Andre Vltchek

Japan is Part of the Neo-Colonialist Clique.

Write that ‘Japan is part of the neo-colonialist clique’, and you will never again be invited to participate in any public debate conducted by Japanese mass media outlets. And that is exactly what I wrote several months ago, after being approached by an important publication based in Okinawa.

When my documentary film about the US bases on Okinawan territory was broadcasted by the South American television network TeleSUR in both Spanish and English, there seemed to be at least some appetite to bring my opinions on the subject to the Japanese public. At one point I was asked to write a 1,200 word essay, placing Japan in the world context, whilst also addressing the grievances of Okinawa.

I did exactly that. And even as I was writing, I knew that the piece would never get used here, because Japanese publications and television stations (in the past I worked for several major media outlets here) are thoroughly servile to Western interests, they are cowardly and toothless. But I wrote anyway, for the Okinawan people, and to see exactly how my essay would be “killed”.

A reply arrived several months later. There were three major ‘issues’ that the editor was concerned about. Firstly, the people of Okinawa would surely not like to be considered “victims, on par with North Koreans”. Second, “was I really sure that the Japanese car manufacturers have been corrupting the Indonesian government, paying it not to build public transportation networks, so that cities could be literally flooded with cars and scooters”? Lastly, my piece was a few words over the acceptable length.

Being well versed in Japanese culture, I knew exactly what I was expected to do. I did exactly the opposite. I insulted the editor, withdrew the piece, and submitted it to NEO. And here it is, below:

Japan is Part of the Neo-Colonialist Clique.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f someone would bother watching the 9-hours long masterpiece of Masaki Kobayashi “The Human Condition”, he or she would have no illusions left about the Japanese position in the world.

China, Korea and other Asian nations were occupied and plundered, people massacred, tortured, experimented on, and raped.

The only thing “in defense” of Japan that could be said is that, unlike its Western allies, it experienced colonialist amok for a relatively short time, compared to the centuries and millennia long barbarism and horror with which Europe has been brutalizing the entire Planet.

Japan was always impressed by Germany. It was inspired by Western medicine, arts and technology. Japan’s “elites” have also been deeply influenced by German perceptions of superiority and exceptionalism.

While Germany was committing its first holocausts, those in its colonies of Southwest Africa, Japan was closely watching. In what is now Namibia, the German army exterminated close to 90% percent of the Herero tribes’ people, as well as other minorities. German doctors openly experimented on the local people. Many were decapitated and their heads shipped to the University of Freiburg and to several Berlin hospitals, to prove that African people were inferior. The same doctors later taught Dr. Mengele and other butchers who were conducting experiments on Jews, Roma and other “inferior races” during World War II.

Japan, increasingly impressed by Germans, was making its own plans for Asia. Some time later it began performing medical experiments on the Chinese people.

It goes without saying, although it is hardly ever pronounced in the West or in Japan itself, that Japanese imperialist slaughters in Asia were directly influenced and inspired by Western colonialism and racism.

Japan is a good student. It loves everything that comes from abroad; or more precisely, from the West. In many ways, it became almost identical to its master. So much so that during the Apartheid era in South Africa and its colonies, the Japanese people were “elevated” to the status of “honorary whites”. They were the only non-white people who were allowed to attend functions exclusively reserved for the white minority. They were welcomed to live in housing reserved for the rulers. They were finally “accepted”.

Japan fought the war, alongside its fascist allies, it committed crimes against humanity and after it lost, it immediately succumbed to the victors who were, like Germans, mainly white and of European descent. Instead of Germans and Italians, it now looked up to the Brits, French, Australians, but above all North Americans.

Japan’s fascist industrial complex and governance system were almost fully preserved by the victorious powers. The worst war criminals were allowed to once again manage the system. The Tokyo Trials were just a farce.

Whatever Japan does, it does well and with legendary precision. Its collaboration with the West during the Korean War was complete, and the grateful colonizers rewarded it. Unlike most of the other colonies which were plundered and humiliated, Japan was elevated, allowed to become rich.

Ecstatic, the country began building its capitalist industrial might. There was absolutely no doubt where it had been standing. It joined Western imperialism, first as a junior partner, and later as an equal member of the club. It has been doing all it can to be more Western and more capitalist than its handlers, and ideologically, more dogmatic and fundamentalist.

Japan used to frustrate the progressive Indonesian, President Ahmed Sukarno, and the most influential Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad (who held the post between 1981 and 2003) who often begged Japan to “return to Asia”.

Japan did not want to return anywhere. It has been cozy with what it perceived as its membership in the “elite club”. Just as it learned from the Europeans, it put its self-interests well above morality, solidarity and humanism.

Political pirouettes, and Machiavellian manipulation of information related to its past and present, became almost identical to the information control and propaganda practiced in the West.

Economic terrorism suddenly had no boundaries. Just to illustrate, the Japanese car industry is directly corrupting the governments of Indonesia, demanding that no public transportation is built in the fourth most populous nation on Earth. As a result, hundreds of millions of people are being paralyzed by traffic jams, and dying from pollution-related illnesses. The infrastructure on Java Island has almost totally collapsed. But as long as people there are forced to buy Japanese cars and scooters, Japan does not even blink.

Japan has also turned itself into an “indoctrination post” for the young and ambitious students from all corners of Asia. Countless Japanese universities have been offering “scholarships”, effectively brainwashing and “neutralizing” talented men and women from poor and potentially rebellious nations. Most of them are taught “communications”, “education” and “development”; or basically, how to say nothing and how not to rebel about anything. They are being patiently instructed on how not to stand up against the Empire and savage capitalism, or more precisely, how to behave exactly how Japan does. “Join the elites, enjoy a good life and keep philosophy and morals out of this!”

Japan is hosting some of the deadliest military bases on earth – those on Okinawa Island.

During my filming there for the South American television network TeleSUR, I saw, first hand, Japanese imperialism at work: the great Okinawan culture had been restrained, social benefits provided in exchange for obedience, and all ethical and internationalist messages related to the bases were muted.

However, Okinawans know, and many are horrified by what is going on, but are unable to change anything.

This is where World War III may start! This is where the West is provoking both China (actually an old historical ally of Okinawa) and North Korea (now Okinawa’s fellow victim) from.

Years ago, I was told by a Chinese diplomat: “If the West attacks us, we will not, most likely, retaliate against Washington or London. We will retaliate against Japan, because its territory is where the attack would come from”. Most likely but paradoxically, the retaliation would be against the islands of Okinawa that is actually “hosting” the bases.

Many Okinawans understand the danger and of course they are totally against the war. But Tokyo ignores their demands to close down the bases. The current administration is becoming increasingly bellicose, anti-Chinese, anti-DPRK and embarrassingly pro-Western.

The Prime Minister likes to pose as a Japanese patriot. But Shinzō Abe is actually a collaborator, not a patriot. And it is not because he is a “right-winger” (Mishima, no matter how controversial his legacy is, was also a right-winger, but without any doubt a true Japanese patriot). He does not serve the interests of Japan, but those of the West, of the Empire that defeated, bombed to the ground, and occupied Japan some 70 years ago; the Empire responsible for tens of millions of lost lives all over Asia.

The recent changes in the law allowing the deployment of Japanese troops from the “Self Defense Force” abroad, is nothing new. Japan has already been paying for several wars, producing military technology for the Empire, provoking its neighbors; it has been doing it for decades.

Just as during WWII, Japan is now, once again, a greatly trusted and respected member of the Fascist alliance. It is arming itself to the teeth, and it is even considering changing its peaceful constitution. The players have changed, but the essence remains the same. It just feels like Japan is harboring strong and spontaneous dispositions to always be part of Western imperialist pacts.
Of course, all is done in the name of self-defense, and with some lofty slogans like “freedom”, “democracy” and “peace” being tossed around. Impulses behind the deeds are much more sinister: racism towards all fellow Asian nations, aggressive ‘exceptionalism’ (learned and adopted from Europe and North America), as well as submissive servitude towards the West. That is the world in which we are living. To Paraphrase the great Indian thinker Arundhati Roy – “now black is called white and war is called peace”- or at least in the West and in Japan they are!

Originally published by : New Eastern Outlook.

Andre Vltchek

Philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

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Dispatches from Eric Zuesse

According to Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (German Economic News), on April 23rd, U.S. President Barack Obama is “demanding the active deployment of the Bundeswehr [Germany’s armed forces, including their Army, Navy, and Air Force] to NATO’s eastern borders” at Poland and the Baltic republics, to join the quadrupling of America’s forces there, on and near those borders of Russia. (This is an extreme violation of what Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to when he ended the Soviet Union and its NATO-mirror organization the Warsaw Pact, but it’s actually culminating a process that began shortly after he agreed to America’s terms, which included that NATO “not move one inch to the east.”)

Obama and Hillary—two shills for the plutocracy that guarantee the potential destruction of humanity and the planet in our time via a cataclysmic and unnecessary war—the ultimate crime. None of the crazy plans that this duo endorses are being communicated to the public by the Western media.

Furthermore, DWN reports that on April 25th, the U.S. President will hold a “summit meeting” in Hannover Germany with the leaders of Germany (Angela Merkel), Italy (Matteo Renzi), France (Francois Hollande), and Britain (David Cameron). The presumed objective of this meeting is to establish in NATO’s countries bordering on Russia, a military force of all five countries that are headed by these leaders, a force threatening Russia with an invasion, if NATO subsequently decides that the ‘threat from Russia’ be ‘responded to’ militarily. 

NATO’s surrounding Russia with hostile forces is supposedly defensive against Russia — not an offensive operation. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America’s President JFK didn’t consider Nikita Khrushchev’s plan to base nuclear missiles in Cuba to be ‘defensive’ on the USSR’s part — and neither does Russia’s President Vladimir Putin consider America’s far bigger operation, of surrounding Russia with such weapons, to be ‘defensive’ and not offensive. The U.S. Government, and NATO, act as if Russia is surrounding them, instead of them surrounding Russia — and their ‘news’ media transmit this lie as if it should be taken seriously, not as its being a lie; but, in actual fact, NATO has already expanded right up to Russia’s western borders.

Germany’s Angela Merkel has shown herself to be as abject a tool of the American empire as any EU politician in recent memory, perhaps worse. In Europe, she plays Japan’s Abe’s evil twin.

Obama is thus now adding to the economic sanctions against Russia that he had imposed allegedly because of Russia’s alleged ‘seizure’ of Crimea from Ukraine after Obama’s coup overthrew Russia’s ally Viktor Yanukovych who led Ukraine until the coup in February 2014.

Right after Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia, Obama slapped sanctions against Russia (even though Western-sponsored polls in Crimea, both before and after the coup, had shown higher than 90% support by Crimeans for rejoining with Russia), and nuclear weapons were prepared, both on the U.S.-EU side and on the Russian side, for a possible nuclear war. 

This is no mere restoration of the Cold War (which was based upon the capitalist-communist ideological disagreement); it’s instead getting forces into position for a possible invasion of Russia, pure-and-simple — raw conquest — though no major news-media in the West are reporting it as being such. 

That preparation doesn’t necessarily mean a nuclear war will result. Russia might accept whatever the demands of ‘the West’ are, and thus lose its national sovereignty. Otherwise, ‘the West’ (the U.S.leadership, and the leaderships in its allied countries) might quit their evermore-ominous threats, and simply withdraw from Russia’s borders, if Russia stands-its-ground and refuses to yield up its national sovereignty.

Basically, the U.S. leadership decided to take over Ukraine, and refused to acknowledge the rights of the Crimean people to reject being conquered by the U.S. — and Russia’s leadership decided to protect them against the type of invasion that subsequently occurred in Ukraine’s former Donbass region, where the opposition to Obama’s coup was even more intense.

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]upposedly, ‘the West’ is asserting that Russia is somehow in the wrong here; but, since even the head of Stratfor has called what Obama did in Ukraine “the most blatant coup in history”, and since the fact that it was a U.S. coup has been documented extensively on cellphone and other videos, and in the most thorough academic investigation that has been performed of the matter — and was even acknowledged by Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko, a participant in the coup, to have been a coup — and since evidence survives on the Internet of the U.S. Embassy’s preparations as early as 1 March 2013 for the February 2014 coup; and since even the U.S. government’s hired polls showed that Crimeans rejected overwhelmingly the U.S. coup and supported rejoining Russia; the question still needs to be answered: What basis of ‘the West’s’ aggressive actions threatening Russia’s national security is there, other than such lies by the West, against Russia’s President? And, that’s a very worrisome basis — worrisome regarding, essentially, dictatorship in ‘the West’, rather than regarding any dictatorship outside ‘the West’. The dictatorship here seems clearly to be coming from the West, against the East.

Back in January, Russian President Vladimir Putin called-out American President Barack Obama on Obama’s big lie, that America’s “ABM” weapons to disable in-flight nuclear missiles were being installed in Europe in order to protect Europe against Iranian nuclear missiles, but now the U.S. acknowledges that Iran doesn’t have, and won’t have, any nuclear missiles, and yet Obama is stepping up (instead of ending) those ABM installations — even though the alleged anti-Iranian reason for them is gone. The only actual reason they have been installed, Putin argues, is in order to enable a blitz nuclear attack against Russia, which will include disabling Russia’s retaliatory capacity.

SIDEBAR
Just look at this disgusting piece of news. Apparently poor Germany is awash in mainstream liberals. 

Majority of Germans Want Obama to Run for President Again—read more

60 percent of Germans regret that sitting US President Barack Obama is legally prohibited from running for presidency again, a public opinion poll commissioned by a German newspaper found Sunday.Sixty-two percent of Germans said they wanted Obama to run for a third time, while 34 percent said they were not disappointed about Obama’s absence from the 2016 presidential race, a poll conducted for Bild am Sonntag by German pollster Emnid found. Only 4 percent said they wanted to see Republican nomination frontrunner Donald Trump succeed Obama as president of the United States, with 83 percent expecting the real estate mogul to fare worse than Obama. Obama, who is due to stand down after the November vote, said last month he hoped for a Democratic successor in the White House and a Democratic majority in the Senate. Two candidates are seeking Democratic nomination – Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former US State Secretary Hillary Clinton, who is in the lead.

SIDEBAR ENDS HERE

Any in-depth news-report about Obama’s organizing for a possible invasion of Russia, needs to deal, therefore, with the key question: What basis of ‘the West’s’ aggressive actions threatening Russia’s national security is there, other than such lies by ‘the West’? And, if there is no honest answer to it, then the only rational response by Western publics, to what Obama and his foreign allies are doing, is to recognize what is actually happening and to take action against their own leaders, before this increasingly high-stakes confrontation — of no benefit but only extremely high costs, to publics around the world — becomes terminal. In that instance, Western publics need to defend themselves against their own nation’s leaders. This is a situation that is frequently encountered in dictatorships.

The key questions are not being asked in the Western press; they are being ignored by it. Unless these questions are publicly dealt with — and soon — the answer, to them all, could well be terminal. Consequently, any ‘news’ medium that fails to address them is less than worthless; it is sheer propaganda that merely parades in the mask of being a ‘news medium’: the potentially terminal questions are then being ignored, and lies are promoted instead, which distract the public from the most urgent public-affairs issue of them all, in our era, not draw the public’s attention to that overriding international-affairs issue.

The closer that things are getting to a nuclear war, the more difficult becomes either side’s backing down from it — and this is especially the case with the aggressor (most especially when it falsely claims that it is being aggressed-against, and this is the reason why the lies urgently need to be exposed).

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=By= Murray Polner

CC BY-SA by AK Rockefeller

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]Years ago, on a troopship returning from Japan, I spoke with a Japanese wife of an American airman. She told me she’d been born and raised in Hiroshima and after the first A-Bomb raid on August 6, 1945, her parents sent her to Nagasaki for safekeeping just in time for the second A-Bomb attack.

Karl Compton

She was among the lucky ones who escaped with their lives. But 75,000 people were killed in Nagasaki (and at least 100,000 in Hiroshima) and many more suffered for decades from excruciating and lingering ailments. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had followed the conventional American carpet bombing of Tokyo and Yokahama, which was meant to break the morale of the Japanese people. When news of the two atomic raids was announced most Americans cheered since they believed the authoritative figures who told them the attacks had helped end the war and saved many American military lives.

Those convincing voices included MIT’s president and eminent physicist Karl Compton whose Atlantic Monthly article claimed the attacks saved “hundreds of thousands—perhaps several million—of lives, both American and Japanese.” Soon after, Henry L. Stimson, the highly-regarded former Secretary of War, assured Americans in Harper’s that the attacks were the most effective way to end the war and save lives. And no less an authority than General Leslie Groves, commander of  the Manhattan Project, told the nation that “The atomic bomb is not an inhuman weapon” and “anyone who doubts this is that we did not start the war, and if they don’t like the way we ended it, to remember who started it.”

Henry Stimson

Even so, Susan Southard’s “Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War” denigrates the NY Times’ William Laurence as “the War Department’s mouthpiece.” Laurence, she writes, worked for the Manhattan Project while still on the Times’ payroll, and wrote “his glorified account of the Nagasaki atomic bombing (from his vantage point aboard the companion plane the ‘Great Artiste’”) for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1946.

It was all part of an effort, Southard says, to “shut down public criticism” though ignorance about nuclear war’s consequences might well have been a contributing factor.

0rdinary Japanese also knew little about what had happened on August 6 and 9 since its newspapers and radio had been censored throughout the war and later by the American occupiers.

Still, to their credit, not every military leader followed the party line. The Associated Press quoted Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the Navy’s Third Fleet, questioning the use of the A-Bombs since the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering. Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to FDR and Truman, angrily wrote in his book “I Was There” that “we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Age” and “wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” And in Dwight Eisenhower’s memoir, “Mandate for Change,” he told Stimson of his “grave misgivings” about the use of the A-Bombs. Halsey, Leahy and Eisenhower were not alone.

Trying to introduce some balance and clarity, Southard quotes John Dower, Pulitzer historian of Japan and WWII (he blurbed her book): “No one denies that these policy makers desired to hasten the war’s end and to save American lives but no serious historian regards those as the sole consideration driving the use of the bombs on Japanese cities.” Certainly the emerging rivalry with the Soviet Union played a crucial role.

“Nagasaki” is an empathetic, meticulous and lucid account of the city and its victims, especially since the city has always lived in the shadow of Hiroshima. An independent writer, Southard is the founder and artistic director of Essential Theater in Tempe, Arizona, who first encountered the Nagasaki story when, as a teenage exchange student, she visited a memorial museum in the city and later learned enough Japanese to be able to serve as a translator for a survivor of the attack on an anti-nuclear US speaking tour.

This necessary book will no doubt remind many of John Hersey’s seminal “Hiroshima,” where one of his survivors “wondered why they lived when so many others died” and another “who saw more death that he ever thought he would see.”

Inside the devastated city survivors (called Hibakusha), scoured neighborhoods, streets, workplaces, schools and hospitals for missing relatives and friends. For some it was too much, drinking “excessively to escape their exhaustion, loss and shame, “killing themselves or suffering lingering and painful deaths. Beyond grief and wounds there were hard times. “[E]conomic stability did not come for many years except for wealthy business barons who had amassed enormous profits during the war; most families faced unrestrained financial distress.”

Southard goes beyond the immediate horrors and concentrates on the aftermath of the attack. Young survivors who became anti-nuclear activists were spurned by Japanese conservatives who played down Japan’s many WWII war crimes by insisting the two nuclear attacks were infinitely worse.

So savage a war left irreconcilable protagonists in its wake. In 1988, when the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum tried –in Southard’s words—“to simultaneously celebrate the end of a horrific war and—while refraining from drawing conclusions about the morality of the bombs’ use—remain compassionate to those who experienced the bombings. American veteran groups and their congressional allies were furious because they believed the exhibit belittled their courage and suffering and emphasized instead Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The exhibit was forced to eliminate a good deal of relevant material including Eisenhower’s opposition and virtually all survivor accounts.

Nagasaki’s mayor was irate and after apologizing for Pearl Harbor and Japan’s war crimes he memorably added, “But do you tell me that because of this aggression and these atrocities committed by the Japanese, there is no need to reflect upon the fact that an unprecedented weapon of mass destruction was used on a community of noncombatants.”

Eight years later the same thing happened in Japan when the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum added exhibits documenting Japanese war crimes and conservative Japanese rose in protest and forced the museum to eliminate, among other wartime horrors, the Bataan Death March, the treatment of POWs, the rape and slaughter of countless Chinese civilians, and other war crimes

Meanwhile, survivors were meeting bureaucratic hurdles, “exasperated and undeterred,” fought back legally and politically. At a rally in 1980, Yamaguchi Senji, who had lost many relatives to radiation sickness, heatedly declared, “0ur demand for the immediate enactment of a law for the relief of all Hibakusha is not only a Hibakusha demand, but also the demand of all people in Japan, and of the whole world, for ‘No More Hibakusha!.”

Southard also describes how eleven years after the bombing, 10-12,000 Korean atom bomb survivors had to fight for the identical health benefits granted Japanese survivors because they were required to have a Japanese witness attest to their identity, leading one Korean to ask, “All my neighbors died of the bomb. How could you bring them? Bring a ghost?”

The survivors’ refusal to remain silent has helped foster worldwide anti-nuclear sentiment. What also ultimately helped them and most Japanese was a generous American occupation, which installed a pacifist constitution unambiguously stating, “The Japanese people forever renounce war and the threat or use of force,” an explicit clause now being altered by a conservative Japanese government and probably supported by the US as it eyes China as yet another potential enemy.

I believe Southard’s major contribution is that, given the ownership of nuclear bombs by so many nations, she forces us to think that, sadly, any city anywhere in the world could one day be on some rogue nuclear nation’s agenda.

Contributing Editor, Murray Polner wrote “No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran“; “When Can I Come Home,” about draft evaders during the Vietnam era; co-authored with Jim O’Grady,  “Disarmed and Dangerous,” a dual biography of Dan and Phil Berrigan; and most recently, with Thomas Woods,Jr., ” We Who Dared to Say No to War.”  He is the senior book review editor for the History News Network.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

-By- Peter Symonds 

North Korea carried out a fourth underground nuclear test yesterday, triggering a round of international condemnation led by the United States. The test will further heighten the tense and dangerous situation in North East Asia and throughout the region generated by the Obama administration’s confrontational “pivot to Asia” directed against China.

The official KCNA news agency declared that the North Korean nuclear test—the first since 2013—was a “complete success” and involved the underground detonation of a hydrogen bomb. Several analysts have cast doubt on the latter claim as a hydrogen bomb—a two-stage device that sets off a fusion reaction—would have generated far more explosive energy than has reportedly registered in initial seismic data.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest condemned North Korea’s “increasingly provocative acts” that had resulted in it becoming “one of the most isolated countries in the world.” The Obama administration is already facing congressional agitation for tougher action. “The answer to North Korea’s threats is more pressure, not less,” Ed Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said. “The administration’s North Korea policy has proven a dramatic failure.”

US allies in Asia and Europe joined in the denunciations. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe “strongly condemned” the nuclear test and branded it as “a major threat to our country’s security.” South Korean President Park Geun-hye convened an emergency national security council meeting, declared that North Korea’s actions constituted a “grave provocation” and warned of “corresponding measures.” Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said the test confirmed “North Korea’s status as a rogue state and a continuing threat to international peace and security.”

Such remarks are completely hypocritical. The greatest threat to international peace is not the small, economically backward state of North Korea, but US imperialism. Washington is currently waging a predatory war in the Middle East and has ratcheted up tensions throughout Asia over the past five years through its “pivot” against China. Its provocative military challenges to Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea threaten to ignite a conflict between the two nuclear-armed powers.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he United States has long exploited North Korea as a means of putting pressure on China and as a justification for its military build-up in North East Asia. The Obama administration has refused to take part in six-party talks sponsored by China to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue unless Pyongyang accedes to US demands in advance. Following North Korea’s nuclear test in 2013, the US prevailed on China to back tougher UN sanctions, compounding the economic crisis of the Pyongyang regime.

At the same time, Washington used the test as a pretext for boosting its anti-ballistic missile systems in North East Asia, in collaboration with Japan and South Korea. Such weaponry is not aimed primarily at North Korea, but China and also Russia. Nor is it defensive in character. The Pentagon is seeking the capacity to mount a first-strike nuclear attack, secure in the knowledge that its anti-missile systems could prevent a residual Chinese or Russian retaliation.

Moreover, Washington’s systematic isolation of the unstable, faction-ridden regime in Pyongyang is a major contributing factor to the regime’s erratic and desperate acts. North Korea’s claims that its nuclear weapons will protect it against US imperialism are absurd. If Pyongyang ever attempted to use its small, rudimentary devices, the US would quickly devastate the country and destroy its military and economic capacity.

North Korea’s latest nuclear test appears to be aimed as much at pressuring China for concessions, as countering the US and its allies. Since Pyongyang detonated its last atomic bomb in 2013, Beijing has enforced the tougher UN sanctions and cooled relations with its Cold War ally. President Xi Jinping, who assumed office in March 2013, has yet to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but has visited South Korea—a country that is still formally at war with North Korea.

Efforts to improve relations resulted in a visit by a top Chinese official to Pyongyang in October to attend a military parade and present a letter from Xi sending “best wishes” to the North Korean leader. The situation quickly soured, however, after Kim Jong Un indicated in December that North Korea would test another nuclear device—overturning previous assurances to Beijing that it would not do so.

China quickly expressed its hostility to yesterday’s test. Foreign affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying declared that Beijing was “strongly opposed to the act” and urged Pyongyang “to fulfil its promise of denuclearisation.” An editorial in the state-owned Global Times criticised North Korea’s “misshapen security policies centred on nuclear weapons” and called on it to “consider the long-term negative impact on Beijing-Pyongyang ties and its own development.”

The latest nuclear test is likely to reignite the debate in Chinese ruling circles over whether to cut its North Korean ally loose. Beijing confronts a dilemma. It is deeply concerned that the nuclear tests provide an excuse for the US to accelerate its military build-up in Asia and for Japan and South Korea to potentially manufacture their own nuclear weapons.

At the same time, China does not want the North Korean regime to implode, creating a social and political crisis that could reverberate into northern China, and also open the door for a pro-US regime in Pyongyang, or a unified Korea. Beijing has always regarded North Korea as a useful security buffer on its northern border.

The Korean Peninsula is just one of the dangerous flashpoints that the Obama administration has deliberately stoked up as part of its “pivot to Asia.” By encouraging allies like Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines, and strategic partners like India, to take a more aggressive stance toward China, the US is transforming the whole region into a tinderbox. A relatively minor incident or accident, whether on the border separating the two Koreas or in the East China and South China Seas, can become the spark for a wider conflagration.

Peter Symonds is a senior political analyst with wsws.org, organ of the Socialist Equality Party. 

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Jeff J. Brown, director of 44 Days Radio Sinoland, was invited by Press TV to discuss Japan, South Korea, China and the 70th anniversary of the defeat of world fascism.
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