The Peace Train Stops at Al-Jazzeera
Professor Sung Yoon Lee is a friend of mine, and this is why friends don’t let friends go on Al Jazzeera. When the floodlights snap on, you just might find yourself in a circus tent. In the extreme opposite corner, we have present “Professor” of Pacific Rim Studies Christine Hong, who appears to a an exact genetic clone of her comrade in the struggle, Christine Ahn, right down to the hip, urbane glasses (damn you to hell, Hwang Woo-Seok!).
The now-moot premise of Riz Khan’s interview is that the U.S.-South Korean naval exercises — but not North Korea’s sinking of a South Korean warship! — might have triggered more naval clashes. Khan asks Christine Hong whether she thinks that perhaps North Korea’s reaction to the exercise (the threat of a “physical response“) might have been excessive. Hong responds without hesitation: “Absolutely not!” If I understand Hong’s argument, North Korea has to sink South Korean warships, withdraw from the 1953 Armistice unilaterally, test nukes, proliferate, keep hundreds of thousands of people in prison camps, and threaten war — most of which she defends and justifies — because America and South Korea haven’t signed a peace treaty. To be precise, these people aren’t really pro-peace or anti-war, they’re just on the other side.
As much as I feel for the legions of young zombies Hong and others like her will be churning out, Hong really represents the die-hard remnant of an ideological shift in the American left on North Korea. The days of seeing North Korea as prepared to disarm, reform, and make peace but for G.W. Bush’s cowboy axis-of-evil rhetoric have ended for most of them. Only North Korea’s most extreme sympathizers can still defend its conduct. Even on the far left, Mike Chinoy and John Feffer can’t go that far, even if they’re forced to leave its conduct unexplained and unanswered in their proposals for more talks, which only makes those proposals seem more detached from reality than ever. The mainstream left is mostly following the Obama Administration’s recognition of the need for sanctions.
The opposite has happened in South Korea, where the mainstream left has adopted various conspiracy theories and disinformation. There’s probably a conspiracy theory for every individual’s emotional need to believe that someone other than North Korea sank the Cheonan, or even that all of this is somehow America’s fault. To which I say, there’s really no point in reasoning with the logically retarded. The only thing you can do about people like this is to a better job of raising and educating their younger siblings. Their emotions have already told them what they believe, and their only use for logic is to find some explanation, plausible or otherwise, to lend some support to their faith. They have no evidence to support their beliefs, of course, but they did have a generous assist from Lee Myung Bak’s government, whose various leaks and stumbles have given the twoofers plenty to pick at.
My understanding is that the complete report of the international investigation is much longer than the report I’d linked here. If so, it might be helpful to would-be de-bunkers to redact out the secret material and release the rest of it.