26 June 2010
Japanese activists have joined South Korean activists and North Korean defectors in that wonderfully quixotic leaflet campaign against Kim Jong Il:
“We’d like to punish the Kim Jong Il government by spreading the truth written on these leaflets,” said Seo Jung-gab, president of the National Action Campaign, one of the participating groups.
Also among groups participating was the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea, a group supporting the families of Japanese abducted by Pyongyang’s agents in the 1970s and ’80s. The leaflets contained a message to the abductees and contact information for organizations in Japan and China working to assist them.
“North Korean citizens don’t even know that their government kidnapped people worldwide,” said Tsutomu Nishioka, chairman of the group.
If you make enough people mad enough at you, they’ll eventually hurt you. The leaflet operations are growing bigger and bolder in their scale and content, and they make for sublime media theater.
Oh, great:
Bruce Bechtol of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College will deliver, next Monday at Brookings in Washington, a paper contending that North Korea is now or will soon be capable of building a uranium-core bomb. [Gordon Chang, Forbes]
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Would it be so wrong if the South Korean authorities just told North Korean propaganda star and traitor Han Song-Ryol not to bother coming home and gave his apartment to some deserving family of North Korean refugees? It seems like a much better idea than arresting him and giving the Hankyoreh and the Rodong Sinmun something to talk about.
The GAO has just released this rather extensive report on the progress of federal executive agencies in complying with the asylum facilitation provisions of the North Korean Human Rights Act. Summary here; highlights here.
On North Korea’s west coast, a possible missile launch.
The Wall Street Journal thinks someone should give the North Korean soccer team asylum. Well, I suppose someone should, if the North Koreans ask first. And after a final 3-0 clubbing at the hands of the Ivory Coast, maybe they should reconsider. I’m sure there must have been a strong temptation to shout some impolitic words into that invisible cell phone.
In Seoul, five police are under arrest for torturing suspects. In light of the number of stories like this I heard from fellow prosecutors, CID agents, and clients, I’m most surprised by how seldom stories like this are actually reported.
How is Israel different from North Korea? Israel is a vibrant society, an open participatory democracy. North Korea is the exact opposite. But in one respect, they are identical — they are nuclear powers who survive as client states of a megapower, and have consistently shown their ability to force their bosses to do their bidding. Neither China nor the US is happy with this state of affairs.
The history of Israel since LBJ is of a peace process that is derailed at some stage by an aggressive military action (e.g., invasion of West Bank or Lebanon or Gaza) or by a rebarbative political position (e.g., Palestinians aren’t a people or Eretz Israel settlements or targetted political killings) — to the embarrassment of the attempts of the US to negotiate peace. That is exactly the same situation with North Korea vis-a-vis China.
One can create an enormous list of similarities here — but they exist because in all four countries there are as many gains to be had from a state of incipient war as there are to a peace that smacks of capitulation. For example. both countries develop and manufacture very powerful weapons, and thereafter conduct a useful international weapons trade in the interests of their “masters” — compare apartheid South Africa and mullahed Iran.
The only real difference, to my mind, is starvation — and that is critical, a game-changer. Israel is a successful and wholly prosperous state. North Korea is a failed state. Its people are starving to death as I write: except for weapons production, its industrial base is moribund if not outright dead. Its own military is bloated but incompetent, a sponge for workers who can’t work — except for the 15 divisions of Spetnaz. Its political system is a joke, and its system of repression is internally divided between the police (who are starving like the proletariat) and the secret police (who are dismayed by the prospect of a hereditary succession.) Starvation is endemic to that system, and it will only get worse.
Failed states can continue long past their “Sell By” date — see the history of Ottoman Turkey for that. But it certainly appears that a domestic collapse is imminent in the DPRK. It is now almost in China’s interest to see a domestic collapse — to walk in as the savior, to provide food and fertilizer, to dismantle Yongbyon and remove the nukes, gas and germ weapons as if they never existed — and to negotiate then (1) a total mutual withdrawal of all forces with the US/UN, (2) a nuclear free peninsula, with (3) South Korea to unify the country and run it from the Yalu to the south as One Free Korea (– at South Korea’s expense, thereby handicapping it even worse than West Germany!) Or to invade, but to reinstall a puppet regime in the North because it still can’t trust the West.
On this anniversary of the unfinished war, the difference is that we can now probably trust China to keep such a three point agreement. Could we, the USA, make it?
So, aside from one state having the legitimacy of being chosen by its people, providing for the basic needs of its citizens, allowing open debate on national policy, allowing in thousands of critical journalists, not putting its people into concentration camps, and using its military to defend itself rather than terrorizing the civilian populations of neighboring states, they’re identical. (I’d add that the Palestinians have had self-government for a decade, and how many of those things can be said of what passes for the two Palestinian “governments,” both of them fetid, despotic stinkholes?)
You could say Israel and North Korea are similar in the same sense that a gas chamber is similar to a fart in a crowded elevator.
I won’t even begin to pick apart your glossing-over of all of the PLO/Hamas acts of terror or refusals to bargain in good faith that have made a lasting peace impossible. No one can reason someone out of such a completely counterfactual and irrational assertion. What’s more, it’s just jarringly off-topic and revelatory of the Israel obsession that’s never far below the surface, it seems, with Europeans, most of whom have probably never even heard the term “mountain turk” and couldn’t find Grozny or Urumqi on a map. So sad, this, but so depressingly persistent.
You’ve made some good comments here on the Cheonan Incident, and I’m certainly not an unconditional defender of a lot of things Israel does, but this ill-reasoned, off-topic comment cost me a lot of my respect for you.
What a load of rubbish comparing NK with Israel, that must be about the silliest argument I have ever read. It’s as unreal as Belgium threatening Luxemburg with nuclear war.
In the meantime, OFK’s favourite daily reports that China is rewriting its ‘istory books.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/southkorea/7853746/China-rewrites-history-of-Korean-War.html
I know where Grozny and Urumqi are, and what Chechens and Wahhabists are — but my point, albeit inflammatory, was to point out that our client state Israel has some of the emotional baggage that China’s state North Korea carries. I agree that comparison of the two states, from our Western perspective, is odious — but it isn’t from the Chinese side of the fence.
But once the comparison is made, my point was, or at least I intended it to be, that Israel and the DPRK are fundamentally different from the perspective of the master state — the DPRK is a failure. What can we do about it to make One Free Korea?
I could say a lot more, including time at the sharp end of the spear in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1967 in active support of the State of Israel. But the point is that, unlike our continued support for Israel, it appears that China may be backing off.
Am getting GAO’s report on TARP when I click the links — or am I just slow with the wry humor? Sigh.
David, there are many other differences. For one, despite what is sometimes claimed, the US has never actually fought for Israel. The Chinese lost 200-300,000 people in the Korean War when they are about 1.5 times the population of the US. Can you see the US losing 100,000-200,000 soldiers fighting for Israel over a period of a couple of years?
Also DPRK is utterly dependent on China, Israel on the other hand would have issues with the level of US arms it would have to support if the US turned its back but otherwise will manage.
In the answer to you end question, surely the goal has to be pressure China. The good news is that is China can be forced to be more responsive in its support for crappy states you get the DPRK, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Iran and others for free.
Wow. That was honestly a very interesting exchange. David, most of what you said isn’t counter-factual, but it’s pretty random to bring that up. You say your point is to emphasize that Israel and NK are fundamentally different, but you spend more time arguing about their similarities. The response received was pretty harsh, especially since I don’t think you went so far as to claim that Israel had caused repression on anywhere near the scale of the NK regime. However, re-reading your post, I can’t say that the response was completely unwarranted, since you make statements like “the only real difference, to my mind, is starvation”, which may have broader implications than you intended.
The thing is, there’s no real parallel to NK in terms of the failure of the state. In NK you have reunification, which doesn’t necessarily threaten China too much, if the U.S. can be convinced to take its military hardware out of a unified Korea, since a unified Korea is likely to be more pro-Chinese than pro-Japanese. In Israel, if the state fails, then all that’s left is annihilation by its Arab neighbors. The people of NK, given education and a choice, would probably overwhelmingly support peaceful reunification under a democratic system, whereas, it’s probably safe to say there is no parallel to this in Israel.
That said, I believe there is strong anti-Israel sentiment in China, as you have noted. Was watching a Lakers’ game in a bar a couple weeks ago and chatting it up with this Chinese guy. Somehow the topic turns to Israel and he is accusing the U.S. of interference in international affairs. He got to arguing that the state of Israel should never have been founded. Pretty lousy argument to be in when one’s trying to watch a game.
In Korea, the solution to the conflict is pretty darn simple, though the timetable for implementation is not so clear. However, because of certain militant Muslims, the situation in the Middle East is a mess. Even if 95% of the Muslims are peaceful, if you have 5% who insist on blowing stuff up and the majority doesn’t shut them down and lock them up, you can never have peace, no matter how many concessions you make. It’s possible that in several generations the Muslim world will lose most of its extremists. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that in 50 years we’re dealing with the same exrement.
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Way to go with the sweeping generalizations about Europeans. As for the geographical jab in the ribs, I guess Brits have been claiming that Americans en masse have no geographical knowledge for long enough, a claim that is also wholly and demonstrably untrue, so perhaps we deserved to get something back?!!!
Chris as an english person myself I would be pretty happy making that “sweeping generalisation” about my fellow nationals.
Israel and DPRK linked conspiracy theories, only on Internet folks.
The only way that Israelites are linked to Koreans is that both are a proud people who have experienced oppression. It ends there. One embracesses traveling to new lands and spreading it’s influence while accumulating wealth and blessed prosperity internationally for centuries numerous, and more importantly is able to defend itself amongst enemies. The other is Proud but yet has never proven why it should be to the Globe. It has claimed 5,000 years of existence, yet has failed at every oppurtunity to get the Global worlds attention except the last 60 years when it came to rescuing it from it’s own self.
Comparing Israel to Korea is like comparing a proud race to an even prouder race.
Only one of the two actually has worldwide influence.
I, for one, thank God its Israel.
Danny, can you really be comfortable asserting that the citizens of a large number of nations across a continent are obsessed with one small, albeit controversial Mediterranean nation?
I would say that it colors more than it should, perhaps, and given the German question and the role Britain played in Israel’s formation, it is rather pervasive in British left wing circles. I am not willing to go further than that, that’s all.
Not to feed this entire off-topic discussion, Chris, but the notable exceptions to the rule — no matter how much we may appreciate those — only tend to highlight the rule itself. And frankly, if you look at the current 3-party distribution of Britsh politics, how much of Britain remains if you exclude “British left wing circles?” What is considered “Conservative” in Britain would hardly count as “conservative” here; that stodgy old Britain a few of us knew and loved (though I’m sure we can all agree there were some elements of it we reviled) just doesn’t exist anymore. Granted, I don’t suppose you’d count the BNP as a British left-wing circle, either, but then, that does no violence to my point, does it? As a general rule, Europe and its subset Britain have a fixation on Israel out of all proportion to that fixation’s logically defensible basis.
Sorry, I should have been more explicit – the sweeping generalisation I was talking about was this:
“most of whom have probably never even heard the term “mountain turk†and couldn’t find Grozny or Urumqi on a map”
Most British know nothing about Israel except that in a generalised sense it is bad and there are lots of wars.