The Pentagon, politicians and the mainstream media do their best to keep the public so distracted that they get war-amnesia. Gore Vidal coined it the United States of Amnesia. President Reagan's cure for the stubborn Vietnam War memory was to invade the small, weak, and poor little island of Grenada in 1983, thus wipping out the public's memory of Vietnam. Once the fog of peace cleared, the US resumed it binges of serial mass murder in illegal wars of empire. The main stream media cheers it on, war profits skyrocket, and the public sits on the couche watching football and eating delivery pizza.
Most people don't even remember that the US is still in illegal wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; as well as terrorizing other brown people all over the world. Who is going to remember the Korean War when the mainstream media loops clich'es 24/7 about North Korea and Kim Jong-un: "paranoid, unpredictable, dangerous, can't feed his own people and threatening to nuke the US mainland"?
Who is going to remind the US public that Douglas MacArthur, Harry Truman, and generals Omar Bradley and Curtis LeMay were paranoid, unpredictable, and dangerous and threatened to nuke North Korea, China and Russia in the 1950's? MacArthur recommended using 30 to 50 nuclear bombs on North Korea and China. Truman publicly threatened to use the atomic bomb, and he sent nukes to the Far East so they would be available. MacArthur wanted World War 3 and would have caused nuclear humanicide if Truman had not fired him during a rare moment of sanity.
The US even practiced dropping simulated nuclear bombs from B-29 Superfortress onto North Korea. At the time the North Koreans did not know they were practice or if they were about to be nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki style. Fear and terror is the US psychological warfare weapon, and the US has not stopped threatening North Korea with nuclear bombs; in violation of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The treaty bans nuclear powers from threatening non-nuclear powers with nuclear weapons. The logic is that for a nuclear power to threaten a non-nuclear power would encouraged proliferation, and that is exactly why North Korea has developed its own nuclear deterrent.
It would be nai've for me to think that I could understand Korean politics and their culture as a tourist. However, there are some obvious tells that the South Koreans have a strong desire for reunification with the North. They mention it at every opportunity. The desire for reunification was essentially put to a referendum with the election of President Moon Jae-in earlier this year. Moon was elected on a liberal platform that included better relations between the two Koreas similar to the liberal "Sunshine Policies" that won President Kim Dae-jung the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000.
Reunification means different things to different people. For conservatives and US foreign policy neocons, reunification means a regime change in North Korea and its absorption by the South. For liberals, reunification means peacefully bettering relations, family visits and tourism, and economic and industrial cooperation; and even some day far in the future a combined federation.
Reunification is not a pipedream. Eventually it will happen because both North and South want it to happen. Naysayers who say that it is impossible need only look at how bad relations were between the US and communist China from 1949 until 1972. Once the ice was broken with a visit to China by a US ping pong team in 1971, then a year later President Nixon made a historic state visit and took the necessary steps towards formal recognition of the People's Republic of China and full diplomatic relations. Diplomacy works when the US works it. The US could be instrumental in the normalization of relations with North Korea instead of constantly putting up roadblocks. North Korea has shown much more interest in normal relations with the US and its Southern cousins than the ignorant mainstream media acknowledges.
A unified Korea would be an economic dynamo in the best interests of both North and South Korea. That raises the hair on the back of the neck of the Japanese, and they raise obstacles to Korean reunification, too. Combining North Korea's trove of natural resources and cheap labor with South Korea's dynamic economy would be a powerhouse that would be a challenge even to China.
A lot of special interests in the US, Korea, Japan and China want to prevent Korean reunification. That presents a strong challenge for strong leadership in South Korea. Nobody else is likely to give Korea independence and reunification except Koreans. That would be a hill worth Koreans fighting for, and a bridge worth them crossing.
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