Korea

(1) Historical factors have combined to produce a fiercely nationalistic population on both sides of the DMZ.

Many monuments, memorials and names of institutions across Canada celebrate our colonial and racist past. Calls for renaming buildings or pulling down statues are symbolic ways of reinterpreting that history, acknowledging mistakes and small steps towards reconciling with the victims of this country’s policies.
At its heart this process is about searching for the truth, a guiding principle that should be shared by both journalists and historians.

I’m back!!
It has recently been reported that Senator John McCain has an aggressive brain tumor. Not long ago I would have thought: “Good. It’ll be great to be rid of that neanderthal reactionary bastard!”

Winston Churchill’s definition of history was simple but true: “One damn thing after another.” That’s the way the summer has unfolded, particularly the sticky and steamy month of August, historically a month when nerves are frayed and conflict simmers underneath an oppressive sun. So many events. So many angry voices. So little time spent on self-reflection. American fascism is back in the public eye, flaunting its wares and waking up the domestic population, which tends to snooze through the application of its imperial variant to all variety of freethinkers abroad.

… war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.
— Howard Zinn (1922-2919),”Violence Doesn’t Work”, The Progressive, July 18, 2007
All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
— Tony Benn MP., (1925-2014) Tony Benn: “His views on socialism, Europe, war and writing“, BBC News, March 14, 2014
No country too poor, too small, too far away, not to be threat, a threat to the American way of life.

Not too far away from Seattle, Washington there are eight ballistic-missile submarines carrying the world’s large shipments of nuclear weapons.
The 560-foot-long black submarines are docked at the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, hauling what is described by Rick Anderson in a recent Los Angeles Times article as “the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the US.”

The guided-missile destroyer USS John McCain (named for the current Senator’s father and grandfather) has collided with an oil tanker near the cost of Singapore.
The ship sustained heavy damage which has resulted in the injuries of 5 US sailors. Currently, 10 US sailors are missing.

The United States Navy has issued the following statement about the crash:

After Donald Trump threatened the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” I spoke to K.J. Noh, a peace activist and scholar on the geopolitics of the Asian continent.

Rehearsing Armageddon
Ann Garrison: North Korea is standing up to the US’s 4800 “locked and loaded” nuclear weapons with an estimated 30 to 60 of its own. Do you think it would still be standing without them?
K.J.Noh: It’s hard to imagine so.

Like obscene profits from great fraud or theft, “wonder weapons” of mass destruction, to which the atomic bomb certainly belongs, have their origins in the inability and unwillingness to accept the equality and dignity of one’s opponents/ competitors (never mind whether one’s cause/product is legitimate).
The ambivalence of the US position during WWII — the discrepancy which became apparent after 1945 between the stated and unstated policies — allowed and even promoted the mythic justification for US atomic bombing.

The schoolyard taunts between President Trump and North Korean leaders have quieted for now. But the underlying risks of a nuclear showdown remain, as Korea expert Tim Shorrock explained to Dennis J Bernstein. By Dennis J Bernstein Many Asia experts…Read more →