RES: a trip to North Korea

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Apr 23 15:53:48 PDT 2000


Brad writes to Jim H.:


>>I think Doug looks at this the wrong way 'round. It wasn't North Korea
>>that separated itself from the world, but General Douglas MacArthur who
>>divided Korea. The policies of the admittedly mediocre North Korean
>>leadership are only a response to the Cold War policies that vilified N
>>Korea as 'the enemy' - the better to militarise the region. IF Stone's
>>Hidden History of the Korean War is good on this, as is Walden Bello's
>>People and Power in the Pacific.
>>
>>--
>>Jim heartfield
>
>You really think that North and South Koreans would be better off
>had the U.S. decided not to fight Kim Il Sung's "reunification" of
>Korea in the summer of 1950?

Walden Bello writes in _People & Power in the Pacific: The Struggle for the Post-Cold War Order_ (San Francisco: Pluto Press with Food First, 1992):

***** Increased tension in South Korea as public opinion increasingly becomes hostile to the continued presence of 44000 US troops that enforce the continuing division of the peninsula. Despite the recent easing of tensions between South Korea and North Korea, more and more Koreans see the US troops as a relic of the Cold War that must be removed if genuine progress toward unification of the peninsula is to take place. As the US ambassador to South Korea himself recently admitted:

The once predominantly favorable attitude of the Korean public toward the United States has been headed downhill ... [The] numbers of Koreans who viewed the US favorably has dropped drastically, from 70 per cent in six years to only 24 per cent today. Even more disturbing to me is another recent poll which found that many students hold views of the US that are simply at variance with the facts -- 79 per cent of college students blame the US for the division of Korea, and 64 per cent consider the US to be the country most reluctant to see Korea unified.[1]

[1] Donald Gregg, Speech before Asia Society, New York, 30 November 1990.

(p. 115) *****

Yoshie



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