Korea

James Corbett returns to The Power Hour with new host Daniel Brigman for a wide-ranging conversation on tensions with North Korea, Russian sanctions, Chinese censorship, bitcoin, Afghanistan withdrawal, the AI takeover and Fukushima updates.

[audio mp3="http://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/2017-08-01%20Power%20Hour.mp3"][/audio]James Corbett returns to The Power Hour with new host Daniel Brigman for a wide-ranging conversation on tensions with North Korea, Russian sanctions, Chinese censorship, bitcoin, Afghanistan withdrawal, the AI takeover and Fukushima updates.

This year we commemorate the 72nd anniversary of the unjustifiable US use of nuclear weapons against civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those two attacks demonstrated the horrific power of the atomic bomb, a bomb that is tiny in comparison to the nuclear weapons available today.
Here are a few quotes that are worth pondering as we now face an avoidable crisis with North Korea, a nation with a few nuclear weapons.
After the initial use of atomic weapons, Admiral William Leahy, effectively Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, commented:

Touching down in Washington D.C. Friday night after a peace delegation to South Korea, I saw the devastating news. No, it was not that Reince Priebus had been booted from the dysfunctional White House. It was that North Korea had conducted another intercontinental ballistic missile test, and that the United States and South Korea had responded by further ratcheting up this volatile conflict.

[audio mp3="http://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/2017-07-31%20James%20Corbett.mp3"][/audio]James Corbett joins The Vin Armani show once again to discuss war on the Korean peninsula, the great carbon swindle, and how an understanding of kakistocracy leads inevitably to anarchy.

The Coalition Against Foreign Military Bases is a new campaign focused on closing all US military bases abroad. This campaign strikes at the foundation of US empire, confronting its militarism, corporatism and imperialism.  We urge you to endorse this campaign.

On 4 July 2017 North Korea fired a missile from their territory that landed in the Sea of Japan.  Western commentators immediately labeled it an ICBM with the capability of reaching Alaska, and by implication, the north of Australia.
The “threat” posed by North Korea’s missile test has dominated the strategic commentaries ever since.  It was personified by a major article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 8 July 2017 by political editor Peter Hartcher.  Hartcher quoted a number of defence “experts”, all of whom assumed:

Fresh off his election victory, Japanese Prime Minister Kobe as well as several of his cabinet members and top party officials, visited the Yasukuni Shrine outside Tokyo. As usual, reaction across Asia was hostile to the PM’s visit to a shrine that honored Class A war criminals that had been part of an Imperial Japanese war machine that had slaughtered and enslaved millions in the run up to and throughout World War II.

Over the years, Russia has fought more wars against Turkey than any other country, even more than Poland. Likewise, between 1904 and 1905 Russia fought a war with Japan whose devastating outcome for Russia lead to a destabilising revolution at home. Russia’s relations with Japan did not get much better as the century rolled on. The Soviet Union was on the opposite side of the Second World War vis-a-vis Japan and territorial disputes over the Kuril Islands remain unresolved into the 21st century.