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World Focus: America: Imperial Bully Threatening World Peace
Friday, September 15 @ 04:56:05 UTC |  By Stephen Lendman
September 14, 2017
America’s rage for unchallenged global dominance represents the greatest threat to world peace, security and humanity’s survival. It’s geopolitically out-of-control, both warrior wings of its duopoly governance hellbent on forcing its will on all other nations. Naked aggression is its favored strategy, punitive sanctions used to soften up targeted nations, imposed unilaterally or by the Security Council, its members bullied and pressured to go along instead of doing the right thing, slapping Washington down by refusing.
The more often this happens, the harder it gets to resist. North Korea is being punished for developing powerful weapons intended solely for defense, not offense, its legitimate right, its choice which ones to pursue.
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World Focus: UN Report on North Korea could be about the United States or South Korea
Tuesday, March 25 @ 10:08:44 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
March 25, 2014 - gowans.wordpress.com
Surely one could be forgiven for thinking that when the Washington Post’s Chico Harlan (February 17) described the conclusions reached by the UN Human Rights Commission’s investigation into North Korea that he was really describing his own country, the United States. Harlan wrote, “The report makes for devastating reading, laying out the way North Korea conducts surveillance on its citizens (see Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s spying on US citizens…and everyone else), bans them from travel (anyone up for a visit to Cuba?), discriminates against them based on supposed ideological impurities (has the United States ever been kind to Marxist-Leninists?), tortures them (water boarding and Abu Ghraib) and sometimes banishes them to isolated prison camps, where they are held incommunicado” (recently Guantanamo and other CIA torture camps around the world to which opponents of the US regime have been rendered, more distantly, the incarceration of German-, Italian- and Japanese-Americans during WWII.)
The report recommends that North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, but if the charges against North Korea are true, then surely the case for referring the United States to the same court is at least as compelling. Add the United States’ record of extrajudicial assassination, its world-leading rate of incarceration, its illegal wars, and its support for the most vile human rights violators on the planet, among them Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain, and the case for referring US leaders to The Hague is overwhelming.
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War and Terror: Washington's "playbook" on provoking North Korea
Tuesday, April 30 @ 05:11:37 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
April 30, 2013 - gowans.wordpress.com
In an April 3 Wall Street Journal article, “U.S. dials back on Korean show of force,” reporters Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes revealed that the White House approved a detailed plan, called ‘the playbook,’ to ratchet up tension with North Korea during the Pentagon’s war games with South Korea.
The war games, which are still in progress, and involve the deployment of a considerable amount of sophisticated US military hardware to within striking distance of North Korea, are already a source of considerable tension in Pyongyang, and represent what Korean specialist Tim Beal dubs “sub-critical” warfare.
The two-month-long war games, directed at and carried out in proximity to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, force the North Korean military onto high alert, an exhausting and cripplingly expensive state of affairs for a small country whose economy has already been crippled by wide-ranging sanctions. North Korea estimates that sanctions and US military aggression have taken an incalculable toll on its economy. [1]
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War and Terror: What North Koreans Think
Saturday, April 13 @ 00:50:05 UTC | "We learned the lesson in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan: be strong."
By Stansfield Smith
April 11, 2013 - counterpunch.org
I recently returned from a late March trip to North Korea [Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK], along with 45 others, through Koryo Tours. On that tour I had the opportunity to discuss with the Korean tour guides their views on the current situation. I only recall the DPRK view mentioned here once in the corporate media, when Dennis Rodman returned with a message from new President Kim Jong. The message was “I don't want war, call me.” Nobel Peace Prize winning President Obama refused to accept it, evidently preferring an escalating threat of a regional nuclear war to talking. I asked my Korean tours guides to be interviewed so I could present their views to US people.
Has the DPRK made proposals for peaceful national reunification?
Yes, now we have options: the historic option of a federal republic, and the recent option. In our history we proposed three principles for reunification: that the North and South unite the country independently of foreign forces, that we reunify peacefully, and that we work together over the years to create the unity of the whole nation.
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War and Terror:
Friday, April 12 @ 10:18:14 UTC | By Stansfield Smith
April 10, 2013 - www.counterpunch.org
The corporate media reduces the DPRK (North Korea) to the Kim family and prefaces their names with the terms “madman”, “evil” and “brutal”. Such vilifications of foreign leaders are used here not only to signify they are target for US overthrow. They are meant to intimidate and isolate anti-war activists as being out in left field for ever wanting to oppose a war against countries ruled by “madmen” – be they Saddam, Fidel, Hugo Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Qaddaffi.
Yet to a sensible person, it is crazy that the US, with nuclear weapons thousands of miles from home, in South Korea, denies North Korea has a right to have its own nuclear weapons on its own land – particularly when the North says it is developing nuclear weapons only as a deterrent because the US won’t take its own weapons out of the Korean peninsula.
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War and Terror: Armistice Agreement Withdrawal: North Korean Belligerence?
Thursday, March 21 @ 12:09:34 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
March 21, 2013 - gowans.wordpress.com
Why has North Korea withdrawn from an armistice agreement that has kept overt hostilities on the Korean peninsula at bay since 1953? Does the withdrawal portend an imminent North Korean aggression? Hardly. North Korea is in no position to launch an attack on its Korean neighbour, or on the United States, at least not one that it would survive. North Korean forces are dwarfed by the US and South Korean militaries in size, sophistication and fire-power. The withdrawal serves, instead, as a signal of North Korean resolve to defend itself against growing US and South Korean harassment, both military and economic.
US provocations
For decades, North Korea has been subjected to the modern form of the siege. "The aim of the siege is to reduce the enemy to such a state of starvation and deprivation that they open the gate, perhaps killing their leaders in the process and throw themselves on the mercy of the besiegers." [1] North Korea withstood the siege, and even flourished, during the years it was able to trade with the Soviet Uni0n and Eastern Europe's socialist countries. But with the demise of Soviet socialism, the country has bent, but not broken, under the pressure of US-led sanctions of mass destruction.
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World Focus: Why North Korea Needs Nuclear Weapons
Wednesday, February 27 @ 21:05:52 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
February 27, 2013 - gowans.wordpress.com
Is North Korea’s recent nuclear test, its third, to be welcomed, lamented or condemned? It depends on your perspective. If you believe that a people should be able to organize their affairs free from foreign domination and interference; that the United States and its client government in Seoul have denied Koreans in the south that right and seek to deny Koreans in the north the same right; and that the best chance that Koreans in the north have for preserving their sovereignty is to build nuclear weapons to deter a US military conquest, then the test is to be welcomed.
If you’re a liberal, you might believe that the United States should offer the DPRK (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official name) security guarantees in return for Pyongyang completely, permanently and verifiably eliminating its nuclear weapons program. If so, your position invites three questions.
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