Thank you to Lise! who directed my first music video for a song called Long Story. This post is long overdue. But time travel can get tricky…
Inspiration & Influence: Christine Hong & KPolicy.org
July 1, 2011
Christine Hong | June 28, 2011
Every so often, we are reminded that the Korean War is not over. Typically, jolts to the memory come in the form of heated spectacles or near-spectacles that flash into view and then fade away. Last year, we witnessed the sinking of a South Korean warship and an artillery exchange off the coast of North Korea. More recently, it has come to light that the South Korean military mistakenly fired upon a South Korean commercial airliner believing it to be of North Korean origin. For war-weary readers, these international headlines, while alarming, do not have the tug-and-pull of the latest news about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, hot zones of current U.S. intervention. We might be tempted to reason: hasn’t volatility long been the substrate of intra-Korean relations? What does this constant “code-red” in Korea have to do with us, anyway?
As historian, Bruce Cumings, points out, the Korean War marked “the palpable birth of interventionist policy abroad and a state apparatus to go with it.” Inaugurating permanent war as a feature of our foreign policy, the Korean War serves as an ominous model for our current wars in the Middle East and North Africa. We are, to be clear, still at war with North Korea, yet stateside, we have little first-hand grasp of the impact of the unfinished war. Moreover, signs that the war is still actively being waged are not always visibly “hot.”
To wit: last week, we learned that the House of Representatives voted to bar humanitarian food aid to North Korea. Ed Royce (R-CA), the policy’s architect, has stated, “the aid we provide would prop up Kim Jong-il’s regime, a brutal and dangerous dictatorship.” Quoting a North Korean defector—a source of intelligence about which we, post-9/11, should be cautious—Royce has argued that giving food aid to North Korea “is the same as providing funding for North Korea’s nuclear program.” Royce doesn’t mention that the defector in question, Kim Duk Hong, offered the following recommendation during the Bush years: “If we really want to destroy Kim Jong Il, we should be brave. We shouldn’t be afraid of war.” The intention, here, is plain: through hard or soft means, regime change. More…
Article published by the Korea Policy Institute on June 28, 2011
*Christine Hong is a KPI fellow and a professor of Asian American and critical Pacific Rim Studies at UC Santa Cruz and a steering committee member of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea.
Inspiration & Influence: I-Ching
February 13, 2011
The Well: Resources
above K’an the abysmal, Water
below Sun the Gentle, Wind, Wood.
The wood goes down into the earth to bring up water. The image derives
from the pole-and-bucket well of ancient China. The wood represents
not the buckets, which in ancient times were made of clay, but rather
the wooden poles by which the water is hauled up from the well. The
image also refers to the world of plants, which lift water out of the
earth by means of their fibers. The well from which water is drawn
conveys the further idea of an inexhaustible dispensing of
nourishment.
THE JUDGMENT
The town may be changed but the
well cannot be changed.It neither decreases nor increases.They come
and go and draw from the well.If one gets down almost to the water and
the rope doesnot go all the way, or the jug breaks, it brings
misfortune. In ancient China the capital cities were sometimes moved,
partly for the sake of more favorable location, partly because of a
change in dynasties. The style of architecture changed in the course
of centuries, but the shape of the well has remained the same from
ancient times to this day. Thus the well is the symbol of that social
structure which, evolved by mankind in meeting its most primitive
needs, is independent of all political forms. Political structures
change, as do nations, but the life of man with its needs remains
eternally the same-this cannot be changed. Life is also inexhaustible.
It grows neither less not more; it exists for one and for all. The
generations come and go, and all enjoy life in its inexhaustible
abundance.However, there are two prerequisites for a satisfactory
political or social organization of mankind. We must go down to the
very foundations of life. For any merely superficial ordering of life
that leaves its deepest needs unsatisfied is as ineffectual as if no
attempt at order had ever been made. Carelessness-by which the jug is
broken-is also disastrous. If for instance the military defense of a
state is carried to such excess that it provokes wars by which the
power of the state is annihilated, this is a breaking of the jug.This
hexagram applies also to the individual. However men may differ in
disposition and in education, the foundations of human nature are the
same in everyone. And every human being can draw in the course of his
education from the inexhaustible wellspring of the divine in man’s
nature. But here likewise two dangers threaten: a man may fail in his
education to penetrate to the real roots of humanity and remain fixed
in convention-a partial education of this sort is as bad as none- or
he may suddenly collapse and neglect his self-development.
THE IMAGE
Water over wood: the image of THE WELL.
Thus the superior man encourages the people attheir work and exhorts
them to help one another. The trigram Sun, wood, is below, and the
trigram K’an, water, is above it. Wood sucks water upward. Just as
wood as an organism imitates the action of the well, which benefits
all parts of the plant, the superior man organizes human society, so
that, as in a plant organism, its parts co-operate for the benefit of
the whole.
Image-in: New Dawn New Day
April 18, 2010
Music. Music. Music. My umma said the happiest she’s ever seen me is when I sing…
Inspiration & Influence: Grace Lee Boggs & LIVING FOR CHANGE (excerpt)
February 1, 2010
LIVING FOR CHANGE (excerpt)
Re-Imagining America, Re-Creating Ourselves
By Grace Lee Boggs
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http://boggseducationalcenter.org/
As we move towards the 2nd USSF that will bring 15,000-20,000 people to Detroit in June, new visitors to the Boggs Center are giving me a deeper understanding of the energies stirring in our country at this very special time on the clock of the world.
For example, on a recent snowy afternoon, we enjoyed a conversation with Dan Wang and Mike Wolf, two artists from the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor (MRCC), Dan was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, and now lives in Minneapolis. Mike is from the Chicago area.
Before our conversation I had viewed maps mainly as aids to get drivers from one place to another. Dan and Mike gave me a sense of how maps created by artists not only expand our knowledge and imaginations but can also help us arrive at life-changing decisions.
MRCC maps provide a picture of the many cultures in the Midwest. They tell us how people live in cities and rural areas, the availability of land, fuel, water; whether they are able to grow their own food or have to import it from long distances (consuming tons of fuel and requiring, often carcinogenic, preservatives and additives); how they dispose of waste, how they educate and entertain themselves, what historic struggles and events they remember and tell each other stories about.
MRCC artists are cultural creatives who recognize that our world and especially the United States are in the middle of a huge cultural revolution. So their maps provide all kinds of information about city life and rural life, about who lives where and when, about gentrification and struggles against gentrification, development and struggles against it, industrialization and de-industrialization, current and increasingly urgent challenges to create the world anew.
I was especially impressed with the information these maps provide about Native American communities because MRCC mapmakers recognize that in this period we have so much to learn from indigenous peoples about the need to think ahead seven generations when we make everyday decisions.
Talking with Dan and Mike, I also got a sense of the huge changes that have taken place in the world and in young people since I became a radical nearly 70 years ago.
When I moved from New York to Detroit in the middle of the 20th century, most radicals, myself included, thought mainly in terms of Race and Class, Blacks and Whites, Workers and Capitalists, I had no idea that one day I would find myself growing older in a country where whites are the minority and people of color from Latin America, Asia and Africa are the New Majority.
I never dreamed that Detroit, once the national and international symbol of the miracles of industrialization, would become the world symbol of the devastation of deindustrialization. Or that, as a result of the new information technology, only one in ten workers actually works in manufacturing and the number of workers outside factory walls exceeds those inside.
It never occurred to me that eventually my identity would be shaped not mainly by my ethnicity, class or gender but by how I responded to the challenge to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up.
I never suspected that the day was coming when people the world over would view the American way of life as mainly responsible for the global warming that threatens all living things on Planet Earth.
Or that a new generation of young Americans, coming out of obscurity and with a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, would assume leadership for encouraging all Americans to live more simply so that there will be a future for all of us and our posterity.
MRCC maps help these millennials decide where to settle and begin rebuilding and revitalizing this country from the ground up.
Inspiration & Influence: Howard Zinn, WHAT WAR LOOKS LIKE
February 1, 2010
[REST IN POWER, Howard Zinn - This article was published before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.]
What War Looks Like
By Howard Zinn, October 2002 Issue of The Progressive
In all the solemn statements by self-important politicians and newspaper columnists about a coming war against Iraq, and even in the troubled comments by some who are opposed to the war, there is something missing. The talk is about strategy and tactics, geopolitics and personalities. It is about air war and ground war, weapons of mass destruction, arms inspections, alliances, oil, and “regime change.”
What is missing is what an American war on Iraq will do to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings who are not concerned with geopolitics and military strategy, and who just want their children to live, to grow up. They are not concerned with “national security” but with personal security, with food and shelter and medical care and peace.
I am speaking of those Iraqis and those Americans who will, with absolute certainty, die in such a war, or lose arms or legs, or be blinded. Or they will be stricken with some strange and agonizing sickness that could lead to their bringing deformed children into the world (as happened to families in Vietnam, Iraq, and also the United States).
True, there has been some discussion of American casualties resulting from a land invasion of Iraq. But, as always when the strategists discuss this, the question is not about the wounded and dead as human beings, but about what number of American casualties would result in public withdrawal of support for the war, and what effect this would have on the upcoming elections for Congress and the Presidency.
That was uppermost in the mind of Lyndon Johnson, as we have learned from the tapes of his White House conversations. He worried about Americans dying if he escalated the war in Vietnam, but what most concerned him was his political future. If we pull out of Vietnam, he told his friend Senator Richard Russell, “they’ll impeach me, won’t they?”
In any case, American soldiers killed in war are always a matter of statistics. Individual human beings are missing in the numbers. It is left to the poets and novelists to take us by the shoulders and shake us and ask us to look and listen. In World War I, ten million men died on the battlefield, but we needed John Dos Passos to confront us with what that meant: In his novel 1919, he writes of the death of John Doe: “In the tarpaper morgue at Châlons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of” him. A few pages later, Dos Passos describes him: “The blood ran into the ground, the brains oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a generation of bluebottle flies, and the incorruptible skeleton, and the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki.”
Vietnam was a war that filled our heads with statistics, of which one stood out, embedded in the stark monument in Washington: 58,000 dead. But one would have to read the letters from soldiers just before they died to turn those statistics into human beings. And for all those not dead but mutilated in some way, the amputees and paraplegics, one would have to read Ron Kovic’s account, in his memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, of how his spine was shattered and his life transformed.
As for the dead among “the enemy”–that is, those young men, conscripted or cajoled or persuaded to pit their bodies against those of our young men–that has not been a concern of our political leaders, our generals, our newspapers and magazines, our television networks. To this day, most Americans have no idea, or only the vaguest, of how many Vietnamese–soldiers and civilians (actually, a million of each)–died under American bombs and shells.
And for those who know the figures, the men, women, children be-hind the statistics remained un-known until a picture appeared of a Vietnamese girl running down a road, her skin shredding from na-palm, until Americans saw photos of women and children huddled in a trench as GIs poured automatic rifle fire into their bodies.
Ten years ago, in that first war against Iraq, our leaders were proud of the fact that there were only a few hundred American casualties (one wonders if the families of those soldiers would endorse the word “only”). When a reporter asked General Colin Powell if he knew how many Iraqis died in that war, he replied: “That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.” A high Pentagon official told The Boston Globe, “To tell you the truth, we’re not really focusing on this question.”
Americans knew that this nation’s casualties were few in the Gulf War, and a combination of government control of the press and the media’s meek acceptance of that control ensured that the American people would not be confronted, as they had been in Vietnam, with Iraqi dead and dying.
There were occasional glimpses of the horrors inflicted on the people of Iraq, flashes of truth in the newspapers that quickly disappeared. In mid-February 1991, U.S. planes dropped bombs on an air raid shelter in Baghdad at four in the morning, killing 400 to 500 people–mostly women and children–who were huddled there to escape the incessant bombing. An Associated Press re-porter, one of the few allowed to go to the site, said: “Most of the recovered bodies were charred and mutilated beyond recognition.”
In the final stage of the Gulf War, American troops engaged in a ground assault on Iraqi positions in Kuwait. As in the air war, they encountered virtually no resistance. With victory certain and the Iraqi army in full flight, U.S. planes kept bombing the retreating soldiers who clogged the highway out of Kuwait City. A reporter called the scene “a blazing hell, a gruesome testament. To the east and west across the sand lay the bodies of those fleeing.”
That grisly scene appeared for a moment in the press and then vanished in the exultation of a victorious war, in which politicians of both parties and the press joined. President Bush crowed: “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula.” The two major news magazines, Time and Newsweek, printed special editions hailing the victory. Each devoted about a hundred pages to the celebration, mentioning proudly the small number of American casualties. They said not a word about the tens of thousands of Iraqis–soldiers and civilians–themselves victims first of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, and then of George Bush’s war.
There was scarcely a photograph of a single dead Iraqi child, or a name of a particular Iraqi, or an image of suffering and grief to convey to the American people what our overwhelming military machine was doing to other human beings.
The bombing of Afghanistan has been treated as if human beings are of little consequence. It has been portrayed as a “war on terrorism,” not a war on men, women, children. The few press reports of “accidents” were quickly followed with denials, excuses, justifications. There has been some bandying about of numbers of Afghan civilian deaths–but always numbers.
Only rarely has the human story, with names and images, come through as more than a flash of truth, as one day when I read of a ten-year-old boy, named Noor Mohammed, lying on a hospital bed on the Pakistani border, his eyes gone, his hands blown off, a victim of American bombs.
Surely, we must discuss the political issues. We note that an attack on Iraq would be a flagrant violation of international law. We note that the mere possession of dangerous weapons is not grounds for war–else we would have to make war on dozens of countries. We point out that the country that possesses by far the most “weapons of mass destruction” is our country, which has used them more often and with more deadly results than any nation on Earth. We can point to our national history of expansion and aggression. We have powerful evidence of deception and hypocrisy at the highest levels of our government.
But, as we contemplate an American attack on Iraq, should we not go beyond the agendas of the politicians and the experts? (John le Carré has one of his characters say: “I despise experts more than anyone on Earth.”)
Should we not ask everyone to stop the high-blown talk for a moment and imagine what war will do to human beings whose faces will not be known to us, whose names will not appear except on some future war memorial?
For this we will need the help of people in the arts, those who through time–from Euripides to Bob Dylan–have written and sung about specific, recognizable victims of war. In 1935, Jean Giraudoux, the French playwright, with the memory of the First World War still in his head, wrote The Trojan War Will Not Take Place. Demokos, a Trojan soldier, asks the aged Hecuba to tell him “what war looks like.” She responds:
“Like the backside of a baboon. When the baboon is up in a tree, with its hind end facing us, there is the face of war exactly: scarlet, scaly, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig.”
If enough Americans could see that, perhaps the war on Iraq would not take place.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States.”
RADICAL: Yes, we are…
February 1, 2010
adjective
1. Arising from or going to a root or source; basic
2. Departing markedly from the usual or customary; extreme
3. Favoring or effecting fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions
4. Linguistics – Of or being a root: a radical form.
5. Botany – Arising from the root or its crown: radical leaves.
6. Slang – Excellent; wonderful.
1. Arising from or going to a root or source; basic
2. Departing markedly from the usual or customary; extreme
3. Favoring or effecting fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions
4. Linguistics – Of or being a root: a radical form.
5. Botany – Arising from the root or its crown: radical leaves.
6. Slang – Excellent; wonderful.
noun
1. One who wants radical political changes.
2. Chemistry – Two or more atoms bound together as a single unit and forming part of a molecule
Empress Myeoung-Song of Joseon (明成皇后, 1851-1895), more commonly known as Queen Min (閔妃), was the last empress of Korea. She is recognized by the Korean people as a heroine.
Empress Myeoung-Song was the wife of Emperor Gojong, Emperor of the Joseon Dynasty of the Daehan Empire. During her life as empress, she strived diplomatically and politically to keep Korea independent of foreign influence. She also proved herself brilliant when handling foreign affairs, as shown when she summoned the help of Russia and the Qing Dynasty of China to block the Japanese from taking over Korea, which was within considerable influence of Tokyo’s imperialistic ambitions.
The Japanese, Emperor Meiji in particular, viewed her as an obstacle. However, efforts to neutralize her or to remove her from Korea’s government continuously failed due to Emperor Gojong’s devotion. The Japanese resorted to sending ambassadors to Korea’s royal court, but such efforts were eventually repelled again by Empress Myeoung-Song. As a result, the Japanese minister to Korea, Miura Goro, faced with losing Korea to other foreign powers, hired assassins to invade the Korean imperial residence and kill the empress in 1895. They killed three women suspected of being Queen Min, and when they verified which was the Queen, they violated her body and then burned the corpse. These acts were witnessed by a Russian architect named Sabatin and other foreign officials, who protested heavily.
Emperor Gojong, enraged over the event, posthumously awarded his late wife the title Myeoung-Song (heavenly light) and enshrined her in Jongmyo, Korea’s state shrine.
Indopedia.org
Korea had been a colony of Japan since 1910 and Korean guerilla units in Manchuria fought against the Japanese during World War II. “I don’t know why Korea was punished,” laments Ik Kil Shin, an activist. Shin was 10 years old when the war in Korea broke out. “Korea was not the aggressor, but the U.S. treated Korea and Korean people as enemies, and carved up the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel,” he says. “It resulted in war. I survived by running away from machine-gun bullets from the war airplanes.”
Though an armistice was signed in 1953 to pause the fighting, no peace treaty was ever signed. Millions of family members remain separated by the division. “I lost my father due to the war,” explains Ann Rhee Menzie, executive director of the Korean Community Center of the East Bay in Oakland, Calif. “He apparently left my mom and children to go north, thinking that he would return shortly, but he never returned. He never even knew that he had left my mom pregnant with a third child. The pain still hurts my mother, now 85.”
Koreans have taken giant strides toward reunifying their country. The minjok (popular) movements of the 1980s put an end to dictatorship in South Korea, making possible widespread public advocacy for intra-Korean reconciliation. Summit meetings held between the leaders of North and South Korea, in 2000 and 2007, charted out concrete steps toward healing the Cold War wounds that divide the country. But the Cold War in Korea is also an international conflict. The United States and North Korea, as well as North and South Korea, are still technically at war. As long as the standoff remains, so will the division.
To those of the Korean diaspora, Mrs. Shin urges more vocal participation in demanding that the United States changes the Korean War armistice into a peace treaty, normalizes relations, and resolves the nuclear issue with North Korea.
“We have to support our [brothers and sisters] in the North who are struggling with cold and hunger and pain, and we have to help them play a role in international society by offering our hands,” she says. “Now is the time for us to change our fate with our will.”
Kpolicy.org
HOW can FOREIGN officials DIVIDE a recently LIBERATED nation?
Well, you get 2 of the biggest SUPERPOWERS represented in a room, take out a map and draw a line through the LAND of your CHOICE. Make sure to provoke and escalate WAR between the people of the land, so you can get not only MILLIONS of them MASSACRED & out of your way, but you can keep the DIVISON going for longer and LONGER as the trauma & state of war continues on for generations. OH, and don’t forget to cover your tracks. YOU should ACT like THOSE PEOPLE started the war out of NOWHERE, and needed YOU to SAVE THEM FROM GOING HYSTERICAL (because of finally gaining their own independence) & JUST STRANGELY KILLING THEMSELVES!
There, that should keep the PEOPLE from REUNIFYING…No?
