From South Korea to the home front

The Verge Editor Sarah Jeong just happened to be in Seoul, out drinking, when the president declared martial law in a coup attempt this week. This wasn't a reporting assignment, but how could a journalist miss the history that was unfolding?

She rushed to the protests, catching the flavor of an instinctive, momentarily successful, popular uprising, combining high tech youth in this super-modern country with old time progressive campaigners who remembered overthrowing a dictator to install democracy. It's fascinating ... here are some excerpts:

... the presence of political protests is not unusual in South Korea: this is a nation that lionizes the protesters who opposed the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and teaches young schoolchildren to revere the 1919 protests against the Japanese colonial occupation. But it’s not just rote opposition politics — even relatively conservative newspapers are criticizing Yoon, and his popularity is in the toilet. It’s against this backdrop that Yoon Suk Yeol made the late-night surprise announcement that the country was now under martial law, in order to stop “shameless pro-North anti-state forces that plunder the freedom and happiness of our people.” All political activities — including those of the National Assembly, the parliamentary body that can legally block his martial law order — were suspended.

[So she took a train to where the action was, outside the National Assembly.] ... The sudden vibe shift starts with a middle-aged auntie sitting on a platform bench waiting for the other train who shouts “Fighting!” at the crowd that packs the escalator and the stairs. Another woman in a motorized wheelchair yells political slogans as she zips ahead to the exit, fist in the air.

When I emerge into the freezing night air, the first thing I see is military uniforms. My heart races and I take out my phone, before realizing that the two young men in full-body tactical camo look frightened. The soldiers are surrounded by furious ahjussis pushing and shoving and cursing at them. [Ahjussis are older working and middle class men who may well remember their student protests that won Korean democracy, however stodgy they may now appear.]

... Before I can even really process it, I can no longer see soldiers on the street. There is still camouflage here and there, but these are a smattering of protesters wearing it head-to-toe, possibly vestiges of their own time doing mandatory military service. Hordes of riot police with shields and neon green vests are marching through the streets. The protesters are ignoring them.

An unidentified man gets on a microphone and begins narrating updates; he starts by asking the crowd to surround him and protect him from having the mic taken by the police. The protesters oblige in an orderly fashion. 

It’s freezing out, and people are mostly bundled up in puffer coats. I wonder if anyone else can tell how drunk I am; I wonder, also, how drunk other people are. On television, politicians who sprinted to the National Assembly to stop the fall of democracy are blinking slowly and slurring their words. They appear to have been enjoying their Tuesday night in very much the same fashion I had been. 

At 1:02AM, the man on the microphone announces that the Assembly has voted to block the declaration of martial law; a heartfelt cheer goes through the crowd. The loudspeakers begin to play some truly awful music, a tinny version of a cheesy protest song that sounds like it was recorded by literal children. The crowd sings along; the ahjussis seem to know all the words by heart. I look up the lyrics later; they roughly translate to: The Republic of Korea is a democratic republic. The power of the Republic of Korea stems from its people.

The chants switch to “Arrest Yoon Suk Yeol!” and “The people are victorious!” The crowd presses against the fences that barricade them from the National Assembly building. Most of them are on their phones, following the events happening inside; some of the older men have their phones pressed against their ears, listening to news broadcasts. 

One kid with an open beer slurs, “Death to Yoon Suk Yeol!” and is ignored. People are standing on top of tall decorative planters, on top of walls, on top of piles of unassembled police barricades that have been abandoned. The people standing on the walls are a mix of young men and ahjussis; I am starting to see selfie sticks and GoPros and livestreamers enter the crowd. An ahjussi yells at great length about how much he loves his friends for coming out with him to protest.

... When I finally catch a cab, the gray-haired driver asks me if I was at the protests. When I answer in the affirmative, he thanks me. I am embarrassed; my Korean is not good enough to explain to him that I am a journalist, that I am an American, that I am supposed to be an impartial observer of history. The ahjussi goes on to tell me he’s always hated Yoon and complains about being called a commie for saying that Yoon was going to ruin the country. ...

I think about the GoPros and livestreamers; I think about the kids asking to have their picture taken, so they can tell their families that they were there on that important day. Politics is being intermediated so smoothly through technology that it has become almost unnoticeable, embedded into the fabric of life for the young and the old alike. ... 

Yoon tried to take power with soldiers, police, and helicopters — to take the country back to the 1980s. But these aren’t the 1980s. He should have seized cell service first.

Go read it all.

My friend  Christine Ahn is mobilizing for Korean democracy still. This event is in Honolulu.

Like many in my age cohort, young and active between 1965 and 1975, I can identify with those people in those crowds. I know what it is to surround a building while facing police, to make loud demands. We did that sort of thing a lot back in the day. (I kept doing it many years longer, but that's another story.) Looking forward to the Trump regime, I think many of my age group wonder whether we could do it again. 

The outpouring of young people to work and canvass for the election just past is reassuring. We didn't win, but it wasn't for lack of volunteers who cared. I don't think Trump's narrow victory will keep them from continuing to care and to turn out for their hopeful vision of the country if they have to.

•  •  •

Jay Kuo, multi-talented human rights lawyer and digital whiz, has some takes on what South Korean events might mean in our context.

Presidents like Yoon or Trump do not feel constrained by laws or even common sense or decency. To stop them from seizing complete power, it takes people willing to mobilize in the streets, press willing to defy censorship orders, unions willing to call for general strikes, legislators ready to risk their safety, and a military prepared to stand down in order to stop a determined takeover of the government by a dictator.

The chances are not negligible that Trump will attempt such a decree at some point during his tenure. After all, he has already said he wants to be a Day One dictator, and he has toyed in the past with invoking the Insurrection Act, thwarted only by cooler heads who will not be present this second time around.

... Nor does the U.S. Constitution or any federal law provide a clear mechanism for undoing martial law once decreed, other than to seek a court order to overturn it. But based on recent rulings, if the final decision rests with this Supreme Court, the fate of the Republic is shaky at best.

That means there likely is no quick way out of an unlawful or pretextual decree by Trump under the Insurrection Act, or some other kind of emergency powers declaration, under which he assumes full control of the government and can silence all dissent. In light of the South Korean example, civic leaders, union officials, legislators and ordinary citizens must begin to ask an important question: What will they actually do if Trump seeks to end our democracy by decree? How far would they go and how would they try to stop him?

This is no longer some abstract thought experiment. Through these events in South Korea, we have now been duly warned of the risks of autocratic takeover. The future of our democracy may very well depend on whether we can match the kind of response we just witnessed. We must take the South Koreans’ complete rejection of military dictatorship as an inspiring example and pledge to defend democracy with equal passion, resolve and action.

I'm inspired again and I'm with Kuo.

Angry young women

Daniel Cox is a data scientist who runs the Survey Center on American Life. He observes that some young liberal American women display measurable evidence of mental distress and even despair. He opines:

One recent event was especially significant for young liberal women: #MeToo. Even as public interest in the #MeToo movement recedes, its influence remains considerable. In recent interviews with young women, we found that the #MeToo movement was incredibly salient—for many, it was a transformative experience that informed their views on relationships, sexism, and gender equality.  

... As the #MeToo movement gained traction, many women began to reevaluate their understandings of the way American society treats them. Gallup polls reveal plummeting levels of satisfaction with the treatment of women in the last few years. In 2016, 61 percent of women said they were satisfied with the way women were treated in the US. The next time Gallup asked this question, in 2018, feelings of satisfaction had fallen dramatically. Today, only 44 percent of women report being very or somewhat satisfied with the treatment of women in American society.

Sounds plausible to me. Women are having a moment of being more appropriately aware that our aspirations are impeded by the sexist and misogynist elements in our society -- like, say, Republican judges and Donald Trump. And, too often, though by no means always, men in women's peer groups can be oblivious and unsupportive.

 

Cox goes on to report mournfully that 4 in 10 among current young liberal women are open to adopting a bisexual or lesbian sexual orientation. He thinks that indicates depression. I think it merely makes sense given what young women are experiencing ...

There's a universal antidote to depression that arises from seeing the world as it is. That's to struggle to make things better, in this case, a revived 21st century feminism. Will current distress generate a new feminist wave? It might. It seems as if every few years we experience a new such eruption -- and will continue to do so as long as women realize we won't have the equality we expect and deserve without demanding it,.

• • •

I was going to give Mr. Cox's distressed musings a pass, until I ran across this: The Real Reason South Koreans Aren’t Having Babies. Wow! The conflict between the sexes could be so much worse.

On the days she’s feeling most generous toward men—say, when she sees a handsome man on the street—Helena Lee can sometimes put her distaste aside and appreciate them as “eye candy.” That’s as far as she goes: “I do not want to know what is inside of his brain.” Most of the time, she wants nothing at all to do with men.

“I try to have faith in guys and not to be like, ‘Kill all men,’” she says. “But I’m sorry, I am a little bit on that side—that is, on the extreme side.”

The ghost of Valerie Solanas lives in South Korea?

[Helena] Lee is part of a boycott movement in South Korea—women who are actively choosing single life. Their movement—possibly tens of thousands strong, though it’s impossible to say for sure—is called “4B,” or “The 4 No’s.” Adherents say no to dating, no to sex with men, no to marriage, and no to childbirth. (“B” refers to the Korean prefix bi-, which means “no”.)

They are the extreme edge of a broader trend away from marriage. By one estimate, more than a third of Korean men and a quarter of Korean women who are now in their mid-to-late 30s will never marry. ...

... “I think the most fundamental issue at hand is that a lot of girls realize that they don’t really have to do this anymore,” Lee told me. “They can just opt out.”

That's some angry women. 

According to this account, young Korean women find dating unsatisfactory and sometimes physically dangerous. Demographers are projecting that the Korean population is shrinking because many young women simply are not choosing to couple and have children -- and don't like the available male partners.

In the U.S., the similar trend is partially mitigated by widespread acceptance of female single parenthood, though that's a hard road for the mother. And new immigrants generally have been more likely to want and bear large families. If it weren't for immigration, we'd be on a demographic trajectory more like Korea's.

What some South Koreans think ...

After all, Koreans are the ones in the immediate line of fire. They are the ones who have been separated from kinfolk for nearly 70 years.

According to E. Tammy Kim, writing from Seoul for the New Yorker:

Koreans see the Singapore summit not just as another sensational episode in the story of Donald Trump but as a step away from a sixty-eight-year-old unfinished war. In South Korea, in all but the most reactionary circles, there is a sense of ethnic solidarity with the North and some longing for unity. Support for President Moon, who is seen widely as the catalyst for this sudden thaw of relations between North Korea and the world, remains high. (Local elections, though overshadowed by the summit, take place on Wednesday in South Korea. Support for Moon’s party, generally, has also remained high, and voters will have a chance to express their confidence at the ballot box.) I’ve yet to meet a single Korean who isn’t willing to express optimism, in some form, about the prospects for peace and reunification. ...

... Lee Soo-jung, an anthropologist at Duksung Women’s University, acknowledged the painful “historical irony” of benefitting from Trump. In a fairer world, she tells me, “The citizens of the world would be able to vote for the U.S. President.” ...

... After the summit, [South Korean President Moon Jae-in] issued a short statement congratulating the U.S. and North Korea on a “successful” and “historic” meeting, praising Trump for his initiative and promising to work toward inter-Korean peace. South Koreans do not trust Kim or Trump, or believe in the possibility of a quick reunification. They are simply aware of the toll that seventy years of national division have taken, and are eager for an alternative future.

How many people around the world must have felt that they, too, deserved to have the chance to vote on U.S. presidents -- since the North American elephant might crush the life out of them with an accidental or unconsidered misstep?

Trump's video trailer for his nothingburger summit

Much of the media finds this weird video apparently gifted from Trump to Kim simply dumbfounding. I don't.

A story: years ago, when I was doing some consulting on organizational effectiveness for the ACLU, I had the sad duty of researching and explaining one of the facts of life to the civil liberties groups' brilliant director. According the best opinion studies, about 16 percent of citizens thought TV cop dramas were documentaries, literally true. (Obviously these folks had no personal experience of police or courts.) This phony film is for these same people. I doubt if it will occur to polling and marketing companies to inquire, but it is aimed at the segment of the population who will believe it. They exist.

Dire times

The difference between John Bolton and most of the rest of the cast of characters around our ignorant, fearful, impulsive president is that he actually believes that war can accomplish something in the interests of the United States. Even most of the generals don't believe that after nearly two decades of murderous futility. Bolton is a true believer in forever war. The POTUS is a small man facing escalating threats in a big job.

Expect war before the midterm elections ...

A few, not very consequential, thoughts on the Korea front

Traditional media can't seem to stop repeating a tired cliche about the POTUS's decision to talk with North Korea's Kim Jong-un: "No sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader." So what and about time! Using our words in preference to insults and fists is taught in kindergarten these days; we should be glad when this elementary notion penetrates the Oval Office, however little trust we may have in the current occupant. Presidents should have been talking with North Korean leaders decades ago -- and finding a way to reach a peace treaty on the divided peninsula.

On the other hand, the Trump meets Kim reality show is a charade. Peace in Korea requires peace between the two Koreas and an evolving regional settlement that supersedes the resentments and fears both Koreas hold toward their former colonial masters in Tokyo.

The brilliant actor in the present moment is South Korea's President Moon. He knows what he has to do:

Mr. Trump’s head-spinning decision to accept an invitation to meet with Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, amounts to a remarkable diplomatic coup for Mr. Moon, who engineered the rapprochement in a whirlwind of diplomacy ...Not only has Mr. Moon steered two headstrong, erratic adversaries away from a military conflict that could have been devastating for his nation, he has maneuvered the Trump administration into pursuing negotiations that it has long resisted — but that he and his allies on South Korea’s political left have long pressed for. ... he has gone to great lengths to play to Mr. Trump’s ego, repeatedly thanking the American president for his support and crediting his policies for bringing Mr. Kim to the negotiating table.

Choe Sang-Hun, New York Times, March 9, 2018

In another Times article, Mark Landler writes and/or the NYT copy desk passes on, the phrase, "Since taking power last May, Mr. Moon ..." I think we used to call what new presidents of democracies did "taking office," not "taking power." But I'm an old fogey.

As is so often true these days, a Washington Post reporter seems to have the most cogent observation on the men and their coming meeting:

“The thing that they have in common is that both of them think that they can outsmart the other,” said Ralph Cossa, president of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum think tank, and a regular interlocutor with North Korean officials. “We’ll have to wait to see who’s right.”

Olympics and peace on the Korean pennisula

As the PyeongChang Winter Olympics begin, my friend Christine Ahn keeps on doing what she has been doing for years: traveling tirelessly to promote reconciliation between the two Koreas and urging restraint on their bellicose backers -- most notably her own United States. In 2015, she was a leader of a women's walk across the so-called "demilitarized zone" which is the border between these two states cut apart by post-World War II imperial jockeying. Today she is on tour, currently in Albany, NY, talking to whoever will listen about the possibilities for peace. This is how a peace movement is built, through a combination of dramatic citizen actions and patient education to preempt the war machine.

Here are some excerpts from Christine's oped column in the Albany Times Union:

Whether called the "bloody nose" strategy or "preventive war," a hawkish cabal in the White House are advocating for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea. They believe they can deal a targeted blow to Pyongyang's nuclear facilities before a North Korean nuclear missile can reach the United States. ...

Like with past U.S. "precision" strikes, this is pure fantasy. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. North Korea is different. It has an arsenal of at least 20 nuclear weapons.

But North Korea is not suicidal. The former chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Dennis Blair, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that North Korea is "only an imminent threat if we make it an imminent threat. We've been talking these guys up a lot more than they deserve."

Yet, hawks in the White House are gunning for a new Korean War, even though we know for a fact that in the opening days of a conventional military conflict, at least 300,000 people would be killed, according to the Congressional Research Service. If nuclear weapons are used, 25 million people would be impacted. The Pentagon estimates any military action to secure North Korean nuclear sites would require a ground invasion, which would require hundreds of thousands of troops.

But as war plans are being drawn in Washington, North Korea and South Korea are sitting down to talk. ...

The U.S. president and his generals are dangerous men, in danger of believing their own feverish fantasies of perfect victories over evil. We've seen far more well balanced leaders launch themselves and us on this sort of perilous adventure. But this time, there is an isolated state with nukes that fears for its very existence.

North Korea seems to be a pretty awful place for North Koreans. After seven decades of separation, the two Koreas have become quite different societies with different values, despite sharing a history and language. Previous Korean-to-Korean peace efforts have brought no breakthroughs.

There have been various attempts in U.S. media to convey what a U.S. "bloody nose" strike on North Korea might look like. North Korea has ample capacity to strike back; most of the victims would be Korean or perhaps Japanese and their deaths would be on us.

The moral truth remains: history and any survivors will not look kindly on any state that starts a nuclear war, as any war-like move by the United States might well do. Is this where we are going? Thanks Christine for trying to stop it.

Six North Korean lives

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea is a haunting narrative of six North Korean lives -- accounts of daily struggles, delights, loves and pain -- during the late 1980's through the early '00s. Barbara Demick, a Los Angeles Times journalist reporting from Seoul, South Korea, spent seven years interviewing her subjects and confirming as many details as possibly about a place from which she, like all outsiders, was barred. She follows a young couple who could never quite connect within their homeland; an older woman who was a true believer in the Kim family Confucian/Communist project and ends up a successful small entrepreneur; a doctor who saw one too many of her pediatric patients starve to death; and an orphan whose survival skills would probably cause him to be classified as a delinquent in any society. Since her subjects lived to tell their tales in South Korea, the reader knows how each story comes out. Yet Demick narrates the perilous and unexpected accidents of these lives so dramatically that I felt as if I was reading a novel. I cared what happened to these people.

Along the way, this book contains a lot of information and reflection about North Korea that is probably not common knowledge as we, the US people, make an unwilling audience for a couple of cartoon characters, ours and theirs, trading insults.

The division of the Korean peninsula is completely unnatural, an artifact of the messy end of World War II and the Cold War. For seventy years before 1945, this ancient kingdom was an unhappy colony of Japan. Because U.S. mapmakers feared Russian ambitions at the end of the Pacific war, they drew a line across the country, each big power occupying one half of Korea. The Korean war of 1950-1953 didn't lead a redrawing of that line (or, to this day, a peace treaty) but did leave two states, the capitalist South, long a corrupt dictatorship and then a democracy, and the Communist North, led by Kim Il-sung. Older Koreans remember when the North was the more prosperous society, materially bolstered by Soviet and Chinese governments. Kim was the author of his own brand of nationalist communism in a country his regime successfully walled off from the outside. Demick explains:

To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. ... all these regimes had the same trappings: the statues looming over every town square, the portraits hung in every office, the wristwatches with the dictator's face on the dial. But Kim Il-sung took the cult of personality to a new level. What distinguished him in the rogues gallery of twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion. His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the pre-Communist days when Pyongyang had such a vibrant Christian community that it was called the "Jerusalem of the East." Once in power, Kim Il-sung closed the churches, banned the Bible, deported believers to the hinterlands, and appropriated Christian imagery and dogma for the purpose of self promotion.

The resulting nationalist, collective, Confucian/Communist mix, called juche, became the faith of the North. Kim's death in 1994 was a defining trauma for Demick's six protagonists. How to live on without the leader was not an abstract question for North Koreans.

The question was exacerbated by the consequences for North Koreans of the collapse of Soviet Communism and the emergence of Chinese capitalism. The North had never fed itself, always dependent on importing about 40 percent of its food. For its people, "the crowning achievement of the North Korean system was subsidized food." People labored not so much for money as for rations and housing provided to workers by the state. When comradely subsidies ended, North Koreans, especially in disfavored areas, literally starved. The life stories in Demick's book are grueling, tales of foraging for grass and bark, of watching helplessly as loved ones simply wasted away, collapsed and died. Demick's summation is brutal:

In a famine, people don't necessarily starve to death. Often some other ailment gets them first. Chronic malnutrition impairs the body's ability to battle infection and the hungry become increasingly vulnerable to tuberculosis and typhoid. ... normally curable illnesses suddenly become fatal. Wild fluctuations of body chemistry can trigger strokes and heart attacks. People die from eating substitute foods that their bodies can't digest. ...

The killer has a natural progression. It goes first to the most vulnerable -- children under five. They come down with a cold and it turns into pneumonia; diarrhea turns into dysentery. Before the parents even think about getting help, the child is dead. Next the killer turns to the aged, starting with those over seventy, then working its way down the decades to people in their sixties and fifties. These people might have died anyway, but so soon? Then starvation makes its way through people in the prime of their lives. Men, because they have less body fat, usually perish before women. The strong and athletic are especially vulnerable become their metabolisms burn more calories.

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law or betray a friend. ... As Mrs. Song would observe a decade later, when she thought back on all the people she knew who died during those years in Chongjin, it was "the simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told -- they were the first to die."

The famine abated at the end of the 1990s; although some international aid came in, it seems not to have reached the most desperate people.

... the worst of the famine was over, not necessarily because anything had improved but, as Mrs. Song later surmised, because there were fewer mouths to feed. "Everybody who was going to die was already dead."

Some estimates make the toll three million out of a population of 22 million North Koreans; all numbers about things North Korean are disputed and the Kim government isn't telling.

Demick's book relates what her protagonists did to survive the famine, how even such a closed system as North Korea was altered by such a trauma, and the various routes they followed when they left their country. They are all exceptional in having managed to get to South Korea. Most people who leave the North end up on the margins of Chinese society. These people are the almost unimaginably lucky ones. South Korea, for its own political purposes, considers them citizens and makes a significant effort to integrate them into its thriving capitalist society. This is not easy.

The sad truth is that North Korean defectors are often difficult people. Many were pushed into leaving not only because they were starving but because they couldn't fit in at home. And often their problems trailed after them, even after they crossed the border. ...

Though this book is full of political observations, ultimately it is about human individuals. Their stories will fill my bad dreams for a long time. ***The quote immediately above exemplifies one of my few quarrels with this book: Demick uses the locution "defector" throughout. I think of that word as signifying some political intent. Yet, though her subjects are certainly disaffected, their departure from North Korea does not really come across as political. I'd call them "escapees" from a society they came to feel was intolerable and unsurvivable.

This was published in 2010 and ought to be in many public libraries. Get ahold of it if you want to know a little more about people our president is threatening with incineration. H/t to Ezra Klein for recommending it.

A prescient warning of national weaknesses

I've occasionally been advised I could not consider myself properly educated if I haven't read some of the theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was a left-leaning, but anti-Communist, public intellectual who tried to explain this country to itself in the 1940s and '50s. He argued for "political realism" -- Barack Obama claimed Niebuhr's thought as a major influence. Though he's no household name, he left a substantial mark on U.S. culture by writing the Serenity Prayer popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous.

Back at the dawn of American empire, Niebuhr highlighted aspects of our national history and experience which made us suckers for launching dumb wars, a warning that feels completely current as that blustering ignoramus in the White House spouts threats against Korea and Iran.

... the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of ... fear that our "technocratic" tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history. We might be driven to hysteria by its inevitable frustrations. We might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations.

The political term for such an effort is "preventive war." ...

The power of such a temptation to a nation, long accustomed to expanding possibilities and only recently subjected to frustration, is enhanced by the spiritual aberrations which arise in a situation of intense enmity. The certainty of the foe's continued intransigence seems to be the only fixed fact in an uncertain future. Nations find it even more difficult than individuals to preserve sanity when confronted with a resolute and unscrupulous foe.

Hatred disturbs all residual serenity of spirit and vindictiveness muddles every pool of sanity. In the present situation even the sanest of our statesmen have found it convenient to conform their policies to the public temper of fear and hatred which the most vulgar of our politicians have generated or exploited. Our foreign policy is thus threatened with a kind of apoplectic rigidity and inflexibility. Constant proof is required that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor....

Nieubhr had our number, I fear, though some residual impulse toward modesty and sanity kept our rulers from initiating annihilation during the long years of Cold War.

Niebuhr's little volume, The Irony of American History, is available online as a .pdf and probably from every older library in the country. It is worth snagging. I am sure I'll find myself quoting further from it in the future.

North Korea, Washington, and the end of US empire

While we were walking the Camino, I got persistent questions from friends watching President Blunderbuss heating up tensions with North Korea (and Iran, and everyone else with half a glimmer in the wide world), "why aren't we in the streets screaming against this madness?"

Returning to the unhappy USofA seems to mean I can no longer dodge thinking about this.

Serious people, including that wise historian of things vital and military Thomas Ricks, pictured here on tour promoting his book Churchill and Orwell, opine that there is a 50/50 chance of war with North Korea, a war that would almost certainly be nuclear. Oh shit, another generation has to live under the threat of fiery annihilation as mine did in the Fifties.

The usual campaigners for peace are making the usual appeals to Congress, but this does not seem equal to the horror of the prospect. The Orange Cheeto gives us unending white supremacist distractions; Congressional GOPers continue their crusade to transfer the nation's wealth to plutocratic sponsors; and most of us just try to get along.

But also, I don't think either the peace movement, or the left, or the Democratic politicians who dissidents are stuck with as a vehicle for influence in Washington, are ready to articulate the central reality that makes war so likely at present: US empire, US hegemony, is over. Cemented in place in 1945 when World War II had flattened the rest of the world, US pre-eminence has been eroding for decades. (Many of us knew this during the Vietnam war.) But mainstream US politics has never quite found a way to deal up front and honestly with this reality. So for all the handwringing over Trump and Korea, there's hardly any mainstream debate about how this powerful country should act as a force among many in a plural world.

Obama certainly had a glimmer about this, though like all of them, he couldn't allow himself to articulate clearly that the current object of US foreign policy has to be to manage the decline of empire. He was willing to suggest some US adventures were "dumb wars"; he knew his efforts at power projection would be undercut by too many dead US soldiers, so he favored drones and spooks over troop commitments; he generally eschewed loud displays of imperial dominance.

Since we mostly lack even language to talk about this, I was heartened to read a smart article by Jeet Heer that lays out Democratic pols' tongue-tied inertia over the country's stance in the world. The entirety is a good survey of the situation and highlights Bernie Sanders' attempt to find ground that mainstream Democrats might join him in.

Sanders’s recent foreign policy speech, notably in its strong defense of the Iran nuclear deal, was a careful attempt to claim Obama’s legacy by arguing for a liberal internationalist approach of alliance-building to solving the world’s problems. The central theme of the speech was the need to re-conceptualize foreign policy not just as a matter of military policy. “Here is the bottom line: In my view, the United States must seek partnerships not just between governments, but between peoples,” Sanders argued. “A sensible and effective foreign policy recognizes that our safety and welfare is bound up with the safety and welfare of others around the world.”

I'm no across-the-board Sanders fan (too often he reminds me of thousands of old white lefty men who never understood why women and people of color and queers might have different priorities) but if he can drive Democrats in this direction, he is serving the country well.

#KoreanPeace

Bay Area Korea activists responded to the Orange Cheato's theatrical but empty classified Senate briefing on Korea policy with a People's Briefing in downtown San Francisco in front of Senator Feinstein's office. They emphasized that any Korean military action could easily kill a million people, mostly in Seoul, in the first 24 hours. That's according to Pentagon estimates. When the U.S. indulges in war talk, the lives we are putting on the line are in east Asia.

On May 9, South Korea will hold a presidential election. The leading candidate, Moon Jae-In, seeks more engagement with North Korea and more independence from U.S. foreign policy, while appreciating the U.S. security guarantee to his country.

Women walking for peace have just crossed the Korean DMZ

My friend Christine Ahn (explaining in the video) has been organizing -- and taking shit -- for this project for at least a year. In the last hour, they've done it.

As reported at CBS News, she had recruited two dozen walkers who included two Nobel Peace laureates -- Mairead Maguire, who shared the 1976 Nobel prize for her work toward ending the conflict in Northern Ireland, and Leymah Gbowee, who was recognized in 2011 for her role in the Liberian peace movement -- as well as U.S. peace luminaries including Gloria Steinem, Medea Benjamin, and Cora Weiss.

Both South and North Korea had their doubts; nobody crosses that line. After six decades, there still is no peace between the divided segments of the country. The so-called "Demilitarized Zone" is instead a forest of defenses on both sides. South Korea's U.S. backers were not enthusiastic. Interestingly, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon endorsed the effort. This crazy woman's idea of showing that barriers need not be permanent is attractive and perhaps can become potent. Something has to give ...

"Punishing North Korea won't work" and other intelligence

Same caution here as the last time I posted about Korea news: I have no expertise in these matters whatsoever. But, perhaps because Korea has been a policy sideshow for official Washington, a lot of what does get written about the Koreas seems somewhat less caught in a intellectual straightjacket than what we hear about such chewed over, if ill-digested, regions as the Middle East. Hence the title of this post.

I found this an interesting conundrum:

Imagine, in a thought experiment, that no country other than North Korea has nuclear weapons today. How would this change the practical policy choices and actions available to those involved? I would suggest the answer is surprisingly little, if at all. To begin with, existing nuclear weapon states' arsenals (and the U.S. arsenal in particular) have already failed in what many believe is one of their primary missions--dissuading countries such as North Korea from building a nuclear weapon.

Pavel Podvig,
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

One of Podvig's Bulletin colleagues made an even more challenging suggestion:

The ... assumption, that North Korea essentially has the bomb today, is also problematic. That assumption derives from the widespread belief that given the right materials even a team of college physics students could build one, so a state should have no trouble at all. But this ignores the infinite capacity of neo-patrimonial or "sultanistic" regimes such as the one in Pyongyang to turn a sure thing into a long shot.

Jacques E. C. Hymans,
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

I think of Hymans as applying an "origins of World War I" hypothesis to the Korean situation. In 1914, complex modern European societies set up a series of assumptions and trip wires that put them on a path to a war that few sought, but none could interrupt once they entered on what they had defined as their national critical paths. Hymans sees something like that developing in East Asia. The irrational strains in each of the societies involved could come into play. Scary prospect; worth pondering.

Meanwhile, at least some who know point out there is no prospect of North Korea's neighbor, China, taking a hard stance against nuclear weapons development.

...there's a silly assumption in Washington that our interests (no nukes in North Korea) are the same as China's. But they're not. China's first interest in North Korea is making sure the Kim regime doesn't collapse. China's second interest? Making sure the Kim regime doesn't collapse. From Beijing's perspective, nukes in North Korea rank somewhere around 10th.

...We can't outsource the solution to North Korea's nukes to China because China views its interests a lot differently than we do.

John Pomfret,
Post Global,
a Washington Post/Newsweek blog

This one I picked up via James Fallows.

The articles I've excerpted above made my picture of what is happening in an unfamiliar part of the world more nuanced. Another contribution to the Bulletin was discouraging:

Many in Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul say Kim Jong Il will never give up his weapons or his nuclear and missile programs. The speculation encourages him to think he won't have to. The fact is, with the possible exception of Kim Jong Il himself, nobody truly knows. But the United States needs to find out.

The only way to do so is to probe through sustained diplomatic give-and-take.

Leon V. Sigal
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

I have an unhappy feeling that more of us need to start grappling with understanding this situation.

What's wrong with the Koreas?

I'm not going to pretend I know anything about North Korea -- or for that matter South Korea. But my friend Christine Ahn does and she's got a point of view on current tensions that people may not have encountered. She sees North Korea's recent nuclear test as yet another episode in a cycle of challenges and feints of violence that all arise from one cause:

At root is the fact that the U.S. is still at war with North Korea. When two nations are at war, there is no room for mutual trust. And so the tit-for-tat games will continue at the cost of an opportunity to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, stabilize Northeast Asia, and divert critically needed resources to the people - not just in North Korea, but South Korea and right here at home.

What we fail to realize is how much this is costing: the millions of North Korean people who endure hardship for the right to be free from another U.S. military invasion, the millions of dollars and Korean won spent on further militarizing the Korean peninsula, the Cold War legacy in the form of National Security Laws in South and North Korea, and the millions of families who are still divided by war.

It's clear that the Six Party Talks were designed to fail. The U.S. entered the talks intending on denuclearizing North Korea, and North Korea entered with the hopes of normalizing relations with the U.S. What would actually break the deadlock is to give the North Koreans what they want: peace. It's about time President Obama actually practiced his rhetoric and gave peace a chance.

Like I said, I don't know much about the Koreas, but it certainly makes intuitive sense to me that maintaining a state of "war" that still festers over fifty years after the shooting stopped is no the way to find peaceful solutions.

A group of Korea-American activists maintain an FAQ on their Korean Peace Treaty campaign. I found their approach to understanding the Koreas broadening. The other two locations I can think of where peoples live in proximity with no peace treaty -- Israel/Palestine and India/Pakistan in Kashmir -- aren't doing so well. There might be something to the idea that what is needed is a peace treaty.