Next thing we know, you're going to be hopping on a missile with your cowboy hat on, whooping it up as you bomb Korea to smithereens, just like the US Air Force did time and time again from 1950-1953 until there was nothing left to destroy (as the mad bomber General Curtis LeMay famously said).
DeLong has certainly shown his true colors in this diatribe.
By his logic, half the population of South Korea, along with President Kim Dae Jung, are Stalinists too because they don't see Kim Jong Il as the Devil. I guess we should throw in Jimmy Carter as well, because he actually went to Pyongyang to engage Kim Il Sung in dialogue before the US foolishly came close to starting a war in 1994. Oh, and let's add to his list Donald Gregg, the former CIA Station Chief in Seoul, who has (surprisingly) urged engagement with the North, and of course the leaders of Australia and Italy, who just opened diplomatic relations with NK despite the presence in the leadership structure of Kim Jong Il. Wow, Stalin has made quite a revival by this count!
The Korean War began long before 1950 - as anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of Korea knows - and the US played a pivotal role in creating the conditions that led to the fracture between north and south. The point is, how do we prevent another war and catastrophe on the Korean peninsula? By throwing invectives around like three year olds? Or trying to figure out a way to defuse military tensions, bring economic stability to the North (despite its political structure, NK has a rather interesting economic history that once included a fairly advanced industrial infrastructure built independently of either the Soviets or the Chinese) and finding an alternative road to security that doesn't require US troops in East Asia for another 50 years.
By the way, the 'historical process' that led to the deployment of the US army was first and foremost the Cold War and had nothing to do with what was happening on the ground in Korea. At the time, given the all-out US support for Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese colonialists, anybody with any sense of nationalism or even pride in Korea was a leftist or communist simply because there was nowhere else to go. Cumings' work in The Origins of the Korean War give graphic accounts of this period, including the still-hidden history of the 1946 US-led counter-revolution on the island of Cheju, where tens of thousands of South Koreans were killed because they refused to disband their independent government (a search on Korea Web Weekly provides deep background on that period as well).
Brad, a paranoid red-baiter who is so full of vitriol that I can almost feel the spittle from here, simply cannot get it into his very thick skull that Koreans, North and South, are actually human beings who've seen some very hard times over the past 50 years due to all sorts of events and circumstances - and want to come together as one people. Trying talking to some Koreans, pal; you might learn a thing or two.
Tim Shorrock - President, Maryland USA Branch of Stalin's Angels - U.S. chair of the Kim Il Sung "On the Spot Visit" Fan Club - Founding Member, Stooges Not Bombs