{"id":835,"date":"2017-04-27T16:31:38","date_gmt":"2017-04-27T23:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/georgiagreenparty.org\/?p=835"},"modified":"2017-04-27T16:31:38","modified_gmt":"2017-04-27T23:31:38","slug":"a-lot-of-what-you-know-about-korea-is-racist-nonsense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/?p=835","title":{"rendered":"A Lot of What You Know About Korea is Racist Nonsense"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pyongyang is not\u00a0crazy<\/h2>\n

by ANDREW DOBBS<\/a><\/p>\n

Check out our follow up piece <\/em>here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Less than three months into Pres. Donald Trump\u2019s reign we can already say that there is a non-trivial chance that the United States will soon be engaged in a nuclear war.<\/p>\n

The threat is still remote, but all the pieces are in place. An aircraft carrier group en route<\/em> to North Korea, anonymous sources threatening a preemptive strike against them, a recent unilateral attack on the Syrian government and the dropping of a 21,000 pound conventional bomb in Afghanistan\u200a\u2014\u200ainterpreted by many as a message for North Korea.<\/p>\n

Any misjudgments or mistakes could easily spark a shooting war in which the North Koreans will face an existential threat they can only resist with their nuclear weapons. The United States would be likely to respond in kind.<\/p>\n

The main thing standing between us and this scenario? The cooler heads and good judgement of Trump and Kim Jong-Un.<\/p>\n

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This is deeply concerning, but to hear the U.S. media tell it all of the irrationality and risk in this is on the North Korean side. NBC News, in the very article announcing the United States\u2019 threat of unauthorized aggression against North Korea, called it <\/em>\u201cvolatile and unpredictable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s defense industry minister called North Korea \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest threat\u201d less than a week after the United States escalated the major power conflict in Syria with little warning. And The New York Times<\/em> spoke of China\u2019s need to \u201crein in\u201d the childish North Koreans, even if the United States is the one that\u2019s killed at least 1,000 civilians in combat since the beginning of 2017.<\/p>\n

Western propaganda draws from a deep well of racist \u201cyellow peril\u201d prejudice to stoke irrational fears against this tiny, poor, isolated country, and it amplifies this paranoia with long-standing stereotypes of East Asian \u201coddity\u201d to dehumanize North Koreans and justify U.S. aggression against them.<\/p>\n

In the hands of a war-horny bigot like Trump, this well-established, bipartisan narrative poses a fearsome threat of making nuclear war inevitable. It\u2019s imperative that we answer these lies immediately if we are to minimize this risk.<\/p>\n

Sign up for DEFIANT\u2019s daily newsletter<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n

There are three basic pieces to the West\u2019s slander of North Korea\u200a\u2014\u200athat the whole country is \u201ccrazy\u201d and especially dangerous, and that North Koreans are treacherous and untrustworthy. They can\u2019t be reasoned with, they won\u2019t honor any diplomatic agreements, and any moment they could fly off the handle and kill millions of people for no reason whatsoever.<\/p>\n

This demands extraordinary military pressure from the United States and allies and may, alas, require us to destroy them.<\/p>\n

Each of these is a perverse misrepresentation. The claim that they are insane in particular is a terrific example of gaslighting\u200a\u2014\u200aan abuse tactic where the perpetrator takes steps to make their victim act or feel crazy and then uses those responses as proof of the victim\u2019s irrationality, a justification for further abuse.<\/p>\n

North Korea, by way of context, is bordered on the north by China and the south by South Korea. South Korea hosts 28,500 U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, many of them literally amassed at the border with the North. On their east is the Sea of Japan (known to Koreans as the East Sea), and across that is a nation which brutally occupied Korea for decades.<\/p>\n

The North Koreans are surrounded on all sides by countries that have invaded or occupied them in living memory, and the world\u2019s most powerful military is still technically at war with them and poised to invade at moment\u2019s notice.<\/p>\n

This is the sort of scenario that would make any country not merely paranoid, but legitimately insecure. In light of U.S. military aggression against countries that choose to resist our global order\u200a\u2014\u200asee Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.\u200a\u2014\u200aNorth Korea can choose to capitulate or focus tremendous resources on building up their defensive capabilities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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USS \u2018Carl Vinson\u2019 heads toward South Korea in March 2017. U.S. Navy\u00a0photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Also in living memory there is the time the United States killed a quarter of the North Korean population and leveled the country\u2019s urban centers, leaving almost no structures standing in Pyongyang. The North Koreans didn\u2019t capitulate then and it isn\u2019t on the table now\u200a\u2014\u200adefense and defiance it is, and this is hardly \u201ccrazy\u201d in context.<\/p>\n

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The U.S. media, however, never provide this context and instead they present North Korean military propaganda as being unhinged and aggressive. They never compare this, of course, to U.S. military flyovers at sporting events or the ceremonial induction of new soldiers at halftime, or even to our National Anthem with its celebration of bombings and rockets and warfare.<\/p>\n

If North Korea is \u201ccrazy\u201d for its militarism, then the United States is downright certifiable.<\/p>\n

U.S. propaganda can dismiss North Korea\u2019s legitimate concerns so easily because of the underlying racist assumption that these are a bizarre and simple-minded people that believe in things like unicorns. This feeds off of and into orientalist logic that sees East Asians as a nearly subhuman \u201cother\u201d that can\u2019t be reasoned with and so must be handled with force.<\/p>\n

It worked when we needed to justify violence against immigrant laborers in the 19th century and it works to justify our imperialist expansion today.<\/p>\n

North Korea\u2019s Government Is Terrible\u200a\u2014\u200aAnd That\u2019s Beside the Point<\/strong>
\nAmerica doesn\u2019t choose its enemies for their moral qualities<\/em>medium.com<\/a><\/div>\n

As for claims about North Korea\u2019s unique danger to the world, this too is divorced from reality. The country has no meaningful power projection capability\u200a\u2014\u200aits naval surface vessels can\u2019t operate more than about 50 kilometers off the coast\u200a\u2014\u200aand the U.S. military has them contained to the south. China is still North Korea\u2019s ally and does not view it as a significant military threat. North Korea is contained.<\/p>\n

But what about those missiles and nukes? The North Koreans could maybe lob a missile at Japan\u200a\u2014\u200aor maybe not, a missile test on April 15, 2017 failed\u200a\u2014\u200aand they could level Seoul with artillery alone. But why would they ever do this?<\/p>\n

The only way to explain such a unilateral assault on any of their neighbors\u200a\u2014\u200awhich would prompt either U.S. or Chinese military assets to overwhelm and destroy them\u200a\u2014\u200ais to go back to that same baseless \u201ccrazy\u201d claim. They could miscalculate of course, but claims that they are especially dangerous almost always rely upon the assumption that they might just wig out and bomb everybody for no reason at all at any moment.<\/p>\n

Again, this is rooted in an infantilizing, dehumanizing, racist logic.<\/p>\n

And any claims of a direct North Korean threat to the United States is ludicrous bullshit. They have no weapons capable of reaching anywhere within thousands of miles of the United States, and are years away from developing it, at best. Even if they reach that goal\u200a\u2014\u200awhich their very uneven history of missile tests indicates will be very difficult\u200a\u2014\u200athey would still have thousands of fewer weapons than we do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visits South Korea in March 2017. U.S. State Department photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Any launch of that sort would represent an act of mortal desperation\u200a\u2014\u200aagain, it would be totally delusional to launch it offensively. Cable news is a much bigger threat to U.S. security than North Korea ever will be.<\/span><\/p>\n

So if North Korea\u2019s military threat is totally derived from their desire to preclude a US attack why not negotiate a peace between our country and theirs? If they had that sort of assurance we could both back away from the brink and perhaps even provide space for an opening in North Korean society.<\/p>\n

Conventional wisdom answers that the North Koreans have reneged on every agreement ever made with them. But if the \u201ccrazy\u201d claims are an example of gaslighting, this answer is a textbook case of projection. It\u2019s not the North Koreans who have betrayed past agreements, but the United States. To cover this up we repeat the same racist logic we used against Native Americans\u200a\u2014\u200awe broke the treaties, but they were the \u201cIndian givers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The main incident here has to do with the \u201cAgreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea,\u201d signed between the two countries in 1994. The Agreed Framework\u200a\u2014\u200aas it is usually called\u200a\u2014\u200abasically traded the end of North Korea\u2019s nuclear weapons program for normalized economic and diplomatic relations with the United States.<\/p>\n

As a good faith step to spur the negotiations North Korea submitted to limited weapons inspections while the United States cancelled military exercises with South Korea. North Korea also used its plutonium production plants for energy, so the United States agreed to work with allies to provide them with fuel oil until two light water nuclear reactors\u200a\u2014\u200anuclear power plants that cannot be weaponized\u200a\u2014\u200acould be built.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump Is Beating the Drum of War<\/strong>
\nGet ready to resist<\/em>medium.com<\/a><\/div>\n

The United States failed to uphold its end of the agreement almost immediately. Two weeks after it was signed, Republicans took back Congress and labeled the agreement \u201cappeasement.\u201d They never provided sufficient funds for providing the fuel oil and the United States never met the obligations set in the Agreed Framework.<\/p>\n

The Americans also failed to take even the first preliminary steps in building the light water reactors for over four years, and then moved at such a slow pace that there was no chance of meeting the timelines set in the Framework.<\/p>\n

Finally, and most significantly, Congress blocked any attempts to begin normalizing relations between North Korea and the United States and Pres. Bill Clinton never pressed it to do so.<\/p>\n

North Korea played along for at least four years and even warned us that it was going to restart its nuclear program a year before it actually began a pilot program. According to Leon Sigal, author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>the North Koreans did not shift from this pilot effort to a full-scale weapons program until Pres. George W. Bush refused new negotiations in 2001.<\/p>\n

North Korea \u201cwas playing tit for tat\u200a\u2014\u200acooperating whenever Washington cooperated and retaliating when Washington reneged, in an effort to end enmity,\u201d Sigal wrote in 2007<\/a>. This extended to the later Six Party Talks between North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia which almost brought North Korea back into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.<\/p>\n

Support Ploughshares Fund<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n

Talks broke down when the United States refused to release $24 million frozen in a Macau bank account, and North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon six months later. But for that $24 million there might be no nuclear threat from North Korea today.<\/p>\n

The fact is that America set such a low priority on disarming North Korea because it isn\u2019t dangerous to the United States because it have nukes. The North Koreans are dangerous because they refuse to submit to our imperial authority and play ball with our global order.<\/p>\n

Notice how much less hand-wringing you hear about Pakistan, even though it does have a nuclear arsenal probably 15 times the size of North Korea\u2019s, while also actively collaborating with jihadists. The Pakistanis are subject to the U.S. empire, however, and they buy their weapons from the U.S. military-industrial complex, so they are no big deal.<\/p>\n

North Korea dares to not only maintain its independence, but to defend it by any means necessary. It can\u2019t be rewarded with negotiation. America has to destroy North Korea to teach the rest of the world a lesson, and this means preparing the U.S. public for nuclear war, painting the country as a bunch of war-crazed military aggressors whose word can\u2019t be trusted.<\/p>\n

Again, this is the definition of projection, taking advantage of racist assumptions baked into U.S. politics and culture.<\/p>\n

The good news is that it appears that North Korea is acting both rationally and politically\u200a\u2014\u200anot militarily\u200a\u2014\u200aright now. The country is playing the present crisis in such a way as to encourage a favorable outcome in South Korea\u2019s upcoming snap presidential election.<\/p>\n

A friendlier government there could mean new economic and political opportunities as well as new diplomatic backup that could help shift the balance in any future negotiations with the United States.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately the North Koreans are lined up against the regime of an insulated, ignorant, white supremacist warmonger who has learned in the last few weeks that the same forces lying about North Korea kiss his ass when he escalates military conflicts around the world.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s our responsibility to push back against our government and against the institutions lying their way into nuclear war.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s our responsibility to speak the truth about North Korea\u200a\u2014\u200aeven if it challenges our most deep-seated political assumptions\u200a\u2014\u200aand it\u2019s our responsibility, always, to stay defiant.<\/p>\n

Writing is hard. Money is short. Support this reporter.<\/em><\/a> Follow DEFIANT on <\/em>Facebook<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Democrats and Republicans alike are howling for war with Korea.\u00a0 Big up the fight for peace.\u00a0 Join the Georgia Green Party<\/a> at our minimum dues level of only $10 per month.<\/p>\n

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Pyongyang is not\u00a0crazy by ANDREW DOBBS Check out our follow up piece here. Less than three months into Pres. Donald Trump\u2019s reign we can already say that there is a non-trivial chance that the United States will soon be engaged in a nuclear war. The threat is still remote, but all the pieces are in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global-empire","category-korea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wp.georgiagreenparty.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}