Kim Jong-un: Stockings Fouled, Ungartered, and Down-Gyvèd To His Ankle !!

I was talking to someone about  Tha Thrilla North-west of Manila the other day. That is the confrontation between Trump representing the USA in the red-white-and-blue trunks and Kim representing North Korea in the faded camo undershorts.

They said that we all know that Kim was a mad man.

I said that I did not know that. I mean, I used to, but not anymore. I said that the reason was that for my entire life, the government and the media have referred to the Kim family as mad men: Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jung-un.
("They're mad, you know! Want to take over the world!" as if we were talking about a long-lived dynasty of Pinky and the Brains.)

I said that sometime around the winter of 2006 my faith in the schizophrenia in the blood of the Kims disappeared. I became a Kim-family-madmen-atheist. People looked at me funny.
I mean, when they would talk about Korea at the bar, getting together for the infrequent 30 minute North Korea Hate, they would shun me.

Ever since the end of World War II we have called the leaders of North Korea names, like crazy, nuts, mad man, boner head, etc. And they always were a little pudgy, they often wore glasses, and they dressed funny... hmmmm, I wonder....

I said that as readily as I usually accept everything the government tells me to believe, 70 years of crazy genes without any remediation, mutation, or amelioration was just too much, even for the dimmest bulb in the pack.
I mean, look at the history: oppressed by Japan since the 1920s, WW II and the rounding up of women by the Japanese Army to be prostitutes for the Japanese soldiers, the Korean War and bombing of the North as thoroughly as the bombings of Dresden or Tokyo...

Exactly which violent act drove the Kims into madness !!!!!!!!!!!!!

--

What Korea Did Was Terrible!

Sinui Island, South Korea, Salt Farm

South Korea, that is. Not North Korea.

North Korea attacks Sony, South Korea turns the other way in the face of slavery.
Obviously it is much worse to hack into the emails of film executives.

In Stars and Stripes today:

Slaves endure 'a living hell' on remote South Korean islands

By FOSTER KLUG, JUNG-YOON CHOI and KIM TONG-HYUNG
The Associated Press
Published: January 1, 2015

... Slavery thrives on this chain of rural islands off South Korea's rugged southwest coast, nurtured by a long history of exploitation and the demands of trying to squeeze a living from the sea.

Five times during the past decade, revelations of slavery involving the disabled have emerged, each time generating national shame and outrage. Kim's case prompted a nationwide government probe during the course of several months last year. Officials searched more than 38,000 salt, fish and agricultural farms and disabled facilities and found more than 100 workers who had received no — or only scant — pay, and more than 100 who had been reported missing by their families.

Yet little has changed on the islands, according to a months-long investigation by the AP based on court and police documents and dozens of interviews with freed slaves, salt farmers, villagers and officials.

Although 50 island farm owners and regional job brokers were indicted, no local police or officials have faced punishment — and national police say none will, despite multiple interviews showing some knew about the slaves and even stopped escape attempts.

Slavery has been so pervasive that regional judges have shown leniency toward several perpetrators. In suspending the prison sentences of two farmers, a court said that "such criminal activities were tolerated as common practice by a large number of salt farms nearby." ...

We still have torture, and torture trumps slavery every time.

--

Why Is North Korea So Crazy?

My extensive reading on the Manhattan Project and World War II has lead me into the peripheral area of the Korean War. I am reading this after I have read some articles on the White House pondering whom to next kill with a drone strike...

And I ponder the long term effects of barbarous wars that had an outcome different from Japan's unconditional surrender.


History News Network
George Mason University
http://hnn.us/article/67717 

Bombing Civilians: An American Tradition

[...]

The cease-fire that ended the Korean War followed a crescendo of bombing, which was then taken as proof that airpower was as decisive in limited wars as it had been in total war. The cities and towns of central and northern Korea had been leveled. In what Bruce Cumings has called the “final act of this barbaric air war,” North Korea’s main irrigation dams were destroyed in the spring of 1953, shortly after the rice had been transplanted. “The subsequent floods scooped clean 27 miles of valley below. . . . The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of [rice] has for the Asian—starvation and slow death.”   

By 1952, according to a UN estimate, one out of nine men, women, and children in North Korea had been killed. In the South, 5,000,000 people had been displaced and 100,000 children were described as unaccompanied. “The countless ruined villages are the most terrible and universal mark of the war on the Korean landscape. To wipe out cover for North Korean vehicles and personnel, hundreds of thatch-roofed houses were burned by air-dropped jellied gasoline or artillery fire,” Walter Sullivan, former New York Times Korea correspondent, reported in The Nation. J. Donald Kingsley, head of the reconstruction agency, called Korea “the most devastated land and its people the most destitute in the history of modern warfare.”   

Freda Kirchwey, in an essay for The Nation, tried to explain the general indifference of the American public to the destruction:

We were all hardened by the methods of mass-slaughter practiced first by the Germans and Japanese and then, in self-defense, adopted and developed to the pitch of perfection illustrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Western allies and, particularly, the Americans. We became accustomed to “area” bombing, “saturation” bombing, all the hideous forms of strategic air war aimed at wiping out not only military and industrial installations but whole populations. . . . A deep scar was left on the mind of Western man, and, again, particularly on the American mind, by the repression of pity and the attempt to off-load all responsibility onto the enemy.

Kirchwey thought that this repression explained the lack of protest “against the orgy of agony and destruction now in progress in Korea.” Nothing the North Koreans, Chinese, or Russians had done “excuses the terrible shambles created up and down the Korean peninsula by the American-led forces, by American planes raining down napalm and fire bombs, and by heavy land and naval artillery.” And now Korea, “blotted out in the name of collective security, blames the people who drop the fire bombs,” which might seem unfair to the military mind but was inevitable:

For a force which subordinates everything to the job of killing the enemy becomes an enemy itself. . . . And after a while plain horror displaces a sense of righteousness even among the defenders of righteousness, and thus the cause itself becomes hateful. This has happened in Korea. Soon, as we learn the facts, it will overtake us here in America.

“The American mind,” Kirchwey was certain, “mercurial and impulsive, tough and tender, is going to react against the horrors of mechanized warfare in Korea.” ,,,

--