OMNI NORTH KOREA
My blog: The War
Department and Peace Heroes
Newsletters on Peace, Justice, and Ecology:
Index:
See: China ,
Imperialism, Imperialism: Bases,
Imperialism: Westward Pacific E. Asia, Korea, Korean War, Militarism, Pearl Harbor, Pentagon, Recruiting, Suicides, Whistleblowing, World
War II: Pacific, and more.
"To initiate a war of aggression
is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime. . .
.” -- Robert H. Jackson, Chief U.S.
Prosecutor, Nuremberg
The Axis of Evil? “The
depiction of [the Soviet Union ] as evil
releases some of our worst, not our best, qualities.” -- J. William Fulbright, The Price of Empire (199). (For
more by Fulbright, see end of newsletter.)
Contents
#1 July 19, 2012
US
Introduction: Dick Bennett
THREE VIEWS OF NORTH KOREA
Sunoo
Beal
Cumings
Contents #2 Three Parts: History, Media, Literature
WHAT HAPPENED, WHAT’S HAPPENING?
Bruce Cumings, North Korea
Garner (2010), Rev. of North Korea
Cumings’ LTE NY Review of Books (2007)
Cumings, et al., Inventing the Axis of Evil (2005)
Cumings: Korean War Games (2013)
Articles from Google
NYT Op-Ed, 3/11/13, by Amb. Donald Gregg, “Reach Out”
US MEDIA ANALYSIS:
Arkansas
Analysis of media reporting requires knowing the
subject. My media criticism was made
possible by Bruce Cumings’ research or that of similar scholars independent of
US dogmas and myths regarding “enemies.”
U.S. and S. Korea
Military Drills 2012
US/SK Drills 2013
US/SK Pact Against NK Provocations
What Do You Do With Crazy? Arkansas
Who Cranked Up First? US/SK Drills vs. NK, and Newspaper
Nationalism,
Klug,
Nukes
Sang-Hun , SK
Korea
US Shoring Up
Thanks to J. William Fulbright
NORTH KOREAN LITERATURE
Dick Bennett, OMNI Book Forum: Literature of
US Enemies
The
Way to War
A Way
Literature
from the “Axis of Evil”
Google Search
Contact Senators Boozman and Pryor
WHAT HAPPENED? WHAT’S HAPPENING? When Did the Korean War Begin? What, Who Caused It?
North Korea
2004
In the battle to open closed Western minds, this
tart and witty broadside makes an excellent start.
Depicted as an
insular and forbidding police state with an “insane” dictator at its helm, North Korea —charter member of Bush’s “Axis of
Evil”—is a country the U.S. America
But, as Bruce
Cumings demonstrates in this provocative, lively read, the story of the U.S.-Korea conflict is more complex than our leaders
or our news media would have us believe. Drawing on his extensive knowledge
of Korea U.S.
and North Korean versions and a fascinating portrayal of North Korea
Bruce Cumings is the author of Korea’s Place in the Sun, War and Television, Parallax Visions, and The Origins of the Korean War. He is a professor of history at the
Category: Current Affairs / Politics /
History-Asian / Korea
Pub Date: Fall 2004
Pub Date: Fall 2004
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Carpet-Bombing Falsehoods About a War That’s
Little Understood By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: July
21, 2010
Shuji
Kajiyama/Associated Press
Bruce
Cumings
THE KOREAN WAR
By Bruce Cumings
Illustrated.
288 pages. Modern Library. $24.
·
Excerpt: ‘The
Korean War’ (July 22,
2010)
The world will be watching, and here’s a book
that American policymakers may hope it won’t be reading: Bruce Cumings’s “Korean War,” a powerful revisionist history of America ’s intervention in Korea America North Korea
Mr. Cumings is chairman of the history
department at the University
of Chicago and the
author of “The Origins of the Korean War,” a respected two-volume survey. He
mows down a host of myths about the war in his short new book, which is a
distillation of his own scholarship and that of many other historians. But he
begins by mowing down David
Halberstam.
Mr. Cumings, who admires Mr. Halberstam’s
writing about Vietnam
Mr. Halberstam’s book is among those that
“evince almost no knowledge of Korea
Americans need to get past the idea, Mr.
Cumings says, that the Korean War was a “discrete, encapsulated” story that
began in 1950, when the United States
intervened to help push the Communist north out of the south of Korea United States succeeded in containment,
establishing the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone that still runs through Korea
Mr. Cumings argues
that the Korean War was a civil war with long, tangled historical roots, one in
which America
Mr. Cumings likens the
indiscriminate American bombing of North Korea My Lai . An official inquiry
is needed into some of these events, he writes, for any kind of healing to
begin. (He also writes that this war, during which nearly 37,000 American
soldiers died, deserves a memorial as potent and serious as Maya Lin’s
Vietnam
Among the most important things to understand
about North Korean behavior then and now, Mr. Cumings writes, is the longtime enmity between Korea and Japan Japan took Korea
as a colony in 1910, with America Japan humiliated and brutalized Korea Japan
North Korea, which is
virulently anti-Japan, remains bitter and fearful of that country and of the United States South Korea , where leaders have long-standing
historical ties to Japan
Mr. Cumings, in “The Korean War,” details the
north’s own atrocities, and acknowledges that current “North Korean political
practice is reprehensible.” But he says that we view that country through “Orientalist bigotry,” seeing only its
morbid qualities. We wrongly label the
country Stalinist, he argues. “There is no evidence in the North Korean
experience of the mass violence against whole classes of people or the
wholesale ‘purge’ that so clearly characterized Stalinism,” he writes.
The most eye-opening
sections of “The Korean War” detail America ’s
saturation bombing of Korea United States dropped more bombs in Korea
“The Korean War” has its share of awkward
sentences, and Mr. Cumings makes at least one mistake of his own, referring to Michael
Herr’s 1977 nonfiction book “Dispatches,” about the Vietnam War, as
a novel.
But this lean book may put some readers in
mind of “Wartime,” Paul Fussell’s acidic attack on some
of the comforting myths about World War II. Mr. Cumings’s prose, at its best,
is reminiscent of Mr. Fussell’s stylized, literate high dudgeon.
Witness the carnage in this passage from early
in “The Korean War”: “Here was the Vietnam War we came to know before Vietnam —
gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy,
fundamentally untrained G.I.’s fighting a war their top generals barely
understood, fragging of officers, contempt for the know-nothing civilians back
home, devilish battles indescribable even to loved ones, press handouts from
Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or
lunatics, an ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid
dictatorship run by servants of Japanese imperialism.”
This year is the 60th anniversary of the
Korean War’s conventional start. Even from this distant vantage point, Mr. Cumings writes, there are still
multiple unpleasant facts Americans have not learned about this war, “truths
that most Americans do not know and perhaps don’t want to know, truths
sometimes as shocking as they are unpalatable to American self-esteem.” His
book is a bitter pill, a sobering corrective.
There’s got to be a change in
I loathe Kim Jong-Il.
Inventing the
Axis of Evil: The Truth About North
Korea , Iran ,
and Syria
Paperback
$14.95 / £8.99
NOW IN
PAPERBACK AN "AUTHORITATIVE AND INFORMATIVE" (THE NATION)
PRIMER ON THE COUNTRIES CAUGHT IN THE CROSSHAIRS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, BY
THREE RENOWNED EXPERTS
A persuasive
argument that the axis-of-evil trope is as illusory as those elusive WMDs.
Ever since the “axis of evil” label was
first applied by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address, the
hawks in his administration have left little doubt as to where they intend to
turn their attention after Iraq :
North Korea , Iran , and Syria
For those wanting to know more about
“who’s next,” this “timely exposition on global (in)stability” (Korean Quarterly) by three leading experts
on each country sets the record straight, confronting
relentless fear-mongering with hard facts. The authors explore each
country’s history and internal politics alongside the spotty record of past U.S. interventions, including the Korean War and
the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Iran Syria
is that we really don’t know what’s going on in Syria
Bruce Cumings is the author of
Category: Current
Affairs / Politics / Political Science
Pub Date: Fall 2005
Pub Date: Fall 2005
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Bleier's Blog
Friday, November 09, 2007
Bruce Cumings (and IF Stone): South
Korea and US Started the Korean War [Odd title, not supported by text nor by
Cumings books on Korea
Many of us learned
from IF Stone's indispensable The Hidden History of the Korean War that it is
far from clear that the Korean was started because of an invasion by the North
as advertised. Now I come to find that Professor Bruce Cumings has written
extensively on the matter suggesting, as Stone indicated, that the matter was
far more complicated. In a letter to the NYRB, he cogently summarizes some of
the evidence indicating that the war was essentially started by the South
Korean military leadership, put in place and supported, as we learned from
Stone by the US
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20840
New York Review of Books
Bruce Cumings writes:
To the Editors:
In his review of David Halberstam's book on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter [NYR, October 25], Richard Bernstein mentions the thesis "advanced in particular by Bruce Cumings" that Syngman Rhee or the South Korean military might have provoked Kim Il Sung's attack in June 1950. In a long chapter entitled "Who Started the Korean War?" I examined just about every thesis on how the war started including this thesis, first advanced not by me but by I.F. Stone in his Hidden History of the Korean War. I used formerly secret archival documents in English and Korean (including a large captured North Korean archive) to conclude this chapter by saying that all the theses were wrong, because civil wars do not start, they come along after years or even decades of internecine conflict—as in Korea.
Because the topUS commander
in Korea Japan
David Halberstam and I spent an afternoon together before his tragic death, talking about this war, and his warmth and generosity did not hide the fact that he was entirely unaware of what might be found in an archive, apart from selected documents that came out after theSoviet Union
collapsed. Neither is Richard Bernstein, whose last review lauded a completely
shoddy book on North Korea
Bruce Cumings
Professor and Chair, History Department
University of Chicago
Chicago , Illinois
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20840
New York Review of Books
Bruce Cumings writes:
To the Editors:
In his review of David Halberstam's book on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter [NYR, October 25], Richard Bernstein mentions the thesis "advanced in particular by Bruce Cumings" that Syngman Rhee or the South Korean military might have provoked Kim Il Sung's attack in June 1950. In a long chapter entitled "Who Started the Korean War?" I examined just about every thesis on how the war started including this thesis, first advanced not by me but by I.F. Stone in his Hidden History of the Korean War. I used formerly secret archival documents in English and Korean (including a large captured North Korean archive) to conclude this chapter by saying that all the theses were wrong, because civil wars do not start, they come along after years or even decades of internecine conflict—as in Korea.
Because the top
David Halberstam and I spent an afternoon together before his tragic death, talking about this war, and his warmth and generosity did not hide the fact that he was entirely unaware of what might be found in an archive, apart from selected documents that came out after the
Bruce Cumings
Professor and Chair, History Department
Korean War Games
Global Network
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To: GN List Serve
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GN List Serve
[globenet@yahoogroups.com]
Friday, April 05, 2013 10:34 AM
Korean War Games
By Bruce Cumings
April 3, 2013
[Cumings’ negative
assessment of NK and quick history of East Asia
from 1930s to present. I have tried to help us follow this highly
complex history by highlighting some names and phrases. –Dick]
[NK and E. Asia ..]
The
Republic of Korea [according to NK], one of the most advanced industrial states
in the world, was, according to Pyongyang, a “puppet of the US imperialists”
led by a “rat” named Lee Myung-bak; if he was on the way out, the incoming president, Park Geun-hye,
brought something new, a “venomous swish of skirt,” to the Blue House in Seoul.
As if the North weren’t hated enough (it ranked fourth in a 2007 global index
of unpopularity, albeit behind Israel ,
Iran and the United States
If the North’s heated rhetoric set some kind of
record, the approach was hardly new. Nothing is more characteristic of this
regime than its preening, posturing, overweening desire for the world to pay it
attention, while simultaneously threatening destruction in all directions and
assuring through draconian repression that its people know next to nothing
about that same world. Twenty years ago, when the Clinton administration
brought maximum pressure on the North to open its plutonium facility to special
inspections, the North railed on about war breaking out at any minute; that
1993–94 episode likewise sought to shape the policies of an incoming South Korean president, Kim
Young-sam. Almost forty years ago, when Jimmy Carter was president, North Korea
Today,
the rhetoric is designed to do three things: to confront President Park with a
choice of continuing the hard line of her predecessor or returning to
engagement with the North; to raise the stakes of Obama’s stance of “strategic
patience” (which has not been a strategy but has certainly been patient, as the
North has launched three long-range missiles and tested two nuclear bombs since
Obama’s 2009 inauguration); and to present China, which for the first time
worked with the United States to craft the most recent UN sanctions against the
North, with a choice—enforce the sanctions at the risk of events spinning out
of control, or return to its usual posture of voting for sanctions and then
looking the other way when the North violates them.
* * *
It can hardly be said that Pyongyang Tokyo is Shinzo Abe, whose grandfather Nobusuke Kishi ran the munitions
industry in 1930s Manchukuo , the region of
northeast China
Meanwhile, China
has besmirched a decade of careful diplomacy with its neighbors by instigating
ever more serious confrontations with Japan
and Southeast Asian nations over islands (most of them uninhabited rock piles)
that it covets, called the Senkakus/Diaoyus, Spratlys and Paracels; barely a
week goes by without Chinese naval ships intruding on islands claimed by Japan,
counting on Tokyo—whose navy is far superior to
China’s—not to escalate the
conflict. South
Korea has a similarly insoluble dispute with Japan
* * *
[NK, SE Asia, USA
Now comes Barack
Obama with his “pivot to Asia,” bringing new US bases and force projections
to the task of containing China—while
denying any such purpose. Surely many in Washington
enjoy the spectacle of China ,
the world’s second-largest economy, at the throat of Japan North Korea ’s
relations with China may
also be at their worst ever, now that Beijing is
working hand in glove with Washington China is
apoplectic because the North’s missiles and A-bombs just might push Japan and South Korea China
[US Provocations and Attacks Against NK Since 1951 Or Earlier.]
At
the end of March, Obama upped the ante by
sending B-52 and B-2 Stealth bombers soaring over South Korea Washington initiated its
nuclear blackmail of the North when it launched B-29s on simulated
Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing missions over North Korea Operation Hudson Harbor US
[Solution?
Negotiation and the Three No’s]
Last year, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said we
have been “within an inch of war almost every day” with the North. Today, it
looks more like millimeters. What a terrible commentary on seven decades of
failed American policies toward Pyongyang
In 2012 on Jeju, an island off the southern tip
of Korea US
- Bruce Cumings, chair of
the history department at the University of Chicago ,
is the author, most recently, of North Korea
Global Network Against
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1.
News for U.S., S. Korea Begin
Military Drills
Telegraph.co.uk
1.
NEW: North Korea declares invalid the armistice agreement that ended Korean war
CNN - 5 days ago
(CNN) -- A new joint military exercise between South
Korea and theUnited States
Fox News - 5 days ago
CNN International - 5 days ago
2.
South Korea and US begin military
drills as North Korea
threatens ...
www.foxnews.com/.../south-korea-and-us-begin-military-drills-as-no...
5 days ago – North Korean state media said Monday
that Pyongyang had carried through with a threat to cancel the 60-year-old
armistice that ended the ...
3.
Pyongyang scraps armistice amid heightened saber rattling
- CNN ...
www.cnn.com/2013/03/.../south-korea-military-exercises/index.html
5 days ago – North
Korea 's announcement came as military drills involving South Korea U.S.
4.
U.S.-South Korea Military Drills Begin As North Korea Threatens War
www.huffingtonpost.com/.../us-south-korea-military-drills-north-kor...
5 days ago – SEOUL , South
Korea — North Korea
5.
War Games: South Korea, U.S. Begin Annual Military Drills As North ...
www.huffingtonpost.com/.../war-games-south-korea-us-mil...
|
6 days ago – SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea and the United States began annual military drills Monday despite North
Korean threats to respond by ...
|
6.
US, South Korea start joint military drills despite ... - World
News
worldnews.nbcnews.com/_.../17267164-us-south-korea-start-joint-mi...
5 days ago – SEOUL — South Korea and the United States began annual military drills Monday despite North
Korean threats to respond by voiding the ...
7.
US, South Korea start joint military drills despite North's ... - NBC
News
usnews.nbcnews.com/_.../17267164-us-south-korea-start-joint-milita...
5 days ago – SEOUL -- South Korea and the United States began annual military drills Monday despite North
Korean threats to respond by voiding the ...
8.
Prison Planet.com » U.S., South Korea begin
military exercises as ...
www.prisonplanet.com/u-s-south-korea-begin-military-exercises-as-n...
5 days ago – A new joint military exercise between South
Korea and the United States
9.
North Korea Apparently Severs Hotline with South
www.voanews.com/.../us-south-korea-begin...military-drills...
|
6 days ago – Move comes as
|
10.
South Korea and US begin military
drills - FT.com
6 days ago – South Korea
11.
US-South Korea Military Drills Begin - International Business Times
www.ibtimes.com/us-south-korea-military-drills-begin...
6 days ago
[See Newsletter #1]
Reach Out to N. Korea
Reach Out to N. Korea
Tue Mar 12, 2013 12:14 pm
(PDT) . Posted by:
"Korea Peace Campaign" Veterans for Peace
NYT Op-Ed, 3/11/13, by Amb. Donald Gregg
The Korean Peninsula is heading into a difficult and very dangerous period.
South Korean andU.S.
exercises.North Korea
to pull out of the 1953 Armistice Agreement that has kept the lid on
simmering North-South tensions for almost 60 years.
Pyongyang ’s rhetoric has reached a new level of
belligerence, threatening
attacks uponAmerica
capabilities. Such threats are still far beyondNorth
Korea ’s abilities,
but they evoke shrill responses from conservatives in bothSeoul
and
Washington
I believe that Kim Jong-un seeks serious dialogue withWashington , but that he will
push toward full nuclear weapons status for Pyongyang
unless he becomes convinced that the United States America
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/opinion/don
The Korean Peninsula is heading into a difficult and very dangerous period.
South Korean and
exercises.
to pull out of the 1953 Armistice Agreement that has kept the lid on
simmering North-South tensions for almost 60 years.
attacks upon
capabilities. Such threats are still far beyond
but they evoke shrill responses from conservatives in both
I believe that Kim Jong-un seeks serious dialogue with
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/opinion/don
MAINSTREAM
MEDIA AND US
US MEDIA TREATMENT OF NORTH KOREA
POT PAINTS
KETTLE BLACK BY Dick Bennett
2012: “U.S. , S. Korea Arkansas South
Korea and the United Sates have begun annual military
drills that North Korea North Korea has repeatedly threatened to attack Seoul
The editorial
of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
March 8, 2013, continues the newspaper’s one-sided reporting of this so-called
example of the “Axis of Evil.” It is so
rife with hostility, that I would need an entire newsletter to explain.
2013: “U.S. , S. KOREA Arkansas
The annual drills this year began March 10,
2013.
North
Korean threatened “to respond by voiding the 1953 Armistice that stopped the
Korean War and launching a nuclear attack on the U.S.
SK then said NK wouldn’t answer two calls on
a hot line and had cut the communication channel.
SK defense minister “vowed to respond to an
attack by the North by toppling the regime.”
If Kim Jong Un really made such a horrendous threat (let’s
see analysis of language and context), is
he severely paranoid, or is he sanely responding to real threat (what happened
to Iraq , what has been
threatened against Iran
US/SK SIGN PACT
TO COUNTER NK “PROVOCATIONS” by Dick Bennett.
“U. S. , S. Korea
Ink Counterblow Deal.” ADG (March 26, 2013). The Treaty
“obligates the U.S. military
to fight to defend its ally if a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula
What Do You Do
With Crazy? Arkansas
In
Part I of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette
(ADG) editorial of March 28, 2013, the writer gives us a parable of a little
man down the street who hates one of his neighbors utterly without cause,
declares it, shouts it, and builds and accumulates a store of weapons. It’s like the story of neighbors, one with
ducks, the other with turtles that kill the ducks, which angers the duck owner
so much he finally perceives his turtle-owning neighbor not only as crazy but
as a turtle! and blows his head off with a shotgun. Except there’s one big difference in the two
stories: there was a demonstrable cause
of the duck owner’s delusion.
The ADG parable writer asked only the question: What do you do with crazy? He doesn’t ask, how might we communicate
with the little man down the street with all the weapons who threatens to kill
his neighbor? When a reader asks that
question, all the crisply clear boundaries and definitions of words like
“crazy” seem less brightly certain. For
“crazy” excludes rationality; you cannot talk to “crazy” by definition: “crazy” doesn’t function by cause and effect
in the real world.
So
in ADG’s parable, what do you do with crazy, the man down the street? You don’t try to find out why he hates
you. You don’t—impossible thought--ask
whether you or anyone had done anything to cause him to be so apoplectic. You
don’t ask if there’s anyone in town, in the world, who is communicating with
the little man down the street with a room full of guns and who gets along with
him, through whom we might communicate with him. You only call in the police, “all standing
around and they’ve got their own weapons—and many of those guns are trained on
the little man. But [therefore?!] the
little man rages just the same.”
That is, within the first few paragraphs the question, What do you do with
crazy? becomes less clear because the fable-teller inadvertently reveals
another crazy, the neighbors who, confronted with an apparently paranoid
neighbor call in not family or friends of the angry little man, or not people
experienced with seeking causes and effects of delusion, or experts in conflict
resolution, but they call in what should be the very last resort--the police
with guns drawn. And I say “apparently”
because the furious neighbor, becoming furiouser and furiouser, has not yet
been thoroughly studied to discover if there is some cause for such apparently
insane behavior, an action that might also be applied to the behavior of his
neighbors who seek armed force as the first resort just like their paranoid
neighbor.
Not until paragraph 9 does the ADG fabulist mention negotiators, who
“have been called in many times. . .and they try to talk reason.” But it’s too late in his story, his argument,
and in the conflict situation. Perhaps
he was in a hurry or perhaps he took for granted our easy acceptance of his
case for unexamined “crazy,” so that just repeating crazy (five times in the
first five paragraphs) would satisfy his readers’ credulity. But imagine yourself as the “crazy,”
surrounded by police with guns drawn, and
“negotiators” from your enemy knock on your door. Would this build your confidence? And listen to the negotiators (par. 9). They ask, “Are you hungry, little man?” But hunger is apparently not the source of
his anger. A genuine examination of the source was not undertaken or, given the
condescension, intended—not the negotiators or training in negotiation you find
in college or professional training.
And the next day the little man is just as angry as before.
Now the fabulist pauses to ask once again, “What do you do with crazy?”
as though the issue had been exhausted.
And he replies: “You watch and
prepare. Because that’s about all you
can do.” But these words are ironical,
actually critical of the armed force still watching and waiting. They can take action. He clearly would have the police storm the
house; they have their guns trained on him ready to shoot. But this moment in the fable marks Part II,
a new level, of the editorialist’s argument, as he turns to the present reality
of the parable’s point, the irrational behavior of Kim Jong-Un of Korea, little
(not big) man, which all of us at leas who are readers of the newspaper
probably understood from the beginning—the ADG’s
familiar story of the crazy dictator of NK threatening SK and USA.
(
The constant drum-beat for war by Washington and mainstream media has
enthralled those of the public who do not study or think for themselves. Donal Wright of Cabot (ADG 4-4-13) opines: “Along
with Iran, North Korea is a desperate nation with a nutcase leader and a trigger
finger on a nuclear weapons,” omitting the
only country who has actually had a “nutcase” leader whopulled that trigger,
but factual history is of no concern to this lover of mass slaughter.. He would have the US
Part II is about the actual
history, which has been covered in preceding entries.
WHO CRANKED UP
FIRST March 30, 2013? By Dick Bennett
For
good reason many analysts of the US Empire refer to mainstream media as complicit
extensions and many of them even as cheerleaders of the Empire. Just as the slogan “support the troops” is
sacrosanct, so is the doctrine of Good USA vs. Evil, the “Axis of Evil.” Here is an example from The New York Times via the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette (March 30, 2013): Choe
Sang-Hun, “N. Korea Cranks Up Its Threats.”
I don’t know which newspaper chose this title, but it does not matter
because both, and especially the latter, reflect the position of the US
Empire: N. Korea
(again) started it, again cranked up the threat engine. But the text shows otherwise fortunately,
facts (who threatened first) trumping ideology (NK one of the “Axis of
Evil”). Kim Jong Un “ordered his missile
units to be ready to strike the United States
and South Korea ” because one
day before, “U.S. forces had
carried out an unusual practice bombing
exercise [my italics] with advanced aircraft across South Korea United States US North Korea
I
have been examining merely the first three paragraphs of Choe’s report. What does Choe, reporter of if not for the
Empire, choose to inform us about during the remaining two-thirds of the
article? Does he offer details of US
Klug, Foster.
(AP). “Nukes a ‘Treasure,’ N. Korea Says.” ADG (April 1, 2013). Nuclear
weapons are “the nation’s life” in this “state of war” by which protection NK
will build a “stronger economy,” stated the Central Committee of the ruling
Workers’ Party. Its nuclear armed forces “’can never be abandoned
as long as the imperialists and nuclear threats exist on earth.’” In the final paragraph, Klug reports two B-2
stealth bombers dropped “dummy munitions on an uninhabited South Korean island”
as part of the annual drills “that Pyongyang
Sang-Hun,
Choe. (NYT). “S. Korea South Korea US mainstream
media structure of reporting enemies (common in the Iraq
“Korea Paju , north of Seoul
“U.S. to Shore Up Defenses on Guam in Light of
the N. Korea Threats.” ADG (April
4, 2013).
What
a headline! And apparently created by
the ADG, for no author is given for the
report, but only: ”Compiled by Democrat-Gazette Staff from Wire Reports.” The article doesn’t mention the decade-long
build up of Guam virtually into a stationary,
immense, permanent carrier battle group.
So who is threatening whom? And
this shoring up is a new weapon, the only two batteries ready of Lockheed
Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAADS, only the military
could think up this acronym), now based at Fort Bliss, TX Why this ratcheting up of the US Guam
threat? Listen to this: “The announcement followed North Korea US United Arab Emirates Qatar “against the threat from Iran Iran
What can you and I do in addition to everything suggested already? Always refer and ask your friends to refer
to the DOD as the Department of War.
Ask your newspaper editors and reports to read and be informed before
they report, and to balance their reporting of US conflicts with other nations
even-handedly.
What should the US
OMNI BOOK
FORUM: LITERATURE OF US
THE OMNI FORUM ON THE
LITERATURE OF US
THE WAY TO WAR
In 2013 OMNI
sponsored a Book Forum entitled, “Literature of US “’Enemies.’” Why was “Enemies” placed within quotation
marks? Because they call into question
the word and statement, they add the dimension of irony. Enemies?
According to whom? Who declared
the enemies?
Not the people of the US Guatemala ,
Nicaragua , Grenada , or Panama Iraq Iran or Chile Rogue State US
So who are the
enemy nations our leaders threaten, invade, occupy, and treat with “shock and
awe”? The people? No.
How do we know? It’s simple.
We, also the people, became informed.
We can do that; we have done that. We can watch, listen, read, read between the
lines, look below the surface of official “news” about war. The members of the
peace movement opposed the Vietnam War because they knew the history and they
cherished justice—that the US had rejected the 1954 peace agreement and
established a brutal government in the South, that in 1962 the US began
bombings, that in 1963 the Kennedy administration arranged a coup in which the
puppets Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu were murdered in order to stop their
efforts to negotiate a peace settlement, and that the illegal, unnecessary war
continued for ten more years. (Chomsky,
Power Systems, pp. 1-3). The Vietnamese leadership and people
North and South also knew this and made a clear distinction between the people
of the US
We again
became informed and created a peace movement to block the invasion of Iraq Iraq Iraq ,
and not the people of the US Nuremberg US at least now know the people of Afghanistan --the Pashtuns (the Taliban)--did not
attack the US , or they can
learn it by learning about the people of Afghanistan
And how do we
learn? Some of you recall the proposal
during the Cold War that the US
It doesn’t
have to be this way. The people have
within their power many ways to oppose the ideas and language of domination and
death: thorough public education in
critical thinking, skill of propaganda analysis, knowledge of “enemy” history,
knowledge of the US Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
the Nuremberg Principles, determination to be a world citizen and not a puppet
or automaton, electing representatives for whom armed violence is truly the
last option. And knowledge of “enemy”
present particularity, the proposal that could have prevented the Cold
War. This way is to learn all we can of
the real people of the “enemy” nations through meeting them, living with them,
and through their literature, which provides the supreme opposite of labels and
stereotypes. We might not be able to
afford living in the “enemy” countries where we would learn their extraordinary
individuality up close, but we can learn about them through literature.
On February 22, 2013, the OMNI Center for
Peace, Justice, and Ecology presented a Forum on the literature of several
“enemy” nations.
We discussed the literature of
all three of the so-called “Axis of Evil”, made possible by an anthology of
translations, Literature from the “Axis
of Evil”: Writing from Iran , Iraq ,
North Korea , and Other Enemy
Nations (Syria , Libya , Sudan ,
Cuba
Jacob George ( U.S. Army Res. Sgt., three tours in Afghanistan
Kaveh Bassiri discussed an
excellent collection of Iranian poetry, Forbidden. Mr. Bassiri came to the
US New York US
(I do not have the texts of their talks, but the Forum was filmed, has
been shown on local Community Television, and is available on DVD.)
And I discussed the literature of the other two “Axis of Evil”
countries presented in Literature from
the “Axis of Evil,” Iraq
and North Korea
DICK’S INTRO TO THE ANTHOLOGY
The Editors
skewer US use of “axis of evil” rhetoric evoking the Axis Powers of WWII. The word evil is evil and
all-encompassing. “The ‘Axis of Evil’
is an abstraction that obliterates both the immense differences between the
included countries, which are not even remotely in alliance with each other,
and the distinctiveness of the individuals who live in them. Its harms cut deep and wide—distorting,
diminishing, deluding, wounding, killing.
Thoughtful
people will ask: Is the “enemy” a
particular leader, or an ideology? A
system of government, a people, a social group? But as soon as President Bush uttered the
words “Axis of Evil” such questions were too late to stop the wars against the
so-called Axis. The President had
spoken the words, most of the Congressional minds boiled, and the machinery of
destruction and death were already in gear.
But it is not
too late to prevent the next explosion of constructed hatred, by deflating the
phrase, to empty out its poison, by celebrating diverse works of national
literatures of their particularity and through them, provide fresh perspectives
on the notion of the “enemy nation. “ Through the literature of nations threatened
by the US
Underlying
this belief is the assurance that understanding of others is the preeminent
purpose and achievement of literature.
To see the real individuals living in different nations, to participate in lives around the
globe. Our leaders and mainstream media
give us abstractions of good and bad nations, when we must experience real
people, unique individuals, like people living in the towns and an the farms of
our own nation in all their diversity.
If we are to decide whether to go along or not; whether to invade and
bomb or not.
Thus the editors naturally recognize the
importance of international education in general—the cultures of other nations,
world literature translated and written in English, study abroad, exchange
programs, multiculturalism. To widen
our “circles of reference. . . against ignorance and fear of the ‘enemy.’”
NORTH KOREAN LITERATURE
Literature?
That iron cage of a country has a literature? Our leaders never mentioned it, did not
know? Our mainstream media were ignorant
too? And compared to the other two
nations of the “Axis of Evil” it is a walled-in to wall-out country. None of the four North
Korean authors included in the anthology Literature
from the “Axis of Evil” is in exile.
All were published by official magazines or state-run publishing
companies and following official guidelines particularly regarding respectful
treatment of the Great Leader.
Biographical information was not available for some of the writers. So I was surprised by this judgment by the
author of the North Korean introduction:
“Nevertheless, what we witness on these pages is the persistent power of
the written word, of the willingness to deliver, despite all obstacles, the
stories of lives in North
Korea
The judgment
is true. One story—by Kang Kwi-mi—tells
a story about a displaced, poor Korean family living in Japan North
Korea US
Is this story (and
the other three selections by North Korean authors) literature or merely a
political pamphlet written for advancement and to avoid punishment? The
motives of the North Korean writers are probably multiple. Whatever, the stories should be a wake-up
call to the US North
Korea US
See my full
notes in my newsletters.
NORTH KOREAN
LITERATURE GOOGLE SEARCH, FIRST PAGE
1.
North Korean
literature -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_literature
In 2006, Words Without Borders included
the works of four North Korean writers, translated into
English, in its anthology Literature from the "Axis of
Evil".
2.
Korean literature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_literature
Korean literature is the body of literature produced in the Korean
language. ..... SomeNorth Korean writers are very highly
appreciated in the South and in 2005 ... Flowers of Fire (1974)
was one of the first anthologies of Korean literature ...
3.
An Interview with Hayun Jung - Words Without Borders
wordswithoutborders.org/article/an-interview-with-hayun-jung
That's the only place where you can
find work by North Korean literary authors, even... All the short stories
and poems included in the anthology were selected ...
4.
Literary Traditions and Culture of Korea: UG Course: SOAS
www.soas.ac.uk/courseunits/155901389.html
UG Course;SOAS;Literary Traditions and Culture
of Korea Korea : North Korea
5.
North Korea: A literary review - Tags: KOREAN literature LITERATURE
connection.ebscohost.com/c/literary.../north-korea-literary-review
Review of North Korean Literature Monthly called `Chosun
Munhak' from January ...Reviews the book 'Anthology of Korean Literature: From Early Times to
the ...
6.
Literature from the 'Axis of Evil': Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea ...
Rating: 3.6 - 5
reviews - $16.95 - In stock
This item: Literature from the 'Axis of Evil':
Writing from Iran , Iraq , North Korea Bedford
7.
Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology - Columbia University Press
cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-13512.../modern-korean-fiction
By inlcuding stories from neglected
female, North Korean, and wolbuk writers ... which synthesizes the
key developments in modern Korean literature, and a ...
8.
Modern Korean Literature: An Anthology - Page 252 - Google Books Result
books.google.com/books?isbn=0824813219
Peter H. Lee -
1990 - Fiction
1903) actively introduced Western literature, especially drama, to
the Korean reading public before he was kidnapped by the North Korean army in 1950.
9.
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Modern Korean literature and visual culture;
Children's literature of North and South... Waxen Wings: The Acta Koreana Anthology of Short Fiction From Korea
10.
Modern Korean literature: an anthology, 1908-65 - Chong-wha ...
Literature has an important role to
play in its portrayal of the relations between ... This anthology is an invitation to
readers to grasp how much Korea
Ad related to North
Korea
1.
Anthology Korean Literature
www.directtextbook.com/
50% off bookstore prices! With coupons
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Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters: http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ For a knowledge-based peace, justice, and
ecology movement and an informed citizenry as the foundation for change.
Contact Your Senators:
- Senator John Boozman:
Senator Mark Pryor
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DC Address:
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The
Honorable Mark Pryor
United States Senate 255 |
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DC Phone:
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202-224-2353
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202-228-0908
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Contact Senator Pryor:
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