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@yahoo.com
