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.
In my experience, Al-Jazzeera’s only criterion for a guest to speak on North Korea is that s/he represent a non-governmental entity.
Latest example, Christine Hong, a second-rate, Asian American Lit assistant professor.
Like Ahn, this Christine has no real expertise on North Korea, just opinions. UC Santa Cruz lists her as a literature professor, with an English PhD from Berkeley. Enough said, really.
Where’s the supposedly impartial Russian analysis of Cheonan? It was overdue a month ago. There’s a weird report in the Hanky of July 28, 2010 that the Russians conclude the sinking was caused by the propeller of Cheonan snaring a stray fishing net that held a stray floating mine — but that has all the indicia of being a trial balloon, albeit a lead one. So where is their report? If it were destructive of the ROK position, one would expect it to have been released with a fanfare to marginalise the East Sea and Yellow Sea maneuvers. Silence appears to be acquiescence.
The problem with the floating mine scenario is that the explosion is unlikely to have been dead midships. There are (reasonably) sophisticated torpedoes in the arsenals of most major navies that home in on the screw noise, but then deviate to explode under the target at its midships area — that has the immense advantage of attacking the information center of a military vessel (which is typically centered at the center of mass) and also creating a hogback explosion with (as we saw in Cheonan) the potential to break the back of the vessel. Floating mines are dumb, and don’t do that. They also leave very strong traces of compression showing which side they hit: they normally do not sink below the target before exploding. The Cheonan was compressed from dead below and edead amidships. So the Russkis have a problem if they are trying to claim a stray floating mine.
There are still two other possibilities — but neither is reassuring to the Russians. First, a bottom laid mine tube with a directional torpedo therein. This is a very frightening Chinese technology, which is carefully laid by minelayers: and second, a ten-inch rocket launched version which is sown almost indiscriminately. (This is a technology that NATO haven’t acknowledged yet, and may not be feasible because of the forces on the carrying tube on entering the water — but if it is feasible, it is a game changer for the DPRK against any form of amphibious assault.) It would alarm the Russians as much as it would alarm NATO, and it would be home-grown in the DPRK
Still, the physical evidence for a large torpedo launched from a DPRK submersible of some kind appears very strong (since the ROK Navy trawled the gizmo up!)– and coupled with the post-incident promotions by Little Kim suggests that the DPRK isn’t trying very hard to deny liability. The ROK’s released report certainly read like an executive summary — and it would be logical for there to be a far more detailed, footnoted (and secret) report in detail. I agree that it would be good for all of us to see a redacted version — perhaps we are waiting for the Russians to release their own whitewash before we show their lack of integrity.
Do you know what has happened to NK Econ Watch? Shortly after releasing a link to Korean war papers at the Wilson Institute that showed on May 31, 1950 Stalin personally approved the DPRK invasion in late June, the site went down with a 404.
Further proof that the Capitalist system will always trumpet over all forms of Communistic Socialism. We actually endure the rights of Idiots like Madame Hong to voice her opinion when it comes to her comrades…
Professor Sung Yoon Lee handled the interview well, and yet, Mr. Stanton, as you implied above, the TV studio environment might have somewhat steam-rolled him. As I recall, however, you are a lawyer, and therefore you most likely know all about one-on-one verbal debating. You also have some good background knowledge about the parallel universe of North Korea (http://www.freekorea.us). Therefore, in addition to Prof. Sung, you should debate fellow travellers/ditzes like Ms./Prof. Hong and Ahn in fora like Al-Jazeera. I hate it when truth is too polite/diplomatic/etc. to forcefully advocate reality.
Greg Andrews wrote:
I agree with this statement.
I may take a wide (and possibly naïve) view, but I don’t think Aljazeera is even intrinsically anti-US, much less pro-North Korean. The only way its audience will be exposed to people like you is if people like you lay out their views there.