Kim Jong Il Thinks He's a God-King: Why Ignore It?

Chris Doss itschris13 at hotmail.com
Tue May 23 22:17:38 PDT 2000


Hey, look, I'm just a young graduate student, a budding Heidegger/Arendt scholar who knows, unfortunately, precious little of geopolitical machinations, but is it not obviously possible that both A and B are true:

A) The leaders of North Korea are "totalitarian megalomaniacs."

B) The American military presence in South Korea has little if anything with detering the "North Korean threat."

Whether North Korea is governed by psychopaths or not has nothing to do with the capability of North Korea to effectively invade South Korea. There are totalitarian megalomaniacs in every psychiatric home, but that doesn't mean that it's excusable to deploy howitzers against them, after all. If the North Korean military is incapable of effectively invading South Korea, whether North Korea is headed by would-be Stalins or not, holding US troops there to defend against them is absurd.


>From: TRox51 at aol.com
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Re: Kim Jong Il Thinks He's a God-King: Why Ignore It?
>Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 00:12:52 EDT
>
>Jeez, Brad, get a grip.
>
>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
>
>
>
>

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