President Barack Obama is briefed by Lt. Col. Ed Taylor as he views the DMZ from Observation Post Ouellette at Camp Bonifas, Republic of Korea, March 25, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)
Jonathan Broder, Newsweek: Dear Barack Obama, Kim Jong Un Wants to Talk
On a cold afternoon in February, several former American officials hurried to the Hilton hotel in Berlin, a city long known for its Cold War spies and intrigue. They had traveled there for a private meeting with senior representatives from North Korea, the most reclusive government in the world. Over the next two days, the Americans gathered in one of the hotel’s modern conference rooms and listened to a surprising new proposal. Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans said, wanted to resume negotiations in hopes of ending decades of hostility between the two countries.
The timing was significant. A month earlier, the U.S. had agreed to talks to formally end the Korean War, but that effort collapsed when Washington demanded the North’s nuclear weapons program be part of the discussions. A few days later, the Hermit Kingdom, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), set off what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb at an underground site in the country’s rugged northeastern mountains. That nuclear test, the country’s fourth, left U.S. officials scrambling for new ways to deal with the threat from one of the world’s last communist regimes.
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WNU Editor: My Chinese contacts have been telling me for the past year that the U.S. and its allies in Asia would be foolish to trust North Korea .... and doubly foolish to enter into talks with them. Their advice is to leave them alone, and hope that with time they would start to reform their government and economy. What's my take .... my Chinese friends do have a point .... but if there is a chance to lessen tensions on the Korean peninsula I say take it, talking (even if nothing is accomplished) is usually a better policy than telling them to "buzz-off".
2 comments:
"would start to reform their government and economy"
The North Korean government has a tighter grip on its citizens there than in any other part of the world. North Korea is a prison. Its people have been starved into submission, and every family is kept on a short leash with the use of the totalitarian regime's "Songbun" classification system, which divides the population into numerous classifications of ranks, measuring trustworthiness and loyalty. Your rank determines how much food the government gives your family. What kind of jobs you and your children and their children will be allowed. Try to escape this prison and your family is punished. There are massive labor camps throughout the prison country. Try to escape the country and its brutal government and your whole family will be condemned to suffer for it. There is no hope for reform in North Korea. Its people cannot save themselves.
Time for Howard Zinn
“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media--none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
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