> Do you think that we should call the U.S. military the:
> Force That Cruelly and Shamefully Deprived a Large Portion of the Korean
> People from the Glorious Benefits of the Heavenly Rule of the Great Leader,
> Kim Il Sung, and the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il...
No, we call it the force which bombed the hell out of North Korean peasants fighting a grim class struggle against a semi-feudal landlordism, then crossed the Yalu and had its hat handed to it by lightly armed Chinese peasants, who for some strange reason were less than thrilled about US planes shellacking Chinese territory (something to do with the US bankrolling of Chiang Kai-shek's brutal, hideous regime, I believe). What saved South Korea from, ah, let's call it Kimization, was Coca-Cola Keynesianism and an American-inspired land reform, which fought the Communist threat of total expropriation with a localized, domestic expropriation of the landlords, and later an intelligent, sophisticated (if brutal) developmental state. Note the great irony of history here: the peasant-nationalist rebellion succeeded where it failed, because it failed where it succeeded -- rather like West Germany's social democracy and powerful unions trumping East Germany's merely formal claim to such, or Taiwan out-developing (thanks to indigenous socialisms galore) the mainland.
-- Dennis