You might think that the South Korean people would see the US as a friend and ally and perhaps be thankful for its help in the Korean War and for the billions of dollars in economic and military aid it has received since. Nope, nothing like it. Jonathan Last in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Americans generally think well of South Korea. The feeling is not mutual. A 2003 Pew survey found that 50 percent of South Koreans (and 71 percent of those age 18 to 29) have an unfavorable view of the United States. This isn’t anti-Bushism: 72 percent of those who disliked America said their hostility was toward the country in general, not just the president. The same survey found that half of South Koreans were “disappointed that the Iraqi military put up so little resistance in the war against the United States.” A 2002 poll found that, by a margin of 3-1, South Koreans opposed even the idea of the war on terror. Some allies.

South Korea has a long history of anti-Americanism. In 1982, for instance, South Korean students set fire to the American Cultural Center in Pusan. At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the undercurrent of anti-Americanism was so strong that then-president Roh Tae Woo held a special meeting of his cabinet to try to figure out how to soothe public opinion. As one student radical explained to the Associated Press in 1989, “the United States and its proxy ruling force… are primarily responsible for all our country’s problems and divisions.”

[..]

The United States was a big issue in South Korea’s last presidential election in 2002, with the most anti-American candidate, Roh Moo Hyun, winning.

President Roh has been less than true blue. He believes that North Korea must be appeased. He and his predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, encouraged their countrymen to forget about the North’s frequent acts of provocation and extensive network of gulags. Instead, they taught South Koreans to view the North as a slow, underprivileged little brother – more of a burden than an enemy. That view has taken deep hold in the South Korean psyche: In 2004, 39 percent of South Koreans said that America was the biggest threat to their national security, while only 33 percent said North Korea was.

Just in case you keep track of these things, 54,246 American soldiers gave their lives to save the South during the Korean War. Between 1945 and 2001, the United States gave South Korea $15 billion in economic and military aid. The annual cost of maintaining our 30,000 troops on the Korean peninsula is about $3 billion. Which is a pretty hefty subsidy to be giving the world’s 11th-largest economy.

Last says he has an “escape fantasy” about the US military leaving South Korea. Actually this is not such a far fetched idea at all. Both Washington and Seoul are keen to move in this direction and over the next five or so years the US military presence, more a relic of the Cold War than a deterrant to North Korea or China, will be greatly reduced on the Korean peninsula. This will happen gradually as the South Korean military is restructured to reflect the realigned defence relationship, which currently hinges on the fact that the US has wartime operational control of the South Korean military (the Combined Forces Command). In a recent agreement the time frame for the transferral has been set as between October 2009 and March 2012 (a 30 month period).

Part 1 of the weekly round up has more North Korea lovin’ than you can poke a nuke at. Part 2 and the rest in the (Australian) morning.

So point your missiles in the air and launch ‘em like you just don’t care!

Jonah Goldberg in the National Review: Multilateralism Falls Short: Exceptions and reality.

Kim Jong Il would seem unrealistic even as a comic-book villain. In a world full of strange and exotic cultures, North Korea’s neo-Stalinist experiment ranks as otherworldly. Try to imagine what a North Korea exhibit at Epcot Center would display: emaciated, out-of-work actors (no shortage there) eating fake tree bark while guarding a giant concentration camp where prisoners are forced to worship a guy who should be wearing a tinfoil hat at the local library. Don’t forget to try the sawdust kimchi!

Proof that North Korea is a hard case can be found in the fact that the Democrats and Republicans have switched sides. Ordinarily multilateralist Democrats are now unalloyed champions of unilateralism, in the form of face-to-face negotiations with North Korea, while President Bush – that infamous go-it-alone “cowboy” – has embraced international teamwork. Both approaches are flawed for a simple reason: North Korea wants a nuclear weapon because it wants a nuclear weapon.

William F. Buckley on RealClearPolitics.com (Universal Press Syndicate): Diplomacy Hits Kim

We have been told for many years that Kim is obsessively vain. But I had not remembered the document of September 1997 from the official government news agency. Reproduced here are the last few sentences of the paean, which serve our purposes. The official document concluded:

“The General is the mental pillar and the eternal sun to the Korean people. As they are in harmonious whole with him, they are enjoying a true life based on pure conscience and obligation. They are upholding him as their great father and teacher, united around him in ideology, morality and obligation. So their life is a true, fruitful and precious life without an equal in history.”

In North Korea such tributes as these substitute for food, which does not exist, at least not enough to feed the country’s 21 million people, 10 percent of whom died of starvation in Kim’s first half decade in power.
..

The proposed sanctions could hypothetically immobilize Kim. You can reduce the need for food by depriving incremental millions of it, but a million-man army needs fuel. Unfortunately, there isn’t any way to seal the border to the north, sufficiently to block extra fuel from passing through the long frontier North Korea shares with China. China has a special consideration here. The pressure of masses of North Koreans who want food and stability creates a huge problem, so much so that the Chinese worry more about instability in the Korean peninsula than about nuclear bombs dispatched from Pyongyang.

The diplomatic ideal, where China is concerned, is to mount sufficient pressure to influence Kim’s behavior, but not so much as to threaten his hegemony. The final formulation of Beijing’s collaboration will be critical, and the challenge in Washington is to egg it on to ensure that Dear Leader will recognize that he has gone one step too far.

Trudy Rubin in the Philladelphia Enquirer: Worldview | Why talks with N. Korea eventually must resume

North Korea’s apparent test of a nuclear weapon has provoked another debate over whether it’s worth negotiating with rogue states.

I believe this is not the moment for a U.S. dialogue with Pyongyang. This dangerous regime, with its track record of illegal weapons sales, must be disabused of any idea that it can get a free pass to the nuclear club. Strong U.N. economic sanctions are crucial, backed by a united front of U.S. and Asian powers. Also crucial is President Bush’s warning that North Korea will be held accountable if it passes nuclear materiel to other states or groups.

But then what? I’ve talked to no one – dove, hawk or owl – who believes sanctions alone will force Kim Jong Il to give up his arsenal. Nor does anyone believe military force is a viable option (provided Kim doesn’t sell his plutonium to al-Qaeda or Iran).

Unless sanctions are crafted to prod North Korea back to the table, it’s hard to see any chance of curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear program. But can talks with North Korea work?

Melanie Kirkpatrick with an idea that I’d love to hear more about, in the Wall Street Journal: “Let Them Go: China should open its border to North Korean refugees.”

The Border Police document, dated Jan. 10, 2005, begins blandly enough: “From the start of illegal border crossings in 1983,” it says, “the number of illegal immigrants from North Korea that have stayed in China has increased every year.” It adds, “Public Security and Armed Police departments have strengthened preventative and deportation efforts.”

The numbers it reports are newsworthy–and staggering: “To date, almost 400,000 North Korean illegal immigrants have entered China and large numbers continue to cross the border illegally.” And, “As of the end of December 2004, 133,009 North Korean illegal immigrants have been deported.” While Chinese authorities obviously know how many refugees they have deported, by definition they can’t know how many are in hiding. The estimate of 400,000 is sure to be low.

The Yanbian Finance Bureau document, dated Oct. 19, 2004, provides further evidence of the extent of the crisis. It is a letter to provincial authorities requesting more money to help with deportation efforts. “According to statistics from the Public Security, border police and civil administration, more than 93,000 refugees are still living in Yanbian Prefecture.” The letter goes on to say that although the Border Police Bureau has established “six new refugee-deportation and detention centers,” it does not have sufficient funds to do the job. Yanbian requests 30 million yuan ($3.8 million) a year “to solve this financial problem.”

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If Beijing wants to send a message to Pyongyang about its nuclear program, it could announce that, effective immediately, it is taking several steps: It will stop deporting North Koreans, allow the United Nations to set up refugee camps, and permit the resettlement of refugees in third countries, from which they could go to South Korea, whose constitution codifies its moral responsibility to accept its Northern cousins, or to other countries willing to take them in. The U.S., which so far has accepted a mere eight North Koreans, could step up to the plate here.

The Border Police document notes that since the early 1980s there have been six instances of mass migrations that have coincided with North Korea’s famines. Now, winter is coming, and there are already reports of food shortages. Allowing the world to help the North Korean refugees in China would help Beijing deal with a problem that is likely to get worse.

Thomas Lifson on RealClearPolitics.com (The American Thinker): “The Desperate Dictator: Kim Jong-Il”

Any dictator who can allow a million or two of his 20 million countrymen to die of starvation, rather than open up his country to allow the adequate provision of proffered aid, must be pretty well invulnerable. Death by starvation is visible, prolonged, painful, and heart-wrenching for the survivors. Anyone dominant enough to compel mass acceptance of starvation must have an iron grip on the reins of power.

Or so one might assume.

Thus most foreign observers consider Kim Jong-il to be acting to achieve foreign policy goals of some sort by provocatively launching missiles and detonating nuclear devices. Perhaps he is demonstrating to terrorist state customers that he has salable goods? Or perhaps he is seeking unilateral talks with the United States? Or perhaps he is just aid-seeking or even anticipating another deal like he got with Bill Clinton, in which the United States will supply billions of dollars in aid in return for promises he doesn’t intend to honor.

But an alternative theory of power in North Korea suggests that Kim is in fact desperate, and is acting to quiet a threatened rebellion by the only group which matters when it comes to domestic power: the North Korean military.

David Warren, in the Ottawa Citizen: Desolations

When I filed this, the United States was still trying to get a limp resolution through the United Nations, condemning North Korea for its claim to have tested a nuclear device, in defiance of all its international agreements. The Americans wanted something like “the full chapter seven” — which would not merely impose, but enforce a general embargo on all shipments of military equipment to the rogue state, and could lead to a naval blockade to isolate it. Instead, to please not only its enemies such as China, but its nominal allies such as France, the U.S. has watered its resolution down to “Article 41″ measures, such as making empty diplomatic gestures, and banning air travel. The pressure was continuing, to water the U.S. resoluton down some more.

The matter is unimportant at one practical level. For even if the psychopaths in Pyongyang cried uncle, they would only have to hide their nuclear programme a little more effectively, in return for the receipt of the generous aid package they negotiated a year ago. There being no commitment even from the U.S. to remove the rogue regime.

Charles Krauthammer on RealClearPolitics.com (the Washington Times) : What Will Stop North Korea

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

– President John F. Kennedy, Oct. 22, 1962

WASHINGTON — Now that’s deterrence.

Kennedy was pledging that if any nuke was launched from Cuba, the United States would not even bother with Cuba but go directly to the source and bring the apocalypse to Russia with a massive nuclear attack.

The remarkable thing about this kind of threat is that in 1962 it was very credible. Indeed, its credibility kept the peace throughout a half-century of Cold War.

Deterrence is what you do when there is no way to disarm your enemy. You cannot deprive him of his weapons, but you can keep him from using them. We long ago reached that stage with North Korea.

Richard Halloran on RealClearPolitics gives a run-down of the four options currently open in dealing with North Korea, and the limitations of each: “No-Win Reactions to N. Korea’s Actions”

The detonation of what North Korea claimed was a nuclear device last week should not have been a surprise as it has been evident for many months that the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, had no intention of giving up his nuclear ambitions.

The New York Times reported that the explosion had given the Bush Administration and much of Washington a “strategic jolt.” But that was because official Washington hasn’t been paying attention, consumed as it has been with Iraq, the Middle East, and the coming elections.

The critical question now is what the U.S. and its allies should do next. None of the options is promising: Negotiations, Sanctions, Military Force, Do Nothing

Jon B. Wolfsthal in Pittsburg Live: “Avoiding Armageddon”

After pursuing atomic weaponry for the better part of a generation, it now appears that North Korea has finally clawed its way into the “Nuclear Club.” And that means that the global strategic game has changed forever.

North Korea, which was barely tolerable to the major Asian powers back when it was merely a potential troublemaker, is now a real and present danger. The time for negotiations is over. Now it’s about containment and deterrence.

Todd Crowell on RealClearPolitics.com: “A Deadly Kind of Fizzle”

It is probably unwise to taunt a man who commands a million-man army. It is also probably unseemly to make light of the man’s ballistic and nuclear weapons, even if they don’t work.

Right now people around the world are running around in circles, pulling their hair and wringing their hands over North Korea’s underground atomic bomb test, when it ought to be the subject of late-night television comedians.

In the old days opposing armies faced each other in an open field before the battle , war paint on their faces, feathers in their helmets, rattling their shields and making rude comments about their opponents’ manhood.

Today global leaders rattle their ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons rather than spears and battle axes, but it is still a macho world. And in macho terms, Kim Jong-il is a man who literally can’t get it up.

A whole new world of ‘fucked up’ perpetrated by the sickness that is the North Korean regime:

The latest description of Kim Jong-il’s policy of state eugenics came from a North Korean doctor, Ri Kwang-chol, who escaped last year and told a forum in Seoul that babies with deformities were killed soon after birth.

“There are no people with physical defects in North Korea,” Dr Ri said. Such babies were put to death by medical staff and buried quickly, he claimed.
[..]

“I defied the order to abort the fetus the prison authorities contemptuously called a ‘Chinese Chink’ and was badly beaten and kicked in my belly by a guard. His name was Hwang Myong-dong,” she said.

One week later, said Ms Han, she was led to a prison clinic “where in a most blunt manner they extracted the dead child from my body”.
[..]

Choi Yong-hwa, 28, described how she was made to accompany a heavily pregnant woman, who had also been returned across the bridge from China, to a clinic where doctors induced labour.

After the infant was born, Ms Choi said she and other women stood by in disbelief as it was suffocated with a wet towel. The mother passed out.

A 66-year-old grandmother also testified to witnessing the deaths of babies at Sinuiju, two of them healthy boys born at full term. The first belonged to a 28-year-old woman called Lim.

The witness was holding the newborn in a blanket when a guard grabbed him by a leg and threw him into a large box lined with plastic.

A total of seven babies – five born prematurely after labour was induced – were left to die in the box. Two days later the premature babies were dead.

The two full-term boys were still blinking, although their lips had turned blue.

A guard battered them to death with forceps, the witness said. At the Nongpo centre in Chongjin, witnesses saw the “children of betrayers” tossed into a wicker basket, covered in plastic sheeting and left to die.

One woman watched the killing of seven babies, taken from their mothers and left face-down on the ground within their view. After two days the guards smothered any that were still alive. “Guards would say the mothers had to see and hear their babies die because they were Chinese,” the report said.

..

“It’s vital to recognise that juche – the dogma of self-reliance – is not a theory but a cult and that Kim is worshipped as the leader of a religion,” said a veteran Western diplomat who negotiated with the North Koreans on 19 visits.

“These Koreans genuinely believe they are a master race and that the peninsula will be united under the rule of the Kim dynasty.”

Behind the facade of a Supreme People’s Assembly, a presidium, a cabinet and the Korean Workers party, North Korea operates as a one-man military dictatorship founded on clan rule, blood ties and deification of the leader. Kim is falsely said to have been born on the sacred slopes of Mount Paektu.

Guess this country.

It’s army, under the command of the ruling regime, is engaging in a campaign of genocide against racial and religious minorities, often beheading, raping and torturing its victims, but it is not the Sudan.

Children as young as 12 are being forcefully recruited into this army, but this is not the Taliban in Afghanistan or “Saddam’s Lion Cubs” in Hussein’s Iraq.

The military regime is busily building bunkers in a strongpoint defence matrix, allegedly in anticipation of a US attack, but it is not Iran.

This country is removing any crosses or other Christian symbols from public spaces, bit it is not Algeria.

This country has the world’s largest narcotics-trafficking militia operating on its territory, but it is not Columbia.

This country has a health crisis worse than the poorest areas of Africa, with more children dying before age 5 in some areas, than the Congo, but it is not Afghanistan.

This country has recently agreed to allow Russia to share in exploitation of its oil fields, in exchange for weapons shipments, but it is not Venezuela.

This country, while shunned by the West, counts China as its main political and economic ally, but it is not North Korea.

While the world’s attention is focused on several noisy ideologically and religiously driven nutjob regimes, one old backyard hussler is slowly but surely losing touch with reality, seemingly by way of good old fashioned drug-induced psychosis. That twitchy little battler is Burma.

“The side road the soldiers have blocked off is 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of the city of Pyinmana in the central Burmese plains. The jungle stretches for more than 400 kilometers (249 miles), like some vast, green carpet, toward a line of jagged peaks on the distant horizon marking the Golden Triangle bordering Laos and Thailand. The only destination worth seeing in this rural stretch of Burma is its tropical rainforest research institute.

But Burma’s ruling generals recently declared the region a restricted military zone, making the trip to the institute off-limits to outsiders. The Junta is having its new capital built somewhere at the end of this 20-foot-wide highway. The central government’s officials were already required to move there last November.

..

Burma’s leadership apparently plans to barricade itself into its remote new capital, from which it expects to control the country in the future. The nearest major city, Mandalay, is a 250-kilometer (155-mile) journey away on a deeply potholed road, and the trip to Rangoon takes about eight hours. Naypyidaw, or “Royal Country,” is the name Than Shwe, the junta’s 73-year-old leader, has personally selected for his government’s secretive new headquarters. According to official instructions to be followed in the event of a foreign attack, “Naypyidaw is our war bunker, where we will wait, during an American attack, until the Chinese hurry to our aid.”

Sounds like a brilliant plan. Although, considering the pace of events in Iraq and throwing in some generous estimates for the actions against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Trans-dnestr my estimated date of invasion is somewhere around hmmm.. how does 2090 sound? By which date you won’t need to wait long for China to help, because you’ll be a part of it.

So what the hell is going here? Well, I did mention drug-induced psychosis, didn’t I?

“Beheadings by troops are common. So too are beatings, the use of forced labour and rape. Growing use of amphetamines among Burma’s 400,000-strong army is fuelling this violence.

A narcotics expert from the Australian National University who is based in Thailand, David Matheson, said researchers had concluded that many troops went into battle high on amphetamines. “When they come across dead Burmese soldiers, they find methamphetamine tablets on most of them if not all of them, particularly in the Shan state.”

The brutality of the attacks is evident in video footage, taken by members of the evangelical Christian missionary group the Free Burma Rangers, of the burning of villages. The video shows young men, armed with AK-47 rifles, setting fire to bamboo homes as residents flee in terror.”

Lets put two and 400,000 together here. “Most if not all” of the military is marching to the rhythm of an ICE binge, and its leadership is barricading itself away from the world in the middle of the jungle, declaring their new place of residence “Royal County”. Add the delusion and paranoia up with the erratic acts of violence, and this is obviously one hell of a tweak out. And it is sure to be followed by one hell of a come down, yet oddly enough “Royal County” just doesn’t sound like a rehab centre to me.

But I propose a solution. Send in the bicycles. That should keep them busy for at least a couple of decades. Heck, maybe after that we can arrange for them to sort through the world’s garbage for recycling, and get on top of that global warming biznit too. Hey, its far more likely to have an effect than another UN Resolution.

Over at Claudia Rosett’s blog, where she points out the lunacy of Kofi Annan’s announcement that Ahmadinejad has “reaffirmed” Resolution 1701, in light of Hezbollah being Iran’s proxy army and all, a commenter asked:

The sooner Annan’s out, the better. So, who are the candidates to replace him? Who do you predict will eventually take his place?

Good question and one to which Greg Sheridan believes he may have an answer. It will certainly be a relief to see Annan go. But what are the prospects for any improvement?

The Secretary-General’s term ends at the end of this year. It is normally rotated between the major regions of the world in turn. This time it is Asia’s turn. Convention has it that it can’t be someone from a country which is a permanent member of the Security Council, so that rules out China.

And probably China would effectively veto a Japanese. The leading Indian candidate, Deputy Secretary General, Shashi Tharoor, suffers, like Kofi Annan himself, from being an absolute UN insider. [TOD: recent interview with Shashi Tharoor here]

The best Asian candidate is the South Korean foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, who visited Australia last week. I had a discussion with him and found him to be formidably smart and on the ball.

[..]

While a charming diplomat in his own right, Ban would not have Kofi Annan’s charisma. That is a huge plus. He is organisationally hard-headed in the Korean way. That is a huge plus. He is not instinctively anti-American and would be much less likely than Annan has been to drift off into third world banalities.

That is also a huge plus.

Alexander Downer thinks Ban the most formidable of the Asians so far in the mix. Downer should back his Korean counterpart.

Ban certainly gets my vote.

The Australian position should be simple: Ban’s the Man.

Here’s hoping. South Korea recently announced that it will not run for a nonpermanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, so that Ban Ki-moon can run for the Secretary-General post.

There are however other candidates. One apparent hopeful is the deputy prime minister of Thailand Surakiat Sathianthai, who claims his candidacy is backed by 10 countries in SE Asia.
Former U.N. disarmament chief Jayantha Dhanapala from Sri Lanka is another possibility, according to a Security Council straw poll in July.

Time magazine has been engaging in some speculation of their own:

“Other possible candidates are former Malaysian Deputy PM Anwar Ibrahim and two contenders to be the first female secretary-general: Singapore Ambassador to Washington Chan Heng Chee – said to be a US favourite – and New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark”

Anwar Ibrahim or Helen Clark would be a bigger disaster than Annan. Fortunately neither is a real contender. Also fortunately Chan Heng Chee and Ban Ki-moon are.

UPDATE: We have a new contender! (hat tip EU Referendum)

It seems that barely anyone noticed the tragedy that unfolded in North Korea in July, when three major storms hit the country, while the regime was busy playing missile tetris.

In one estimate, Good Friends, a Seoul-based relief agency, announced on Wednesday that more than 54,700 North Koreans were dead or missing and 2.4 million people – a tenth of the North’s population – homeless as a result of the floods.

Good Friends also said 231 bridges were washed out and that the province of Hwanghaedo, the largest grain-producing area in the country, was among the hardest hit.

(Note: The above estimates have since been disputed, but it is too early to tell if the new estimates are simply “official” North Korean propaganda)

What is more frightening still is that the suffering could be only just beginning for the North Koreans. In true Communist Fascion, the North Korean regime is taking a natural disaster and running with it, seemingly doing their best to make sure it is followed by a man made one.

But it is difficult to get reliable information. An information blackout, imposed by the North Korean regime to stave off potential unrest and coupled with the country’s deepening isolation after missile tests last month, is spawning a major humanitarian crisis, said relief officials in Seoul.

..

North Korea was reconsidering the World Food Program’s offer for emergency aid, which it had earlier rejected, Bourke said. Besides its regular aid operations in the North, the program has 3,800 tons of food it can immediately release.

How kind of them to reconsider.

Here’s what happened the last time floods destroyed the already inadequate food supply in North Korea:

Famine in North Korea during the 1990s, brought about by years of floods, drought and mismanaged farm policy, killed at least 1 million people. The WFP said some studies indicated as many as 2.5 million, some 10 percent of the population, perished.

“In the mid-1990s, up to three million North Koreans died in silence, as if nothing had happened to them,” said Reverend Pomnyun, a Buddhist monk who heads Good Friends.

Even in a good year, North Korea falls about 1 million tonnes short of the food it needs to feed its people. South Korea provided 500,000 tonnes of rice last year.

However following North Korea’s missile tests, a United Nations Security Council resolution was passed that called for sanctions on the North and South Korea suspended a planned supply of another 500,000 tonnes of rice.

Thankfully it appears they have now accepted the foreign aid offer from WFP.

To throw some light on the bizarrely inhumane behaviour of the regime, here’s Bill Reeside Jr. explaining why North Korea is a 20 million member cult, in The Observer:

• Every adult, from the poorest farmer to the top military brass and the biggest bureaucrat, is required to wear a lapel pin featuring a picture of the elder or younger Kim.

  When I asked a South Korean co-worker how I could procure one of these pins as a souvenir, it was made very clear that they were not available to outsiders and that any North Koreans who gave up their pin would be severely punished.

• Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994, is installed by the constitution as the “Eternal President.” He is referred to as the “Great Leader,” while his son is known as the “Dear Leader.” After Kim Il Sung’s death, the country’s calendar was changed so that Year One corresponded to the year of his birth.
• North Korea is famous for resisting outside penetration. The national philosophy is juche (joo-cheh) or “spirit of self reliance.” Although the country has suffered mightily from droughts, floods and the loss of its Soviet patron, the leadership routinely refuses outside aid or puts such stringent restrictions on travel within the country that aid organizations give up on helping the starving.

  Most studies, understandably sketchy, of the North Korean population document that millions have starved to death and that the population’s height, weight and life span are actually shrinking due to malnutrition. We were instructed to never offer food or clothing to the local population, because that would imply that the government was inadequately providing for the people.

• At least one night a week, we would see people streaming to the local auditorium or school. These were “education” events, mandatory sessions for communications from the capital. In addition, every morning at daybreak, the local village was awakened by loudspeakers, with commanding voices and military music exhorting the people to support the cause that day.
• In addition to resisting incursions from the outside, North Korea relentlessly hunts down the few who are brave enough to leave the country. Some people successfully make it across the Yalu River into China. North Korea insists that they be returned by the Chinese, to a fate that usually involves prison.

Meanwhile, showing no sign of being in the least distracted from the game plan the “Dear Leader” has apparently decided now would be a good time for a little nuclear testing. Yep, its business as usual for North Korea’s glorious leaders, who didn’t even think twice about holding millions of their people hostage to more sanctions that these new tests may provoke, not to mention the snub they represent to South Korea, currently generously trucking food across their shared border.

Spiegel Online are hosting some fantastic photos of a new railroad connecting Tibet and China. I am adding this one to my list of things to do before I die, the landscape is breathtaking.

The train link is a mixed blessing for the Tibetans. Since it opened last month 70000 Chinese and foreign tourists have already taken the train, so the local economy is going to benefit greatly. Further the Chinese understand that preserving at least some Tibetan culture is in their interest, because that is what draws the foreign tourists. Although to them it is just another cash cow to milk, much like they are doing with the Shaolin Temple, which was first razed and forgotten and then repackaged and sold out, the increased tourist thoroughfare will moderate Chinese aggression against the Tibetan population. The Chinese Communist Party realises the importance of appearances, knowing that the rest of the world will continue to turn a blind eye on Tibet if at least a thin veneer of tolerance and harmony is maintained. They also realise all those “Free Tibet” stickers are nothing more than a fashion accessory for the morally vain imbecilia of the West and no serious threat to Chinese interests in Tibet exists.

On the other hand there are rumours in Tibet that China is planning on sending 400,000 people to resettle in the region. Demographics is after all the most powerful geopolitical force in existance and it has served the Chinese well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the 30th anniversary of the 20th century’s deadliest earthquake, which struck the city of Tangshan, China in the dead of night, with the power of 400 atomic bombs. The quake claimed the lives of a quarter of the city’s million residents. Some sources estimate the death toll as much as three times higher. The Maoist government had ignored warnings from scientists, who noted the rising seismic activity, choosing to focus on internal disputes and perception shaping instead. They also refused all foreign aid offered to them, although around 165,000 people were recorded as being severely injured, a spokesman for the Red Flag journal declaring: “Any grave natural disaster can be overcome with the guidance of Chairman Mao”.

Rowan Callick reports on the cover-up existing to this day in The Australian:

Coalminer Li Yulin, aged 41, clawed his way out of his collapsed home in his underwear and stumbled towards the nearby Kailuan mine. He flagged down the red mine ambulance that was speeding towards him.
..

They drove into the heart of Beijing, arriving at 8am at Zhongnanhai, the leaders’ compound next to the ancient imperial Forbidden City. Dozens of armed soldiers surrounded them. When they had explained their mission, two policemen led them to a reception room where they met vice-premier Ji Dengkui, whom Li recognised from newspaper photos.

“I cried in excitement and he held me in his arms,” Li said. “I felt like a lost son meeting his mother again. I thought, ‘The people of Tangshan are saved.”‘

Li and driver Cui breathlessly reported what they knew of the disaster, concluding by shouting: “Long live the Communist Party. Long live Chairman Mao.” Li lost 22 family members in the earthquake, including his parents and his eldest son, aged 15.

How did the leaders in Zhongnanhai, mesmerised by their own Cultural Revolution endgame and riven by rivalry, respond to the almost supernatural expectations of Li and Cui? Slowly and inadequately.

Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, one of the Gang of Four, took charge of the rescue efforts, focusing on propaganda rather than practical needs. The next day the story from the official Xinhua newsagency, which still operates today, was headed by a Maoist slogan: “Humans must have the strength to subdue the heavens.” It focused on Mao’s leadership against such disasters.

The People’s Daily newspaper, which also still operates, reported how brave survivors had gathered to criticise Deng Xiaoping’s revisionism. A party member was praised for choosing to rescue the communist branch secretary despite hearing cries from his trapped son and daughter. By the time he returned home, the children were dead.

It took a week for the People’s Liberation Army to bring cranes to the disaster site, by which time almost all the survivors under the rubble had fallen silent, as aftershocks kept hitting the beleaguered city.
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After Zhang Qingzhou published a novel, on the 20th anniversary, about the earthquake that destroyed his home when he was 16, he was contacted by a reader claiming the disaster had been predicted, as had another earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale 17 months earlier, near the northeastern city of Haicheng, where local officials had been warned and taken precautions, restricting the death toll to 2000.
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Zhang followed up his reader’s leads, speaking with Yang Youchen who, as head of the China Earthquake Administration’s office in Tangshan, had predicted at a meeting early in 1976 that evidence from more than 40 seismic monitoring posts indicated a severe earthquake was due in July or August within a 50km radius of Tangshan.

Yang was punished for his prediction by being sent to a school for unsound cadres. When he repeated his warning at a China Seismological Bureau meeting in Jinan in May, he was removed.

Zhang says the people who succeeded Yang “died in the earthquake, burying his warnings with them”. The cover-up became public when Zhang’s book was published, after a battle with authorities. It soon sold out and reprints have been officially banned.

In Tangshan Apocalypse Zhang wrote that Geng Qingguo, of Beijing’s earthquake forecast team, had predicted the area around Beijing might suffer an earthquake as strong as 7 on the Richter scale, following the Haicheng event. Her reports were quashed by the national bureau.

Geng wrote to Xinhua newsagency criticising her boss, Mei Shirong, who responded that “Geng recklessly made trouble for me. Beijing is the capital. Words must be used with more caution here.”

The warnings came thick and fast in July, Zhang says: from a seismic monitoring post at Kailuan coalmine on July 6, from Zhao Gexhuang mine post and from Beijing’s earthquake forecast team on July 14, from Hongwei middle school post on July 16, from Tongxian county earthquake station on July24 and from Ma Jiagou mine post just 11 hours before the quake.

Zhang says Wang Chengmin, a national seismological bureau researcher, wanted to report the heightened activity, but, he told Zhang, the bureau’s leaders were too busy “criticising Deng Xiaoping and rightism” to pay attention.

Academic discussion had been replaced by a determination “to cover up the truth and to control public opinion”, Wang said. “Certainly it would have been possible to send a warning to people in Tangshan.”

Bizarrely, the handling of the same earthquake in Qinglong County, just 115 km from Tangshan, is hailed by the UN as a case of “public administration best practice”. In 1996 the UN Global Programme for the Integration of Public Administration and the Science of Disasters (UNGP-IPASD), released a report titled “Integration of Public Administration and Earthquake Science: The Best Practice Case of Qinglong County”:

The magnitude 7.8 Great Tangshan Earthquake (GTE) occurred under the city of Tangshan, China, on July 28, 1976. When the dust settled, a quarter of a million people had died, and only a small handful of buildings were left standing. Emerging from this tragedy is a public administration best practice: public administrators of Qinglong County integrated scientific knowledge and monitoring by lay public, and prepared for the Great Tangshan Earthquake. Although 180,000 buildings in the county were destroyed, not one life was lost in the county due to the devastation (one person had a heart attack) while over 240,000 people died in surrounding areas.

“Surrounding areas” of course primarily refers to the flattened city of Tangshen, possibly the 20th century’s best example of public administration worst practice.

The UN Global Programme for the Integration of Public Administration and the Science of Disasters conducted a detailed study of Qinglong County between 1995-1996. This is Qinglong County’s remarkable story.

Two weeks before the Tangshan earthquake…
Administrator Wang Chunqing attended a conference organized by the State Seismological Bureau (SSB) for the North China-Bohai region. During this conference, on the evening of July 16, 1976, scientist Wang Chengmin of the SSB’s Analysis and Prediction Department spoke at an informal meeting attended by sixty conference participants. Young administrator Wang Chunqing was among the audience. He took detailed notes of the scientist’s presentation, including this entry:

“…There is a strong possibility of a magnitude 5 earthquake from July 22 to August 5, 1976 in the Tangshan region. A magnitude 8 is also likely in the second half of ‘76. Preparations should be made immediately…”

On July 21, 1976, administrator Wang Chunqing returned to Qinglong County. He reported on the Tangshan conference, highlighted the talk given by scientist Wang Chengmin, and included updated information from the county’s 16 lay monitoring stations. Public officials of Qinglong County took the report very seriously and acted upon the information immediately.
School classes were relocated and held outdoors several days before the eventual earthquake. Students also played an important part in the collection of data.
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An official early warning from the Chinese Communist Party Committee of Qinglong County was issued advising people to prepare for a possible devastating earthquake.

The County government took advantage of a planned agricultural meeting to publicize the earthquake warning. Telephone and public announcement systems were also used to broadcast the alert.

Volunteer earthquake monitoring stations report:

From July 24th, natural spring water had become muddy and undrinkable.

By July 26th, temporary earthquake tents were set up. Led by County Secretary Ran Guangqi, who moved into an earthquake tent himself, over 60% of Qinglong County’s more than 470,000 residents moved out of their homes. Those who did not move were instructed to keep their doors and windows open at all times to avoid being trapped in case of an earthquake.
Businesses also relocated to outdoor locations where they continued their normal activities.
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In Qinglong County (115 km from Tangshan), more than 180,000 buildings were destroyed by the GTE; over 7,000 of these totally collapsed. However, only one person died, and he died of a heart attack. Meanwhile, in the city of Tangshan and in all its other surrounding counties, more than 240,000 people were crushed to death and 600,000 were seriously injured. Five hours after the earthquake, Qinglong County dispatched the first medical team to the disaster zone, and within a very short time, sent relief teams to Tangshan to help with rescue work and transport of the wounded.
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In the twenty years since the Great Tangshan Earthquake, the Chinese have strengthened their capacity to mitigate earthquake disasters from the perspectives of both science and public administration. Successes in these areas have resulted in fewer fatalities during earthquakes.
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On this twentieth anniversary of the Great Tangshan Earthquake, we look forward to the day when communities will be able to reduce loss of lives from natural disasters because of the lessons learned from Qinglong County.

It should be noted that the above presentation was designed for the UNGP-IPASD by members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geology and the State Seismological Bureau, also of China.

The contrast between the stories of these two communities is a most tragic irony.

Forewarning relay and preparation were not the only problems in Tangshan. The BBC reported on this day 30 years ago:

The survivors of the Tangshan quake are living in tents and are expected to be moved to winter shelters, the New China news agency has reported. Aircraft and lorries have been taking large quantities of relief supplies to help the relief effort.

The authorities later hope to move people to simple houses, which can withstand tremors and are warm and rainproof before winter sets in.

Chinese officials have rejected any offers of help from the outside world, saying that survivors have enough to eat and wear and there are sufficient medical supplies and doctors in the city.

Well, perhaps not:

One week [after the quake], Tan [Pengru] walked down Victory Street on crutches. The four-lane street was lined with dead bodies, barely leaving room for a bicycle path. Sometimes, the corpses were stacked into piles, and in between them, survivors were cooking their meals in makeshift stoves, oblivious to the horror and the stench that permeated the air.

There was also a short period of lawlessness when food and clean water were extremely scarce. “We had airdrops of food, but people had to fight for them. There was occasional violence,” he sighed. Fortunately law and order was quickly restored with the help of the army that was pouring into the city and mounting a mammoth rescue effort.

Adding insult to injury, two years ago a “memorial” wall was built in Tangshan out of three granite blocks, with families being charged a cost of 1000 RMB to have a perished loved one’s name displayed on it. Or a generous 800 RMB for a place on the back of the wall. Needless to say, a not uncommon view of the residents of Tangshan is to see this as “using a disaster as a gimmick to make money”.

Tangshan before the quake:

After the quake:

Read the rest of this entry »

Do read Hugh Fitzgerald’s empassioned and brilliant essay, inspired by Richard Cohen’s column on Tuesday, obscenely titled “Hunker Down With History”.
Hugh starts off taking modern journalism to task, but achieves so much more. I am not going to quote any of it here. Read the whole thing. It is a history lesson the West urgently needs.

Another fantastic history lesson for Cohen was written by Israel Matzav here. Here’s a part of it, but again, it is well worth reading in full.

The term “Palestina” was invented by the Roman emperor Hadrian. The Romans wanted to rename Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) after the Philistines, the longtime enemy of the Jews. Hadrian believed that by renaming the Jewish homeland after the Jews’ archenemy, he would be able to forever break the bond between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people.

But even the name of the Philistines, from which the term “Palestine” was adopted, is completely alien to the Land of Israel.

The name Philistines in Hebrew is plishtim, which comes from the Hebrew verb polshim (foreign invaders).
Arabs only came to the Land of Israel in large numbers after the Jews returned in the 20th century and started to rebuild the nation, thereby creating economic and employment opportunities for Arab immigrants.

Prior to 1870, when Jews started to return to the Holy Land in large numbers, there were fewer than 100,000 Arabs living in what is today the State of Israel – including Yesha (the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District).

This small number of nomadic, tribal Arabs who lived in the Holy Land before the modern Jewish return never considered themselves to be a separate people or nation.

The Arabs who lived in the Land of Israel were not “Palestinians” but Arabs – part of a huge Arab people with 22 very large independent nations that control one-ninth of the land mass on the planet Earth.

In an interview given by Zuhair Mohsen to the Dutch newspaper Trouw in March 1977, Mr. Mohsen explains the origin of the ‘Palestinians’:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

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Israel is anything but a mistake, and history shows the justice of Israel’s cause. With the exception of the period between the two Jewish Temples between roughly 586 and 516 BCE, Jews ruled this land continuously from approximately 1300 BCE until 68 CE. Since that time, no other government has been based in Israel, no other country has called Jerusalem its capitol, and no other people has called this land its home. It is not history that is Israel’s enemy but the false narrative of history presented to the World by the Arab Muslims. It is not history that is Israel’s enemy, but Arab attempts to wipe out the vestiges of that history, as if destroying all of the Temple artifacts on the Temple Mount will confirm that it was ‘always’ Haram al-Sharif, that two Jewish Temples never stood there and that Jesus never argued with money changers there.

This country was deserted swampland for much of the period between 68 CE and the beginning of the return of larger numbers of Jews started in 1870. Israel’s interior areas were mainly a desert-like wasteland while her coast was a malaria-ridden swamp. But Jews always prayed three times a day that God should gather them in from their diaspora and bring them back to this country. Many Jews attempted to come here on their own. Jews were a majority of the population of Jerusalem in the 19th century, and settled many of the cities of the Galilee as well. In 1844 – when the Land of Israel was controlled by the Turkish Muslims – the Turkish census counted 7,120 Jews and 5,000 Muslims living in Jerusalem. Thus, Jerusalem was already a Jewish city 160 years ago. Until an Arab massacre wiped them out in 1929, there was even a large Jewish community in Hebron, which included a major Talmudical academy, which was transplanted from the village of Slobodka in Lithuania.

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Don’t forget to read Hugh Fitzgerald’s piece now.

For some reason this article on the resurgence of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia had me from the first sentence.

KHARKHORIN, Mongolia (Reuters) – When Gendenjav Choijamts thinks of praying, he thinks of vodka.

The 62-year-old monk at Mongolia’s oldest Buddhist monastery remembers when his father and his friends had to pretend they were gathering for a drinking session to hide the fact they were gathering in prayer.

“My father was a monk but because people were persecuted for that; it wasn’t widely known,” he said in the lush green grounds of Erdene Zuu, which dates from the 16th century.

“He was a herder. He hid his shrine and would chant in secret in the evening,” he said.

Monastic life, which took hold in Mongolia in the 1500s, was nearly wiped out within 15 years of communist rule, mostly during Stalinist purges in the 1930s when an estimated 17,000 lamas were executed.

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