[Peace-discuss] "North Korea's Justifiable Anger", from Counterpunch, by Stansfield Smith UFPJ

[Stuart Levy]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/10/north-koreas-justifiable-anger/


Does Obama Want More War?


  North Korea's Justifiable Anger

by STANSFIELD SMITH
The corporate media reduces the DPRK (North Korea) to the Kim family and 
prefaces their names with the terms "madman", "evil" and "brutal". Such 
vilifications of foreign leaders are used here not only to signify they 
are target for US overthrow. They are meant to intimidate and isolate 
anti-war activists as being out in left field for ever wanting to oppose 
a war against countries ruled by "madmen" -- be they Saddam, Fidel, Hugo 
Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Qaddaffi.
Yet to a sensible person, it is crazy that the US, with nuclear weapons 
thousands of miles from home, in South Korea, denies North Korea has a 
right to have its own nuclear weapons on its own land -- particularly 
when the North says it is developing nuclear weapons only as a deterrent 
because the US won't take its own weapons out of the Korean peninsula.
Missing in what passes for discourse on the DPRK in the corporate media 
is that the US was conducting month-long war maneuvers last March in 
Korea, now extended into April, using stealth bombers, undetectable by 
radar, capable of carrying nuclear weapons. And this year these are not 
"deterrent" war maneuvers, but "pre-emptive war" maneuvers.
Would the US government and people get a little "irrational" if a 
foreign country that previously had killed millions of our people, sent 
nuclear capable stealth bombers off the coasts of New York City, 
Washington DC, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, there to fly 
around for a month in preparation for a possible nuclear attack on us? 
For what is called, in warped US language, war "games"?
The US may have killed 20% of the population of Korea, said General 
Curtis Lemay, who was involved in the US air war on Korea. If so, that 
is a higher rate of genocidal slaughter than what the Nazis inflicted on 
Poland or the Soviet Union. The Korean War may be unknown ancient 
history to us, but it is no more ancient history to Koreans than the 
Nakba is to Palestinians.
North Korea knows that history, and it is warning the US they know what 
to expect and are arming themselves to prevent it. Are the DPRK leaders 
"paranoid" or taking justifiable precautions?
What kind of deranged people call war preparations a "war game"? North 
Korea doesn't think it's a "game." Over 4 million died in the last war 
to reunify their country that the US divided. If men had an annual rite 
called "group rape games" wouldn't we think it a criminal misogynist 
pathology, and wouldn't women be justified in being outraged and arming 
themselves in self-defense?
An accurate reading of the events leading up to the present situation 
shows that North Korea is responding to US military escalation, and in 
particular to US refusal to negotiate. This includes a peace treaty to 
end the Korean War, any steps towards reunifying Korea, the end to the 
US occupation of South Korea and ending the annual month-long US-South 
Korean war maneuvers. Even today, it includes US refusal to talk in 
order to lower the tensions.
North Korea was hit with US/UN Security Council sanctions for a missile 
launch last year. South Korea sent off a missile this year; were there 
any sanctions?
Since World War II there have been 9000 missile launches. 4 were by the 
DPRK. There have been 2000 atomic bomb tests. 3 were by DPRK. No country 
was sanctioned by the UN Security Council for this. No country except 
the DPRK. Why wouldn't the North Koreans be incensed by this double 
standard, especially when the US has nuclear weapons in South Korea?
The US kill rate in the 1950-53 Korean War equaled more than one 9-11 
every day, day after day, for the whole 1100 day war. US people had a 
scar from one 9-11. So what kind of war scars do Koreans have?
Korea is divided because our country invaded and divided it after the 
Japanese surrender. The leaders of the DPRK had been fighting the 
Japanese since the early 1930s, and 200,000 had lost their lives. When 
Korean liberation was at hand in 1945, the US intervened and blocked it.
The US was supposed to leave in 1948, along with the Soviet Union, but 
because Kim Il Sung was likely to win planned nation-wide elections, the 
US made the division permanent and blocked national elections, just as 
it did later in Vietnam. This lead to the Korean War, the cause of the 
present militarization: A foreign country divided and occupied their 
country against their will.
We should play our part to improve the human rights situation in Korea, 
not only in the North but in the South as well. Both societies are more 
closed and controlled than our own. Whether being occupied by foreign 
troops, threatened with war and war maneuvers, or subjected to harsh 
economic sanctions, this does not facilitate free and open societies.
If we really want more rights for the people of the DPRK then we should 
stop pointing a gun at their head. If we listened to Kim Jong Un's 
message delivered a month ago, ignored by President Obama, "We don't 
want war. Let's talk," that would only foster a more open society there 
-- and in South Korea, just as we know it would here in the US.
*/Stansfield Smith/*/is an anti-war and Latin America solidarity 
activist in Chicago who recently returned from a trip to North Korea 
[Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK)], with Koryo Tours. He can 
be reached at: stansfieldsmith at yahoo.com 
<mailto:stansfieldsmith at yahoo.com>/
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