Dateline Feb 11, 2018
espite all efforts of the paranoid and unpredictable US regime, the Koreans are making love not war during the 2018 Winter Olympics. The US regime is furious and pulling out all the hate stops to tarnish North Korea, and try and put South Korea back on the US colonial leash. While not exactly an anti-colonial attack dog, South Korea’s democratically elected peace-president Moon Jae-in is showing signs that he is not an America poodle either.
A departure from the colonialist script: South Korean President Moon Jae-in speaks during the opening ceremony of the 132nd IOC session ahead of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Gangneung, South Korea, Monday, February 5, 2018.
Every four years the US regime uses the Olympics as an opportunity to rain chaos and hate during the Olympics’ historical tradition of bringing the world’s best athletes together in celebration of world unity, human dignity, fraternity among all nations and the possibilities when nations come together in peace.
Happiness, unity and peace are a threat to the paranoid US regime, which is dedicated to war, death, and chaos. Like a drone hurling bombs at wedding parties and funerals, the unpredictable US regime tries to sabotage anything good and decent that might come from a peaceful gathering of nations. Such a large gathering during the Olympics of world leaders, athletes and people of the world sets off the military-industrial-complex’s algorithm of a meeting of high profile targets in need of a signature strike.
As Obama said, “I have two words for you, Predator Drone; you won’t even see it coming”. It worked for Obama during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. From the time of the announcement in July of 2007, for almost eight years until 2014, Russia was preparing for the celebration of its emergence like a phoenix from the ashes of chaos sown by US infiltrators of neoliberalism, looting of state enterprises, and imposing austerity on Russian citizens during the decade of the 1990’s.
The US economic advisors to Russia’s drunken and abjectly corrupt president Boris Yeltsin led Russia down a yellow brick road they said would lead to a golden transformation from communism to a Western style capitalism, with consumerist abundance for all. When the neoliberal transformation turned into a train wreck the US Nobel Prize winning economists said it was just a temporary hard landing. The savage free marketism orgy went on for over a decade, during which most Russians saw their economic and social security vanish, their lifespan index plummet, criminality fester in every nook and cranny of society, and their national sovereignty reduced to that of a humiliated vassal state at the mercy of the Washington plutocracy. By the turn of the millennium, the Russian people had had enough of US-style voodoo economics and elected Vladimir Putin as their leader. Putin told the US thank you very much and showed the esteemed economic shamans the exit door and kicked them out. The US would never forgive Putin and they would do everything they could to shun, vilify and regime-change him.
Good for South Korea. They deserve the liberation and independence the US promised them in 1945. South Korea had been under the boot of Japanese subjugation from 1905 to 1945. Since 1945 the South has been under the subjugation of the US boot. North Korea has been independent since the Russians left in 1948. They are nobody’s puppet and they want to go their own way.
During the years while Vladimir Putin was engineering a recovery of Russia’s economy, the US’s Obama regime was spending $5 billion plotting a coup d’etat in Ukraine. The coup was timed for when Russia would be overjoyed celebrating the Sochi Olympics. To prepare the US public for a resumption of a US-led Cold War the international cartel of Western propaganda organs, led by the New York Times and the Guardian, began laying the groundwork of anti-Russian propaganda. The propandists led a vilification project portraying Vladimir Putin as a thuggish, homophobic killer of journalists, a ruthless operator who invaded Georgia, and is an evil dictator. While the Russians and the rest of the world celebrated the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, US backed fascists instigated a violent overthrow of Russia’s neighbor and historical cousin country Ukraine (in fact Ukraine is the cradle of Russian civilization), the original rus, and its democratically elected government.
The US in its ruthless pettiness always looks for an opportunity to rain on the parade of some other country that it wants to punish for not being one of its lackeys, or for not showing sufficient deference to the global hegemon. For the 2018 Winter Olympics the US planned to ramp up tensions and impose more economy killer-sanctions on North Korea in order to put an even brighter contrasting glow to the US dominated Western-style capitalist South Korean so-called miracle economy.
In 2017 the US regime got a sneaking suspicion that things were not going as planned. The feisty South Korean people said they had had enough of the US backed corrupt puppet president Park Geun-hye, granddaughter of the despotic US-backed dictator Park Chung-hee (1963 to 1979). In late 2016 the South Korean people began mass protests holding candlelight vigils demanding the resignation of Park Geun-hye.
Trump and Pence—two moral and intellectual imbeciles, two turds catapulted to the summit of US power— vividly personify the bankruptcy of US politics and the emptiness of its claims to be a real democracy.
Candlelight vigils have become a tradition of South Korean protesters since the 2002 killing of a South Korean girl by US occupation soldiers. When the soldiers were being court martialed by the US military, the South Korean people held candlelight vigils demanding justice. They didn’t get it. The soldiers were found not guilty (surprise!), but the non-violent candlelight vigils continued as a traditional form of protest whenever the South Koreans demonstrated against injustice, US arrogance, and political corruption.
The candlelight vigils against Park Geun-hye continued and grew in 2017 until the South Korean parliament caved in to the demonstrators and impeached Park for corruption and influence peddling. Park Geun-hye is now in prison, where her grandfather should have once been too, if an assassin’s bullet had not found him first in 1979. Her grandfather had also been a collaborator during Korea’s humiliation of Japanese colonialism. Collaboration and corruption do run in the family, but these dynastic vices are virtues in the eyes of the Americans who instinctively seek out the most corrupt to use as their local shills.
In May 2017 elections that followed Park’s ouster the South Korean people, especially the younger generation, said they had had enough of US instigated animosity between them and their Northern brothers and sisters. Moon Jae-in ran an elections campaign on a platform of anti-cronyism with South Korea’s giant industrial monopolies, increased social programs for the people and a Sunshine Policy 2.0 similar to that of President Kim Dae-jung (1998 to 2008). Moon won a landslide victory on his platform of peace and social justice for the people.
The US regime has been sulking, plotting and hyperventilating with sarcasm, saber rattling and retaliation against both South Korea and North Korea for resuming a warming of relations that started in the early 21st century under Kim Dae-jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his Sunshine Policy in 2000. Before Moon could even take office in May, the US regime humiliated him and caused him to lose face by putting THAAD missiles in South Korea. Thousands of South Koreans protested against the THAAD’s, but since the US has military operational (colonial) control in South Korea the peoples’ protests were disregarded. Instead the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson rained on the Sunshine before it even dawned. In April 2017 Reuters reported:
“[Tillerson] expected to discuss tougher sanctions [with Congress], which US officials say could include oil embargo, banning North Korean airlines, intercepting cargo ships, and punishing Chinese and other banks for doing business with Pyongyang…all options are on the table.”
For months the US regime has been raising the volume of the rhetoric against North Korea, threatening war, installing THAAD missiles, shipping more nukes to Guam, threatening a first strike nuclear attack, conspiring with military allies, and tightening the screws of killer economic sanctions. All options are on the table except the diplomatic option. The US refuses to sit at the same table with Koreans.
The proponents of economic sanctions claim that they are a non-violent means of coercion. That is not true. Economic sanctions are war by other means. Any coercion of one country against another is aggression, especially if that country is acting within it legal rights as a sovereign nation. North Korea has broken no international law and it has as much right as South Korea, Japan and the US to have nuclear power for electricity, to test missiles and to even have a nuclear arms program for self-defense and to possess nuclear bombs.
North Korea has not committed aggression against any other country or threatened to attack anyone except in self-defense. The US, its allies and the UN have overstepped their bounds in punishing North Korea for what they have every legal right to do. If the US is so concerned about nuclear proliferation, then they should start living up to their own obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and go talk to their friends Pakistan, India, and Israel too.
In the 21st century economic sanctions, embargos, blockades, call them whatever; they are weapons of mass destruction that kill civilians and non-combatants indiscriminately. Economic sanctions kill by restricting the imports of food, medicine, fuel and other essentials. Economic sanctions deny the victim the ability to export its products in exchange for hard currency, puts a freeze on their foreign assets, and makes international transactions nearly impossible.
Killer economic sanctions strangle the ability of a country to sustain the civilian infrastructure necessary for the health and life of their citizens. Even when economic sanctions are so-called “smart sanctions” that target limited sections of a victim’s economy and individuals, all economic sanctions have the effect of intimidating other countries from all economic activity for fear of inadvertently violating the sanctions or just angering a muscular US foreign policy attitude that has hundreds of ways of retaliating against those that have displeased it. Economic killer-sanctions are a weapon that a strong country can use against a weak country to try to force a change in its behavior, as if a domineering parent were disciplining a naughty child. That is not how grown up diplomacy is supposed to work.
North Korea has proven that the US propaganda is a lie that North Koreans refuse to sit at the diplomatic table. The North Koreans have offered time and again to negotiate with the US, it has offered to suspend its nuclear program in return for acts of goodwill by the US in return, and North Korea has even offered multiple times to negotiate a final peace treaty to the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice, but not a final peace.
North Korea and South Korea are meeting, talking and marching under a unified flag at the Olympics. The US is throwing a tantrum and accusing Kim Jong-un’s extended olive branch as a dirty trick to divide South Korea from its master, the US. The US regime is berating its South Korean underlings as being weak, off the colonial leash, and going it alone without its US paternalistic protection.
Good for South Korea. They deserve the liberation and independence the US promised them in 1945. South Korea had been under the boot of Japanese subjugation from 1905 to 1945. Since 1945 the South has been under the subjugation of the US boot. North Korea has been independent since the Russians left in 1948. They are nobody’s puppet and they want to go their own way. They want to be Koreans and not Western clones. That is their right. They deserve respect. We can start by using their correct name which is The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK).
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About the author
David William Pear, currently serving as a senior contributing editor, is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. He is also a regular columnist and commenter on OpedNews. His articles have been published by The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Russia Insider, Pravda and many other progressive publications. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, St Pete for Peace, CodePink and International Solidarity Movement. In February of 2015 he was part of a people-to-people delegation to Cuba with CodePink. In November of 2015 he was a delegate with CodePink to Palestine to show solidarity with Palestinians. In 2016 David spent 10 weeks in Palestine with the Palestinian non-violent resistance group International Solidarity Movement (ISM). David frequently makes extended trips to Russia as a private citizen. After retiring from finance in 2009, David earned a certification as an Emergency Medical Technician. David is a Vietnam veteran having served as a member of the 5th Special Forces Group as a combat advisor to the Army of the Republic of (South) Viet Nam. David resides with his wife and three cats in Clearwater Beach, Florida.
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David has a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the University of Maryland and attended classes at George Washington University to receive his Certified Financial Planner certification. He also attended courses at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for his certification as a Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA). He has volunteered for public health service, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, emergency medicine and needs of the homeless. His hobbies include boating, fishing and motorcycle touring. He is also a licensed skydiver (USPA-inactive).
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STEPHEN LENDMAN was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient. His new site is at http://stephenlendman.org
