the fact, often left out in the media, that over two-thirds of the speech focused on building up North Korea’s economy, as the “supreme task…is to stabilize and improve the people’s living as early as possible.” These are hardly the words of someone mobilizing for impending war.⁷

Yet, this shift in North Korea’s policy is also not simply a codification of the current status quo. If war is not around the corner, it is on the horizon. As Professor Jung-chul Lee of Seoul National University points out, we cannot really know the full meaning of these declarations given the current state of the world, the region, and the hardline administration of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.⁸  Conflict erupting between China, the United States, and Taiwan could destabilize the Korean Peninsula. Furthermore, as the United States is bogged down in regional wars and conflicts—particularly in Ukraine and Israel’s ongoing attacks against Gaza—miscalculations or escalating responses by Yoon and Kim have the potential to ignite war in the region.

Extricating ourselves from the current situation must start with understanding the motivations behind the speech. Kim’s remarks at the December 27, 2023, Ninth Plenary of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea provides some context for understanding them. Kim stated that South Korea’s status as a “colonial pawn of the United States” makes it an inappropriate counterpart to discuss “reunification.”⁹  Furthermore, he stated that, regardless of which party is in power, South Korea’s policy of reunification has always been one of reunification through absorption and the collapse of North Korea.¹⁰ If these are the stated causes for North Korea’s shift in policy, we must look at how we got to this point. To understand, we must look back to the causes and dynamics that brought us to the situation today.

North Korea-U.S. Negotiations Collapse Again

The collapsed Hanoi Summit in 2019 marks a decisive point in shifting North Korea’s strategy. The summit was one of a long string of failed peace negotiations with the United States that started with the thawing of the Cold War in the 1980s as North Korea shifted its U.S. policy from confrontation to engagement. Revisiting the ebbs and flows of the negotiation process reveals that North Korea earnestly pursued peace with a vacillating United States, whose geopolitical stratagems and imperialist ideology not only sapped its commitment to the process, but often also actively derailed it. The book Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program by Hecker, nuclear scientist, former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a longtime expert on North Korea’s nuclear weapons, offers valuable insights into the historical context of and motivations behind the negotiation process.

One of the most important elements in comprehending the negotiation process is understanding North Korea’s paradoxical pursuit of peace with the United States through nuclear bombs. This shift was precipitated by the thawing of the Cold War, which risked leaving North Korea isolated: China normalized relations with the United States and then—despite North Korea’s strong opposition—with South Korea.¹¹ In 1988, North Korean leadership presented a plan for peaceful unification that included a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, disarmament, and peace between North and South Korea. In exchange for respecting its autonomy, North Korea would “let bygones be bygones” and “continue to work towards improving relations” with the United States.¹² North Korea’s shift in its U.S. policy from confrontation to engagement was a significant change given North Korea’s animosity toward the primary role of the United States in dividing the Korean Peninsula, as well as its near carpet bombing of North Korea.¹³ Furthermore, by 1992, the North was even secretly willing to accept “continuing US military presence on the Peninsula as a hedge against expanded, potentially hostile, Chinese or Russian influence.”¹⁴ Much like North Korea had played the Soviet Union and China against each other, in the post-Cold War era, when ideological bonds were weakened, North Korea was hoping to do the same with the United States as a new balancing force.¹⁵

North Korea’s approach was to normalize relations with the United States from a position of strength and not of weakness. Thus, it pursued a dual-track strategy of diplomacy and nuclear weapons “to hedge against failure in one track or the other.”¹⁶ When diplomacy failed or stalled, North Korea would switch to developing its nuclear weapons. Its survival would be ensured, whether through peace or a nuclear deterrent. Furthermore, the nuclear track could pressure the United States to return to the diplomatic track.¹⁷ As longtime North Korea experts Carlin and John Lewis observed, the best way for the United States to denuclearize North Korea would have been to “make room for the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] in an American vision of the future of Northeast Asia.”¹⁸ One such close moment was the October 2000 joint communiqué to fundamentally improve relations that emerged from U.S. President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework.¹⁹

Clinton’s “Grand Bargain”

In 1994, the Korean Peninsula was one decision away from being engulfed in a catastrophic war. Faced with the possibility that North Korea was extracting fissile material from its spent nuclear rods to produce plutonium bombs, Clinton contemplated the possibility of a preemptive strike against North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor. The latter would have triggered a North Korean attack upon South Korea; the ensuing conflict was expected to kill one million people.²⁰ Former president Jimmy Carter’s visit with Chairman Kim Il-sung averted catastrophe and opened negotiations to the 1994 Agreed Framework. This “grand bargain” would normalize diplomatic and economic relations through the phased dismantling of the Yongbyon reactor and its replacement with two light-water nuclear ones.²¹ Heavy fuel oil would be provided during the transition.

North Korea froze operation of its graphite-moderated reactors, accepted the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring, and cooperated in the safe storage of its spent fuel. In 1998, U.S. officials stated to Congress their satisfaction with North Korea’s fulfillment of the agreement.²² The United States, however, offered neither “formal assurances, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons” nor delivered on the construction of its light-water reactors.²³ As early as December 1996, a Republican-dominated Congress blocked the Clinton administration from meeting its obligations; Congress was waiting for North Korea to collapse.²⁴ It was likely during this time, in the late 1990s, when the United States appeared split on fulfilling its obligations, that North Korea started its uranium enrichment insurance policy: a second, more technologically sophisticated (but easier to conceal and expand) path toward a nuclear bomb. In 1998, with the Agreed Framework “moribund,” North Korea launched a missile over Japan.²⁵ Despite the provocations (or, more likely, because of them), the United States and North Korea salvaged the Agreed Framework and achieved the October 2000 joint communiqué to “build a new relationship free from past enmity.” When Clinton left office, North Korea was “at the bottom of the list of future security problems for the United States.”²⁶

George W. Bush: Neocon Regime Change. . . .  

Obama’s Strategic Neglect. . . .

Neocons Derail Trump’s RapprochemenT. . . .

Bi-Partisan Pax Americana

Neoconservatives, including Robert Joseph and Bolton, have done the most to derail negotiations with North Korea. Many of these neoconservatives were associated with the Project for the New American Century, the founding principles of which espouse “American military preeminence” to consolidate its “global leadership” in the post-Cold War moment so that it can “maintain American security and advance American interests” through a “foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad.”⁴⁹ Given its impetus to challenge not just the “regime hostile to our interests” and to U.S. “values,” neoconservative policy was, from the outset, incompatible with North Korea’s dual-track approach for co-existence on an equal footing. Even as denuclearization took place, Bush accused North Korean leadership of being tyrants and dictators. For an ideology that aggressively, albeit selectively, and militarily pushes and enforces U.S. values, such labels are more than words; they are the future justifications for war and intervention.⁵⁰

Yet, it was not simply the neoconservatives that impeded negotiations with North Korea; liberal hawks also did. Even as the Clinton administration engaged with North Korea, it labeled the country one of the “backlash states” that “threaten the democratic order being created around them.”⁵¹ Liberal hawks, including under the Obama and Joe Biden administrations, might differ on the means, but the Democratic Party and its foreign policy advisors are part of the same military-industrial complex and foreign policy network that extends the Monroe Doctrine of U.S. domination globally.⁵²

The Center for a New American Security, a think tank replete with officials from the Clinton, Obama, and current Biden administrations, not only receives funding from major weapons manufacturers, it also reflects much of the same rhetoric as the Project for the New American Century.⁵³ In the center’s first report, The Inheritance and the Way Forward, written by Michèle Flournoy (Obama’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy) and Kurt Campbell (architect of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” and Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State), affirms the same commitment to the United States being “the preeminent leader in the international community” so that it can “protect or advance our interests in a globalized world,” even as it restrains the more aggressive impulses of the neoconservatives.⁵⁴

If North Korea viewed denuclearization as part of a larger normalization process with the United States, the United States, even in the most fruitful years under the Clinton administration, viewed negotiations not as a way to establish peace with North Korea, but as a way of disarming it. It is worth pointing out that while the world needs denuclearization, in practice, this has simply meant preventing small countries from going nuclear, while the nuclear powers, including the only country to use nuclear bombs twice, keep their vast arsenal.

Furthermore, any observer of U.S. foreign policy can infer that while friends can become foes, foes rarely become friends—unless they agree to house the U.S. military. After all, despite (or perhaps because of) having given up its nuclear weapons in 2003, Libya was attacked eight years later by NATO.⁵⁵ Today, the Biden administration contains the same liberal hawks, notably Antony Blinken and Campbell, who were a part of Obama’s failed “strategic patience.” . . . .  MORE

Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand

If the South Korean movements for peace can be classified as either those pursuing peace or those pursuing reunification, then each has approached the problem of peace too generally (peace in broad strokes) or too locally (peace focused on the inter-Korean process). Today, both approaches need to come together into a coherent movement that encompasses broader universal demands to build solidarity across the region, as well as being informed by the specific geopolitical realities confronting Koreans.

Revisiting North Korea’s assessment of the situation provides a start for re-engagement with North Korea in a peace-based process. If North Korea has rejected peaceful reunification with a South Korea that is under the heavy influence of the United States and is seeking reunification based on absorption and designating North Korea the main enemy, then the key for improving conditions is a South Korea that has restored its self-determination, one that seeks peaceful engagement respectful of North Korea’s system and does not push a hostile policy. There must be, in effect, a South Korea with the independence and willingness to engage meaningfully with the North.

Yet, neither these nor the necessary broader regional peace can be achieved by standing on the sidelines of history. If South Korea is to play its role in bringing peace to Korea and the region, then its peace movements need to come together to pressure its government to rise up to the task. Discussion, debate, and mutual dialogue must allow us to come up with a common banner for peace, justice, and people’s well-being. In that spirit, I present the following demands to catalyze conversation:

1.     Peace in the Korean Peninsula. The tensions and instability of the unfinished Korean War have plagued the lives of Koreans and their neighbors. Peace in the Korean Peninsula must be achieved not by pressuring and isolating North Korea, which not only violates its sovereign right to exist, but also justifies and fuels North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. The only path to peace in the Korean Peninsula is through the normalization of relations that guarantee North Korea’s security. At its core, the United States must be pressured to normalize diplomatic and economic relations with North Korea.

2.     Peace in the Taiwan Strait. A historical and legal basis exists in which Taiwan is part of China as one country. Nonetheless, Taiwan’s period of political separation from the People’s Republic of China has resulted in the creation of its own institutions. It is also clear that Taiwan, situated barely one hundred miles from mainland China, is a red line for China in terms of its security concerns. Their differences must be resolved peacefully lest we have a war that would be catastrophic not just for China, Taiwan, and the United States, but also for the Korean Peninsula and for Japan, which would likely be dragged into it.⁷¹

3.     Northeast Asia Peace Community. While peace in the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait are key components for peace in Northeast Asia, peace in Northeast Asia is also key for peace in the Korean Peninsula. The division of the region into two separate camps strains regional stability and lays the tinder for open conflagration.

4.     Fight social problems and climate change, not war. South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are all experiencing various levels of social problems, from low birth rates to an aging population. Furthermore, the world is faced with the climate crisis. Military spending diverts resources and energy that should be going to improve people’s livelihoods, as well as both mitigating and adapting to a world being reshaped by a rapidly changing climate.

How do these translate into demands?

1.     We must oppose the joint U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) and South Korean war games that escalate inter-Korean tensions. While labeled as routine, these exercises mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their accompanying weaponry, including nuclear capable aircraft to practice the leadership decapitation, nuclear strike, and full-scale invasion of North Korea near its own waters.
  In a moment of unintended empathy, military strategists pointed out the dangerous nature of war games aimed at China that might serve as cover for an actual invasion of Taiwan.⁷² Likewise, the U.S.-South Korea large-scale military exercises disrupt North Korea’s economy by forcing it to mobilize its full military in response. Some of the greatest overtures the United States has made include pausing these war games. When George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and Trump paused the USFK and South Korean war exercises, North Korea responded with diplomatic overtures. Pausing the military exercises to decrease tensions does little to threaten USFK and South Korean war readiness. Furthermore, we must pause all the other war games that are escalating tensions in the region and the world such as the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise.

2.     We must recover wartime operational control. Currently, the United States Forces Korea holds operational control over both its own military and that of South Korea during wartime.⁷³ Regaining the authority to control its own troops during war would give South Korea greater independence and leeway on whether or not to participate in the U.S.-South Korea joint war games.

3.     We must dismantle security agreements like the American-Japanese-Korean trilateral pact, which trigger mirror accords between China, Russia, and North Korea. If the war in Ukraine was ultimately triggered by de facto NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, then the splitting of the region across the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula lays the conditions for regional conflict. We should also dispel all illusions that a multinational integrated missile defense system will make us impregnable to missiles. As the U.S. military understands it, the only “deterrent” is not a shield, but the threat of a counterforce (first strike), or, in the case of second strike capability, a massive nuclear counterattack. Interceptor missiles are useful in the first case, not the second. Much like the catastrophic impact of a levee that collapses under the growing weight of rising waters, this strategy works until mutual assured destruction is actually triggered.

4.     We must support each other’s struggles in the region. Such solidarity should not simply be centered on the struggle of one’s country, but on the larger struggle for peace in the region. It is easy to become absorbed in the immediate demands and fruits from one’s own struggle. Yet, peace in the region is interconnected and requires long-term vision and investment in strengthening our solidarity. This means actively participating in the struggles for peace across Northeast Asia, such as the annual May peace march in Okinawa, or other special anniversaries and occasions in the region, such as the anniversary of the June 15 Inter-Korean Summit.

5.     We must support struggles on the frontlines. While often war and militarization might appear to be abstract and distant issues, they are very concrete and immediate for those living in sites of struggle, such as near bases in Okinawa, or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense installation in Soseong-ri in South Korea, or the Naval Base on Jeju Island. Many of these struggles might have started from an immediate impact on people’s daily lives. Yet, they offer political exposure that transforms people into peace activists.

We are in perilous times. Our ability to find common ground, understanding, and agreement on tactical and strategic objectives will be crucial for achieving peace in the region, improving people’s lives, and addressing the planetary crisis.

Notes (Substantiation for all claims and comments)https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/

2022
[I add an occasional report from the ADG to remind us how the US mainstream media functions as an extension of US foreign policy.]

KIM TONG-HYUNG.   “ N. Korea: Nuclear strike is on table.”

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (1 May 2022).

. . .Kim’s threat to use his nuclear forces to protect his country’s ambiguously defined “fundamental interests” possibly portends an escalatory nuclear doctrine that could pose greater concern for South Korea, Japan and the United States, experts say.

North Korea has conducted 13 rounds of weapons launches so far this year, including its first full-range test of an ICBM since 2017, while Kim exploits a favorable environment to push forward its weapons program as the U.N. Security Council remains divided and effectively paralyzed over Russia’s war in Ukraine.

There are also signs that North Korea is rebuilding tunnels at a nuclear testing ground that was last active in 2017. Some experts say the North may try to conduct a new test sometime between the inauguration of South Korean President-elect Yoon Suk Yeol on May 10 and his planned summit with President Joe Biden on May 21 to maximize its political effect.

U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter said the United States was aware of reports that North Korea could be preparing to conduct a nuclear test, which she said would be deeply destabilizing for the region and undermine the global nonproliferation regime.  [Be informed about Obama $trillion redesigning US nuclear arsenal.  –D]

“We urge the DPRK to refrain from further destabilizing activity and instead engage in serious and sustained dialogue,” she said, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

WHAT’RE WE GOING TO DO WITHOUT A DEMON TO HATE?
Jeremy Kuzmarov.   “Contrary to Relentless Media Demonization, A Swiss Businessman Who Worked in North Korea For Seven Years Found Much To Like About the Country.”  CovertAction Magazine.  May 05, 2022 1:44 pm.

In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page article titled “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.”

Co-authored by Pulitzer-winning correspondent David E. Sanger, the article cited satellite imagery and a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to argue that North Korea was continuing to secretly develop missiles in violation of the June 2018 Singapore agreement between Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

However, the prominently embedded satellite photo was actually dated March 2018—three months before Kim and Trump met in Singapore—and the missile bases presented as damning evidence of Kim’s duplicity had been known to South Korea for at least two years.

The Times’s deception is part of a larger media propaganda campaign against North Korea that has helped condition the U.S. public to accept draconian U.S. sanctions policies, the spending of billions of dollars per year beefing up the South Korean military, and the $7.1 billion Pacific Deterrence Initiative that includes a major naval build-up in the South China Sea.

PEACE
“Tell Congress: It’s Time for Peace with North Korea.”  UFPJ (June 2022). 
Tensions between the U.S. and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or “North Korea”) are on the rise again. In recent weeks, North Korea has conducted missile tests, and the U.S. and South Korea have responded with missile of tests of their own. Moreover, a recent outbreak of COVID-19 in North Korea threatens a population that is already experiencing shortages of food and basic supplies. Today it’s as urgent as ever for the U.S. to work toward a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. A peace agreement would be a crucial step toward nuclear disarmament, and without it renewed military conflict could erupt at any moment. It would also help reunite thousands of families who have been separated for over 70 years. Call on Congress today to take action.

2017

Social Media and Public Ignorance 2017

ADG.  “Civility, Please.”   [Don’t be too critical.] “Last year, a Pew Research Center study found that 62 percent of Americans get their news from social media.  If the digital landscape has become a place of extremism and propaganda, fake news, trolls and beheadings, what hope is there that people will be properly informed?”  The Baltimore Sun  in NADG, “Civility, Please.”  [ A treasured subject for the US propaganda system is the evil of NK (one of the “nexus of evil”) versus virtuous, exceptional US.  Despite all of the evidence available through my seven anthologies on Korea and other sources that seek to see the world as other see it, and thereby to change our manner of thinking, our government continues its pro-war disinformation campaign filtered down to the public through the mainstream media and social media.  Why not?  The campaign is successful.  The US is not a dictatorship because its leaders see that’s not necessary.  –Dick]

Two Mor4e Examples of Mainstream Media (MM)/ADG REPORTING OF TRUMP Bellicosity

Trump Damages the Stock Market with his Incendiary Threats.

Jay and Crutsinger (AP).  “Stocks Up After N. Korea Cool-off.”  NADG (8-15-17).  The market “’reacted negatively to…Trump’s somewhat [?] incendiary comments about ‘fire and fury,’” but then “’the administration sort of walked back Trump’s comments.’”  Kim Jong Il may be crazy [untrue), but Trump provokes him with bellicose nuclear brinkmanship [true].                              

Dan Thomasson.  “Trump Puts the World at Risk.”  NADG (8-15-17).  Kim Jong Un is “a madman [false] with homicidal tendencies” and “pure military insanity,” but President Trump “provoked North Korean leadership into threats” of nuclear bombing Guam [true].   [Mainstream US media establishing a balance between Jong-Un and Trump.]   [See Cumings below esp.]

Controversial deployment of the U.S.’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system:   SURROUNDING RUSSIA AND CHINA, South Korean Resistance

“THAAD Will Not Protect South Korea.”  [Trump Admin.]

Published on March 29, 2017  by ZoominKorea  (also published in Space Alert)

https://koreaexpose.com/thaad-missile-defense-no-help-korea

Elderly women held up signs reading “Illegal THAAD, back to the U.S!” as they marched, leaning on walking frames for support. 

Soseong-ri, their small village in South Korea, has become the center of a fight that could lay the groundwork for U.S.-Korean relations under Seoul’s next government. On Mar. 18, 5,000 people from across South Korea gathered in the village to protest the controversial deployment of the U.S.’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system.  In July 2016, the US and South Korean governments announced plans to deploy the THAAD system in Seongju County, North Gyeongsang Province. But due to staunch opposition from local residents, the location was revised to a nearby golf course owned by the South Korean corporation Lotte, nestled between Soseong-ri in Seongju County and the city of Gimcheon.  Since Lotte handed its land over to the South Korean Ministry of National Defense on Feb. 27, Soseong-ri, just three kilometers from the golf course, has become the front line in the fight against the missile system. The deployment has already begun and the South’s defense ministry will soon transfer the land to United States Forces Korea (USFK). Residents of Seongju and nearby Gimcheon have vowed to reverse the deployment.  A “Peace Walk” in opposition to THAAD took place near the former Lotte Skyhill Seongju Country Club, the missile deployment site, on Mar. 18. 

Missile Defense Is No Defense
[the THAAD deployment in Seongju will not protect South Korean citizens and is not intended to; see below for explanation  –D]
THAAD, made by the U.S. weapons firm Lockheed Martin, stands for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. It consists of a radar, used to surveil the missile activity of so-called enemy countries and detect incoming missiles, and interceptor missiles, which — in theory — can be launched to shoot down incoming missiles in mid-air.

The THAAD deployment in South Korea is supposed to counter threats from the North, but it is not unique. The U.S. has missile defense systems installed all over the world, mainly in Eastern Europe and Asia, and it is clear from their locations that their deployments are aimed at creating a network surrounding China and Russia.

[ANALOGY, MISSILE DEFENSE, AND /PREEMPTIVE FIRST STRIKE ADVANTAGE]
If two adversarial countries have nuclear weapons, neither will attack the other, because it fears retaliation in the form of a nuclear counter-attack. Picture two people holding guns to each others’ heads. If one shoots first, the other will shoot back, and vice versa. The result is a perpetual standoff. This is known as mutually assured destruction, and proved an effective form of deterrence between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War.  But to return to our analogy: If one gunman renders the other unable to fire, nothing deters him from pulling the trigger of his own gun. This is the ultimate aim of missile defense — to gain first strike advantage by removing the enemy’s ability to retaliate. 

[US/SU ABM TREATY AND PRES. BUSH REPUDIATION OF IT, THREATENING NUCLEAR WAR] 
U.S. missile defense systems are dangerous precisely because they enable a preemptive nuclear strike. This is why some argue that such systems are, in fact, offensive. It is also why, in 1972, the US and the Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), which limited the development of missile defense systems by both countries. But in 2002, after thirty years of relative stability guaranteed by mutually assured destruction, former U.S. President George W Bush walked away from the ABM Treaty.  Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned antiwar activist who was present at the signing of the ABM Treaty, said:  When president Bush came into office, he said, ‘I’m getting out of the ABM Treaty.’ That was a key moment in the strategic equation, because the ABM Treaty was the main source of strategic stability.  China, Russia and North Korea have all declared a policy of no first use, i.e. they will not use their nuclear weapons offensively, but the US has not done the same and reserves the right of preemptive strike.

No Protection for South Korea
According to JJ Suh, professor of Politics and International Affairs at International Christian University in Japan, the aim of the THAAD deployment in Seongju is not to protect South Korean citizens at all: “This system is designed to work at higher altitudes, higher than 45 kilometers. But most North Korean missiles [that would be used against South Korea] are short-range missiles that would fly below 45 kilometers.”
The THAAD system, Suh said, serves U.S. strategic interests in the region: It can be… deployed against intermediate-range missiles from North Korea targeting Okinawa… or Guam. And so, it’s more plausible that the U.S. military wants to deploy the THAAD system in South Korea to protect [U.S.] soldiers and military assets in the region, rather than South Koreans in South Korea.

The THAAD radar, if stationed in South Korea, would also significantly expand the U.S.’s field of vision for spying on Chinese missile activity. For this reason, China has been staunchly opposed to the system’s deployment in South Korea.

[SK A PAWN FOR US GLOBAL AMBITIONS]
But the South Korean people may pay a steep price for hosting THAAD, warned missile defense expert and MIT professor Ted Postol. The system, he says, “will put South Korea in the path of a potential conflict between the U.S. and China. In the event of a confrontation between these two superpowers, China’s first target for a nuclear strike could be the THAAD radar in Seongju”. . . .  MORE [a major article: THAAD is unproven, extremely expensive, extremely dangerous to S. Korea, and extremely unstabilizing globally] https://koreaexpose.com/thaad-missile-defense-no-help-korea/

 Bruce Cumings .  “This Is What’s Really Behind North Korea’s Nuclear  Provocations.”  The Nation (MARCH 23, 2017). 

It’s easy to dismiss Kim Jong-un as a madman [as do the writers in the ADG above].   But there’s a long history of US aggression against the North, which we forget at our peril.

https://www.thenation.com/article/this-is-whats-really-behind-north-koreas-nuclear-provocations

[The eminent author of half a dozen books on NK—see below–explains US provocations of NK.  -D] 

Donald Trump was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on February 11 when a message arrived mid-meal, courtesy of Pyongyang: North Korea had just tested a new, solid-fuel, intermediate-range ballistic missile, fired from a mobile—and therefore hard-to-detect—launcher. The president pulled out his 1990s flip-phone and discussed this event in front of the various people sitting within earshot. One of these diners, Richard DeAgazio, was suitably agog at the import of this weighty scene, posting the following comment on his Facebook page: “HOLY MOLY!!! It was fascinating to watch the flurry of activity at dinner when the news came that North Korea had launched a missile in the direction of Japan.”

Actually, this missile was aimed directly at Mar-a-Lago, figuratively speaking. It was a pointed nod to history that no American media outlet grasped: “Prime Minister Shinzo,” as Trump called him, is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a former Japanese prime minister whom Abe reveres. Nobusuke was deemed a “Class A” war criminal by the US occupation authorities after World War II, and he ran munitions manufacturing in Manchuria in the 1930s, when Gen. Hideki Tojo was provost marshal there. Kim Il-sung, whom grandson Kim Jong-un likewise reveres, was fighting the Japanese at the same time and in the same place.

[US, NOT NK, PROVOCATIONS]   As I wrote for this magazine in January 2016, the North Koreans must be astonished to discover that US leaders never seem to grasp the import of their history-related provocations. Even more infuriating is Washington’s implacable refusal ever to investigate our 72-year history of conflict with the North; all of our media appear to live in an eternal present, with each new crisis treated as sui generis. Visiting Seoul in March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asserted that North Korea has a history of violating one agreement after another; in fact, President Bill Clinton got it to freeze its plutonium production for eight years (1994–2002) and, in October 2000, had indirectly worked out a deal to buy all of its medium- and long-range missiles. Clinton also signed an agreement with Gen. Jo Myong-rok stating that henceforth, neither country would bear “hostile intent” toward the other.

The Bush administration promptly ignored both agreements and set out to destroy the 1994 freeze. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is rightly seen as a world-historical catastrophe, but next in line would be placing North Korea in his “axis of evil” and, in September 2002, announcing his “preemptive” doctrine directed at Iraq and North Korea, among others. The simple fact is that Pyongyang would have no nuclear weapons if Clinton’s agreements had been sustained.

Now comes Donald Trump, blasting into a Beltway milieu where, in recent months, a bipartisan consensus has emerged based on the false assumption that all previous attempts to rein in the North’s nuclear program have failed, so it may be time to use force—to destroy its missiles or topple the regime. Last September, the centrist Council on Foreign Relations issued a report stating that “more assertive military and political actions” should be considered, “including those that directly threaten the existence of the [North Korean] regime.” Tillerson warned of preemptive action on his recent East Asia trip, and a former Obama-administration official, Antony Blinken, wrote in The New York Times that a “priority” for the Trump administration should be working with China and South Korea to “secure the North’s nuclear arsenal” in the event of “regime change.” But North Korea reportedly has some 15,000 underground facilities of a national-security nature. It is insane to imagine the Marines traipsing around the country in such a “search and secure” operation, and yet the Bush and Obama administrations had plans to do just that. Obama also ran a highly secret cyber-war against the North for years, seeking to infect and disrupt its missile program. If North Korea did that to us, it might well be considered an act of war.

On November 8, 2016, nearly 66 million voters for Hillary Clinton received a lesson in Hegel’s “cunning of history.” A bigger lesson awaits Donald Trump, should he attack North Korea. It has the fourth-largest army in the world, as many as 200,000 highly trained special forces, 10,000 artillery pieces in the mountains north of Seoul, mobile missiles that can hit all American military bases in the region (there are hundreds), and nuclear weapons more than twice as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb (according to a new estimate in a highly detailed Times study by David Sanger and William Broad).

Last October, I was at a forum in Seoul with Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state for Bill Clinton. Like everyone else, Talbott averred that North Korea might well be the top security problem for the next president. In my remarks, I mentioned Robert McNamara’s explanation, in Errol Morris’s excellent documentary The Fog of War, for our defeat in Vietnam: We never put ourselves in the shoes of the enemy and attempted to see the world as they did. Talbott then blurted, “It’s a grotesque regime!” There you have it: It’s our number-one problem, but so grotesque that there’s no point trying to understand Pyongyang’s point of view (or even that it might have some valid concerns). North Korea is the only country in the world to have been systematically blackmailed by US nuclear weapons going back to the 1950s, when hundreds of nukes were installed in South Korea. I have written much about this in these pages and in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Why on earth would Pyongyang not seek a nuclear deterrent? But this crucial background doesn’t enter mainstream American discourse. History doesn’t matter, until it does—when it rears up and smacks you in the face.

[Some of Prof. Cumings’ books:  1981, Origins of the Korean War; 1997, Korea’s Place in the Sun; 2003, North Korea; 2004, Inventing the Axis of Evil; 2010, The Korean War: a History. 

Mehdi Hasan.   Support Us

“Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason — They Remember the Korean War.”   The Intercept.  May 3 2017.
Americans may not remember the devastating impact of U.S. bombing raids on civilian targets, but North Koreans cannot forget it.

It’s a question that has bewildered Americans again and again in the wake of 9/11, in reference to the Arab and Muslim worlds. These days, however, it’s a question increasingly asked about the reclusive North Koreans.

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. Children are taught to hate Americans in school while adults mark a “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month” every year (it’s in June, in case you were wondering).

North Korean officials make wild threats against the United States while the regime, led by the brutal and sadistic Kim Jong-un, pumps out fake news in the form of self-serving propaganda, on an industrial scale. In the DPRK, anti-American hatred is a commodity never in short supply.

“The hate, though,” as longtime North Korea watcher Blaine Harden observed in the Washington Post, “is not all manufactured.” Some of it, he wrote, “is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets.”

Forgets as in the “forgotten war.” Yes, the Korean War. Remember that? The one wedged between World War II and the Vietnam War? The first “hot” war of the Cold War, which took place between 1950 and 1953, and which has since been conveniently airbrushed from most discussions and debates about the “crazy” and “insane” regime in Pyongyang? Forgotten despite the fact that this particular war isn’t even over — it was halted by an armistice agreement, not a peace treaty — and despite the fact that the conflict saw the United States engage in numerous war crimes, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, continue to shape the way North Koreans view the United States, even if the residents of the United States remain blissfully ignorant of their country’s belligerent past.

For the record, it was the North Koreans, and not the Americans or their South Korean allies, who started the war in June 1950, when they crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the south. Nevertheless, “What hardly any Americans know or remember,” University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings writes in his book “The Korean War: A History,” “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”

How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II?

How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?

Twenty. Percent. For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population. According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”

Every. Town. More than 3 million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the vast majority of them in the north. . . .  MORE

If another Korean war, a potentially nuclear war, is to be avoided and if, as the Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera famously wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” then ordinary Americans can no longer afford to forget the death, destruction, and debilitating legacy of the original Korean War.

SEEKING PEACE

ANN WRIGHT’S VISIT to NK 10-23-17

IN Q&A asked about access:

Quaker’s have had a farming project in NK for some 35 years.  Mennonites too.

See Korean Peace Network and Divided Families.

Ann (our exemplary peacemaker from Bentonville) visited NK with other Code Pink women and marched with 5000 NK women for Peace.

Alas, although 175 nations have diplomatic relations with NK, US does not.

3-4-23 Ann sent me this update:

Since the Trump administration there has been essentially a US ban on US citizens travelling to North Korea as one must get from the US State Dept a “special validation passport” and then a North Korean visa–which they haven’t been giving due to COVID!

Lots of effort on getting a Congressional resolution to end the Korean war.

And on July 27 a big mobilization in Washington, DC, the 70th anniversary of the armistice of 1953.

Two websites have lots more information:

Women Cross DMZ

Korea Peace Now

Ann Wright (author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience

www.voicesofconscience.com)

2016

     “US and Arms Dealers Shriek at Sight of North Korean Mouse.”  Nukewatch Quarterly (Spring 2016).       http://www.nukewatchinfo.org/Quarterly/2016%20Spring/Page%205%20Spring%202016.pdf

North Korea’s January 6 announcement that it conducted an H-bomb test was both ridiculed as completely implausible and condemned as highly “provocative.” Its February 7 satellite launch was likewise denounced as a “cover” for long-range ballistic missile development. Without hard evidence that North Korea has even a single nuclear weapon, official “concern” over the North’s nuclear program needs to be manufactured if our own nuclear arsenalists are to stay in business.

With the enormous Y-12 nuclear weapons complex in his home state desperately searching for an enemy, it is no surprise to hear Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn. and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chant that he wants the US “to take a more assertive role in addressing North Korea’s provocation.” Anna Fifield, the Washington Post Bureau Chief in Tokyo, who should at least pretend to be an impartial observer, wrote January 6 that the underground bomb test was a “brazen provocation and a clear defiance of international treaties.” Fifield later told National Public Radio that she wouldn’t want to speculate about what motivated North Korean President Kim Jong Un, because the inside of his head “is a scary place” [see above from ADG].   The NPR interviewer let this unsubstantiated assertion go unchallenged, like it was common knowledge.

North Korea is such a military, economic and political nothing, that it is disgraceful to see the national media parrot official Pentagon and State Department fear-mongering about Pyongyang’s supposedly terrible, belligerent, and aggressive intentions, and pathetic to see public opinion crystalized in unison.

When was the last time North Korea bombed, invaded, militarily occupied, or  installed puppet regimes in other lands? Those brazenly provocative violations of international treaties were committed by the United States. When has North Korea placed 5,000-man, “super carriers,” (the largest ships in the world, each carrying 60 aircraft) in the Persian Gulf and attacked Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan using Reaper drones and jet fighter-bombers? Oh yes; that was the United States.  (continued at http://www.nukewatchinfo.org/Quarterly/2016%20Spring/Page%205%20Spring%202016.pdf)

Contents: North Korea Anthology  #7, October 29, 2017
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/10/omni-north-korea-newsletter-7-october.html

Threatening War

Dick Bennett: Headlines Threatening War: the White House/Pentagon/Mainstream Media Complex

Jon Schwartz and Suki Kim on NK in The Intercept

Dick Bennett: Peace Achieved 1991-2, and Again 2016-17?  Kim Il Sung/Jimmy Carter/Kim Jong Un and Bill Clinton/Jimmy Carter/Donald Trump

Dick Bennett:  Summary: BombasticTit for Tat.

Seeking Peace

Art Hobson: Make Peace with North Korea

Dick Bennett: See the World as Others See It—J. William Fulbright and the Role of Empathy in Making Peace

Stop Anti-Ballistic THAAD

Innovate!  Valerie Plame:  Use the System to Stop War-Mongers, Buy into Twitter

Take Action with PeaceAction

END NORTH KOREA ANTHOLOGY #8Threatening War, Seeking Peace

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice.

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/10/omni-north-korea-anthology-8-october-12.html

(#1 July 19, 2012; #2 April 13, 2012; #3, Jan. 19, 2016; #4, Feb. 10, 2016; #5, March 12, 2016; #6, July 9, 2017; #7, October 29, 2017).

What’s at stake:  “Throughout [post-WWII] there was a huge invisible lacuna in the official imagination: thinking about how to make peace.  That is what a Cold War is about; even though we are at peace we do not think about preserving peace, but about making war.  Perhaps it is easier, because making war depends precisely on technical skills with material objects, whereas making peace means dealing with fellow human beings.  Not so easy.  Not as satisfying, if domination is the objective.”  Diana Johnstone in From Mad to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning by Paul H. Johnstone (pp. 29-30).

THREATENING WAR, DEMONIZINGTHE ENEMY
[See OMNI’s anthologies on the Ukraine War v. Putin.] 
The Way Arms Races Happen and WWIII Might: Expanding Brinkmanship

IGNORANCE AND BIGOTRY SUSTAINING HOSTILITIES

[I have fallen behind in reporting on NK, whose official designation as an enemy nation by the US threatens the planet.   Will one of you take my place?  Someone who wants to advocate for peace with NK and to ban nuclear weapons.   I have lots of excellent articles for #9.   Or choose the topic you are most interested in—Israel/Palestine, climate chaos, US fascism, overpopulation, etc?  –Dick]

NK ANTHOLOGY #1:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2012/07/omni-north-korea-newsletter-1.html

NK #2:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2012/04/omni-north-korea-newsletter-2.html

NK #3:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/01/north-korea-newsletter-3-january-19-2016.html

NK #4:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/02/north-korea-newsletter-4-seeing-enemy.html

NK #5:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/07/omni-north-korea-newsletter-5-march-12.html

NK #6:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/07/omni-north-korea-newsletter-6-korean-war.html

NK #7:  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/10/omni-north-korea-newsletter-7-october.html

NK #8: 

CONTENTS NK ANTHOLOGY #8

2024
Gerald Sloan.  “Joint Military Maneuvers.” 
Dae-Han Song.  “Peace in Korea and Northeast Asia Now!”  https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/
2022
Kim Tong-Hyung.  NK Nuclear Weapons Development, Testing.
Jeremy Kuzmarov.  “A Swiss Businessman” Seeing NK from Inside.
UFPJ.   Urgent Call for Peace Treaty to End Korean War.
2017

Three Examples Mainstream Media (MM)/ADG REPORTING on NK.  ZOOMinKorea.  Trump Admin.’s THAAD a Preemptive First Strike Weapon v. ABM Treaty.
Bruce Cumings.  Recounts NK History and US Provocations.
Mehdi Hasan.  “Why Do North Koreans Hate Us?”    Memory!
Ann Wright.   Visit to NK with Code Pink.
2016
US Military-Industrial-Nuclear Complex plus US Provocations.

SOURCES
[Only one of these sources can be labeled “mainstream media,” and that one was selected to illustrate how mm misreport NK.  This list illustrates one aspect of what my annotated bibliographies titled “control of information in the US”: JRB, Control of Information in the U.S. and Control of the Media in the U.S.]                  

Felix Abt
CovertAction Magazine
The Intercept
Korea Peace Now
mronline.org
Monthly Review
NADG
The Nation
Nukewatch Quarterly
Gerald Sloan
Space Alert!
UFPJ
Women Cross DMZ
Ann Wright
ZOOMinKorea
Contents NK Anthology #7

TEXTS NORTH KOREA ANTHOLOGY #8

US NUCLEAR WAR PREPARATION: From North Korea’s Nuclear Mouse 2016 to NK’s Ballistic Missiles

“JOINT MILITARY MANUEVERS”

By Gerald Sloan (2017)

Our muscle-flexing with South Korea

is like jabbing a stick in an anthill

then killing the terrified insects.

North Korea has not forgotten

our bombing their dams (a war crime)

in the early ‘fifties, then gleefully

celebrating as their rice paddies

washed away, their primary food

supply. We desperately must justify

our obscenely bloated war machinery. 

2024   

“Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand: Peace in Korea and Northeast Asia Now!” by Dae-Han Song.  Monthly Review (July-August 2024).  (Jul 01, 2024).   https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/

Topics: Geography  History  Imperialism  Inequality  Movements Places: Americas  Asia  korean-peninsula  United States

[This major scholarly article (over 500 Notes), that attempts to understand NK as their leaders understand it, might seem baffling to US readers,  accustomed as we are to a demonized NK.  Anyone growing up in the US anti-communist propaganda regime will find section after section of the article a shock their inculcated system of assumptions regarding that nuclear nation.   –Dick]

On September 9, 1945, US service men looked upon the lowering of the Japanese flag and then saluted the hoisting up of the US flag in its stead in Seoul, South Korea in front of what used to be the office of the Japanese governor-general. This marked the beginning of the US military occupation of what would become South Korea, despite the Korean Peninsula having been a non-combatant. Image credit: Oh Seok-min, “U.S. military releases photos of colonial Japan’s surrender ceremony in 1945,” Yonhap News Agency, September 9, 2020.

Dae-Han Song is the head of the Contents Team for the Seoul-based International Strategy Center and a member of the No Cold War collective.

In his New Year’s address on January 15, 2024, North Korean Workers’ Party Chairman Kim Jong-un proposed removing from North Korea’s socialist constitution the notions of South and North Koreans as compatriots and the pursuit of peaceful reunification.¹ Furthermore, he argued that North Korea’s education should teach students that South Korea is the North’s main enemy state.² While denying that this was an announcement for reunification through preemptive attack, Kim stated that if war broke out, North Korea would occupy, subjugate, and reclaim South Korea.³ This speech severed ties with the more than thirty years of peaceful reunification pursued by North Korea’s two previous leaders.

Since the early 1990s, North Korea has sought the normalization of relations with the United States and peaceful reunification with South Korea. During that time, inter-Korean relations ebbed and flowed. But North Korea’s changed inter-Korean policy moves away from peaceful reunification and toward war in the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia.

If we are to chart our way back to peace, we must understand the motivations that led to such a shift and the historical and geopolitical processes that have led us to our current moment: the failed peace negotiations with the United States, the historical and social limits of South Korean politics, and the intensifying polarization of Northeast Asia due to U.S. military escalation.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously said that “power concedes nothing without a demand.”⁴ Peace movements must organize around a common set of demands against war: opposing the U.S. military escalation that is dividing the region into camps; overcoming the structural limitations of South Korea that keeps it dependent upon the United States; and coalescing frontline struggles within South Korea and the region into a common struggle against U.S. military escalations.

Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s Address

The 2024 New Year’s speech triggered alarm, including among longtime North Korea experts Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, who penned an article, “Is Kim Jong Un Preparing For War?”⁵ In his speech, Kim had shifted toward open hostility by recommending the state remove language asserting that South and North Koreans are “80 million compatriots,” as well as the phrase “independence, peaceful reunification and great national unity” from North Korea’s socialist constitution. Instead, he recommended instilling the “firm idea that ROK [the Republic of Korea] is their [North Korean people’s] primary enemy state and invariable principal enemy.”⁶

The tone was a marked shift from the approach taken by the state over the past three decades. For reunification, Kim envisioned “completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annex [sic] it as a part of the territory of our Republic in case of [sic] a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula.” While severing fraternal relations, he clarified that the goal is not a “preemptive attack for realizing unilateral ‘reunification by force of arms.’” In effect, while he did not rule out reunification through war, he was also not proposing it. This sentiment of breaking ties but not declaring war is buttressed by the fact, often left out in the media, that over two-thirds of the speech focused on building up North Korea’s economy, as the “supreme task…is to stabilize and improve the people’s living as early as possible.” These are hardly the words of someone mobilizing for impending war.⁷

Yet, this shift in North Korea’s policy is also not simply a codification of the current status quo. If war is not around the corner, it is on the horizon. As Professor Jung-chul Lee of Seoul National University points out, we cannot really know the full meaning of these declarations given the current state of the world, the region, and the hardline administration of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.⁸  Conflict erupting between China, the United States, and Taiwan could destabilize the Korean Peninsula. Furthermore, as the United States is bogged down in regional wars and conflicts—particularly in Ukraine and Israel’s ongoing attacks against Gaza—miscalculations or escalating responses by Yoon and Kim have the potential to ignite war in the region.

Extricating ourselves from the current situation must start with understanding the motivations behind the speech. Kim’s remarks at the December 27, 2023, Ninth Plenary of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea provides some context for understanding them. Kim stated that South Korea’s status as a “colonial pawn of the United States” makes it an inappropriate counterpart to discuss “reunification.”⁹  Furthermore, he stated that, regardless of which party is in power, South Korea’s policy of reunification has always been one of reunification through absorption and the collapse of North Korea.¹⁰ If these are the stated causes for North Korea’s shift in policy, we must look at how we got to this point. To understand, we must look back to the causes and dynamics that brought us to the situation today.

North Korea-U.S. Negotiations Collapse Again

The collapsed Hanoi Summit in 2019 marks a decisive point in shifting North Korea’s strategy. The summit was one of a long string of failed peace negotiations with the United States that started with the thawing of the Cold War in the 1980s as North Korea shifted its U.S. policy from confrontation to engagement. Revisiting the ebbs and flows of the negotiation process reveals that North Korea earnestly pursued peace with a vacillating United States, whose geopolitical stratagems and imperialist ideology not only sapped its commitment to the process, but often also actively derailed it. The book Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program by Hecker, nuclear scientist, former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a longtime expert on North Korea’s nuclear weapons, offers valuable insights into the historical context of and motivations behind the negotiation process.

One of the most important elements in comprehending the negotiation process is understanding North Korea’s paradoxical pursuit of peace with the United States through nuclear bombs. This shift was precipitated by the thawing of the Cold War, which risked leaving North Korea isolated: China normalized relations with the United States and then—despite North Korea’s strong opposition—with South Korea.¹¹ In 1988, North Korean leadership presented a plan for peaceful unification that included a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, disarmament, and peace between North and South Korea. In exchange for respecting its autonomy, North Korea would “let bygones be bygones” and “continue to work towards improving relations” with the United States.¹² North Korea’s shift in its U.S. policy from confrontation to engagement was a significant change given North Korea’s animosity toward the primary role of the United States in dividing the Korean Peninsula, as well as its near carpet bombing of North Korea.¹³ Furthermore, by 1992, the North was even secretly willing to accept “continuing US military presence on the Peninsula as a hedge against expanded, potentially hostile, Chinese or Russian influence.”¹⁴ Much like North Korea had played the Soviet Union and China against each other, in the post-Cold War era, when ideological bonds were weakened, North Korea was hoping to do the same with the United States as a new balancing force.¹⁵

North Korea’s approach was to normalize relations with the United States from a position of strength and not of weakness. Thus, it pursued a dual-track strategy of diplomacy and nuclear weapons “to hedge against failure in one track or the other.”¹⁶ When diplomacy failed or stalled, North Korea would switch to developing its nuclear weapons. Its survival would be ensured, whether through peace or a nuclear deterrent. Furthermore, the nuclear track could pressure the United States to return to the diplomatic track.¹⁷ As longtime North Korea experts Carlin and John Lewis observed, the best way for the United States to denuclearize North Korea would have been to “make room for the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] in an American vision of the future of Northeast Asia.”¹⁸ One such close moment was the October 2000 joint communiqué to fundamentally improve relations that emerged from U.S. President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework.¹⁹

Clinton’s “Grand Bargain”

In 1994, the Korean Peninsula was one decision away from being engulfed in a catastrophic war. Faced with the possibility that North Korea was extracting fissile material from its spent nuclear rods to produce plutonium bombs, Clinton contemplated the possibility of a preemptive strike against North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor. The latter would have triggered a North Korean attack upon South Korea; the ensuing conflict was expected to kill one million people.²⁰ Former president Jimmy Carter’s visit with Chairman Kim Il-sung averted catastrophe and opened negotiations to the 1994 Agreed Framework. This “grand bargain” would normalize diplomatic and economic relations through the phased dismantling of the Yongbyon reactor and its replacement with two light-water nuclear ones.²¹ Heavy fuel oil would be provided during the transition.

North Korea froze operation of its graphite-moderated reactors, accepted the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring, and cooperated in the safe storage of its spent fuel. In 1998, U.S. officials stated to Congress their satisfaction with North Korea’s fulfillment of the agreement.²² The United States, however, offered neither “formal assurances, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons” nor delivered on the construction of its light-water reactors.²³ As early as December 1996, a Republican-dominated Congress blocked the Clinton administration from meeting its obligations; Congress was waiting for North Korea to collapse.²⁴ It was likely during this time, in the late 1990s, when the United States appeared split on fulfilling its obligations, that North Korea started its uranium enrichment insurance policy: a second, more technologically sophisticated (but easier to conceal and expand) path toward a nuclear bomb. In 1998, with the Agreed Framework “moribund,” North Korea launched a missile over Japan.²⁵ Despite the provocations (or, more likely, because of them), the United States and North Korea salvaged the Agreed Framework and achieved the October 2000 joint communiqué to “build a new relationship free from past enmity.” When Clinton left office, North Korea was “at the bottom of the list of future security problems for the United States.”²⁶

George W. Bush: Neocon Regime Change. . . .  

Obama’s Strategic Neglect. . . .

Neocons Derail Trump’s RapprochemenT. . . .

Bi-Partisan Pax Americana

Neoconservatives, including Robert Joseph and Bolton, have done the most to derail negotiations with North Korea. Many of these neoconservatives were associated with the Project for the New American Century, the founding principles of which espouse “American military preeminence” to consolidate its “global leadership” in the post-Cold War moment so that it can “maintain American security and advance American interests” through a “foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad.”⁴⁹ Given its impetus to challenge not just the “regime hostile to our interests” and to U.S. “values,” neoconservative policy was, from the outset, incompatible with North Korea’s dual-track approach for co-existence on an equal footing. Even as denuclearization took place, Bush accused North Korean leadership of being tyrants and dictators. For an ideology that aggressively, albeit selectively, and militarily pushes and enforces U.S. values, such labels are more than words; they are the future justifications for war and intervention.⁵⁰

Yet, it was not simply the neoconservatives that impeded negotiations with North Korea; liberal hawks also did. Even as the Clinton administration engaged with North Korea, it labeled the country one of the “backlash states” that “threaten the democratic order being created around them.”⁵¹ Liberal hawks, including under the Obama and Joe Biden administrations, might differ on the means, but the Democratic Party and its foreign policy advisors are part of the same military-industrial complex and foreign policy network that extends the Monroe Doctrine of U.S. domination globally.⁵²

The Center for a New American Security, a think tank replete with officials from the Clinton, Obama, and current Biden administrations, not only receives funding from major weapons manufacturers, it also reflects much of the same rhetoric as the Project for the New American Century.⁵³ In the center’s first report, The Inheritance and the Way Forward, written by Michèle Flournoy (Obama’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy) and Kurt Campbell (architect of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” and Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State), affirms the same commitment to the United States being “the preeminent leader in the international community” so that it can “protect or advance our interests in a globalized world,” even as it restrains the more aggressive impulses of the neoconservatives.⁵⁴

If North Korea viewed denuclearization as part of a larger normalization process with the United States, the United States, even in the most fruitful years under the Clinton administration, viewed negotiations not as a way to establish peace with North Korea, but as a way of disarming it. It is worth pointing out that while the world needs denuclearization, in practice, this has simply meant preventing small countries from going nuclear, while the nuclear powers, including the only country to use nuclear bombs twice, keep their vast arsenal.

Furthermore, any observer of U.S. foreign policy can infer that while friends can become foes, foes rarely become friends—unless they agree to house the U.S. military. After all, despite (or perhaps because of) having given up its nuclear weapons in 2003, Libya was attacked eight years later by NATO.⁵⁵ Today, the Biden administration contains the same liberal hawks, notably Antony Blinken and Campbell, who were a part of Obama’s failed “strategic patience.” . . . .  MORE

Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand

If the South Korean movements for peace can be classified as either those pursuing peace or those pursuing reunification, then each has approached the problem of peace too generally (peace in broad strokes) or too locally (peace focused on the inter-Korean process). Today, both approaches need to come together into a coherent movement that encompasses broader universal demands to build solidarity across the region, as well as being informed by the specific geopolitical realities confronting Koreans.

Revisiting North Korea’s assessment of the situation provides a start for re-engagement with North Korea in a peace-based process. If North Korea has rejected peaceful reunification with a South Korea that is under the heavy influence of the United States and is seeking reunification based on absorption and designating North Korea the main enemy, then the key for improving conditions is a South Korea that has restored its self-determination, one that seeks peaceful engagement respectful of North Korea’s system and does not push a hostile policy. There must be, in effect, a South Korea with the independence and willingness to engage meaningfully with the North.

Yet, neither these nor the necessary broader regional peace can be achieved by standing on the sidelines of history. If South Korea is to play its role in bringing peace to Korea and the region, then its peace movements need to come together to pressure its government to rise up to the task. Discussion, debate, and mutual dialogue must allow us to come up with a common banner for peace, justice, and people’s well-being. In that spirit, I present the following demands to catalyze conversation:

1.     Peace in the Korean Peninsula. The tensions and instability of the unfinished Korean War have plagued the lives of Koreans and their neighbors. Peace in the Korean Peninsula must be achieved not by pressuring and isolating North Korea, which not only violates its sovereign right to exist, but also justifies and fuels North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. The only path to peace in the Korean Peninsula is through the normalization of relations that guarantee North Korea’s security. At its core, the United States must be pressured to normalize diplomatic and economic relations with North Korea.

2.     Peace in the Taiwan Strait. A historical and legal basis exists in which Taiwan is part of China as one country. Nonetheless, Taiwan’s period of political separation from the People’s Republic of China has resulted in the creation of its own institutions. It is also clear that Taiwan, situated barely one hundred miles from mainland China, is a red line for China in terms of its security concerns. Their differences must be resolved peacefully lest we have a war that would be catastrophic not just for China, Taiwan, and the United States, but also for the Korean Peninsula and for Japan, which would likely be dragged into it.⁷¹

3.     Northeast Asia Peace Community. While peace in the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait are key components for peace in Northeast Asia, peace in Northeast Asia is also key for peace in the Korean Peninsula. The division of the region into two separate camps strains regional stability and lays the tinder for open conflagration.

4.     Fight social problems and climate change, not war. South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are all experiencing various levels of social problems, from low birth rates to an aging population. Furthermore, the world is faced with the climate crisis. Military spending diverts resources and energy that should be going to improve people’s livelihoods, as well as both mitigating and adapting to a world being reshaped by a rapidly changing climate.

How do these translate into demands?

1.     We must oppose the joint U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) and South Korean war games that escalate inter-Korean tensions. While labeled as routine, these exercises mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their accompanying weaponry, including nuclear capable aircraft to practice the leadership decapitation, nuclear strike, and full-scale invasion of North Korea near its own waters.
  In a moment of unintended empathy, military strategists pointed out the dangerous nature of war games aimed at China that might serve as cover for an actual invasion of Taiwan.⁷² Likewise, the U.S.-South Korea large-scale military exercises disrupt North Korea’s economy by forcing it to mobilize its full military in response. Some of the greatest overtures the United States has made include pausing these war games. When George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and Trump paused the USFK and South Korean war exercises, North Korea responded with diplomatic overtures. Pausing the military exercises to decrease tensions does little to threaten USFK and South Korean war readiness. Furthermore, we must pause all the other war games that are escalating tensions in the region and the world such as the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise.

2.     We must recover wartime operational control. Currently, the United States Forces Korea holds operational control over both its own military and that of South Korea during wartime.⁷³ Regaining the authority to control its own troops during war would give South Korea greater independence and leeway on whether or not to participate in the U.S.-South Korea joint war games.

3.     We must dismantle security agreements like the American-Japanese-Korean trilateral pact, which trigger mirror accords between China, Russia, and North Korea. If the war in Ukraine was ultimately triggered by de facto NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, then the splitting of the region across the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula lays the conditions for regional conflict. We should also dispel all illusions that a multinational integrated missile defense system will make us impregnable to missiles. As the U.S. military understands it, the only “deterrent” is not a shield, but the threat of a counterforce (first strike), or, in the case of second strike capability, a massive nuclear counterattack. Interceptor missiles are useful in the first case, not the second. Much like the catastrophic impact of a levee that collapses under the growing weight of rising waters, this strategy works until mutual assured destruction is actually triggered.

4.     We must support each other’s struggles in the region. Such solidarity should not simply be centered on the struggle of one’s country, but on the larger struggle for peace in the region. It is easy to become absorbed in the immediate demands and fruits from one’s own struggle. Yet, peace in the region is interconnected and requires long-term vision and investment in strengthening our solidarity. This means actively participating in the struggles for peace across Northeast Asia, such as the annual May peace march in Okinawa, or other special anniversaries and occasions in the region, such as the anniversary of the June 15 Inter-Korean Summit.

5.     We must support struggles on the frontlines. While often war and militarization might appear to be abstract and distant issues, they are very concrete and immediate for those living in sites of struggle, such as near bases in Okinawa, or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense installation in Soseong-ri in South Korea, or the Naval Base on Jeju Island. Many of these struggles might have started from an immediate impact on people’s daily lives. Yet, they offer political exposure that transforms people into peace activists.

We are in perilous times. Our ability to find common ground, understanding, and agreement on tactical and strategic objectives will be crucial for achieving peace in the region, improving people’s lives, and addressing the planetary crisis.

Notes (Substantiation for all claims and comments)https://monthlyreview.org/2024/07/01/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-peace-in-korea-and-northeast-asia-now/

2022
[I add an occasional report from the ADG to remind us how the US mainstream media functions as an extension of US foreign policy.]

KIM TONG-HYUNG.   “ N. Korea: Nuclear strike is on table.”

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (1 May 2022).

. . .Kim’s threat to use his nuclear forces to protect his country’s ambiguously defined “fundamental interests” possibly portends an escalatory nuclear doctrine that could pose greater concern for South Korea, Japan and the United States, experts say.

North Korea has conducted 13 rounds of weapons launches so far this year, including its first full-range test of an ICBM since 2017, while Kim exploits a favorable environment to push forward its weapons program as the U.N. Security Council remains divided and effectively paralyzed over Russia’s war in Ukraine.

There are also signs that North Korea is rebuilding tunnels at a nuclear testing ground that was last active in 2017. Some experts say the North may try to conduct a new test sometime between the inauguration of South Korean President-elect Yoon Suk Yeol on May 10 and his planned summit with President Joe Biden on May 21 to maximize its political effect.

U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter said the United States was aware of reports that North Korea could be preparing to conduct a nuclear test, which she said would be deeply destabilizing for the region and undermine the global nonproliferation regime.  [Be informed about Obama $trillion redesigning US nuclear arsenal.  –D]

“We urge the DPRK to refrain from further destabilizing activity and instead engage in serious and sustained dialogue,” she said, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

WHAT’RE WE GOING TO DO WITHOUT A DEMON TO HATE?
Jeremy Kuzmarov.   “Contrary to Relentless Media Demonization, A Swiss Businessman Who Worked in North Korea For Seven Years Found Much To Like About the Country.”  CovertAction Magazine.  May 05, 2022 1:44 pm.

In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page article titled “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.”

Co-authored by Pulitzer-winning correspondent David E. Sanger, the article cited satellite imagery and a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to argue that North Korea was continuing to secretly develop missiles in violation of the June 2018 Singapore agreement between Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

However, the prominently embedded satellite photo was actually dated March 2018—three months before Kim and Trump met in Singapore—and the missile bases presented as damning evidence of Kim’s duplicity had been known to South Korea for at least two years.

The Times’s deception is part of a larger media propaganda campaign against North Korea that has helped condition the U.S. public to accept draconian U.S. sanctions policies, the spending of billions of dollars per year beefing up the South Korean military, and the $7.1 billion Pacific Deterrence Initiative that includes a major naval build-up in the South China Sea.

PEACE
“Tell Congress: It’s Time for Peace with North Korea.”  UFPJ (June 2022). 
Tensions between the U.S. and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or “North Korea”) are on the rise again. In recent weeks, North Korea has conducted missile tests, and the U.S. and South Korea have responded with missile of tests of their own. Moreover, a recent outbreak of COVID-19 in North Korea threatens a population that is already experiencing shortages of food and basic supplies. Today it’s as urgent as ever for the U.S. to work toward a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. A peace agreement would be a crucial step toward nuclear disarmament, and without it renewed military conflict could erupt at any moment. It would also help reunite thousands of families who have been separated for over 70 years. Call on Congress today to take action.

2017

Social Media and Public Ignorance 2017

ADG.  “Civility, Please.”   [Don’t be too critical.] “Last year, a Pew Research Center study found that 62 percent of Americans get their news from social media.  If the digital landscape has become a place of extremism and propaganda, fake news, trolls and beheadings, what hope is there that people will be properly informed?”  The Baltimore Sun  in NADG, “Civility, Please.”  [ A treasured subject for the US propaganda system is the evil of NK (one of the “nexus of evil”) versus virtuous, exceptional US.  Despite all of the evidence available through my seven anthologies on Korea and other sources that seek to see the world as other see it, and thereby to change our manner of thinking, our government continues its pro-war disinformation campaign filtered down to the public through the mainstream media and social media.  Why not?  The campaign is successful.  The US is not a dictatorship because its leaders see that’s not necessary.  –Dick]

Two Mor4e Examples of Mainstream Media (MM)/ADG REPORTING OF TRUMP Bellicosity

Trump Damages the Stock Market with his Incendiary Threats.

Jay and Crutsinger (AP).  “Stocks Up After N. Korea Cool-off.”  NADG (8-15-17).  The market “’reacted negatively to…Trump’s somewhat [?] incendiary comments about ‘fire and fury,’” but then “’the administration sort of walked back Trump’s comments.’”  Kim Jong Il may be crazy [untrue), but Trump provokes him with bellicose nuclear brinkmanship [true].                              

Dan Thomasson.  “Trump Puts the World at Risk.”  NADG (8-15-17).  Kim Jong Un is “a madman [false] with homicidal tendencies” and “pure military insanity,” but President Trump “provoked North Korean leadership into threats” of nuclear bombing Guam [true].   [Mainstream US media establishing a balance between Jong-Un and Trump.]   [See Cumings below esp.]

Controversial deployment of the U.S.’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system:   SURROUNDING RUSSIA AND CHINA, South Korean Resistance

“THAAD Will Not Protect South Korea.”  [Trump Admin.]

Published on March 29, 2017  by ZoominKorea  (also published in Space Alert)

https://koreaexpose.com/thaad-missile-defense-no-help-korea

Elderly women held up signs reading “Illegal THAAD, back to the U.S!” as they marched, leaning on walking frames for support. 

Soseong-ri, their small village in South Korea, has become the center of a fight that could lay the groundwork for U.S.-Korean relations under Seoul’s next government. On Mar. 18, 5,000 people from across South Korea gathered in the village to protest the controversial deployment of the U.S.’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system.  In July 2016, the US and South Korean governments announced plans to deploy the THAAD system in Seongju County, North Gyeongsang Province. But due to staunch opposition from local residents, the location was revised to a nearby golf course owned by the South Korean corporation Lotte, nestled between Soseong-ri in Seongju County and the city of Gimcheon.  Since Lotte handed its land over to the South Korean Ministry of National Defense on Feb. 27, Soseong-ri, just three kilometers from the golf course, has become the front line in the fight against the missile system. The deployment has already begun and the South’s defense ministry will soon transfer the land to United States Forces Korea (USFK). Residents of Seongju and nearby Gimcheon have vowed to reverse the deployment.  A “Peace Walk” in opposition to THAAD took place near the former Lotte Skyhill Seongju Country Club, the missile deployment site, on Mar. 18. 

Missile Defense Is No Defense
[the THAAD deployment in Seongju will not protect South Korean citizens and is not intended to; see below for explanation  –D]
THAAD, made by the U.S. weapons firm Lockheed Martin, stands for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. It consists of a radar, used to surveil the missile activity of so-called enemy countries and detect incoming missiles, and interceptor missiles, which — in theory — can be launched to shoot down incoming missiles in mid-air.

The THAAD deployment in South Korea is supposed to counter threats from the North, but it is not unique. The U.S. has missile defense systems installed all over the world, mainly in Eastern Europe and Asia, and it is clear from their locations that their deployments are aimed at creating a network surrounding China and Russia.

[ANALOGY, MISSILE DEFENSE, AND /PREEMPTIVE FIRST STRIKE ADVANTAGE]
If two adversarial countries have nuclear weapons, neither will attack the other, because it fears retaliation in the form of a nuclear counter-attack. Picture two people holding guns to each others’ heads. If one shoots first, the other will shoot back, and vice versa. The result is a perpetual standoff. This is known as mutually assured destruction, and proved an effective form of deterrence between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War.  But to return to our analogy: If one gunman renders the other unable to fire, nothing deters him from pulling the trigger of his own gun. This is the ultimate aim of missile defense — to gain first strike advantage by removing the enemy’s ability to retaliate. 

[US/SU ABM TREATY AND PRES. BUSH REPUDIATION OF IT, THREATENING NUCLEAR WAR] 
U.S. missile defense systems are dangerous precisely because they enable a preemptive nuclear strike. This is why some argue that such systems are, in fact, offensive. It is also why, in 1972, the US and the Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), which limited the development of missile defense systems by both countries. But in 2002, after thirty years of relative stability guaranteed by mutually assured destruction, former U.S. President George W Bush walked away from the ABM Treaty.  Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned antiwar activist who was present at the signing of the ABM Treaty, said:  When president Bush came into office, he said, ‘I’m getting out of the ABM Treaty.’ That was a key moment in the strategic equation, because the ABM Treaty was the main source of strategic stability.  China, Russia and North Korea have all declared a policy of no first use, i.e. they will not use their nuclear weapons offensively, but the US has not done the same and reserves the right of preemptive strike.

No Protection for South Korea
According to JJ Suh, professor of Politics and International Affairs at International Christian University in Japan, the aim of the THAAD deployment in Seongju is not to protect South Korean citizens at all: “This system is designed to work at higher altitudes, higher than 45 kilometers. But most North Korean missiles [that would be used against South Korea] are short-range missiles that would fly below 45 kilometers.”
The THAAD system, Suh said, serves U.S. strategic interests in the region: It can be… deployed against intermediate-range missiles from North Korea targeting Okinawa… or Guam. And so, it’s more plausible that the U.S. military wants to deploy the THAAD system in South Korea to protect [U.S.] soldiers and military assets in the region, rather than South Koreans in South Korea.

The THAAD radar, if stationed in South Korea, would also significantly expand the U.S.’s field of vision for spying on Chinese missile activity. For this reason, China has been staunchly opposed to the system’s deployment in South Korea.

[SK A PAWN FOR US GLOBAL AMBITIONS]
But the South Korean people may pay a steep price for hosting THAAD, warned missile defense expert and MIT professor Ted Postol. The system, he says, “will put South Korea in the path of a potential conflict between the U.S. and China. In the event of a confrontation between these two superpowers, China’s first target for a nuclear strike could be the THAAD radar in Seongju”. . . .  MORE [a major article: THAAD is unproven, extremely expensive, extremely dangerous to S. Korea, and extremely unstabilizing globally] https://koreaexpose.com/thaad-missile-defense-no-help-korea/

 Bruce Cumings .  “This Is What’s Really Behind North Korea’s Nuclear  Provocations.”  The Nation (MARCH 23, 2017). 

It’s easy to dismiss Kim Jong-un as a madman [as do the writers in the ADG above].   But there’s a long history of US aggression against the North, which we forget at our peril.

https://www.thenation.com/article/this-is-whats-really-behind-north-koreas-nuclear-provocations

[The eminent author of half a dozen books on NK—see below–explains US provocations of NK.  -D] 

Donald Trump was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on February 11 when a message arrived mid-meal, courtesy of Pyongyang: North Korea had just tested a new, solid-fuel, intermediate-range ballistic missile, fired from a mobile—and therefore hard-to-detect—launcher. The president pulled out his 1990s flip-phone and discussed this event in front of the various people sitting within earshot. One of these diners, Richard DeAgazio, was suitably agog at the import of this weighty scene, posting the following comment on his Facebook page: “HOLY MOLY!!! It was fascinating to watch the flurry of activity at dinner when the news came that North Korea had launched a missile in the direction of Japan.”

Actually, this missile was aimed directly at Mar-a-Lago, figuratively speaking. It was a pointed nod to history that no American media outlet grasped: “Prime Minister Shinzo,” as Trump called him, is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a former Japanese prime minister whom Abe reveres. Nobusuke was deemed a “Class A” war criminal by the US occupation authorities after World War II, and he ran munitions manufacturing in Manchuria in the 1930s, when Gen. Hideki Tojo was provost marshal there. Kim Il-sung, whom grandson Kim Jong-un likewise reveres, was fighting the Japanese at the same time and in the same place.

[US, NOT NK, PROVOCATIONS]   As I wrote for this magazine in January 2016, the North Koreans must be astonished to discover that US leaders never seem to grasp the import of their history-related provocations. Even more infuriating is Washington’s implacable refusal ever to investigate our 72-year history of conflict with the North; all of our media appear to live in an eternal present, with each new crisis treated as sui generis. Visiting Seoul in March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asserted that North Korea has a history of violating one agreement after another; in fact, President Bill Clinton got it to freeze its plutonium production for eight years (1994–2002) and, in October 2000, had indirectly worked out a deal to buy all of its medium- and long-range missiles. Clinton also signed an agreement with Gen. Jo Myong-rok stating that henceforth, neither country would bear “hostile intent” toward the other.

The Bush administration promptly ignored both agreements and set out to destroy the 1994 freeze. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is rightly seen as a world-historical catastrophe, but next in line would be placing North Korea in his “axis of evil” and, in September 2002, announcing his “preemptive” doctrine directed at Iraq and North Korea, among others. The simple fact is that Pyongyang would have no nuclear weapons if Clinton’s agreements had been sustained.

Now comes Donald Trump, blasting into a Beltway milieu where, in recent months, a bipartisan consensus has emerged based on the false assumption that all previous attempts to rein in the North’s nuclear program have failed, so it may be time to use force—to destroy its missiles or topple the regime. Last September, the centrist Council on Foreign Relations issued a report stating that “more assertive military and political actions” should be considered, “including those that directly threaten the existence of the [North Korean] regime.” Tillerson warned of preemptive action on his recent East Asia trip, and a former Obama-administration official, Antony Blinken, wrote in The New York Times that a “priority” for the Trump administration should be working with China and South Korea to “secure the North’s nuclear arsenal” in the event of “regime change.” But North Korea reportedly has some 15,000 underground facilities of a national-security nature. It is insane to imagine the Marines traipsing around the country in such a “search and secure” operation, and yet the Bush and Obama administrations had plans to do just that. Obama also ran a highly secret cyber-war against the North for years, seeking to infect and disrupt its missile program. If North Korea did that to us, it might well be considered an act of war.

On November 8, 2016, nearly 66 million voters for Hillary Clinton received a lesson in Hegel’s “cunning of history.” A bigger lesson awaits Donald Trump, should he attack North Korea. It has the fourth-largest army in the world, as many as 200,000 highly trained special forces, 10,000 artillery pieces in the mountains north of Seoul, mobile missiles that can hit all American military bases in the region (there are hundreds), and nuclear weapons more than twice as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb (according to a new estimate in a highly detailed Times study by David Sanger and William Broad).

Last October, I was at a forum in Seoul with Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state for Bill Clinton. Like everyone else, Talbott averred that North Korea might well be the top security problem for the next president. In my remarks, I mentioned Robert McNamara’s explanation, in Errol Morris’s excellent documentary The Fog of War, for our defeat in Vietnam: We never put ourselves in the shoes of the enemy and attempted to see the world as they did. Talbott then blurted, “It’s a grotesque regime!” There you have it: It’s our number-one problem, but so grotesque that there’s no point trying to understand Pyongyang’s point of view (or even that it might have some valid concerns). North Korea is the only country in the world to have been systematically blackmailed by US nuclear weapons going back to the 1950s, when hundreds of nukes were installed in South Korea. I have written much about this in these pages and in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Why on earth would Pyongyang not seek a nuclear deterrent? But this crucial background doesn’t enter mainstream American discourse. History doesn’t matter, until it does—when it rears up and smacks you in the face.

[Some of Prof. Cumings’ books:  1981, Origins of the Korean War; 1997, Korea’s Place in the Sun; 2003, North Korea; 2004, Inventing the Axis of Evil; 2010, The Korean War: a History. 

Mehdi Hasan.   Support Us

“Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason — They Remember the Korean War.”   The Intercept.  May 3 2017.
Americans may not remember the devastating impact of U.S. bombing raids on civilian targets, but North Koreans cannot forget it.

It’s a question that has bewildered Americans again and again in the wake of 9/11, in reference to the Arab and Muslim worlds. These days, however, it’s a question increasingly asked about the reclusive North Koreans.

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. Children are taught to hate Americans in school while adults mark a “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month” every year (it’s in June, in case you were wondering).

North Korean officials make wild threats against the United States while the regime, led by the brutal and sadistic Kim Jong-un, pumps out fake news in the form of self-serving propaganda, on an industrial scale. In the DPRK, anti-American hatred is a commodity never in short supply.

“The hate, though,” as longtime North Korea watcher Blaine Harden observed in the Washington Post, “is not all manufactured.” Some of it, he wrote, “is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets.”

Forgets as in the “forgotten war.” Yes, the Korean War. Remember that? The one wedged between World War II and the Vietnam War? The first “hot” war of the Cold War, which took place between 1950 and 1953, and which has since been conveniently airbrushed from most discussions and debates about the “crazy” and “insane” regime in Pyongyang? Forgotten despite the fact that this particular war isn’t even over — it was halted by an armistice agreement, not a peace treaty — and despite the fact that the conflict saw the United States engage in numerous war crimes, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, continue to shape the way North Koreans view the United States, even if the residents of the United States remain blissfully ignorant of their country’s belligerent past.

For the record, it was the North Koreans, and not the Americans or their South Korean allies, who started the war in June 1950, when they crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the south. Nevertheless, “What hardly any Americans know or remember,” University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings writes in his book “The Korean War: A History,” “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”

How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II?

How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?

Twenty. Percent. For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population. According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”

Every. Town. More than 3 million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the vast majority of them in the north. . . .  MORE

If another Korean war, a potentially nuclear war, is to be avoided and if, as the Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera famously wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” then ordinary Americans can no longer afford to forget the death, destruction, and debilitating legacy of the original Korean War.

SEEKING PEACE

ANN WRIGHT’S VISIT to NK 10-23-17

IN Q&A asked about access:

Quaker’s have had a farming project in NK for some 35 years.  Mennonites too.

See Korean Peace Network and Divided Families.

Ann (our exemplary peacemaker from Bentonville) visited NK with other Code Pink women and marched with 5000 NK women for Peace.

Alas, although 175 nations have diplomatic relations with NK, US does not.

3-4-23 Ann sent me this update:

Since the Trump administration there has been essentially a US ban on US citizens travelling to North Korea as one must get from the US State Dept a “special validation passport” and then a North Korean visa–which they haven’t been giving due to COVID!

Lots of effort on getting a Congressional resolution to end the Korean war.

And on July 27 a big mobilization in Washington, DC, the 70th anniversary of the armistice of 1953.

Two websites have lots more information:

Women Cross DMZ

Korea Peace Now

Ann Wright (author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience

www.voicesofconscience.com)

2016

     “US and Arms Dealers Shriek at Sight of North Korean Mouse.”  Nukewatch Quarterly (Spring 2016).       http://www.nukewatchinfo.org/Quarterly/2016%20Spring/Page%205%20Spring%202016.pdf

North Korea’s January 6 announcement that it conducted an H-bomb test was both ridiculed as completely implausible and condemned as highly “provocative.” Its February 7 satellite launch was likewise denounced as a “cover” for long-range ballistic missile development. Without hard evidence that North Korea has even a single nuclear weapon, official “concern” over the North’s nuclear program needs to be manufactured if our own nuclear arsenalists are to stay in business.

With the enormous Y-12 nuclear weapons complex in his home state desperately searching for an enemy, it is no surprise to hear Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn. and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chant that he wants the US “to take a more assertive role in addressing North Korea’s provocation.” Anna Fifield, the Washington Post Bureau Chief in Tokyo, who should at least pretend to be an impartial observer, wrote January 6 that the underground bomb test was a “brazen provocation and a clear defiance of international treaties.” Fifield later told National Public Radio that she wouldn’t want to speculate about what motivated North Korean President Kim Jong Un, because the inside of his head “is a scary place” [see above from ADG].   The NPR interviewer let this unsubstantiated assertion go unchallenged, like it was common knowledge.

North Korea is such a military, economic and political nothing, that it is disgraceful to see the national media parrot official Pentagon and State Department fear-mongering about Pyongyang’s supposedly terrible, belligerent, and aggressive intentions, and pathetic to see public opinion crystalized in unison.

When was the last time North Korea bombed, invaded, militarily occupied, or  installed puppet regimes in other lands? Those brazenly provocative violations of international treaties were committed by the United States. When has North Korea placed 5,000-man, “super carriers,” (the largest ships in the world, each carrying 60 aircraft) in the Persian Gulf and attacked Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan using Reaper drones and jet fighter-bombers? Oh yes; that was the United States.  (continued at http://www.nukewatchinfo.org/Quarterly/2016%20Spring/Page%205%20Spring%202016.pdf)

Contents: North Korea Anthology  #7, October 29, 2017
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/10/omni-north-korea-newsletter-7-october.html

Threatening War

Dick Bennett: Headlines Threatening War: the White House/Pentagon/Mainstream Media Complex

Jon Schwartz and Suki Kim on NK in The Intercept

Dick Bennett: Peace Achieved 1991-2, and Again 2016-17?  Kim Il Sung/Jimmy Carter/Kim Jong Un and Bill Clinton/Jimmy Carter/Donald Trump

Dick Bennett:  Summary: BombasticTit for Tat.

Seeking Peace

Art Hobson: Make Peace with North Korea

Dick Bennett: See the World as Others See It—J. William Fulbright and the Role of Empathy in Making Peace

Stop Anti-Ballistic THAAD

Innovate!  Valerie Plame:  Use the System to Stop War-Mongers, Buy into Twitter

Take Action with PeaceAction

END NORTH KOREA ANTHOLOGY #8https://www.thenation.com/article/this-is-whats-really-behind-north-koreas-nuclear-provocations

[The eminent author of half a dozen books on NK—see below–explains US provocations of NK.  -D] 

Donald Trump was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on February 11 when a message arrived mid-meal, courtesy of Pyongyang: North Korea had just tested a new, solid-fuel, intermediate-range ballistic missile, fired from a mobile—and therefore hard-to-detect—launcher. The president pulled out his 1990s flip-phone and discussed this event in front of the various people sitting within earshot. One of these diners, Richard DeAgazio, was suitably agog at the import of this weighty scene, posting the following comment on his Facebook page: “HOLY MOLY!!! It was fascinating to watch the flurry of activity at dinner when the news came that North Korea had launched a missile in the direction of Japan.”

Actually, this missile was aimed directly at Mar-a-Lago, figuratively speaking. It was a pointed nod to history that no American media outlet grasped: “Prime Minister Shinzo,” as Trump called him, is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a former Japanese prime minister whom Abe reveres. Nobusuke was deemed a “Class A” war criminal by the US occupation authorities after World War II, and he ran munitions manufacturing in Manchuria in the 1930s, when Gen. Hideki Tojo was provost marshal there. Kim Il-sung, whom grandson Kim Jong-un likewise reveres, was fighting the Japanese at the same time and in the same place.

[US, NOT NK, PROVOCATIONS]   As I wrote for this magazine in January 2016, the North Koreans must be astonished to discover that US leaders never seem to grasp the import of their history-related provocations. Even more infuriating is Washington’s implacable refusal ever to investigate our 72-year history of conflict with the North; all of our media appear to live in an eternal present, with each new crisis treated as sui generis. Visiting Seoul in March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asserted that North Korea has a history of violating one agreement after another; in fact, President Bill Clinton got it to freeze its plutonium production for eight years (1994–2002) and, in October 2000, had indirectly worked out a deal to buy all of its medium- and long-range missiles. Clinton also signed an agreement with Gen. Jo Myong-rok stating that henceforth, neither country would bear “hostile intent” toward the other.

The Bush administration promptly ignored both agreements and set out to destroy the 1994 freeze. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is rightly seen as a world-historical catastrophe, but next in line would be placing North Korea in his “axis of evil” and, in September 2002, announcing his “preemptive” doctrine directed at Iraq and North Korea, among others. The simple fact is that Pyongyang would have no nuclear weapons if Clinton’s agreements had been sustained.

Now comes Donald Trump, blasting into a Beltway milieu where, in recent months, a bipartisan consensus has emerged based on the false assumption that all previous attempts to rein in the North’s nuclear program have failed, so it may be time to use force—to destroy its missiles or topple the regime. Last September, the centrist Council on Foreign Relations issued a report stating that “more assertive military and political actions” should be considered, “including those that directly threaten the existence of the [North Korean] regime.” Tillerson warned of preemptive action on his recent East Asia trip, and a former Obama-administration official, Antony Blinken, wrote in The New York Times that a “priority” for the Trump administration should be working with China and South Korea to “secure the North’s nuclear arsenal” in the event of “regime change.” But North Korea reportedly has some 15,000 underground facilities of a national-security nature. It is insane to imagine the Marines traipsing around the country in such a “search and secure” operation, and yet the Bush and Obama administrations had plans to do just that. Obama also ran a highly secret cyber-war against the North for years, seeking to infect and disrupt its missile program. If North Korea did that to us, it might well be considered an act of war.

On November 8, 2016, nearly 66 million voters for Hillary Clinton received a lesson in Hegel’s “cunning of history.” A bigger lesson awaits Donald Trump, should he attack North Korea. It has the fourth-largest army in the world, as many as 200,000 highly trained special forces, 10,000 artillery pieces in the mountains north of Seoul, mobile missiles that can hit all American military bases in the region (there are hundreds), and nuclear weapons more than twice as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb (according to a new estimate in a highly detailed Times study by David Sanger and William Broad).

Last October, I was at a forum in Seoul with Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state for Bill Clinton. Like everyone else, Talbott averred that North Korea might well be the top security problem for the next president. In my remarks, I mentioned Robert McNamara’s explanation, in Errol Morris’s excellent documentary The Fog of War, for our defeat in Vietnam: We never put ourselves in the shoes of the enemy and attempted to see the world as they did. Talbott then blurted, “It’s a grotesque regime!” There you have it: It’s our number-one problem, but so grotesque that there’s no point trying to understand Pyongyang’s point of view (or even that it might have some valid concerns). North Korea is the only country in the world to have been systematically blackmailed by US nuclear weapons going back to the 1950s, when hundreds of nukes were installed in South Korea. I have written much about this in these pages and in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Why on earth would Pyongyang not seek a nuclear deterrent? But this crucial background doesn’t enter mainstream American discourse. History doesn’t matter, until it does—when it rears up and smacks you in the face.

[Some of Prof. Cumings’ books:  1981, Origins of the Korean War; 1997, Korea’s Place in the Sun; 2003, North Korea; 2004, Inventing the Axis of Evil; 2010, The Korean War: a History. 

Mehdi Hasan.   Support Us

“Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason — They Remember the Korean War.”   The Intercept.  May 3 2017.
Americans may not remember the devastating impact of U.S. bombing raids on civilian targets, but North Koreans cannot forget it.

It’s a question that has bewildered Americans again and again in the wake of 9/11, in reference to the Arab and Muslim worlds. These days, however, it’s a question increasingly asked about the reclusive North Koreans.

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. Children are taught to hate Americans in school while adults mark a “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month” every year (it’s in June, in case you were wondering).

North Korean officials make wild threats against the United States while the regime, led by the brutal and sadistic Kim Jong-un, pumps out fake news in the form of self-serving propaganda, on an industrial scale. In the DPRK, anti-American hatred is a commodity never in short supply.

“The hate, though,” as longtime North Korea watcher Blaine Harden observed in the Washington Post, “is not all manufactured.” Some of it, he wrote, “is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets.”

Forgets as in the “forgotten war.” Yes, the Korean War. Remember that? The one wedged between World War II and the Vietnam War? The first “hot” war of the Cold War, which took place between 1950 and 1953, and which has since been conveniently airbrushed from most discussions and debates about the “crazy” and “insane” regime in Pyongyang? Forgotten despite the fact that this particular war isn’t even over — it was halted by an armistice agreement, not a peace treaty — and despite the fact that the conflict saw the United States engage in numerous war crimes, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, continue to shape the way North Koreans view the United States, even if the residents of the United States remain blissfully ignorant of their country’s belligerent past.

For the record, it was the North Koreans, and not the Americans or their South Korean allies, who started the war in June 1950, when they crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the south. Nevertheless, “What hardly any Americans know or remember,” University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings writes in his book “The Korean War: A History,” “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”

How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II?

How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?

Twenty. Percent. For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population. According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”

Every. Town. More than 3 million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the vast majority of them in the north. . . .  MORE

If another Korean war, a potentially nuclear war, is to be avoided and if, as the Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera famously wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” then ordinary Americans can no longer afford to forget the death, destruction, and debilitating legacy of the original Korean War.

SEEKING PEACE

ANN WRIGHT’S VISIT to NK 10-23-17

IN Q&A asked about access:

Quaker’s have had a farming project in NK for some 35 years.  Mennonites too.

See Korean Peace Network and Divided Families.

Ann (our exemplary peacemaker from Bentonville) visited NK with other Code Pink women and marched with 5000 NK women for Peace.

Alas, although 175 nations have diplomatic relations with NK, US does not.

3-4-23 Ann sent me this update:

Since the Trump administration there has been essentially a US ban on US citizens travelling to North Korea as one must get from the US State Dept a “special validation passport” and then a North Korean visa–which they haven’t been giving due to COVID!

Lots of effort on getting a Congressional resolution to end the Korean war.

And on July 27 a big mobilization in Washington, DC, the 70th anniversary of the armistice of 1953.

Two websites have lots more information:

Women Cross DMZ

Korea Peace Now

Ann Wright (author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience

www.voicesofconscience.com)

2016

     “US and Arms Dealers Shriek at Sight of North Korean Mouse.”  Nukewatch Quarterly (Spring 2016).       http://www.nukewatchinfo.org/Quarterly/2016%20Spring/Page%205%20Spring%202016.pdf

North Korea’s January 6 announcement that it conducted an H-bomb test was both ridiculed as completely implausible and condemned as highly “provocative.” Its February 7 satellite launch was likewise denounced as a “cover” for long-range ballistic missile development. Without hard evidence that North Korea has even a single nuclear weapon, official “concern” over the North’s nuclear program needs to be manufactured if our own nuclear arsenalists are to stay in business.

With the enormous Y-12 nuclear weapons complex in his home state desperately searching for an enemy, it is no surprise to hear Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn. and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chant that he wants the US “to take a more assertive role in addressing North Korea’s provocation.” Anna Fifield, the Washington Post Bureau Chief in Tokyo, who should at least pretend to be an impartial observer, wrote January 6 that the underground bomb test was a “brazen provocation and a clear defiance of international treaties.” Fifield later told National Public Radio that she wouldn’t want to speculate about what motivated North Korean President Kim Jong Un, because the inside of his head “is a scary place” [see above from ADG].   The NPR interviewer let this unsubstantiated assertion go unchallenged, like it was common knowledge.

North Korea is such a military, economic and political nothing, that it is disgraceful to see the national media parrot official Pentagon and State Department fear-mongering about Pyongyang’s supposedly terrible, belligerent, and aggressive intentions, and pathetic to see public opinion crystalized in unison.

When was the last time North Korea bombed, invaded, militarily occupied, or  installed puppet regimes in other lands? Those brazenly provocative violations of international treaties were committed by the United States. When has North Korea placed 5,000-man, “super carriers,” (the largest ships in the world, each carrying 60 aircraft) in the Persian Gulf and attacked Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan using Reaper drones and jet fighter-bombers? Oh yes; that was the United States.  (continued at http://www.nukewatchinfo.org/Quarterly/2016%20Spring/Page%205%20Spring%202016.pdf)

Contents: North Korea Anthology  #7, October 29, 2017
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/10/omni-north-korea-newsletter-7-october.html

Threatening War

Dick Bennett: Headlines Threatening War: the White House/Pentagon/Mainstream Media Complex

Jon Schwartz and Suki Kim on NK in The Intercept

Dick Bennett: Peace Achieved 1991-2, and Again 2016-17?  Kim Il Sung/Jimmy Carter/Kim Jong Un and Bill Clinton/Jimmy Carter/Donald Trump

Dick Bennett:  Summary: BombasticTit for Tat.

Seeking Peace

Art Hobson: Make Peace with North Korea

Dick Bennett: See the World as Others See It—J. William Fulbright and the Role of Empathy in Making Peace

Stop Anti-Ballistic THAAD

Innovate!  Valerie Plame:  Use the System to Stop War-Mongers, Buy into Twitter

Take Action with PeaceAction

END NORTH KOREA ANTHOLOGY #8