Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Nuclear anxiety grows with North Korea standoff
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/32919 ... a-standoff
How Did the Trump Administration Lose an Aircraft Carrier?
https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... er/523458/
The US said this aircraft carrier was near North Korea. Turns out it was 3,500 miles away.
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Apr 18, 2017, 5:11pm EDT
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/4/18/1534 ... -korea-not
Nicholas KristofVerified account @NickKristof 16h16 hours ago
Nicholas Kristof Retweeted Capitolist
Fortunately, the Pentagon posted a "lost: aircraft carrier" ad on Craig's List. The Russians replied and told us where our carrier was.
Unpredictable. Unhinged. Dangerous - Asian Countries Look Warily At Trump
Alex Brandon
ByKIM TONG-HYUNGPublishedAPRIL 19, 2017, 8:58 AM EDT
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Unpredictable. Unhinged. Dangerous.
Many South Koreans are using those words to describe the president of their most important ally, rather than the leader of their archrival to the North. They worry that President Donald Trump’s tough, unorthodox talk about North Korea’s nuclear program is boosting already-high animosity between the rival Koreas.
No matter whether Trump succeeds at getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons and missile programs, his actions, comments and tweets are changing how the region views the long-running conflict. Senior North Korean officials see their relations with Washington as even more volatile than before. China is appealing for calm, and possibly re-examining its role. Japan is weighing a retaliatory strike capability against the North.
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CHINA
After decades of failure to stop North Korea’s march toward a nuclear arsenal, some see Trump’s bluster as a shrewd attempt to press China, the North’s most important ally and trading partner, into pressuring North Korea more aggressively over its nuclear program.
Trump has said he’s willing to make trade and economic concessions to China in return for its help with North Korea. “A trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them if they solve the North Korean problem!” Trump said on Twitter, recounting what he told Xi while hosting him this month at his Palm Beach, Florida, resort.
Pulling back from a campaign promise, Trump has also said he would not declare China a currency manipulator, as he looked for help from Beijing.
The rhetoric seems to be blurring the lines between North Korea and economic ties with China, issues that previous U.S. administrations had kept separate.
If such persuasion falls short, Trump has suggested he might use more coercive methods. So-called secondary sanctions on Chinese banks that do business with North Korea could also be in the offing, officials have said.
“Trump is posing a hard choice to Beijing — do something, something about North Korea and hope it generates some effects, or face American economic retaliation,” said Dean Cheng, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “Whether that works or not, it’s a very different strategy from the last three presidents.”
Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University, said that the way U.S. officials describe “maximum pressure and engagement” suggests that the Trump administration wants to ease Chinese fears about a collapse in North Korea, something that prevented Beijing from aggressively pressuring the North in the past.
“If the United States and China can set the tone, there will also be more opportunities for dialogue. It seems Trump could be more willing to cut a deal with North Korea than Obama was,” Koh said.
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SOUTH KOREA
South Koreans may be uneasy about North Korea’s expanding arsenal of weapons, but many doubt that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, wants to start a war that would likely end in the destruction of his government and the ruling elite. Donald Trump is another story, judging by widespread concern posted on Twitter.
Some see him as a hot-tempered, unpredictable leader who might attack North Korea before it masters the technology to build a nuclear-tipped missile that could hit the U.S. mainland. North Korea is moving steadily toward that goal, and some experts believe it could achieve it during Trump’s presidency.
U.S. strikes earlier this month against Syria, coupled with Trump’s dispatching of what he called an “armada” of U.S. warships to the Korean region, touched off fears that the United States was preparing for military action, though it was revealed this week that the flotilla was taking a roundabout path to Korean waters and has yet to arrive.
Lim Eul Chul, a North Korea expert at South Korea’s Kyungnam University, doesn’t think Trump wants to attack North Korea but said he appears eager to send a message that war is possible.
That has driven North Korea to issue its own threats and begin preparations for “even a 1 percent chance that the U.S. will launch pre-emptive strikes,” Lim said. “That’s just how the authoritarian Kim government survives.”
The Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper said recently that Trump is playing a “dangerous card” with his verbal threats, risking a miscalculation by Pyongyang and a war on the peninsula.
“Trump seems capable of doing anything, and he might choose to strike the North before it’s technologically able to strike back,” said Ray Kim, a 39-year-old Seoul resident. “Even if a war breaks out, it’s not like that war will take place on U.S. soil. Trump has much less to lose.”
___
NORTH KOREA
Trump is clearly on the mind of the North Korean leadership.
A senior Foreign Ministry official told The Associated Press last week that Pyongyang has been watching Trump’s actions — including his recent order for the strike on a Syrian air base and his many tweets about North Korea — and determined that his administration is “more vicious and more aggressive” than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama.
In response, Pyongyang is promising it will continue to build up its “nuclear deterrent” and respond in kind to any hostile moves, perceived or real.
North Korean fury at Washington was rising well before Trump took office, in particular over reports that annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises now include training for precision strikes on the North’s leadership or nuclear and military facilities. Pyongyang’s regime has called that “a red line,” and has since begun its own training for pre-emptive strikes and speeded up its testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
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JAPAN
Japan is drawing up emergency responses in case of a North Korea missile strike. A number of municipalities are testing community alarm systems and planning evacuation drills as concerns run high around U.S. military bases. Both Japan and South Korea are home to tens of thousands of U.S. troops.
The rising tension has opened the door to debate about once-taboo subjects in Japan, where the disastrous World War II experience and a postwar constitution that renounced the right to use military force have created a strong pacifist streak.
Japan’s ruling party recently urged the government to introduce advanced missile-defense equipment such as a land-based Aegis or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, which is being introduced in South Korea.
Ruling party defense experts have even proposed that Japan lift a self-imposed restraint on conducting a retaliatory strike if attacked, rather than relying solely on the U.S. military.
The steady turning up of the heat on all sides has increased the possibility of a miscalculation that could result in an incident that escalates too quickly to be contained, or even outright conflict.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/asia- ... wary-trump
In South Korea, War Hysteria Is Seen as an American Problem
The big issue here is the May 9 presidential election, which is expected to bring a progressive to power.
Gwangju, South Korea—When I arrived at Incheon International Airport near Seoul on April 2 to start a two-month stay in South Korea, I was immediately struck by the sharp contrasts between America and this bustling country of 50 million.
First was the airport itself. Incheon is one of the best-designed and most efficient airports in the world; it’s years ahead of the dilapidated structures that US air travelers are forced to endure. The lines for immigration and customs move briskly, and weary travelers are assisted by guides who speak English and politely lead you to the right gate.
Upon entry, the government agents who stamp your passport (and demand your fingerprints on a fancy electronic device) have the same authoritarian air as in most countries. But they’re a far cry from the grim and determined Customs and Border Patrol agents who have become notorious under President Trump for their rude and insulting behavior toward foreign visitors and refugees.
Then, as soon as you emerge into the terminal itself, you encounter South Korea’s fabulous and mostly public Wi-Fi system. Smartphones and computers are immediately connected to the Internet without charge or registration, making it easy to e-mail or text friends or family upon disembarking. High-speed Wi-Fi is prevalent throughout the country, and makes South Korea the most wired place on earth.
And right across the street from the terminal is the beautiful, futuristic structure for KORAIL, South Korea’s high-speed train system, which connects Incheon with every major city in the country. As with Europe, Asia has invested heavily in rail—unlike the United States, where such systems are still pipe dreams. My 159-mile trip the next morning to Gwangju, a city of 1.5 million in the southwest that’s known as the cradle of Korea’s democratic revolution, took less than three hours.
So far, however, my stay here has overlapped with the greatest contrast of all: the sharp difference between American and South Korean coverage of North Korea’s nuclear and missile program and the huge perception gap about the situation by US and South Korean citizens.
Shortly before I flew from Washington, DC, to Seoul, a US Navy aircraft-carrier group led by the USS Carl Vinson was ordered to move toward Korean waters. Immediately, the US media started broadcasting dire reports about the possibility of US pre-emptive strikes from these ships on the North’s military facilities. With CNN available on most cable systems here, the alarming news spread far and wide.
The reports were fueled by a steady flow of threatening tweets from President Trump and dire predictions and warnings from his cabinet (led by the oafish secretary of state, Rex Tillerson). Their pronouncements were reinforced by the hawkish and frequently unhinged Korea “experts” who dominate cable television.
For the most part, the US media have been split between lurid speculation about what such a war might look like and gleeful guesswork about whether Trump will send SEAL Team 6 assassination squads to take out Kim Jong-un, the North’s boyish, 33-year-old dictator.
Observers with deep understanding of Korean affairs, such as John Delury, a professor at Seoul’s Yonsei University who recently mapped out a sensible plan for diplomacy with the North in The New York Times, are rarely consulted. And, as is usual with coverage of North Korea, most American reporting lacks any historical context, includes virtually no Korean voices, and is almost universally in favor of the confrontational approach adopted by both Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama.
As the historian Bruce Cumings pointed out in The Nation last month, the American press assiduously avoids any mention of the horror inflicted on the North by US warplanes during the Korean War, as well as the long history of US military provocations on the peninsula. (His article should be required reading for anybody seeking to understand Kim’s motives; perhaps Chris Hayes, a Nation editor at large, would consider inviting Cumings on his MSNBC show, All In with Chris Hayes, to counter the inflammatory, one-sided discussions on his network.)
Sadly, though, NBC has been the source for the most abysmal stories. On April 13, the network, citing “multiple senior US intelligence officials,” proclaimed that Trump was “prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test.”
But the story was widely rebuked as reckless and without foundation. According to South Korea’s Hankyoreh, “reporters covering the South Korean Ministry of National Defense for other US news outlets unanimously dismissed the report as false. South Korean foreign affairs sources bluntly called the report ‘a canard.’” The story was so outlandish that the Trump administration itself was forced to repudiate it, with a National Security Council spokesperson telling ABC the story was “way wrong.”
Pyongyang, of course, added its own hyperbole. “North Korea will immediately make its own kind of appropriate super-hardline response according to the kind and the intensity of the American provocation,” the Korean People’s Army declared in a statement on April 14, The Hankyoreh reported.
If attacked, the KPA said, it was prepared to strike, including with nuclear weapons, at “all of the bases of evil,” including the US military bases “in South Korea such as those at Osan, Gunsan and Pyeongtaek.” In a swat at Japan and the US bases there, the KPA reminded Trump “that all American bases throughout the Pacific region, including those on Guam, Okinawa and the Japanese main island, are within the sights of our strategic rocket forces.”
The sensational US coverage and the North’s statements convinced many Americans that war was imminent. My 93-year-old father in California, who worked as a missionary in Korea for many years, was deeply frightened by the reports. All last week I received e-mails and Facebook messages from family and friends urging me to come home as soon as I could. My response was always: No worries, ordinary South Koreans are not concerned at all.
With the exception of a tiny minority of fanatical anti-communists, South Koreans have largely been unfazed by the headlines. “I’m much more worried about anything President Trump might do than the threats of war and retaliation from North Korea,” a friend of mine who teaches engineering at a local university in Gwangju told me over dinner one night. His sentiment is widely echoed throughout South Korea.
In Seoul, people are going about their regular business. “For many South Koreans, the concerns about the North can feel like a rite of spring, along with the rain showers or the cherry blossoms that crowds flock to see this time of year,” two Seoul-based reporters for The Wall Street Journal wrote last Friday. On Saturday, James Pearson, the Reuters correspondent in Seoul, took time out from his extensive coverage of North Korea’s missile tests to tweet that “South Koreans in general are not interested in the fireworks north of the DMZ.”
As if to make his point, that day thousands of South Koreans turned out nationwide for an emotional issue close to home: observing the third anniversary of the Sewol ferry disaster. In 2014, more than 300 people, most of them high-school students, died when the ferry capsized just over a mile from shore. Many Koreans blame their recently deposed president, Park Geun-hye, for the government’s botched rescue of the ship. (She was indicted for bribery, abuse of power, and other corruption charges on Monday.) Park’s cold response to the victims—she was reportedly getting her hair done during the disaster and refused to meet with the bereaved families—was a key factor in the movement to impeach her.
In fact, preventing a return to conservative, right-wing rule seems to be the dominant theme for Korean citizens. In Gwangju, which was the scene of a violent South Korean military crackdown and massacre in May 1980, the focus is the country’s future after Park’s forced resignation and recent arrest. The sentiment was best expressed by a large sign in Gwangju’s downtown last week (seen in my photograph at the top of this post). It demanded the immediate imprisonment of Park and the chiefs of Samsung, Lotte, and other conglomerates under investigation for bribing her while she was in office.
To be sure, the escalating rhetoric between the United States and North Korea over the past few weeks, as well as Trump’s threats to “do it alone,” have greatly alarmed Korean politicians of all stripes.
South Korea will choose its next president on May 9. The two leading candidates, the liberal Moon Jae-in and the more centrist Ahn Cheol-soo, have wide leads over the likely conservative candidate, Hong Jun-pyo. The United States has been closely following the election with growing trepidation. As I reported last year before Park was deposed, US military officials and analysts have expressed alarm that the left opposition could win this year.
Moon was a top adviser to the late former president Roh Moo-hyun, who was a progressive labor lawyer before entering politics. Moon has staked out a position very different from Trump’s: He has called for direct dialogue and negotiations with North Korea and a reopening of the economic cooperation with the North championed by Roh and Kim Dae-jung, the beloved opposition leader who was president in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
These ideas are very attractive to Koreans tired of the years-long dispute between Pyongyang and Washington. “We in South Korea can do this on our own initiative,” one of my colleagues at the Gwangju City Archives told me over lunch on Monday, referring to Kim’s “Sunshine” policies toward the North. A professor of European industrial history at a nearby university told me many Koreans are convinced that the United States wants to maintain the North as an enemy to “help your military industry.”
He has a point. Moon has also said the United States should delay deployment of the controversial Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system known as THAAD (built by Lockheed Martin) until the next government is in place, although he has wavered on that in recent days. But the THAAD antimissile batteries were hurriedly dispatched to South Korea last month by the Pentagon despite the concerns of Moon and others that it could destabilize relations with China.
Ahn, who made his name as a software executive, has taken a more hard line, saying he agrees with the immediate deployment of THAAD. But like Moon, he has emphasized the importance of negotiations and China’s involvement in the process. Meanwhile, at their first group debate on April 13, both Moon and Ahn expressed strong opposition to a unilateral US pre-emptive strike and emphasized that South Korea must play a lead role in any dealings with North Korea or China. The candidates are now running neck and neck, and either one could win the presidency.
That will likely force a change in Trump’s policy, away from confrontation and back to the combination of sanctions and military strength emphasized by the Obama administration. By week’s end, the Associated Press was reporting that a White House review of North Korean policy had, in fact, settled on “maximum pressure and engagement”—a shift away from the hard-line rhetoric of the past few weeks. “In the end, they settled on a policy that appears to represent continuity,” the AP concluded.
And on Sunday, as Vice President Mike Pence was arriving in South Korea to consult with the acting government in Seoul, H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national-security adviser, seemed to confirm the new policy. “It’s time for us to undertake all actions we can, short of a military option, to try to resolve this peacefully,” he said on ABC’s This Week program, according to Reuters.
For the progressive forces here, however, the war talk coming from both Trump and Kim Jong-un is deep cause for concern. In a stinging editorial on Easter Sunday, the Hankyoreh newspaper, which was founded by journalists purged during the authoritarian 1970s and ’80s, blamed both sides for aggravating tensions.
“A military clash on the Korean Peninsula would have disastrous consequences not only for North and South Korea but also for all neighboring countries,” the newspaper said. “That is why we will never agree with hardliners who are willing to go to war and who see war as inevitable. The brinkmanship of the U.S. and North Korea, which appear to be engaged in a battle of nerves, is tantamount to taking hostage the entire populations of North and South Korea.”
Still, the feeling here in Gwangju and elsewhere seems to be that this, too, shall pass—until someone comes along with the courage and stamina to buck the United States and try serious engagement for a change. After all, this is their country. That’s a lesson too many Americans, in their obsession with North Korea as a strategic enemy, seem to forget.
Media Lens @medialens 4 hrs ago
This is NOT a spoof. It's an actual @guardian tweet. When did this 'paper' become such a sick joke?
https://twitter.com/guardian/status/855046110452297728 …
NEWS APR 20 2017, 7:07 PM ET
U.S. Spy Planes Watching for Possible North Korea Nuke Test
by WILLIAM M. ARKIN, KEN DILANIAN, ROBERT WINDREM and COURTNEY KUBE
The U.S. continues to take active measures to prepare for the possibility of a nuclear test by North Korea, U.S. officials told NBC News, including the deployment of a special nuclear "sniffer" aircraft, drones, and U-2 spy planes.
The U.S. Air Force's special sniffer plane is capable of detecting evidence of a nuclear explosion.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-s ... st-n749111
Mockery, anger in South Korea over USS Carl Vinson 'bluffing'
US President Donald Trump said he was sending "an armada" to Korean waters to potentially deal with threats from Pyongyang.
But its no-show has caused some South Koreans to question his leadership and strategy regarding their unpredictable neighbor in the north.
And as the country prepares to vote for a new president on May 9, the claim could have far-reaching implications for the two countries' relations.
"What Mr. Trump said was very important for the national security of South Korea," Presidential candidate Hong Joon-pyo told the Wall Street Journal.
"If that was a lie, then during Trump's term, South Korea will not trust whatever Trump says," said Hong, who is currently trailing in the polls.
...
Some of Trump's comments have also rankled in South Korea. He told the Wall Street Journal -- after getting a primer on regional geopolitics from Chinese President Xi Jinping -- that the Korean peninsula "actually used to be part of China."
South Korea's Foreign Affairs Ministry, in a daily briefing Thursday, announced the government's response to the comments.
"The Ministry is in the process of checking facts with both the US and China through various diplomatic channels," the ministry's spokesperson Cho June-hyuck said.
"The international community unequivocally acknowledges that Korea was never a part of China in its thousands of years of history that no one can deny the fact," he added.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/20/asia/ ... index.html
ich
Trump – in North Korea You will be Murdering Human Beings!
By Andre Vltchek
April 21, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - When I think about North Korea, what first comes to my mind is a mist over the calm and majestic surface of the Taedong River near Pyongyang. Next I always recall two lovers, locked in a tender and almost desperate embrace, sitting side by side on the shore. I saw them every day, while taking brisk walks at dawn. Now I don’t know for sure whether they were real or just a product of my fantasy; a sad and gentle reminder of all that has been already lost, as well as of all that should have happened but never really materialized.
Public Housing Pyongyang (photo by Andre Vltchek)
Currently, as Donald Trump’s “armada” is speeding towards China and DPRK, I keep recalling those moments: the cliff, the lovers and a lone fisherman with his long rod at the other side of the river. Everything in my memory connected to those dawns is now motionless, serene.
Sometimes I wonder whether words still have the power they once used to have. In the past, a beautiful poem, a confession, or a declaration of love, were capable of changing one’s entire life, and sometimes even the entire destiny of a nation. But is this still the case, in this time and age? As a writer I often feel futility, even despair. Still, as an internationalist, I refuse to succumb to pessimism, and I try to use words as my weapons, again and again.
I have already said a lot about North Korea. I have shown images. I have spoken about the unimaginable pain this country has had to endure. I have spoken broadly about its tremendous gesture – of helping to liberate and then to educate so many parts of the world, including the enormous and devastated continent of Africa.
Still the propaganda against the people of DPRK rules.
Let me try again; let me try again and again and again:
North Korea is a beautiful country, inhabited by human beings, with blood circulating through their veins. Despite what you are directly and indirectly told, these people feel pain and they are capable of experiencing great joy. Like others, they often dream, fall in love, and suffer when being insulted or betrayed or abandoned. They laugh and cry, they hold hands, get angry, even desperate. They have great hopes for a better life and they work very hard trying to build their future.
So listen well, manager, or supervisor of what you yourself call the “free world”. Or how should I call you, President? Ok, fine, President… If you shoot your Tomahawk missiles at them, at DPRK, (as you recently did at Syria), or if you drop your bloody “Mother of All Bombs” on them (as you just did on some god-forsaken hamlet in Afghanistan, just in order to demonstrate your spite and destructive force), their bodies will be torn to pieces, people will die in tremendous agony; wives will be howling in despair burying their husbands, grandparents will be forced to cover the dead bodies of their tiny grandchildren with white sheets, entire neighborhoods and villages will cease to exist.
Of course you people do it everywhere; you think that you are the masters of the world, so used to spreading agony and desolation all over the world, but let me remind you one more time and put it on the record: it may all look like some fun-to-play computer game or a TV show, but it is not; it is all real, when your shit hits the targets, it’s damn real! I have seen plenty of it, and I have had really enough!
I know this is not what you have been told, and this is not what you tell the others.
North Koreans are supposed to look and behave like a nation of brainless robots, lacking all basic emotions and individuality, staring forward without seeing much, unable to feel pain, compassion or love.
You don’t want to see the truth, the reality, and you want others to be blind as well.
Even if you’ll blow the entire DPRK to pieces, you’ll actually not see much anyway, you’ll see almost nothing: just your own missiles shooting from battleships and submarines, your own airplanes taking-off from aircraft carriers, as well as some computer-generated images of powerful explosions. No pain, no reality, and no agony: nothing will get to you; nothing will reach you and your citizens.
It is you who is blind; it is not they.
You actually like it, don’t you? Admit you do. Let’s have it all in the open. And many citizens in the West like it as well – new titillating experiences, free ‘entertainment’, and a welcome break from the dire and empty, grey, loveless and meaningless routine of daily life in both North America and Europe. Hundreds of millions glued to their TV screens. Your popularity is going down, lately, isn’t it? The more missiles you shoot, the more bombs you drop, and the more countries you intimidate and confront, the broader your ‘support base’ gets.
You are a businessman, after all. The trade, the deal is simple, easy to grasp: you give to the majority of your people what they desire, and they give you support and admiration. True, isn’t it, if stripped of all that ‘political correctness’.
The psychologist Jung called this culture ‘pathological’. It has already destroyed basically all continents on Earth. It is now, perhaps, attempting to finish what is left of the world.
Still, you ought to know and understand and should be fully aware of the following: you might now get some generous endorsement from your fellow mentally ill citizens, but if you blow up the DPRK or any other country on Earth, sky-high, and if we as the planet Earth still somehow manage to survive, you and your ‘culture’ will be cursed for centuries and millennia to come! Think about it. Is it really worth it?
Perhaps you don’t give a damn. Most likely you don’t. Still, give it a try, try to think, and try to imagine: you will go down in history as a degenerate mass murderer and a bigot!***
Three years ago, this is how I described the 60th anniversary of the Victory Day in the DPRK:
“The brass band begins to play yet another military tune. I zoom on an old lady, her chest decorated with medals. As I get ready to press the shutter, two large tears begin rolling down her cheeks. And suddenly I realize that I cannot photograph her. I really cannot. Her face is all wrinkled, and yet it is both youthful and endlessly tender. Here is my face, I think, the face I was looking for all those days. And yet I cannot even press the shutter of my Leica.
Then something squeezes my throat and I have to search in my equipment bag for some tissue, as my glasses get foggy, and for a short time I cannot see anything at all. I sob loudly, just once. Nobody can hear, because of the loud playing of the band.
Later I get closer to her, and I bow, and she reciprocates. We make our separate peace in the middle of the boiling-hot main square. I am suddenly happy to be here. We have both lost something. She lost more. I was certain she lost at least half of her loved-ones in the carnage of those bygone years. I lost something too, and now I also lost all respect and belonging, to the culture that is still ruling the world; the culture that was once mine, but a culture that is still robbing people of their faces, and then burns their bodies with napalm and flames.
It is the 60th Anniversary of Victory Day in the DPRK. An anniversary marked by tears, grey hair, tremendous fireworks, parades, and by the ‘memories of fire’.
That evening, after returning to the capital, I finally made it to the river. It was covered by a gentle but impenetrable fog. There were two lovers sitting by the shore, motionless, in silent embrace. The woman’s hair was gently falling on her lover’s shoulder. He was holding her hand, reverently. I was going to lift my big professional camera, but then I stopped, abruptly, all of a sudden too afraid that what my eyes were seeing or my brain imagining, would not be reflected in the viewfinder.”
This is how I still remember the event.
The West has already killed millions of North Koreans. How many more have to vanish, just for not surrendering? What is the price of not agreeing to serve the Empire? Would it be one million more, or ten million? The number, please: you are a businessman; so do define the price truthfully!
On one of the riverbanks (photo by Andre Vltchek)
The DPRK has never attacked anybody. The United States which claims it now ‘feels threatened’, has attacked dozens and dozens of countries, robbed millions of people of life, and raped freedom, democracy and cultures all over the world.
There is one image inside my head, which I want to share with all my readers, even if I will be risking that this time my writing will be bordering on sentimentality. I don’t give a fuck, for once; this is no time for ‘polished and elegant style’. So here it is:
At one point I managed to break free from our delegation. It was in the capital, Pyongyang. I just walked and walked, along the mighty river, through an enormous park alongside ancient fortifications.
I spotted a girl, tiny, with a big ribbon in her hair. She was wearing white shoes. It was sunset. Her mother, a simple but beautiful lady, was talking to her. It was so obvious how much she loved and cherished her daughter. The two of them could not see me; I was observing them from some distance. There was so much tenderness, so much serenity between these two human beings. The mother was caressing her daughter’s face, explaining something, pointing at the trees. Their faces were totally relaxed, no fear, no tension, just love.
I walked further, and still in the park, I saw a couple surrounded by a group of people. It was a family photo session. A man and a woman were obviously getting married; he was wearing a formal suit, she was dressed in a wedding gown. Then I noticed that large black sunglasses were hiding a large part of the man’s face. He was blind. Most likely, he was badly burned behind the dark spectacles. His future wife was younger, and she was attractive. She was happy! She kept chatting, laughing cheerfully. I was stunned. In the West, people have been betraying each other, abandoning one another over the tiniest inconveniences or doubts, for the most egotistic reasons. And here, a young attractive woman was joining, happily, her badly injured man, so they could walk together, side-by-side, for the rest of their life journey.***
I saw a lot of North Korea after those few hours in the park. I was faced with the most fortified border on Earth. I met and discussed philosophy and how the West tries to de-humanize its enemies, with Yang Hyong Sob, the Vice President of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Committee. I discussed philosophy and existentialism with the great theologian and philosopher John Cobb, on board a bus that was taking us from Pyongyang to the borderline.
Subway in Pyongyang (photo by Andre Vltchek)
There were ‘big moments’ during that trip, great celebrations all around me. There were elaborate performances and speeches, marches and music. Yet, nothing touched me so deeply as those moments in the park. There, I observed enormous tenderness given to a child by her mother. And I witnessed that natural and beautiful, simplicity and joy of love, mixed with serenity and dignity radiating from a young woman marrying her blind and injured partner.
That is North Korea, which I have been privileged enough to have observed with my own eyes. That is North Korea which the manager wants to ‘take care of’, which means ‘to destroy’. And that is North Korea where I realized, as on so many other occasions, in so many countries, that there is still so much love that resides on this Earth, and that no barbarity, no cruelty, would ever be able to defeat it.***
This essay is not my ‘usual stuff’. It is not a philosophy, or reportage. I don’t know what it is. I don’t care what it is. I just wanted to share something with my readers: something that is inside me right now, something that is breaking and shouting and rebelling against the state of things.
What I am certain of is that at this moment, I want to be there, in Pyongyang. I want to go back, although no one has invited me to return, yet.
If the supervisor, the manager, decides to attack, I want to be on my feet and alert and ready, facing his ships and missiles. Just like that, as always, without any cover or bulletproof vest, just with my cameras, and a pen and a simple notepad, as well as a tiny Asian dragon – a good luck charm – in my pocket.
I will not be afraid. I don’t think most of the people of North Korea would be afraid. Only those who are ready to commit mass murder, over and over again, in all corners of the world, are now most likely scared; at least subconsciously, at least in their own essence as well as of their own insanity.
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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.
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