Avoiding War with Pyongyang

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As I suggest in my introduction, this is an increasingly dystopian moment in America, which makes it the perfect moment to remind TD readers that, for a contribution of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy of John Feffer’s riveting dystopian novel, Splinterlands. (Check out our donation page for the details.) And for just a few bucks, you can get an unsigned but no less riveting copy of that book, which Barbara Ehrenreich -- in a comment that has only become more apt by the week -- called “a startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality today.” Tom]
If you happen to be a dystopian novelist, as TomDispatch regular John Feffer is, then you’re in business these days.  Back in 2015, when Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency was just heating up and Feffer was writing Splinterlands, his vivid look back from the year 2050 at our shattered planet, he named the massive storm that would devastate Washington in 2022 “Hurricane Donald” -- and you can’t be more predictively on the mark or dystopian than that.  Now, in August 2017, armed bands of neo-Nazis and white supremacists are in our streets and we have a president whose deepest desire seems to be to support them (because they support him).  Meanwhile, the generals from our losing wars are manning the ramparts of an embattled administration (and being treated by the mainstream media as the “adults in the room”) and an unpredictable man-child is in the White House. In other words, the material is clearly going to be there for Feffer -- in his ordinary life a thoughtful columnist at Foreign Policy in Focus -- to devote the rest of his time to dystopian fiction.
And that’s without even mentioning America’s dystopian Asian wars of the past, present, and possibly future. They undoubtedly deserve their own grim set of novels, starting with the bloody and brutal American conquest of the Philippines.  Included would also have to be the Pacific War against Japan that ended when a new weapon of unimaginable power obliterated two Japanese cities and significant parts of their populations, leaving humanity to face the possibility of its own future obliteration (and you can’t get more dystopian than that); the Vietnam War that left millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians (and 58,000 Americans) dead; a quarter century of Afghan Wars (the second of them now the longest in American history); and last but hardly least, the Korean War, which began in June 1950 and halted in 1953, after millions of Koreans (and 36,000 Americans) had died.  By the estimate of the then-head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, 20% of the North’s population died in those years under a rain of 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm (more than was used against the Japanese in World War II), while the North was burned to a crisp without atomic weapons.
In a strange sense, that conflict became America’s first permanent war since no peace treaty was ever agreed to -- though all American wars now seem to be permanent.  Of course, with Donald Trump’s recent impromptu comment that North Korean threats “will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before,” an obvious nuclear reference made on the eve of the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, a future Korean inferno is once again on many minds here and elsewhere, John Feffer’s included. And yet he suggests that, if only American officialdom could rid itself of its own dystopian turn of mind when it comes to North Korea, there might be a perfectly peaceable and reasonable way forward. If only indeed... Tom

Trump and the Geopolitics of Crazy
The Times They Are A-Changin’ in North Korea
By John Feffer

Read on at Tomdispatch 

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Interessanter Vergleich mit dem ARD Presseclub zum gleichen Thema!
 

North Korea and war

A Murderous History of Korea

Bruce Cumings

More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population:

Read on at the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Nukes and the Global Schism

Nukes and the Global Schism
Robert Koehler, Counterpunch, July 14, 2017

The United States boycotted the U.N. negotiations to ban — everywhere across Planet Earth — nuclear weapons. So did eight other countries. Guess which ones?

The international debate over this historic treaty, which became reality a week ago by a margin of 122 to 1, revealed how deeply split the nations of the world are — not by borders or language or religion or political ideology or control of wealth, but by possession of nuclear weapons and the accompanying belief in their absolute necessity for national security, despite the absolute insecurity they inflict on the whole planet.