Pen/Insular_Notes

Maybe it’s a case of stopped clocks being correct twice a day, I dunno, but every so often those fools running North Korea get things right:

…
The U.S. already in September last year allowed Israel to purchase 1,000 GPS-guided missiles, called GBU-39, to be used in bombings on Gaza Strip. These missiles arrived in Israel in early December before the start of air strikes and they were the main means of strike in the air-raid, the first stage of the current military operation.

With this patronage of the U.S., Israel tightened the blockade of Gaza Strip last year and killed armed personnel of Hamas on November 4, which forced Hamas to resume its rocket and mortar attacks on the northern area of Israel.

This led to the total destruction of the truce which had been maintained, though perfunctorily, between Hamas and Israel from June 2008. Israel, as if it had been waiting for it, made it a pretext to carry its plan of massive military attacks on Gaza Strip into practice.

Israel and the U.S. are pursuing several political and military purposes through the operation.

A general election is slated in Israel on February 10. Yet the ruling Kadima Party appears disturbed over the scandal of the Prime Minister and the support rate to it is woefully low.

The Israeli authorities seek to stave off the crisis within the party and boost its “popularity” through the military adventures at the expense of the Palestinians.

From the military point of view, they regard the operation as an important chance of recovering from its miserable setback in the 2006 Lebanese War.

The current operation may be called the second war by proxy to be provoked by the present U.S. administration in the Mid-east through Israel during its eight-year office.

The Bush administration has tried by hook or by crook to turn the Mid-east peace process into an “anti-terrorism war” for establishing an order of its exclusive sway in the region, but to no avail.

The U.S. is trying to cover up its defeat in its Mid-east policy by means of focusing the world’s attention on the “terrorism” of Hamas and beating the drum of “anti-terrorism war” more loudly.
…

Full article here.

For the wit-challenged among my readers this will no doubt be more evidence of my Kim Jong Il-loving tendencies.

Demo in Seoul, 30 December 2008.

I feel bound to warn everyone that there is a dangerously militarised country threatening Asia today.

It has a population at least 15 million less than the UK and yet supports an active army more than five times the size of Britain’s, while spending far more than the UK on conventional weapons. In fact, it has over 600,000 active troops, a reserve army of 4.5 million and conscripts every able-bodied young man not rich enough to avoid it for two years of their lives. While this country’s GDP per capita is ranked 35th in the world, it is the world’s 5th biggest buyer of arms and also the 17th largest exporter of weapons. It routinely threatens its neighbours with large-scale military exercises and has engaged in a number of military skirmishes in recent years with one of its neighbours, resulting in loss of life on both sides. Although it does not currently have nuclear weapons, this country has a record of seeking nuclear weapons in the past and is known to possess technological knowhow as well as civilian nuclear reactors that make it a potential nuclear power.

You all know which dangerous militaristic country I’m talking about don’t you?

Let’s change the world!

Being a bit slow and a bit preoccupied at the moment, I’ve only just noticed that Socialist Worker has a cool online article about the recent Korean People’s Day of Action on November 11. As the article explains, it was a day of action to highlight all three of the key issues for the Korean left at the moment - the antiwar movement, the anti-Korea- US FTA campaign and the casual workers’ movement. The demonstration in Seoul certainly looks to have been bigger than most of the other demonstrations seen there in recent years. Despite government and police attempts to ban it and stop people from travelling to the capital, at least 40,000 were there. Let’s hope this can give a bit of impetus to the Kwon Young-ghil presidential campaign.

More on the day of action in Korean here and here with lots of pictures.

I know I really shouldn’t feel this way, but sometimes there’s a sort of schadenfreude to be derived from seeing scared liberals on the run. The panic definitely seems to have set in amongst Korea’s once-radical, now soft social-liberal intellectuals (Paek Nak-chung, Ko Un, Hwang Sok-yong etc). With both rival conservative candidates (Lee Myung-bak and Lee Hoi-chang) for the presidency polling better than any of the liberal or left candidates and less than a month to go before election day on December 19, the ddong is definitely hitting the sonp’unggi. The response from a group of concerned intellectual types is to call for all the various so-called progressive candidates to merge their campaigns and find a single candidate. This is clearly unlikely to happen and if it did I think it would be a travesty, taking away the last real choice from Korean voters - the choice to vote for a really left, really different presidential candidate (I’m talking about Kwon Young-ghil of the Democratic Labour Party).

What disturbs me about the liberal call for unity is that this panic that the world is about to end and the dark days of conservatism are about to return is really devoid of politics or sensible political analysis. Worst of all it leads to very much the sort of moral blackmail that the unions and liberal commentators have used to sustain the New Labour government here in the UK through all its abominable neoliberal and pro-war follies of the last 10 years. It goes something along the lines of “we know this lot of neoliberal shysters aren’t much good, but think how much worse things would be under the Tories/GNP. So you’d better vote for the shysters you know or you’ll be sorry!”

This question really comes down to where you perceive the main political divide in Korean politics as lying. Is it, as the liberals would have us believe, between the dark authoritarian forces of conservatism (dark though they undoubtedly are) and the forces of liberalism and democratisation? Or is it between the forces of neoliberalism and the pro-US troop-dispatchers in both the conservative and liberal camps on the one hand and the anti-war crowds demonstrating to bring the troops back from Iraq, the anti-FTA protesters fighting neoliberalism and the DLP, standing for worker’s rights and egalitarian development on the other? Well I think you can probably guess where I think the real divide lies. The current liberal panic may be truly felt by many intellectuals and others who see themselves as ‘progressive’ in some sense, but at heart it is smokescreen, clouding the real issues at stake in South Korea’s polarised and neoliberalised society. Perhaps it’s also a smokescreen hiding the guilt of all those liberals who know in their hearts that the last two administrations have betrayed the hopes of many ordinary Koreans. One can only hope.

Can anybody else make any sense out of Roh Moo-hyun’s latest pronouncement on South Korea’s involvement in the Iraq disaster?

President Roh Moo-hyun said Sunday that his decision to send Korean troops to Iraq was a historical error, even though he didn’t want to history to record him as a leader who made mistakes.

Answers on a postcard, or preferably the comments box.

A wind is blowing through South Korea’s electoral politics, and this time it’s not coming from the north. In what is actually something of an unexpected turn of events for me, it seems that Roh Moo-hyun’s decision to keep a contingent of Korean troops twiddling their thumbs in northern Iraq (or Kurdistan if you prefer) for another year (something he apparently promised Bush around the time of their well-publicised tiff at the ASEAN meeting) is set to have a major effect on the upcoming presidential elections. According to Hankyoreh, the UNDP - the rather shaky looking phoenix that has risen from the ashes of the old Uri Party - has come out against the extension of the troop deployment, meaning that it could be defeated in a parliamentary vote as long as they can grab a few allies. Even more interestingly, both the presidential candidate for the liberal camp, Chung Dong-young and the conservative Grand National Party are so far not saying whether they are for or against the extension. This reflects the basic fact that 80% of the population are against keeping the troops in Iraq and Roh himself had earlier promised that they would be brought home by the end of this year.

So there is now the strange situation where what is effectively the ‘ruling party’ is trying to steal a bit of popular leftwing ground (that would otherwise be left to the Democratic Labour Party alone) while the ruling party’s presidential candidate is reluctant to follow suit, perhaps because he wants to hedge his bets for a bit longer. The prospect that the election could become partially a referendum on Roh’s slavish obedience to Bush over the Iraq war (albeit justified in terms of ‘national interest’) is certainly a promising one, although how it would play for the real left (the DLP) as opposed to the opportunists of the UNDP is unclear. Opposition to troop deployment is one of the DLP’s two main planks, along with opposition to neoliberalism, so another nominally antiwar candidate could perhaps undercut their support.

I seem to have been on one of my unplanned blogging holidays for the last month. Actually I’m in Korea now trying to accustom myself to the humidity, but enjoying the heat after the miserable British summer weather this year.

While I’ve been busy with other things, my new pals at No Ordinary Sun have been keeping the flag flying with a brief report on this year’s Marxism conference and some excellent recent articles in Socialist Worker on East Asian matters - one on Abe’s recent crushing defeat in the Japanese upper house elections and another by activists from Ta Hamkke on the Korean hostages kidnapped in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, on the labour front, Jamie at Two Koreas and Judy at Otherwise have been providing some good coverage of the E-Land/New Core disputes involving casualised (women) workers. The second major occupation of a supermarket owned by E-Land was broken up by riot police a couple of days ago and apparently along with unionists a large number of Ta Hamkke members were also arrested. Fortunately, they have been released this morning. There’s more on the dispute here in English.

Over at Frog in a Well Korea Jonathan Dresner has brought up George Bush’s recent analogy between the US involvement in present-day Iraq and the country’s historical involvement in Korea. This seems to have become quite a hot internet topic already and has been dealt with by Juan Cole at his blog and by Robert Koehler of Marmot’s Hole fame as well as Fred Kaplan at Slate. Here’s the comment I left at Juan Cole’s blog:

I think what Bush is saying is that in their fantasies he and Cheney would very much like Iraq to turn out like the South Korea of the, say, 1960s and 1970s. That is, ruled by a dictatorial military strongman; politically and economically subordinate to the US (and Japan maybe); and with a number of massive, strategically important US bases protecting US interests in the area and projecting power toward the big enemies (Russia/China). But of course fantasies are only fantasies.

(By the way, I’d advise against reading the comments at the Marmot’s Hole post on this - it’s like an asylum for professional wingnuts).

I wonder whether far right Tokyo governor and professional crow-hater Shintaro Ishihara may fall foul of the UK’s new law against ‘glorifying terrorism’ on his next visit to London? It seems he has written and produced a new film - titled ‘For Those We Love’ - on the kamikaze pilots of WWII, that is rather keen to show them in a good light as patriotic heroes (thus helping to overcome Japan’s terrible tendency toward masochistic history^tm). As the Hankyoreh notes:

…the film’s political message is simultaneously suggestive and clear, with lines like “We shall meet in death at Yasukuni Shrine,” or “We were right to start a war to liberate Asia from the whites.”

The Guardian’s arts blog has something to say about it too, and points out that:

Hearteningly, For Those We Love seems to have had the opposite effect: despite a strong opening weekend, in which it trailed only Spider-Man 3 and Kitaro, a local kiddie fantasy, it has not only provoked disquiet among both younger audience members and those who lived through the Japanese defeat, but has also drawn uncomfortable parallels between its heroes and the similarly unquestioning, ideology-driven suicide bombers of today.

Somehow, I have a feeling it’s not going to be winning any prizes at Cannes.

UPDATE: An illustrated version of Kim Do-hyeong’s Hankyoreh article is up at the Japan Focus site.