World news outlets were rocked this
week by Donald Trump’s alleged agreement (the news was actually broken, rather
strangely, by the South Korean delegation that brought the North Korean’s offer
to the White House) to hold a meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. Given
Trump’s belligerent rhetoric of only a few months ago in which he threatened to
rain “fire and fury” upon the North Koreans, it was surprising to say the
least. But perhaps it was really not so surprising after all. For Trump clearly
sees in this nuclear summit the prospect of great headlines throughout the
world—and if there is one thing this global narcissist lives for, it’s headlines
announcing a “first” for him (not to mention getting other less savory news off
the front pages). Whether he’ll be able to pull something real out his toupe´
is something else again. For as usual, the headlines mistake what Kim Jong Un
has offered. He did NOT say he was willing to give up his nukes. He said he is
willing to discuss the “denuclearization of the peninsula.” What does that mean? Not exactly clear. But
one thing is certain: Kim Jong Un, like his father and grandfather before him, wants
to get out from under the American threat, both nuclear and otherwise. He wants
to get a formal end to the Korean war (not just a cease-fire). He wants a halt
to the joint military exercises put on twice a year by American and South
Korean forces, including simulated nuclear strikes. He wants an end to
punishing sanctions. So when he says, “denuclearization,” if he means it at
all, he’s talking more about getting rid of American nukes (including those at
the disposal of South Korea) than getting rid of his own. And he may just
figure that if he can get Trump committed to a huge summit meeting, the president
may be so rash as to agree to something that would be a huge victory for Korea.
Already, in fact, Kim has gone a long way toward getting what he has long
sought: using his nuclear testing to induce the United States to recognize him
and his country as equal enough to deserve a summit meeting.
But
enough speculation. Here I would like to simply provide the background I
adduced way back in September when the explosions from both sides were giving
the world daily agita. This is
important to keep in mind when, as no doubt will happen, our media outlets drum
up the heart-stopping “US v THEM” dramatics should a summit actually take
place. Hence, this blog, first posted on September 5, 2017. It’s titled, ‘Who’s ‘Begging for War?’
As North Korea ups the ante once
again, this time with a massive nuclear blast that some observers (and the
North Koreans themselves) are calling a hydrogen bomb, the rhetoric coming out
of the Trump administration gets more belligerent by the minute. As I noted in
a previous blog, the two adolescent leaders—Kim Jong Un of North Korea and
Donald Trump of the U.S.—are engaged in a pissing contest. ‘My dick is bigger
than yours; look how far my piss goes.’ Only it’s not piss that’s being
compared; it’s weapons of such massive destructive power that most rational
humans shudder to even contemplate their use. But not the Donald. “What’s a
nuke for, if we can’t use it?” he once said. Most recently, Nikki Haley (who,
before becoming our UN Ambassador, seemed semi-rational) has been uttering
nutter phrases like “We have kicked the can down the road enough. There is no
more road left…” No more road for diplomacy, is what she seems to mean,
especially considering that she also said Kim Jong Un is “begging for war.” The
President himself tweeted much the same thing, berating the South Koreans for
their “talk of appeasement with North Korea,” which will “not work, they only
understand one thing.” That is, violence of the nuclear variety.
And
as we all look on in horror as nuclear Armageddon looms ever closer, we have to
ask: Just who is it that’s begging for
war? Can the world really believe that North Korea, a nation of 24 million
people whose economy seems permanently hobbled, and whose military, while
large, would be no match for that of the United States and South Korea combined
(the South itself may have nukes in its huge military arsenal supplied by the
United States), actually wants a war? Or is it rather Donald Trump—he whose
administration has lurched from one failure to another without a single legislative
victory, with an approval rating that’s the lowest of any president in modern history—who
is really searching for a ‘wag-the-dog’ solution to distract us all from his
mounting problems?
To
really probe this question, especially the one concerning what exactly Kim Jong
Un thinks he’s doing with his rockets and nukes, we need to know a bit about
history (which most Americans, especially their idiot president, do not). My
source is an article that appeared on consortiumnews.com last week: “How
History Explains the Korean Crisis,” by distinguished historian William R.
Polk. In it, Polk makes sense of North Korean belligerence by detailing the
long history of invasions Koreans have suffered, starting in 1592 when Japan
invaded and controlled the country for a decade or so. The Japanese invaded
again in 1894, and this time set up a ‘friendly government,’ thereby ruling
Korea for the next thirty-five years. It was in this period that many Koreans
fled the country, including Syngman Rhee (the first president of the South) who
fled to America, and Kim Il Sung (the first leader of the North) who fled to
Russia-influenced Manchuria, where he joined the Communist party. By WWII Japan
had reduced many Koreans to virtual slaves (thousands of Korean women became
“comfort women” or concubines for the Japanese Army). But what’s fascinating to
me is what happened to some of those Koreans who became rulers in the post-WWII
period. Syngman Rhee, long resident in the United States and ‘Americanized’
(not to say ‘Christianized’), was set up as the first president of the new
South Korea (North and South were vaguely established by the UN in 1945, but
Rhee officially became the South’s ‘president’ with American help in August of
1948). He ruled basically as a U.S. puppet, with the United States military
assuring his continuance by sending thousands of U.S. troops to support him,
and American industry assuring the economic rise of his part of the country. According
to William Polk, “Syngman Rhee’s government imposed martial law, altered the
constitution, rigged elections, opened fire on demonstrators and even executed
leaders of the opposing party.” His successor (via a
military coup in 1961), Park Chung Hee, spent the war in Korea, but by collaborating with the Japanese occupiers (he
apparently even changed his name to a Japanese one). His rule as President was
so vicious that he, too, was overthrown (assassinated by his intelligence
chief, 1979) and replaced first by Choi Kuy-hah, who was then deposed in a
military coup by Gen. Chun Doo-hwan, who himself immediately imposed martial
law that closed universities, banned political activities and throttled the
press. A book I’ve read recently, Human
Acts by renowned Korean novelist Han Kang, dramatizes the university and high
school protests of 1980 in Gwangju that were savagely put down by Chun
Doo-hwan, who ordered soldiers to coldly shoot over 600 young protesters and
bury them in mass graves.
By
contrast, Kim Il Sung, who was to become the leader of North Korea after WWII
for no less than fifty years, spent the war years as a guerilla fighter influenced
by the Russians, where he led the resistance to the Japanese occupiers. His
status as a hero was established there, and he soon became the first Prime
Minister of the North, which he declared as a state in 1948, with ambitions to
reunite North and South (Syngman Rhee had announced the same intention, as
‘reunification’). But when Rhee declared that the South was a fully independent
state, Kim Il Sung saw it as an act of war, and (once China had agreed to take responsibility
for the outcome) ordered his army to invade the South. Far better equipped and
motivated than the southerners, Sung’s army took possession of Seoul, the
South’s capital city, within three days, on June 28, 1950. By this time, the
U.S. had persuaded the UN Security Council to protect the South, and organized
21 countries to send troops (though Americans made up the bulk of the forces in
what was called a “police action”). Still, Sung’s military drove the southern
army all the way south to the city of Pusan, where, by August, the southern
army “held only a tenth of what had been the Republic of Korea.”
Here the situation
was saved for the South only by the brilliant counterattack led by General
Douglas MacArthur, who made a storied landing at Inchon, where, behind enemy
lines, the Americans were able to cut off the Northern army from its bases.
That led to a further attack by the South, which retook Seoul, and then moved
across the 38th parallel (the dividing line between North and South)
and drove nearly to the Chinese frontier. This brought China into the conflict,
and, with what it called a 300,000 man “Volunteer Army,” overwhelmed the South
Koreans and drove the Americans out of the North. At this point, General
MacArthur urged President Truman to use fifty nuclear weapons to stop the
Chinese, but Truman instead replaced MacArthur and continued the more or less
conventional war. Except that it was not at all conventional for the North.
U.S. carpet-bombing devastated the North with more tonnage (including chemical weapons) than had been used against
the Japanese in all of WWII. Analysts today estimate that the North lost 33% of its population through
this bombing—one of every three North Koreans perished. As Polk puts it, “Korea
proportionally suffered roughly 30 times as many people killed in 37 months
of American carpet-bombing as these other countries (Britain, France, China and
the U.S.) lost in all the years of the Second World War.” This may help explain
why North Koreans generally favor their government’s stance to repel invaders
at all costs: most have experienced the utter devastation of war firsthand.
Finally, the North agreed to negotiate a cease-fire to
end the stalemate (the state of war between North and South still exists), with the country divided
at its 38th parallel by a demilitarized zone to keep the armies
separate and to keep ‘new’ (i.e. nuclear) weapons out of the peninsula.
Unfortunately, the United States, in 1957, violated article 13(d) of the
agreement:
In June 1957, the U.S. informed the North
Koreans that it would no longer abide by Paragraph 13(d) of the armistice
agreement that forbade the introduction of new weapons. A few months later, in
January 1958, it set up nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching Moscow and
Peking. The U.S. kept them there until 1991. It wanted to reintroduce them in
2013 but the then South Korean Prime Minister Chung Hong-won refused (Polk op.
cit.).
Thus, we see that it was
the United States that decided to introduce nuclear weapons to the Korean
conflict. But what about the North Koreans and their nukes? Even here, Polk
points out, both the South and North had agreed to abide by the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation agreement (1975 and 1985 respectively), but both violated the
agreement (South Korea covertly from 1982 to 2000; North Korea in 1993,
withdrawing totally in 2003.) Polk also adds that the precipitating event for
the North’s withdrawal and its underground testing begun in 2006, was George W.
Bush’s January 2002
Axis of Evil speech, in which
he demonized North Korea. Thereafter,
North Korea withdrew from the 1992 agreement with the South to ban nuclear
weapons and announced that it had enough weapons-grade plutonium to make about
5 or 6 nuclear weapons (Polk op. cit.).
This brings us to today. As noted in a
recent article (Mel Gurtov, “Echoes of Reagan: Another Nuclear Buildup,”
commondreams.org: 9.3.2017), the United States currently has about 6,800
nuclear weapons (roughly 1,400 strategic weapons deployed, the rest stockpiled
or retired). Among these, the 920 missile-launched nuclear warheads deployed on
230 invulnerable submarines, are alone “enough to destroy an entire country and
bring on nuclear winter.” By comparison, North Korea may have about a dozen
nuclear weapons (some analysts say they could have as many as 60), most of them
about the size of the ‘paltry’ nukes that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It
also has the still fairly rudimentary missiles it has been launching with
frequency this year, very few with the ability to strike the United States or
anywhere near it. So what is this business about the North “begging for war?”
It is an absurdity. What the North is really after is simple: survival; a
resolution of the South-North war, which has been ongoing since the armistice
in July 1953; and, related to that, an end to the huge and provocative war
games that have been carried on for the last three weeks. These ‘games’ go on
twice a year, and are clearly designed to threaten the North by simulating an
invasion of North Korea and a “decapitation” operation to remove Kim Jong Un.
What would the United States do if Russia were to carry on war games from Cuba
or Mexico? We already know the answer to that. Yet despite the continuing pleas
of the North to the U.S. and South Korea to cease these provocative military
exercises, the U.S. and its protégé have persisted and even expanded them ever
since the end of active fighting. In addition to these regular war games,
recently the United States has sent groups of F-35B fighters, F-15 fighters and
B-1B bombers on military operations over a training range near Seoul, where
they dropped their dummy bombs to simulate a nuclear strike. According to Mike
Whitney (counterpunch.org, 9.4.2017, “What the Media isn’t telling you about
North Korea’s Missile Tests”),
The show
of force was intended to send a message to Pyongyang that Washington is unhappy
with the North’s ballistic missile testing project and is prepared to use
nuclear weapons against the North if it fails to heed Washington’s diktats.
That’s it exactly. For this is the way the world according to
American empire works: we can hold
threatening war games, we can
surround you with nukes from submarines and bombers and missile launchers, we can insult you and threaten you and
starve you and humiliate you and refuse to end our war against you, but if you dare
to stand up to our bullying, we will destroy you. And it’s your own fault for
defying our ‘rule of law.’
But of
course, the North sees through this. Kim Jong Un may be a clown in a funny
haircut who’s trying to prove he’s a big boy now, but he’s no dummy. His nuclear
response to the threats from the United States, when considering his people’s history,
and his knowledge of recent history, is perfectly rational. As Mike Whitney
points out, “Kim has no choice but to stand firm. If he shows any sign of
weakness, he knows he’s going to end up like Saddam and Gaddafi.” To remind
you, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya finally decided to take the West at its word, and
give up his nuclear plans. He was thereafter the victim of an invasion by
western powers and ended up publicly violated in a gruesome death, mocked by
American leaders like Hillary Clinton: “We came, we saw, he died.” Ditto Saddam
Hussein of Iraq, whose country is in ruins. Kim Jong Un would clearly like to
avoid that fate. He and his people would like to avoid being bombed back into
the Stone Age, again. And so they are gambling that the blustering primate in
Washington will either run true to his cowardly form, or be persuaded by calmer
and more rational minds to see if there might not be an opening for
negotiations. In fact, we all have to hope that this is the case. China and
Russia also hope that this is the case, proposing once again (as they did in
March and often before that) that in exchange for a halt to the military
exercises by American and South Korean forces, North Korea could be persuaded
to freeze its nuclear and missile programs. Surely, there is the germ for a diplomatic
agreement here. Even South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in has just
reiterated his offer to hold peace talks with North Korea (newsweek.org,
9.5.17) in what he has called his “Sunshine Policy.”
The only real question is whether the United States,
and especially its wacky president, will ever agree to stop the war games. Because,
after all, we are the Americans, the big dogs, who don’t back down, don’t negotiate
unless it’s totally on our terms. Which in this case, means: do what we say not
what we do, give up your nukes, and we can discuss the terms of your
unconditional surrender. Anything short of that is “begging for war.”
Addendum,
Mar. 10, 2018. Since writing the above, I have read Min Jin Lee’s novel, Pachinko. In it, Lee narrates a saga of
a Korean family that, during the pre-WWII period, moves to Osaka, Japan to seek
its fortunes there. What we learn is the agonizing plight of Koreans in Japan
(and in Korea under Japanese colonization) who are always and everywhere
discriminated against as “lazy” and “morally defective,” even when successful and allowed to become Japanese citizens. This helps to explain both the
never-healed antagonism between Koreans and Japanese, and the never-outgrown
defensiveness of Koreans that pertains to this day—including, perhaps, some of
the behavior of Kim Jong Un himself.
Lawrence DiStasi
