To the U.S., steps toward denuclearization have been the starting and ending point for negotiations with North Korea. But for the North Koreans, it has always been about trying to secure a guarantee to merely exist.
Ju-Hyun Park grew up in Northern California. In his early childhood, he remembers, people asked, “Where are you from?” That question later shifted to “North or South Korea?”
The war hawks are wrong when they say that past negotiations, like the 1994 Agreed Framework, didn’t make a difference. August 2017 was a reminder of the scariest, and riskiest, days of the Cold War. All month long, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a bitter war of words that escalated into tit-for-tat displays of military might and ended with mutual threats of mass destruction.
As a former chief of staff under South Korea’s previous liberal president, Roh Moo-hyun, Moon is expected to consider goodwill measures towards the North, including the reopening of the jointly run Kaesong industrial park and the resumption of aid. Moon has also pledged to rein in the power of the chaebol – once-revered companies that are now seen as a symbol of the country’s domestic ills of corruption and inequality.
The Korean War was central to the militarization of our society and to the creation a national security state. It was an essential element in fostering racism, sexism and in the cutting of social programs - creating growing inequality. Today, the threat of a cataclysmic war between Washington and North Korea cannot be discounted. It is vital for the US public to know that North Korea has been asking for a peace treaty with Washington and Seoul for sixty-four years.
For the sixth straight weekend, hundreds of thousands of Koreans came out in Seoul (and with other Korean cities estimates approaching 2 million people on the streets) to demand the resignation of President Park Geun-hye. The below essays were written just after the fourth demonstration weekend.
South Korea's unions, once one of the best organized segments of the global labor movement, have suffered setbacks since the late 1990s, when the government made it easier for employers to lay off workers and hire casuals. Fewer than one in 10 workers is now unionized, the country’s lowest level ever. South Korea’s government and business leaders want to put Han away because he represents a pivotal segment of what is left of labor militancy.
Reader Comments: Can Women End Korean War?; Countess vs. Communist-Battle to Become Madrid's Mayor; How the United States Strangled Puerto Rico; Obama's Human and Moral Challenge: Oscar López Rivera; The Press and Bernie Sanders; The Female Mathematician Who Changed the Course of Physics;
Appeal by Dr. Kristin Neuhaus, successor to Dr. George Tiller; Cross Borders Concert at the Gaza Strip border;
Today in History - Tiananmen Square Massacre; Angela Davis Acquitted
Rail strike raises the issue of privatization, paves way for general strike in on February 25.
An almost unreported strike in South Korea, which has just come to an end, epitomises how a `free' market can be incompatible with the liberty of workers to defend their own security.
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