War or Peace in Korea
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. What can you say? They are lightweights fighting in the heavyweight division while the fate of possibly millions are at risk. Two heads of state trading taunts and insults back and forth like kids in a schoolyard. Trump declared that talking with North Korea is a “waste of time” and threatened to “totally destroy” that country by unleashing “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” On his trip to Asia he softened his line a bit by inviting North Korea to “come to the table” and “make a deal.” He then reverted to more saber-rattling. The U.S. military has been in South Korea since 1945. There is no peace treaty formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War. Maybe that would be a good place to start. Tensions must be defused. The alternative is catastrophic war.
Speaker
Eric Sirotkin
Eric Sirotkin is a human rights lawyer. His peacemaking activities have taken him to North and South Korea. He helped found the New Mexico Human Rights Coalition and the National Lawyers Guild Korean Peace Project. He is the recipient of the City of Albuquerque’s Human Rights Award. He is the author of Witness: A Lawyer’s Journey from Litigation to Liberation.
Jerry Markatos –
As loud threats of a US attack on North Korea continue, we are lucky AR has broadcast this important and insightful talk! It merits our further contributions to Alternative Radio AND a note of thanks to the South Korean embassy for the constructive initiatives Eric Sorotkin mentions. For those of us determined to believe our Congress may be capable of rational acts, calls to our representatives to resist Trump’s belligerence are in order.
Andy Reibson –
Kim Jong Fat brags in press releases about executing criminal enemies of the people, in big stadium shows, with anti-aircraft cannons and Sirotkin wants to sit down and chat with him? Send old Jimmy Carter over again for another basketful of boatride lies, maybe revive Obama’s apology tour and schedule an afternoon speech (’cause there’s no electricity for a primetime show) in Pyongyang? And Sirotkin wasted so much airtime on the past, the governments, the United Nations, the United States – South Korea is a bit like medieval Japan’s warring daimyo states. There is a government, but it’s nothing, the chaebols are in charge of South Korea. Hyundai, SK, LG, and Samsung, they are the ones who’ll be handling North Korea’s impending collapse and the incredibly-ignorant, stunted, servile peasants’ eventual return to Asia’s booming, oligarchic, cronycapitalistic order.
Peter –
I appreciate this talk as another perspective from the demonizing especially found in Donald Trump in recent months, and as a general problem in understanding the situation in North-South Korea. “Pygmy man” and “rocket man” etc. are unfortunately the ignorant mask of politicians with ulterior motives, not those genuinely interested in peace.
But North Korea is not a separate isolate problem from the US foreign policy overall, which is a world-domination program for economic and military purposes. This aspect of the problem I would suggest to the speaker could be number 13 in his program for improvement of the current problem. We cannot separate North Korea from world domination attitudes in general, particularly at this moment toward a burgeoning China and its economic aspirations.
I would also caution against suggesting the South Korean people are blasé about that crazy old uncle in the north. From my ten plus years of residence in South Korea, I believe this answer was a polite response to a foreigner. South Koreans are deeply disturbed about the history and the separation, and fervently long for reunification. That’s why Kim Young Nam’s sunshine policy had such appeal, and such hope at the time, to be shot down by George W. Bush pursuing the neocon playbook of regime change and world domination.
Again, this latter aspect should be given more emphasis, in my view, in future briefings on this topic.