East of Asia

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

2009-05-07T16:36:00.000-07:00

Listen:

View:
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence

Excuse me while I Disapear

2008-07-29T22:30:00.000-07:00

East of Asia is on vacation until further notice, pending disabling distractions, shifting priorities involving other writing projects and/or the lack of time and energy. The author is soly responsible for its lack of content. Void where prohibited.

* * *

Be Nice to Russia in the Balkans

2008-02-29T18:11:00.000-08:00

There’s cause for human rights activists to be antsy about what’s going on in the Balkans. Not just because the Serbs are beating their ethic-cleansing breasts over the Kosovo’s recent declaration of independence. Those people are small-time thugs and NATO peacekeeping troops should know how to deal with them

The worry is Russia. The fear is that Administration officials and Washington think-tankers are going to misread the dynamic of regional politics, once again. There’s more at stake here than stability in a volatile region. Gains in human rights protections in this neighborhood have helped lower the threshold of tolerance for human rights violations globally, with ramifications in such places as Sudan and North Korea

Like it or not, Russia still views Serbia as part of its sphere of influence. It won’t let go as easily as it did in Bosnia during the 1990s, when domestic politics were in turmoil. There’s a risk of America stepping foolishly into an old fashioned proxy war with Russia over Kosovo. Just like we marched blindly into the trap of asymmetrical warfare in conquering Baghdad. Shots may not be fired in this contest, but it would mean a big setback for human rights.

An anemic Soviet Union disintegrated while watching its allies and puppet republics peel away. But it did so when it was on the brink of economic ruin. Russia has oil wealth now. Its thriving economy is integrated with the international community through trade and investment. It has a stable government even if is not the beacon of democracy hoped for by he West.

Ominously, Vladimir Putin’s brand of one-party authoritarianism has caused serious backsliding on human rights, particularly for the freedom of the press. But he enjoys widespread support among the Russian people. With stability and prosperity, Russian patriotism is on the rise. By challenging Russia head-on in Kosovo without thinking about the consequences, however, we’ll risk provoking a far more virulent kind of nationalism, that would place the agents of democracy – independent journalists, human rights advocates and political opposition leaders like former chess champion Garry Kasparov – in grave peril.

Putin has denounced Kosovo’s secession as “immoral and illegal,” and his anointed successor, Dmitry Medvedev, visited Belgrade Monday(2/25) to reiterate the Kremlin’s steadfast support for the Serbian regime. Postwar Russians were raised on the belief that the former Yugoslavia was among the vassal states in Moscow’s orbit, a little brother to protect in the national interest, an ally to help defend the Motherland. That national ethos hasn’t eroded completely.

Kosovo’s right to self-determination should be non-negotiable. But blundering in the dialog with Moscow can ratchet up the odds of resurrecting a history of hostility and nuclear gamesmanship. Putin’s pique over the US missile defense installation in Poland can’t be laughed off. Defusing the Serbian powder keg must involve cooperation and mutual respect between Washington and Moscow. We can only hope that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice knows this. She was a specialist in the Soviet Evil Empire at Stanford before entering politics and hoisting the neocon flag. One can only hope that her replacement will have the wisdom to play nicely with the New Russia.

The U.S. diplomatic mission Kosovo should concentrate on protecting the human rights of the majority ethnic Albanian population. If we can help Kosovo realize a sustainable independence in the real world and not just on parchment – one that also protects the rights of the Serb minority – we’ll have achieved a great victory for democracy. But we’re not going to get there by slapping Russia in the face.

Karl Schoenberger is a journalist and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center

Gandhi for President

2007-08-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

Bad Taste Political Analysis

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has studied the latest poll results and decided he could wait no longer. He announced through a medium that he is forming an exploratory committee that wild help him decide whether to run for President of the United States.

In a prepared statement, Gandhi emphasized that he has never equivocated in his advocacy of non-violence as a means of resolving conflicts – in stark contrast to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Bringing a swift end to the Iraq War is expected to Gandhi’s principal campaign promise.

Some political analysts question whether an Indian national is qualified to run for U.S. president. But opinions differ.

The movement to qualify California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a potential presidential candidate opens the door to other foreign-born politicians like Gandhi, said Ralph Kramden, a politican science professor at the Gleason Institute of International Studies in the Bronx.

“Gandhi is a living legend and the celebrity status thing wins elections these days,” Kramden said. “So long has he can raise the money to buy television airtime, he’s in the race. If he gets the big bucks, he can say, 'How would you like a trip to the moon, Hillary? Pow! Right in the kisser.'”

However, the failure of the would-be future president to make public appearances over the past six decades has many Washington insiders shaking their heads. Ben Kingsley, a spokesman for Gandhi’s campaign committee said it was premature to draw any conclusions about the fitness of the political maverick to endure the rigors of the campaign trail.

Is Gandhi, who will run as an independent, electable? Or will his past practices of civil disobedience, illegal salt gathering and non-cooperation in prison spoil his chances in the primary season, when a candidate's record and personal history are scoured by weasels in the media to discover skeletons in closets.

“Bapu has no skeletons to hide other than his own,” Kingsley said. "His body is wasting away, but we can't promise he won't go on a hunger strike if he feels his message is misunderstood."

The conventional wisdom is that Gandhi will not be viewed as a serious contender for the 2008 election, but will use his campaign as a bully pulpit to promote his controversial views on peace.

Gandhi is rumored to have been a member of India's radical leftist Congress Party, but has disavowed any association with Stalinism. Reports that he once paraded through the streets of New Delhi wearing only a loin cloth could not be corroborated.

#

Flash News: The Cold War Ends in Pyongyang, North Korea

2007-03-08T11:09:00.000-08:00

Lost in the banter over the recent tentative agreement with North Korea that would disarm it’s nuclear arsenal was an incredible development: the Bush Administration backed down, Pyongyang won.

This actually is not a bad outcome. If it holds, the agreement will go down in history not as an arms control deal but as the end of the Cold War.

By opening the door to possible negotiations over diplomatic normalization between the United States and North Korea, Washington made a long-overdue concession, even if it was tacit, to recognize the North Korean regime as legitimate. It’s akin to Iran saying, okay, maybe Israel does have a right to exist.

This is not just a matter of the Bush Administration wisely reversing its foolish policy of promoting regime change. Since the hostilities in the 1950-1953 Korean War ended with a shaky armistice – not a peace treaty – the United States has steadfastly refused to negotiate with the North one-on-one to resolve tensions in the powder keg Korean Peninsula. This suited Cold War strategy and gave virtual combat training to our troops on the DMZ. But the policy should have been jettisoned in 1990, when the opportunity to support South Korea’s new policy of engagement and eventual reunification came and went.

The result has been 17 years of wasted time. Cut off from its major patron in the collapsing Soviet Union, the economy tanked and famines and deprivation followed. The seeds were sown for a desperate and fatalistic course to gain international respect with nuclear weaponry.

The Clinton Administration picked up the hot potato from the myopic Bush I gang and forged a flawed but credible attempt to coax the starving and paranoid Communist state back toward reality. Then George Bush Junior and his foaming-at-the-mouth advisors stepped in and quashed the disarmament deal. Get this: they acted on dubious intelligence reports about a new uranium enrichment program. And they forced the Asian partner in the “axis of evil” into a corner, where it bared its fangs.

North Korea remains a repugnant country, a failed autarkic experiment in totalitarianism ruled by an irrational scion of dynastic political cult worship. It boasts the worst record on human rights violations in our Galaxy, bar none.

But finally, it looks like it got what it needed to start the proccess of rejoining the ranks of international society.

A Sex Study Designed to Paper over History: Abe's Dilemma

2007-03-08T09:15:00.000-08:00

Okay, Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Junior is failing the test of whether he can balance the views of right-wing monsters in his ruling party with common sense. In a jingoistic haiku of virtual holocaust denial, Abe made the audacious remark last week that the enslavement of Koran and Chinese prostitutes (“comfort women”) by the Imperial Army during the Pacific War was voluntary. The women weren’t coerced, he said. .

Predictably, the victims of Japanese war time aggression howled in protest. And justifiably so – credible and copiously documented research on the veracity of the army’s sex slave trade by foreign as well as Japanese historians proves the case.

So does the gripping testimony of many aging survivors of the rolling military brothels that followed marauding troops as they marched into China and Southeast Asia, old women who have overcome the shame of their past and risked ostracism in their communities to speak out after all these years.

Indeed, the Japanese government issued an apology in 1993 to victims of the brothels, But that went too far for the rabid nationalist fringe, which is still arguing that the United States baited Japan into World War II and Asia invited its would-be liberators.

So what does Abe do? He announces today, as a sop to critics of his brutish diplomatic blunder, that he appointed a special panel in his Liberal Democratic Party to investigate the matter. We can expect a muffled and indecisive whitewash of guilt or innocence by foxes probing the dried blood in the chicken coop, a half-baked revision of historical revisionism.

Don’t worry. Japan’s ship of state stays afloat on the superbly vague commitment to study contentious issues in a serious and forward-looking manner.

Abe will wait for the scandal to blow over and then put his finger to the domestic political winds. And in August there’s a good chance he’ll appease his power base by making an incendiary pilgrimage to Yasukuni Shrine. The old gods of imperial fascism still hold a death grip on Japan’s honesty and its credibility in international society.

The British Problem

2006-10-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

Endangering our Xenophobic Melting Pot, Threatening Subject-Verb Relationships

While we are sleeping, something terribly wrong is happening at America’s borders: Britain are coming! Britain are coming!

This happens to be the worst national security crisis facing our nation. Americans are at risk of having high-paid jobs stolen by legal as well as illegal aliens from the British Isles. British capital is the overwhelmingly dominant leader in direct foreign investment. Brits already own landmark properties here. The country ranks near the top of foreign nations snatching up our treasury securities, and it has the power to undermine our financial system.

British transplants to our soil include many illegal aliens, dozens of them and maybe more, who overstay their visas and go underground to exert insidious influence on our tolerant and defenseless society. Never mind that the rock star Sting represented himself as a legal alien. There are illegal aliens in New York, and the British crooner should know that as a former member of the Police.

These British subjects are corrupting our language and culture and even infiltrating our media. Take the so called US edition of the British news weekly “The Economist,” which hides its real intent behind a thin veneer of witty commentary. Don’t you see the Fabian socialism, bred in sadistic and sexually permissive public schools (euphemistic for elitist private schools), behind the British guise of fiscal conservatism? Their Socialist prime minister has cynically portrayed himself as hawkish Bush-kissing ally.

Just look at what’s happening to the American language. The business world is saying things like “take a decision” instead of making one. In sports casting, the broken syntax of British pidgin (a Germanic lingo with affected French words) is creeping into local vernacular.

Taking a cue from BBC announcers who report on “football matches” (sic), we are beginning to mix up our subject-verb agreements. They say “Liverpool are on a winning streak,” and “Italy are headed for the World Cup finals.” I can’t stand it. So now we’re starting to say “Detroit are the favorite in the World Series” and "Oakland aren’t playing well this season.” If we don’t keep our guard up, we’ll be putting Rs after our vowels and saying things like “the Cubs is a perennial loser.” And we’ll have to watch cricket in prime time, after suffering through programs that unleash sniffy English nannies on American families with naughty children. Wasn't Teletubbies bad enough? Uh oh . . .

People over 50 remember the British invasion of the 1960s, when girly-haired Englishmen copied American folk and blues, putting some pretty damn good US rock bands on food stamps. They unabashedly violated US intellectual property rights by reverse-engineering our native music.

Now, the potential impact on the fabric of our society is enormous when you consider the British Hoards waiting at the border. They’re ready to flood our country with white folks who will upset the fragile balance of our population’s diversity. Because they are wealthier than us, they will have more babies and skew demographics in their favor.

The risks to national security cannot be underestimated. Pretty soon, students of British descent will dominate our school systems and take the best spots in our top universities. Coddled by unofficial affirmative action programs, British women will take over our corporate board rooms, while American men hit the glass ceiling.

It’s not practical to erect a barbed wire fence across the Atlantic to hold back the armada of British interlopers. But we should alert loyal citizens to be on guard for suspicions white people with funny accents at airports and rail stations, and be on the lookout for men carrying little European purses. We need vigilantes to patrol the border with Canada, so that no subjects of the Queen of England can sneak across to our homeland.

It’s widely known that Britain had ambitions of global hegemony in the past, and has never apologized to its victims. It even abused its own British colonists on these shores. Britain are at out doorstep, and we has a duty to stop the menace now, before it is too late.

#

There You Go Again, George

2006-10-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

Pooh on You, North Korea!

Today our president, our opportunistic commander in chief, proved once again that his inflexible ideology and his unwillingness to face reality are endangering the nation's security. With wailing sirens in the background (staged by Carl Rove, perhaps, for the fear effect) he outlined a rehash of his failed strategy to contain North Korea in a news conference at the embattled White House.

Again, he flatly refused to consider direct negotiations with Pyongyang (a word he has trouble pronouncing) and showed his contempt for ground-breaking negotiates with the reclusive nation at the end of the Clinton Administration. There's no hard evidence Clinton's deal with North Korea to halt nuclear fuel development, if coupled with stringent monitoring, would not have worked in the long run and prevented Kim Jong Il from testing his first little atom bomb.

Rather, there is every indication that the president undermined that historic step in successful diplomatic engagement with North Korea simply because it gave credit to the Clinton administration. The resulting dialogue with "punyong" has been an unmitigated disaster, worsened rather than facilitated by the mamby pamby six-party talks format - constructed to mask the brainless rejection of direct talks by our macho leader and his darkly whispering neo-con advisers -dipl0matic amateurs all.

Yes, I'm beginning to sound a little like a Democratic partisan, maybe even a KCNA mouthpiece. But I speak as a loyal critic, out of loyalty to our flawed democracy's best interests in national security, not to this tragically misguided administration. It doesn't really matter whether this morass was created by a Republican or a Democratic in the White House. But this irrational brinksmanship happens to be the handiwork of an irresponsible leader, who raised the odds of South Korea's capital being incinerated by conventonal rockets, not nukes, and who may take his party down with his ill repute in November.
#

Give Japan's Abe Junior a Chance

2006-10-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

Japan’s new prime minister is planning his first foray into international diplomacy with a trip to Beijing and Seoul, presumably to mend fences with the Asian neighbors that have excoriated his predecessor for making provocative visits to the infamous Yasukuni Shrine. Abe comes into office with a reputation as a nationalist and hawk on defense, who some pundits believe will ultimately irritate, not improve, relations with South Korea and China.

Can Abe make friends in Asia without violating the sensitivities that endure among the victims of Japanese aggression in World War II?

A closer examination of Abe’s background reveals a much more complicated and nuanced picture of the man. Abe, 52, is the youngest prime minister in Japan’s nine decades of parliamentary government. As a ranking member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, he is by definition a conservative in the business boosting, right-wing and pro-military tradition that defines the party that has led the country for most of the post-World War II era.

It’s important to note, however, that Abe belongs to a new generation of Japanese leaders and he’s part of a new brand of nationalism that has taken hold in Japan in recent years. He does not hail from the rabid emperor-worshipping ultra-nationalism championed famously by the popular novelist Yukio Mishima in the 1960’s, when he committed ritual harakiri. Or more recently advocated by Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara and other veteran LDP party hacks.

Like his father, the late LDP general secretary Shintaro Abe, who was a well respected diplomat in his tenure as foreign minister, the youngish prime minister is associated with the internationalist wing of the LDP - not the hard-core gang of nationalists. He’s an English speaker, a rare trait among Japanese politicians, who studied political science at the University of Southern California.

He may share ambitions with other conservatives to revise Article 9 of the American-drafted Peace Constitution, which constrains Japan’s military to self defense and makes it difficult for Japanese troops from engaging meaningfully in international peace keeping missions. But his motives do not appear to be driven by a desire to return Japan to its pre-war glory days, with the power-projecting force that Korea and China fear. My view is that Abe and many of his political allies are riding a wave in the Japanese public that seeks greater national pride, not a back flip to Asian hegemony. The kind of nationalist goals he aims at, such as getting a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, are not unreasonable in light of Japan’s Great Power economic status as the world’s second richest nation.

If Abe wants to keep his job long enough to accomplish his political agenda for domestic reform and international prestige, however, he must appease the heavy duty nationalists among the old men in the LDP, who still wield considerable political influence in the Japanese tradition of opaque Machiavellian manipulation. So his response to the question of whether he will follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Junichi Koizumi, by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine –which symbolically worships convicted war criminals as well as the multitude of Japan’s war dead – is intentionally vague. This allows his administration to get off the ground without being undermined by detractors inside and outside Japan.

Only time will tell whether Abe can balance the trust of his party members and the Japanese public with the good will he apparently wants to build in the region. With North Korea threatening to test its first nuclear bomb and ongoing territorial disputes with China in potentially oil-rich offshore islands, the stakes are high.

An Audacious Electronics Contractor in China

2006-08-31T20:18:00.000-07:00

I was shocked to hear that an electronics contractor that makes Apple’s iPod in China has sued a Chinese financial daily for telling the truth about its alleged abuse of workers.

FoxConn, a Taiwanese outsourcing contractor that makes parts and equipment for major electronic brands, including Apple, apparently got caught with its pants down when it’s laborers were forced to work excessive overtime hours. Instead of taking corrective action, as it is obligated to do under Apple’s code of conduct, the company when to court in the city of Shenzhen in southern China and sued the China Business News for defamation, demanding $3.8 million in damages, according to Reuters.

FoxConn, a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry, is shooting itself in the foot by taking this action. As US public awareness rises about rampant labor abuse in electronic factories in China, smart contractors should be cleaning up their act to become more attractive suppliers. Their customers, giant multinationals like Apple, HP and Dell, are slowly getting serious about corporate social responsibility – and protecting their reputations as nice guys who run a clean and humane operation.

This is a human rights issue. The uncountable droves of young Chinese peasant women who pour into the Pearl River Delta are happy to get coveted jobs in the prestigious electronics industry. They don’t know any better when factory owners force them to work marathon shifts, far longer than the national labor law allows. I’ve interviewed girls who say they work up to 18 hours at a stretch on the assembly line when their factories get behind on production schedules.

It’s abusive and illegal, and any American company who doesn’t make its best efforts at rooting out this abuse in their supply chain should be taken to task. Apple reportedly took well-meaning steps to address the problem at FoxConn earlier this month, which makes it even more of an outrage that the Taiwanese contractor is trying to kill the messenger in court.

Labor abuses are widely known and reviled in textile and sports shoe sweatshops around the globe, but it’s only recently that a few courageous non-profit advocacy groups in Hong Kong and in southern China have shined a light at the situation in electronics factories. It’s long been a taboo subject to probe because of the Teflon coated reputations and economic influence of brand makers, who don’t really make much of anything themselves anymore. But the dirty little secret is that they’ve all been outsourcing their manufacturing to the lowest bidders among these contractors – some of which are based in Silicon Valley.

The human rights violation has been invisible behind the walls of the “clean rooms” in these impressively shiny, spotless factories. The girls often live two-to-bunk inside the plant compound, taking turns working 12-hour shifts while their bunkmates sleep, six and seven days a week. Once they’ve been around long enough to realize something’s terribly wrong, they find they can’t do much about it. Complaining risks the cancellation of their labor contract and sends them back to their impoverish villages. Getting together to form a committee or God forbid a labor union is impossible. Only China’s official labor union has the right to organize factory workers, and it’s an organ of the ruling Communist Party, which promotes capitalism but quashes the right to assembly to keep an iron grip on political power.

I don’t know all the details of the FoxConn case, but I know the context. I’ve talked to factory managers who make contorted arguments that the excessive overtime shifts are perfectly legal because local labor offices have given them official dispensation to waive the protections mandated in the national labor law. Their clients, the big brand makers, can in turn say that their overseas labor practices are in line with local law. Only their corporate codes of contact, which are not standardized and next to impossible to enforce, set boundaries for labor practices.
Apple should now do what’s known in business jargon as “best practices.” It should take transparent steps to resolve the problem at FoxConn. Its code of conduct compliance team should disclose the details of the case and submit a report to an organization like Business for Social Responsibility, which can used the case study to educate other companies on the right thing to do. That will help level the playing field and equitably spread the costs of safeguarding human rights in China across the electronics industry. And maybe it can make a dent in the systemic corruption that fosters abuses by the people who make the computers and other electronic tools we buy.

-30-

It’s the Quality of Life, Stupid

2006-08-30T18:04:00.000-07:00

You don’t have to be a Trotskyite or even a Socialist to notice that after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, something very strange has been going on in the U.S. economy. It’s morphing into what looks a lot more like a laissez faire than a fair shakes economy, replete with permissiveness for no-holds-barred business behavior. It’s been uprooted from the Keynesian "mixed" economy philosophy that guided decades if unprecedented prosperity after World War II, with its dastardly “liberal” regulatory checks on business excess and its populist government intervention in the free market. But we've since privatized the free market of common good in the name of efficiency.

That’s a gross over simplification of a very complex reality, of course. Shameless hyperbole. But it has some basic truth to it, and it came to mind this morning when I read the front page New York Times article about the “slight increase” last year in median household income. I imagine more than a few neoclassical economists view this as a vindication of the regressive tax cuts and other questionable economic policies that have defined our existence over the past six years. (Photo above depicts a young John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946)

But if you read past the headline and the perfectly factual first paragraph, you get to the real story about the Census Bureau’s new data. It’s totally misleading because the modest rise in household income is due to the fact that more family members in each household are entering the workforce to make ends meet. Personal income hasn’t risen at all.

Instead of supporting the myth of prosperity in a growing economy, the statistics reveal how miserable the lives of so many Americans have become in a new landscape of double working parents, lousy public schools, vanishing pensions, and crippling health care costs that are passed on directly to the backs of the lucky people who still have insurance.

Even a growing salary isn’t growing when the employee’s health insurance premiums jump and benefits decline, boosting out of pocket costs. I learned this the hard way earlier this year, when United Health Care sent a letter saying customers like me were going to enjoy “greater value” in their benefits following the company’s recent merger with Pacific Health Systems. Then I learned that our beloved pediatrician and several other doctors treating my ailments were no longer on contract. They’d refused to be paid at the significantly lower rates for their services that the combined healthcare giant offered after the merger. Tough luck.

Nobody should complain that higher gasoline prices are hurting the American quality of life, because the skyrocketing cost of fossil fuel is finally forcing thick-skulled policy makers to move in the direction of seriously thinking about alternative energy and rational mass transportation systems. Hopefully, that will result in progress, after 30 years of denying the lessons of the first two oil crises.

But the news from the Census Bureau goes to the heart of the problem festering away in our economy. There’s a deception behind the data about household income is “rising,” just as there is a deception in the claim that the U.S. economic recovery is based on greater industrial “productivity.” The middle class job force has been left out of this phony productivity-driven prosperity. Strident complaints about the damage perpetrated on white-collar workers by global outsourcing (or sending welll paying jobs overseas) may exaggerate the effects of unavoidable economic displacement, but they cannot be dismissed out of hand. Whether you love globalization or not, the American Everyman is feeling the pinch, and it’s starting to hurt badly.

There was more upbeat news from the Census Bureau: The growth in the number of people living in poverty leveled off in 2005. Only one in eight Americans now lives in poverty, defined as having an annual income under roughly $10,000 for an individual or $20,000 for a family of four. As if that’s something to be proud about for the world’s sole surviving superpower. Where did those trickle-down benefits from the Bush Administration’s supply-side economy policies go? To the astonishing rise of CEO compensation, or to the Wal-mart masses? (Poverty map above is from 2000, but the ugly picture hasn't changed much since then)

Another dry Census statistic to consider: 46.6 million Americans had no health insurance last year, or nearly 16 percent of the population. It was a small increase in terms of percentage points from 2004, but a devastating blow to the lives of those involved. The rate of uninsured grew for the fifth consecutive year, despite the opportunities for improvement one might expect from the so-called economic turnaround. I don’t know how to close this dispatch without sounding like some sort of rabid anti-American, pro-Terrorism hooligan to the electronic ears of the with-us or against-us Establishment. But it seems increasingly clear where the American quality of life is going behind the deceptively rosy economic statistics. Diminished expectations, lower income, more debt, more latchkey kids home alone because of the dearth of affordable childcare, greater rates of death and morbidity among the healthcare have-nots, so many more working hours at stagnant wages to sustain the miracle of productivity growth, and after scurrying around trying to retain the semblance of our former prosperity, no time to think about all this.

-30-

The Disturbing Message behind North Korea’s Darkly Humorous Vitriol – and the Distraction of Pussy-footing around with Iran

2006-08-28T14:03:00.000-07:00

One of the few pleasures I had when it was my rotation to work the overnight desk for the Associated Press in Tokyo in the early 1980s was monitoring North Korea’s English language news wire. It was like tuning into comedy central.

Besides singing adoration for “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung and crowing that its Juche ideology of demented autarky was guiding the nation to prosperity, Pyongyang attacked the United States daily with the shrillest over-the-top rhetoric imaginable. It was more than mere propaganda. It was hilarious. Instead of offering tea leaves to read, the Korean Central News Agency entertained with ironic phraseology that paid homage to both George Orwell and Eugene Ionesco.

Later in my career I sent countless telexes and letters to North Korean officials asking permission to visit the country and hoping to meet some of the creative authors behind the absurd verbiage. Were they GIs who defected during the Korean War, enslaved as translators and sending illicit messages of regret and ridicule and dark humor? My timing was always out of synch with the erratic cycle of chance when the reclusive regime opened up to foreign journalists. But I never stopped being a fan of Pyongyang’s perverted political poetry.

The frightening thing is that North Korea is no longer a paper tiger. It has the bomb. Several of them. You don’t have to look very far to find a security analyst who will tell you that the regime of “Peerless Leader” Kim Jong Il, the late great leader’s son, could be paranoid enough set off a little mushroom cloud in a wild moment of panic, as suicidal as that may seem. North Korea’s strategic deterrent to rational diplomacy is far more mad than the relatively benign mutual assured destruction (MAD) doctrine of the Cold War.

Let’s hear what the KCNA wire is saying today:

In the top dispatch, it characterizes the Bush Administration’s threat of escalating economic sanction (an effort to get a recalcitrant Pyongyang back into six-party talks) as a “gangster-like act of gravely infringing upon the sovereignty and dignity of its dialogue partner.” Thin skinned as ever, but you have to wonder if the White House is still relying too heavily on the stick and letting the carrots rot.

The wire service ran an article from the official state newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, blasting the US imperialists for creating “clouds of war” on the Korean Peninsula with annual joint military exercises in South Korea, and planning a “preemptive attack” on the North “worked out by the Bush bellicose forces.” This may sound a little weird, but it's nothing new. In response to the 1983 "Team Spirit" exercizes, KCNA bellowed that a ''a semiwar state'' had been declared and that ''all the units of the Korean People's Army will get ready in full combat gear to smash in time the enemy's war moves. ''

Today's utterances are hardly the soothing words of diplomacy. They can be explained partly as aimed at mobilizing the local citizenry – who are still suffering from food shortages in a botched totalitarian society and are sneaking across the Chinese border in droves. They don't believe the propaganda and many are yearning for political assylum in the South, like the gang of 136 refugees trapped yesterday in a legal bind in Bangkok on their odyssey to Seoul. But there’s also method of childish distemper to this madness, crafted for external consumption. It is the rant of a dangerously frustrated, boxed in and decaying military state that considers itself the only legitimate government on the Korean Peninsula, and a martyr to the cause of rectifying its own glorious role in history.

Still, North Korea’s hysteria doesn’t excuse the fact that foaming-at-the-mouth neo cons in the Administration conned George Bush soon after his first inauguration into thinking that brinksmanship was the only way to contain the “nucular” threat from North Korea. Bill Clinton and his pals were wimps for thinking otherwise and trying to negotiate and cajole North Korea out of its missile tests, black market weapons sales, and plutonium dreams.

I’m left with the feeling that the people who act on behalf of the US government have met their match in their battle with North Korea’s propaganda machine. They are just as frustrated as their foe, crippled by their own rigid ideology, and incapable of defusing the time bomb ticking away in one of the world’s most dangerous hot spots. Dealing with the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran is a cake walk in comparison, although chances are they’re going to blow that one too. Why are they making this avoidable mistake, and why did they preoccupy themselves with Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction in the first place, when the smoking gun is branished by the other member of the "axis of evil" in East Asia?

Yasukuni Shrine

2006-08-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

If I had this blog thing up and runing on August 15, the anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II, I would have chimed in to complain about the shallow reporting on the Prime Minister's controversial visit to Yasukuni Shrine.

The nub of my comment would have been to say the visit, paying homage to the spirits some war criminals in addition to those of fallen Imperial soldiers dating back to the year Meiji 2 (1869), was primarily about domestic politics, not international. Koizumi may be stepping down as premier, but he's young enough to want to manipulate politics from behind the scenes for years to come, in the Tanaka tradition of wire-puller. He's continuing to pander to the right wing of his party, despite the howls of protest from Beijing and Seoul, because he can't stop doing so without looking like a real lame duck. This is textbook LDP politics, shedding some light on the core of unhealthy nationalism that gives Japan's new nationalistic awakening a bad name. (Cartoon above, from the Yasukuni Shrine Web site, illustrates Japanese children learning about praying for war ghosts)

There, I've said it. Ten days too late. With the full understanding that nobody's listening. Just clearing my throat. Ahem.

Signing On

2006-08-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

Greetings, bloglings. I'm new to this form of communicating, so cut me some slack if I'm amateurish in my initial attempts.

I stopped traveling regularly around Asia a couple of years ago and am still trying to get my feet and my brain on the ground.

Image at right is me posing by the famous red mailbox I made when I was a student at Kyoto University in the late 1970s. Amazingly, in April it was still hanging next to the rice shop in Asukaicho I lived above. I try to check it every few years. Haven't seen any mail for me, but its nice to ponder my immnortality as a former "Kyo Gaijin," as lost foreingers were known in Kyoto at the time. Yes, you CAN go back.