More on the DPRK "Situation"

Trey Smith

The corporate media reduces the DPRK (North Korea) to the Kim family and prefaces their names with the terms “madman”, “evil” and “brutal”. Such vilifications of foreign leaders are used here not only to signify they are target for US overthrow. They are meant to intimidate and isolate anti-war activists as being out in left field for ever wanting to oppose a war against countries ruled by “madmen” – be they Saddam, Fidel, Hugo Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Qaddaffi.

Yet to a sensible person, it is crazy that the US, with nuclear weapons thousands of miles from home, in South Korea, denies North Korea a right to have its own nuclear weapons on its own land – particularly when the North says it is developing nuclear weapons only as a deterrent because the US won’t take its own weapons out of the Korean peninsula.

Missing in what passes for discourse on the DPRK in the corporate media is that the US was conducting month-long war maneuvers last March in Korea, now extended into April, using stealth bombers, undetectable by radar, capable of carrying nuclear weapons. And this year these are not “deterrent” war maneuvers, but “pre-emptive war” maneuvers.

Would the US government and people get a little “irrational” if a foreign country that previously had killed millions of our people, sent nuclear capable stealth bombers off the coasts of New York City, Washington DC, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, there to fly around for a month in preparation for a possible nuclear attack on us? For what is called, in warped US language, war “games”?
~ from North Korea's Justifiable Anger by Stansfield Smith ~

This whole "situation" smacks of the American Exceptionalism I often write about. The ONLY nation to utilize nuclear bombs in war against a civilian population (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) has spent a good deal of the past few decades scolding particular nations for even attempting to develop nuclear weapons. At the same time, we have encouraged those nations that advance the interests of our elite to maintain nuclear stockpiles.

As Smith mentions, almost no one in the mainstream media has mentioned the "war games" angle. Knowing this kind of important information, it begs the question: Is the US purposely goading the DPRK to do and say what they are doing and saying? Are we setting them up for our own political ends?

Smith makes another key point for your consideration.

Since World War II there have been 9000 missile launches. 4 were by the DPRK. There have been 2000 atomic bomb tests. 3 were by DPRK. No country was sanctioned by the UN Security Council for this. No country except the DPRK. Why wouldn’t the North Koreans be incensed by this double standard, especially when the US has nuclear weapons in South Korea?

Look, I am against the whole idea of nuclear weapons. I think the world would be a far safer place if we got rid of every damn one of them. My point here is not that I favor a nuclear weapon free-for-all. It's more that, if we continue to maintain the capability to destroy the world at the push of a button, who are we to deny any other nation the same right? If we argue that our nuclear arsenal exists to serve as a deterrent to other nations, then how can we deny other nations who wish to have their own nuclear arsenal to deter us?