“NOW YOU’VE DONE IT.”

(Jenny Lin Asian Times, Aljazeera, Hyung-Jin Kim, Edith M. Lederer, Frazer Chronicle)

 

North Korea, land of enchantment, a hot spot of cultural, and intellectual activity…..just where I’d like to take my lovely wife for a fortnight or two. But ya better plan your visit at the right time, and bring an umbrella cause your gonna need it. Winter is the dominate climatic pattern, while the summer, which I love, is short, hot and wet. Damn, foiled again in my quest for the perfect vacation spot.

 

North Korea is what I call a baby boomer country, conceived during or directly after World War II, with the country being occupied by the Soviet Union, the north, and the United States, naturally the south. Gotta give it to those G.I.’s they sure as hell wanted no part of those cold January blizzards that hit the north of the country.

 

The partitioning of Korea by the soon to be super powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, really began in August of 1945 when the Soviets established Kim II-sung as the head of the Provisional Peoples Committee. Kim II was not, at the time, the head of the Communist Party, whose headquarters were in Seoul in the U.S.-occupied south.

 

One of the first things Kim II did was to establish the KPA, the Korean People’s Army, and of course aligned with the Communists. With the help of the Soviet Union, an elite group of fighters was formed from a cadre of guerrillas and former soldiers who had gained their experience in battles against the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese.

 

Of course everybody has heard of the 38^th parallel, and the occupation of the Korean Peninsula north of that parallel by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, and how Russia foiled a joint trusteeship between the U.S. and the Soviets to help resurrect the country after the war.

 

The rift over the years has only widened due to differences between Russia, the United States, North Korea, or the (DPRK) Democratic People’s Republic of Korea which was established in 1948. Much of Korea’s production assets had been owned by the Japanese or by Koreans who had collaborated with Japan.

 

Kim II began to nationalize these assets in 1946, placing around 70% of the country’s industry under state control. This figure had risen to 90% by 1949, and since that time virtually all manufacturing, finance and internal and external trade has been conducted by the state.

 

A prelude to the Korean Conflict, bloody confrontations along the 38^th Parallel between the north and south ended in all-out war between which drew China, the Soviets, and the United Nation and American forces into the tussle. A bloody stalemate ensued resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths before finally the 38^th Parallel stabilized and after long negotiations, the warring sides agreed to a border truce in 1953.

 

I don’t pretend to understand the north or South Korean culture other then the fact it’s like 360 degrees different than that of the United States. It always seems cold there, with poverty and displaced people living in paper shacks under unbearable conditions.

 

 

 

The culture of North Korea doesn’t seem capable of a sustained war, doesn’t seem capable of launching a preemptive military strike of any kind, unless you count sticks and stones. All I know is that we’ve fell for this nuclear threat before, remember Iraq, and we’ve also been disillusioned by the possibility of a Communist or a socialist takeover, Viet Nam.

 

We’ve spilled our blood all over the place in order to keep the peace…..right? But what if we have been mislead on a continuing basis, entering into first one conflict or war after another, some we don’t even know about, remember the C.I.A.

 

War isn’t romantic, fun, neat cool, and it’s differently not the way to catch an adrenalin rush, anyway a lasting one. War is all about displaced people, the degradation of human-kind, of wasted human accomplishment, broken bodies, rape, and carnage, and of lasting scares for generations.

 

There are only two guarantees that come from war, death, and the fact that rich people are going to get richer. Oh and yes, that the elite will not supply any of their sons and daughters for the effort that is necessary.

 

1953 TO THE PRESENT

It’s really funny how politicians talk about change being good until your either talking about the constitution of the United States, wages, or treaties and armistices that were signed by people no longer living.

 

Who is at fault for continually bringing the old dust covered document out into the light of day, well I guess it would be the United Nations who sometimes seems to be the whipping boy for the United States. Here is a shattering statement, a unique bold one for the times we live in, scrap the 60 year old armistice, in today’s world it makes no sense.

 

Nuclear, pooplyear, we got ‘em, Russia has ‘em, Britain has ‘em as does France and China, and do you really think that any of these countries are going to launch one of their bombs…..not likely. I swear to God those in power on Capitol Hill or the Pentagon have rocks in their head, nobody in his/her right mind really thinks that anybody will really shoot a nuclear bomb at the United States.

 

If a bomb is detonated the area involved can become uninhabitable for years, even centuries, and the people…..well let me tell you about the people, they are atomized, never to be seen again, whether they are men, women, children, it doesn’t matter, they are all gone…..and they are the lucky ones. Survivors can linger on for weeks, months and sometimes years, suffering almost constantly until death.

 

So when a country threatens another with their nuclear bombs, I find the ensuing rhetoric nothing more than testosterone posturing by both military officials as well as politicians,  of course you’d have to include both Condoleezza Rice and Hilary Clinton in this category, although I don’t know how.

 

Defuse the situation, stop all the simple minded chest beating, and serve the countries that you represent, and remember one simple truth, how many other countries in the world can drop a bomb down a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet away? Now……….let that sink in for a while, and do you really think that North Korea really doesn’t know that?

 

HAVE A NICE DAY!