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href="https://medium.com/defiant/a-lot-of-what-you-know-about-north-korea-is-racist-nonsense-a625256b51cc">https://medium.com/defiant/a-lot-of-what-you-know-about-north-korea-is-racist-nonsense-a625256b51cc</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">A Lot of What You Know About North Korea
Is Racist Nonsense</h1>
<div class="section-inner sectionLayout--insetColumn">
<p name="fdf8" id="fdf8" class="graf graf--p graf-after--h4">by
<a href="https://www.patreon.com/AndrewDobbs"
data-href="https://www.patreon.com/AndrewDobbs"
class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" rel="nofollow
noopener nofollow noopener nofollow noopener noopener
noopener nofollow noopener nofollow noopener nofollow
noopener nofollow noopener" target="_blank">ANDREW DOBBS -
April 18, 2017<br>
</a></p>
<p name="473c" id="473c" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Less
than three months into Pres. Donald Trump’s reign we can
already say that there is a non-trivial chance that the
United States will soon be engaged in a nuclear war.</p>
<p name="526b" id="526b" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">The
threat is still remote, but all the pieces are in place. An
aircraft carrier group <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">en
route</em> to North Korea, anonymous sources threatening a
preemptive strike against them, a recent unilateral attack
on the Syrian government and the dropping of a 21,000 pound
conventional bomb in Afghanistan — interpreted by many as a
message for North Korea.</p>
<p name="475a" id="475a" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Any
misjudgments or mistakes could easily spark a shooting war
in which the North Koreans will face an existential threat
they can only resist with their nuclear weapons. The United
States would be likely to respond in kind.</p>
<p name="f20a" id="f20a" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">The
main thing standing between us and this scenario? The cooler
heads and good judgement of Trump and Kim Jong-Un.</p>
<p name="2ca4" id="2ca4" class="graf graf--p
graf-after--figure">This is deeply concerning, but to hear
the U.S. media tell it all of the irrationality and risk in
this is on the North Korean side. NBC News, in the very
article announcing the United States’ threat of unauthorized
aggression against North Korea, called <em
class="markup--em markup--p-em">it </em>“volatile and
unpredictable.”</p>
<p name="a43e" id="a43e" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Australia’s
defense industry minister called North Korea “the world’s
greatest threat” less than a week after the United States
escalated the major power conflict in Syria with little
warning. And <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">The New
York Times</em> spoke of China’s need to “rein in” the
childish North Koreans, even if the United States is the one
that’s killed at least 1,000 civilians in combat since the
beginning of 2017.</p>
<p name="572f" id="572f" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Western
propaganda draws from a deep well of racist “yellow peril”
prejudice to stoke irrational fears against this tiny, poor,
isolated country, and it amplifies this paranoia with
long-standing stereotypes of East Asian “oddity” to
dehumanize North Koreans and justify U.S. aggression against
them.</p>
<p name="4701" id="4701" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">In
the hands of a war-horny bigot like Trump, this
well-established, bipartisan narrative poses a fearsome
threat of making nuclear war inevitable. It’s imperative
that we answer these lies immediately if we are to minimize
this risk.</p>
<p name="329e" id="329e" class="graf graf--p
graf-after--mixtapeEmbed">There are three basic pieces to
the West’s slander of North Korea — that the whole country
is “crazy” and especially dangerous, and that North Koreans
are treacherous and untrustworthy. They can’t be reasoned
with, they won’t honor any diplomatic agreements, and any
moment they could fly off the handle and kill millions of
people for no reason whatsoever.</p>
<p name="1f8e" id="1f8e" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">This
demands extraordinary military pressure from the United
States and allies and may, alas, require us to destroy them.</p>
<p name="797d" id="797d" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Each
of these is a perverse misrepresentation. The claim that
they are insane in particular is a terrific example of
gaslighting — an abuse tactic where the perpetrator takes
steps to make their victim act or feel crazy and then uses
those responses as proof of the victim’s irrationality, a
justification for further abuse.</p>
<p name="69a2" id="69a2" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">North
Korea, by way of context, is bordered on the north by China
and the south by South Korea. South Korea hosts 28,500 U.S.
soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, many of them
literally amassed at the border with the North. On their
east is the Sea of Japan, and across that is a nation which
brutally occupied Korea for decades.</p>
<p name="a9fd" id="a9fd" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">The
North Koreans are surrounded on all sides by countries that
have invaded or occupied them in living memory, and the
world’s most powerful military is still technically at war
with them and poised to invade at moment’s notice.</p>
<p name="10ee" id="10ee" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">This
is the sort of scenario that would make any country not
merely paranoid, but legitimately insecure. In light of U.S.
military aggression against countries that choose to resist
our global order — see Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. — North
Korea can choose to capitulate or focus tremendous resources
on building up their defensive capabilities.</p>
</div>
<div class="section-inner sectionLayout--fullWidth">
<figure name="2e13" id="2e13" class="graf graf--figure
graf--layoutFillWidth graf-after--p" data-scroll="native"><figcaption
class="imageCaption">USS ‘Carl Vinson’ heads toward South
Korea in March 2017. U.S. Navy photo</figcaption></figure>
</div>
<div class="section-inner sectionLayout--insetColumn">
<p name="3237" id="3237" class="graf graf--p
graf-after--figure">Also in living memory there is the time
the United States killed a quarter of the North Korean
population and leveled the country’s urban centers, leaving
almost no structures standing in Pyongyang. The North
Koreans didn’t capitulate then and it isn’t on the table
now — defense and defiance it is, and this is hardly “crazy”
in context.</p>
<p name="2cc3" id="2cc3" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">The
U.S. media, however, never provide this context and instead
they present North Korean military propaganda as being
unhinged and aggressive. They never compare this, of course,
to U.S. military flyovers at sporting events or the
ceremonial induction of new soldiers at halftime, or even to
our National Anthem with its celebration of bombings and
rockets and warfare.</p>
<p name="8b79" id="8b79" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">If
North Korea is “crazy” for its militarism, then the United
States is downright certifiable.</p>
<p name="0302" id="0302" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">U.S.
propaganda can dismiss North Korea’s legitimate concerns so
easily because of the underlying racist assumption that
these are a bizarre and simple-minded people that believe in
things like unicorns. This feeds off of and into orientalist
logic that sees East Asians as a nearly subhuman “other”
that can’t be reasoned with and so must be handled with
force.</p>
<p name="00d8" id="00d8" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">It
worked when we needed to justify violence against immigrant
laborers in the 19th century and it works to justify our
imperialist expansion today.</p>
<p name="a0a2" id="a0a2" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">As
for claims about North Korea’s unique danger to the world,
this too is divorced from reality. The country has no
meaningful power projection capability — its naval surface
vessels can’t operate more than about 50 kilometers off the
coast — and the U.S. military has them contained to the
south. China is still North Korea’s ally and does not view
it as a significant military threat. North Korea is
contained.</p>
<p name="746d" id="746d" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">But
what about those missiles and nukes? The North Koreans could
maybe lob a missile at Japan — or maybe not, a missile test
on April 15, 2017 failed — and they could level Seoul with
artillery alone. But why would they ever do this?</p>
<p name="629d" id="629d" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">The
only way to explain such a unilateral assault on any of
their neighbors — which would prompt either U.S. or Chinese
military assets to overwhelm and destroy them — is to go
back to that same baseless “crazy” claim. They could
miscalculate of course, but claims that they are especially
dangerous almost always rely upon the assumption that they
might just wig out and bomb everybody for no reason at all
at any moment.</p>
<p name="e196" id="e196" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Again,
this is rooted in an infantilizing, dehumanizing, racist
logic.</p>
<p name="21c8" id="21c8" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">And
any claims of a direct North Korean threat to the United
States is ludicrous bullshit. They have no weapons capable
of reaching anywhere within thousands of miles of the United
States, and are years away from developing it, at best. Even
if they reach that goal — which their very uneven history of
missile tests indicates will be very difficult — they would
still have thousands of fewer weapons than we do.</p>
</div>
<div class="section-inner sectionLayout--fullWidth">
<figure name="17a3" id="17a3" class="graf graf--figure
graf--layoutFillWidth graf-after--p" data-scroll="native"><figcaption
class="imageCaption">U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
visits South Korea in March 2017. U.S. State Department
photo</figcaption></figure>
</div>
<div class="section-inner sectionLayout--insetColumn">
<p name="1b54" id="1b54" class="graf graf--p
graf-after--figure">Any launch of that sort would represent
an act of mortal desperation — again, it would be totally
delusional to launch it offensively. Cable news is a much
bigger threat to U.S. security than North Korea ever will
be.</p>
<p name="3c69" id="3c69" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">So
if North Korea’s military threat is totally derived from
their desire to preclude a US attack why not negotiate a
peace between our country and theirs? If they had that sort
of assurance we could both back away from the brink and
perhaps even provide space for an opening in North Korean
society.</p>
<p name="ca4f" id="ca4f" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Conventional
wisdom answers that the North Koreans have reneged on every
agreement ever made with them. But if the “crazy” claims are
an example of gaslighting, this answer is a textbook case of
projection. It’s not the North Koreans who have betrayed
past agreements, but the United States. To cover this up we
repeat the same racist logic we used against Native
Americans — we broke the treaties, but they were the “Indian
givers.”</p>
<p name="3afc" id="3afc" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">The
main incident here has to do with the “Agreed Framework
between the United States of America and the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea,” signed between the two
countries in 1994. The Agreed Framework — as it is usually
called — basically traded the end of North Korea’s nuclear
weapons program for normalized economic and diplomatic
relations with the United States.</p>
<p name="6203" id="6203" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">As
a good faith step to spur the negotiations North Korea
submitted to limited weapons inspections while the United
States cancelled military exercises with South Korea. North
Korea also used its plutonium production plants for energy,
so the United States agreed to work with allies to provide
them with fuel oil until two light water nuclear
reactors — nuclear power plants that cannot be
weaponized — could be built.</p>
<p name="3ae8" id="3ae8" class="graf graf--p
graf-after--mixtapeEmbed">The United States failed to uphold
its end of the agreement almost immediately. Two weeks after
it was signed, Republicans took back Congress and labeled
the agreement “appeasement.” They never provided sufficient
funds for providing the fuel oil and the United States never
met the obligations set in the Agreed Framework.</p>
<p name="2b9d" id="2b9d" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">The
Americans also failed to take even the first preliminary
steps in building the light water reactors for over four
years, and then moved at such a slow pace that there was no
chance of meeting the timelines set in the Framework.</p>
<p name="d05e" id="d05e" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Finally,
and most significantly, Congress blocked any attempts to
begin normalizing relations between North Korea and the
United States and Pres. Bill Clinton never pressed it to do
so.</p>
<p name="e5eb" id="e5eb" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">North
Korea played along for at least four years and even warned
us that it was going to restart its nuclear program a year
before it actually began a pilot program. According to Leon
Sigal, author of <a
href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003IHVLAA/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=brightmount05-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B003IHVLAA&linkId=a6e1290bdc86df822ec7f57bd0bd44c6"
data-href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003IHVLAA/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=brightmount05-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B003IHVLAA&linkId=a6e1290bdc86df822ec7f57bd0bd44c6"
class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" rel="nofollow
noopener" target="_blank"><em class="markup--em
markup--p-em">Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy
with North Korea</em></a><em class="markup--em
markup--p-em">, </em>the North Koreans did not shift from
this pilot effort to a full-scale weapons program until
Pres. George W. Bush refused new negotiations in 2001.</p>
<p name="7da6" id="7da6" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">North
Korea “was playing tit for tat — cooperating whenever
Washington cooperated and retaliating when Washington
reneged, in an effort to end enmity,” <a
href="https://cis.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Sigal0207Audit_0.pdf"
data-href="https://cis.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Sigal0207Audit_0.pdf"
class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" rel="nofollow
noopener" target="_blank">Sigal wrote in 2007</a>. This
extended to the later Six Party Talks between North and
South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia
which almost brought North Korea back into the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty.</p>
<p name="3af5" id="3af5" class="graf graf--p
graf-after--mixtapeEmbed">Talks broke down when the United
States refused to release $24 million frozen in a Macau bank
account, and North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon six
months later. But for that $24 million there might be no
nuclear threat from North Korea today.</p>
<p name="d70f" id="d70f" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">The
fact is that America set such a low priority on disarming
North Korea because it isn’t dangerous to the United States
because it have nukes. The North Koreans are dangerous
because they refuse to submit to our imperial authority and
play ball with our global order.</p>
<p name="cacb" id="cacb" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Notice
how much less hand-wringing you hear about Pakistan, even
though it does have a nuclear arsenal probably 15 times the
size of North Korea’s, while also actively collaborating
with jihadists. The Pakistanis are subject to the U.S.
empire, however, and they buy their weapons from the U.S.
military-industrial complex, so they are no big deal.</p>
<p name="173f" id="173f" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">North
Korea dares to not only maintain its independence, but to
defend it by any means necessary. It can’t be rewarded with
negotiation. America has to destroy North Korea to teach the
rest of the world a lesson, and this means preparing the
U.S. public for nuclear war, painting the country as a bunch
of war-crazed military aggressors whose word can’t be
trusted.</p>
<p name="3ac6" id="3ac6" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Again,
this is the definition of projection, taking advantage of
racist assumptions baked into U.S. politics and culture.</p>
<p name="1d2e" id="1d2e" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">The
good news is that it appears that North Korea is acting both
rationally and politically — not militarily — right now. The
country is playing the present crisis in such a way as to
encourage a favorable outcome in South Korea’s upcoming snap
presidential election.</p>
<p name="b1d8" id="b1d8" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">A
friendlier government there could mean new economic and
political opportunities as well as new diplomatic backup
that could help shift the balance in any future negotiations
with the United States.</p>
<p name="2de5" id="2de5" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">Unfortunately
the North Koreans are lined up against the regime of an
insulated, ignorant, white supremacist warmonger who has
learned in the last few weeks that the same forces lying
about North Korea kiss his ass when he escalates military
conflicts around the world.</p>
<p name="94ce" id="94ce" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">It’s
our responsibility to push back against our government and
against the institutions lying their way into nuclear war.</p>
<p name="534d" id="534d" class="graf graf--p graf-after--p">It’s
our responsibility to speak the truth about North
Korea — even if it challenges our most deep-seated political
assumptions — and it’s our responsibility, always, to stay
defiant.</p>
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