October Issue

NEWS 9
The ‘international community’ is currently
fixated on the exchange of provocations
between the United States and North Korea,
and it seems that the possibility of nuclear
confrontation is as high as it has been since
the apex of the Cold War. The potential conflict
between these two nuclear powers – as well as
the additional powers that would enter the fray
due to alliances and treaties - is not a subject
that can be comfortably ignored, as it can, if
the necessary parties get involved, result in the
destruction of life on Earth (many times over).
There is a complex history to the antagonism
between these two countries, one that can
never be understood by simply swallowing the
surface-level information and/or propaganda
spewed forth from cable news.
As many are aware, North Korea is a totalitarian
dictatorship located in the Northern half of the
Korean Peninsula. It relies on an ideology of
self-reliant state socialism, and, aside from
its limited trading partners and rare visitors,
has effectively applied a policy of isolationism
and xenophobia toward the rest of humanity.
The brutality of the North Korean government,
headed by the Kim dynasty, has been
documented extensively. Secret police, rigged
elections, state collectivization policies, life-long
indoctrination, and forced labour camps are a
few of the structural mechanisms by which the
regime in Pyongpyang sustains itself.
Aside from the Korean War during 1950-1953, it
has only played the occasional auxiliary role in
conflicts throughout the region. Without getting
too deep into the history, it is still in a state of
extreme hostility with South Korea, with whom
it shares a demilitarized border zone that is
perpetually occupied with army units ready for
fighting. Since South Korea is an ally of the
United States, and due to the countless military
bases that the United States has in the region
(as well as throughout the world), North Korea is
also clashing with the United States, although it
has an ally in China and to some extent Russia.
If one wants to understand the relations
between these regional and global powers, as
well as the logic of their international relations
strategies, they can simply observe how
petty high school students engage in drama,
rumours, lies, rivalries, and conflicts. The
unfortunate reality is that these same powers
also possess instruments of violence capable
of causing death on a grand scale.
“I think that they’re both being really childish
and prideful,” says Hasib Shams, a fourth year
Psychology and Health Studies major: “We
should just toss Kim Jong-Un and Trump into
a ring and let them deal with their differences
themselves, instead of letting them potentially
start a war that would wipe out humanity”.
Recent headlines have been littered with
claims that North Korea has been testing its
inter-continental ballistic missiles in the Pacific
Ocean, specifically around South Korean
airspace. It has also been practice-launching
its missiles over Japan. This follows over a
decade of anxiety regarding North Korea’s
nuclear weapons development program. There
is no doubt that North Korean military exercises
constitute a severe threat to global security.
However, the mainstream headlines relating
to this subject present a biased and distorted
version of the story. It has been documented
that the United States and South Korea have
been conducting provocative military exercises
within North Korean ocean space for the past
couple of years, in violation of international law,
and this actually served to accelerate North
Korea’s nuclear program. This is not meant in
any way to exonerate North Korea for its own
crimes and machinations; however, United
States foreign policy in East Asia is proving to
be just as pernicious and damaging as it has
historically proven to be in the Middle East
(countless innocent deaths through illegal
resource-motivated wars that also produced
ISIS through a power vacuum and continental
resentment), or Latin America (the overthrowing
of democratically elected leaders, the backing
and supplying of right-wing death squads and
fascist regimes).
John Pilger, a renowned Australian journalist
and documentary film-maker, heavily criticizes
the war games that the United States is
orchestrating in the Pacific Ocean in its great
power balancing against China and Russia.
In his new documentary, The Coming War on
China, he explains how the United States, in
its struggle to maintain global hegemony, has
established a new iron curtain of offensive
military bases surrounding China, and that its
provocations against North Korea could serve
to trigger a conflagration of wars that would
eventually engulf the planet in a nuclear inferno.
This hypothetical situation is very possible, and
it would indisputably be the worst-case scenario
for humanity; a pitiful ending to the story of
human history.
While Obama started this trend of proliferating
weapons and armaments around China, Trump
is carrying on his legacy in a more blatant and
idiotic manner. He stated in his first address
to the UN that he would be willing to “totally
destroy North Korea” if it stepped out of line.
Coming from the only country that has utilized
nuclear weapons in wartime, this should not
simply be dismissed as empty rhetoric.
We live in a political illusion. The figureheads
of the most powerful nations in the world
are willing to doom the fate of the species
in order stand firm on their Machiavellian
agendas and schemes. The heads of states
are motivated by resource-driven economic
incentives, shortsighted political gains, and the
selfish pursuit of their ‘interests’ by any means
necessary. International relations scholars,
especially those who identify with the ‘realist’
school of thought, will justify these phenomenon
as the workings of an anarchic and powerdriven
world system. Unfortunately, no amount
of arm-chair philosophizing, arrogant academic
jargon, or delusional assumptions about human
nature or statecraft can remove us from the path
of collective insanity through which our species
is traversing. The reality is that the games
that these world leaders play carry real and
catastrophic consequences, be it in the form
of climate change, global integrated economic
collapse, political instability, and of course the
spectre of nuclear war.
The prescient historian, sociologist, and
philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford
spent much of the second half of his life trying
to warn the public that if nuclear proliferation is
normalized and left unchecked, it will eventually
erase all the achievements that human beings
have produced over our collective history. It will
abruptly conclude the project of civilization, as
Mumford warned decades ago: “The madmen
are planning the end of the world. What they call
continued progress in atomic warfare means
universal extermination, and what they call
national security is organized suicide.”
To View the Doomsday Clock Visit:
http://thebulletin.org/timeline
www. the-underground.ca OCTOBER 2017
VOLUME 37, ISSUE 02