After sending yesterday's post to my friend Dan, he replied, "As I suspected - It's quite a different story than the fear-mongering in the news [here in the US]". And that got me to thinking... Interpreting the situation in the North is just not so easy and I was worried that it could create the wrong impression. Thus, I replied again as follows today:
Hi Dan,
Yes, the media doesn’t catch the nuances. But it’s not hard to take a completely different perspective and still be right.
After all, the North Koreans did
start a war 50 years ago that killed millions of people. And many pundits believe
the US and N. Korea came perilously close to war in 1994. In the last couple
months, North Korea has tested a nuclear bomb, shot off both long- and
short-range rockets, kidnapped, tried and sentenced American journalists,
gratuitously provoked conflict by sending ships into S. Korean waters, shut
down a factory complex run by the South and a major source of foreign currency
earnings, declared that they no longer recognize the armistice from the end of
the Korean War and that they regard recent actions by the South as declarations
of war…
Even if the North doesn’t start
a war, if they get away with holding a nuclear bomb for long, the Japanese,
Koreans and Taiwanese will all go nuclear quickly and a new regional arms race
will ensue… (which is why it is thought China won’t let the North have a bomb)…
It would be a brave mainstream journalist in the US to overlook all this and say that that North’s nonsense is just a charade.
Steven
