North Korea Primer

Repost from the old site.

By now you surely have heard that North Korea has a nuclear bomb and has tested it, although the bomb appears very small, the test did not go well, and it has not yet been put on top of a missile. I am not at all worried about this bomb, though maybe I should be.

I have been studying North Korea for years, and this is the basis for my carefree attitude about their nuclear bomb. They simply are not going to use it in an aggressive manner as it is strictly for defensive purposes.

For those reasons, I actually support North Korea’s getting a bomb, as I figure they will never use it anyway (unless we are so stupid as to attack them) and it is only them having a bomb that keeps us from attacking them.

I think all sane, rational countries being threatened by nuclear powers should have the right to get WMD’s to defend themselves. Most countries in the world qualify as sane, and certainly North Korea does. All the nonsense about “crazy Kim Jong Il” is just US propaganda crap. For an example of an insane, irrational country that should never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, consider the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

I actually dislike the regime intensely, but there are positive notes amidst all the terror of the gulags and the corruption of the elite.

For one, I really feel that Kim Jong Il has been trying his best to feed his people, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of capitalist regimes in the Third World, whose governments do not make the tiniest efforts to feed anyone, as this is seen as the responsibility of the individual.

The World Bank, the IMF and the US government routinely try to attack and even destroy such governments if they try to feed their people. Jean Bertrand Aristide, for example, was overthrown at gunpoint by the US, France and Canada, in part because he was spending large sums to give millions of poor Haitians one free meal (lunch) a day.

The World Bank and the IMF usually demand that these governments scale back or terminate any government feeding programs in order to continue to get loans from these institutions.

My understanding is that the northern part of Korea has never been able to feed its people, even before the Communist regime. I suppose it has always either relied on imports from Southern Korea or China, or else, if that was not forthcoming, it simply lacked enough food. The country is very cold and mountainous with rocky soil and it is hard to get crops to grow there.

Some background on the famine: North Korea had the worst floods in 100 years in 1995 and 1996, followed by the worst drought in 100 years in 1997, which also involved famine. All this happened after the economy collapsed in 1990 with the loss of Soviet economic cooperation.

To give you an example of what was involved in this 1990 collapse, note that the price of oil immediately climbed by 1000% (10 times) in the space of a year. They simply could not purchase enough oil to run their factories and farms so the whole country pretty much shut down.

For those enamored of the theory that Communist states like Cuba and North Korea can only be maintained by massive aid from outside to “keep them afloat”, we should note that from 1946-1960, South Korea received 4 times the aid to South Korea as the Soviet Union was giving to North Korea. For most of the 1950′s, the US provided 50% of the entire budget of South Korea. Which state is the welfare case, anyway?

The US has been deliberately trying to destroy their economy from Day One so we should talk about their economic problems. Right now, we are trying to cut off the regime from the entire world banking system. This means that factories that make consumer goods have been unable to import the materials necessary to make those products.

During the starvation crisis of the 90′s, my perception is that the world did not exactly step up to the plate for avert the crisis. The US continued embargoing North Korea, as they have since 1950, and as they did during the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-1962 in which 15 million Chinese died while the US scurried to block all food aid.

The embargo has recently been strengthened in an effort to cut off the North from the world financial system. The US and other nations played politics with the food aid during the famine, a disgusting display of cynical Realpolitik in my opinion.

Regarding the number of deaths in the famine, anti-North Korean polemicists claim that 3-4 million people died. Fine, they can claim that all they want but they need to prove it. The Asian Development Bank says that 500,000 died*. Others put the figure at 600,000.

It was a terrifying, nightmarish time and the horror stories from the era seem for the most part to be true.

It is useful to note that even at the worst of the starvation in the 1990′s, the rate and degree of infant mortality, starvation and malnutrition per 1000 people only began to approach, but did not reach or surpass, the same rate as India experiences day in, day out, every single year, including this one.

So, what happened in North Korea from 1995-1997 has continued to occur on a greater scale and to the same degree every year since then in India. So how come we don’t hear how India starves its people? It should be noted that the regime has not been able to feed its people for the last 10 years and 40% of the youngest generation are stunted from malnutrition.

North Korea has liberated women to a radical degree – there are more college-educated women than men. The regime does an excellent job of taking care of orphans (especially) and children in general.

There are many orphans. – 30% of the population of North Korea was killed in the war, mostly by US carpet bombing, often with napalm, that was frankly terrorist warfare – a devastation comparable in degree to those experienced by Poles, Russians and World Jewry in World War 2.

The US, under Curtis LeMay, destroyed just about every city and town in North Korea, often with blatant napalming of entire cities. When napalm was invented in 1945, no one imagined that it would be used wholesale against entire cities.

As early as 1952, almost every civilian in North Korea was living in either a cave or a tunnel. There are still a huge number of orphans – if you meet North Koreans, you will find that almost everyone lost at least one relative in the war.

North Korea has excellent in the treatment of the handicapped – sending them to the many special schools and programs that are set up for them, finding employment for them and making special efforts to find them marriage partners.

As with the orphans, there are many handicapped, mostly due to the devastating war, and the North Korean people treat the handicapped with a kindness and deference that would surprise most residents of the capitalist dog-eat-dog West.

North Korea has truly free housing and practices preventive medicine on a comparatively high level. Prostitution is a memory and it is impossible to bribe a cop. North Koreans had a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality than South Korea until 1980, and until the tragedies of the 1990′s, North Korea’s rates of these 2 indexes were on a par with advanced industrialized states.

North Korea had higher per capita growth rates than South Korea for decades until the 1980′s. By 1980, visitors riding trains from North Korea to China were shocked at how much better off North Korea seemed to be than China. North Korea’s rural areas were neat and well-built up, with well-maintained farm machinery in ample supply. In contrast, China, both cities and countryside, appeared squalid.

Since then, the system has foundered. It is not so much that the system itself is a completely failed model as capitalist propagandists assert but that it is a limited model. That is, you can get superb economic growth in both agriculture and industry for decades under Communism (the experience of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China are instructive).

But after decades of growth, the system seems to reach a law of diminishing returns and also bogs down into bureaucracy. North Korea has now significantly liberalized their economy to the point where it is not really a totally Communist economy (certainly not a “Stalinist” system – North Korea’s model never really resembled Stalin’s USSR anyway) at all anymore.

A lot of the enterprises are virtually being run by workers themselves and the cities are crowded with farmers markets and stands for small entrepreneurs.

Nevertheless, many of the horror stories you hear about North Korea’s gulags are probably true. Still, there is a problem with these stories. It is now acknowledged that most information from North Korean defectors is pretty much useless. Sometimes they have good information if you can get to them before South Korean intelligence does. After that, they are about useless.

Defectors’ stories are most valuable for telling us what life is like in their immediate surroundings. Few top-level defectors have left North Korea over the lifespan of the regime, so our understanding of the inner workings of the regime is limited.

The notion that North Korea would give their nuclear weapon to terrorists, or God forbid Al Qaeda, regularly heard in the US media, nearly qualifies as a paranoid delusion. The whole notion of “giving a nuke to terrorists” which Americans have been hammered with nonstop since 9-11 is sort of silly and fantastical anyway.

To look into this requires a brief primer on nuclear weapons. I am not an expert, but here goes.

For starters, let us look at the nonsense about the suitcase nukes. A modern nuclear weapon, as I understand it, is about as big as a very small car – say a Volkswagen beetle or an electric car. If you put it in your living room, it takes up a good part of the room. You can put it in a large truck, but a suitcase!? Come on.

Furthermore, most modern-day nuclear weapons are either launched from a missile of dropped from a bomber. A common misconception is that a nuke is detonated on impact. You could put a nuke in a truck and drive it into a building 100 mph, drop it from a plane, shoot it on a missile, set it on fire, or even attack it with another nuclear weapon, and none of that will detonate it.

The only way to detonate a nuclear weapon is to fire a detonator at the atomic core inside the nuke. In modern nuclear weapons, the detonator is a very large precision instrument located inside the nuke itself. It must be fired just right, with mathematical precision down to fractions of a second and many other variables lined up perfectly.

This a process that is enormously difficult, and large states with huge budgets and legions of physicists have had a very hard time doing it, with the project often taking years or decades, and many projects ending in failure. The notion that terrorists living in Afghan caves can make one of these weapons, smuggle it into the US and detonate it is hysterical.

It is testament to the ignorance or duplicity of the US media and politicians that such scenarios resonate across our land to terrify a public that is uneducated about these complex matters.

Another notion, constantly parried about on the “Terror Channels” of the US media, is that Kim Jong Il wants to attack South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, or especially the US, with his nasty nukes. I don’t believe this. The relationship between the South and the North is enormously complex, but the South (and especially its US patron) threatens the North as much as vice versa.

I do not think a North Korean goal is an unprovoked attack against South Korea, and certainly not Japan or, ludicrously, Taiwan. Any North Korean attack on an US target, forget the US mainland, would be met with such a devastating response that North Korea would be history. A Northern attack on the South would be similarly suicidal.

The North has not spent 40 years rebuilding its land from the total devastation of the war to blow it all on a suicidal war of aggression. On the contrary, I think that North Korea would eventually would like to reunify the South and the North. The South Korean population seems to agree, as 80% oppose the US’ belligerent stance towards the North.

I am not sure why the US media, which resembles a Halloween haunted house attraction meant to scare your pants off for sheer entertainment, is always trying to keep us terrified of dubious threats. Unless they just want to keep us chronically terrified for other ulterior motives.

If anyone should be afraid of anyone, the North should be afraid of the US. We are still officially at war with them, as we never signed an armistice. The US holds regular war games with the South aimed at North Korea. Plans to attack and wipe out the regime are being constantly updated, the most recent of which is frightening in its attention to trivial detail and baseless optimism about success.

37,000 US troops at 100 installations dot the South Korean landscape. The largest US bombing range in Asia is the scene of bombing practice 5 days a week, year-round. The US stationed nuclear weapons in South Korea for decades, menacing the North. Those are gone, but they have been replaced by nuclear-armed ships and planes that the US surrounds the North with.

On January 8, 2002, three weeks prior to the declaration of the Axis of Evil, George Bush presented a “Nuclear Posture Review” to Congress, ordering the Pentagon to prepare contingency plans for nuclear attack on Iran, Iraq and North Korea, in addition to the non-Axis states of Syria, Libya, Russia and China.

From their point of view, the North is mystified at why we vilify them. They see themselves as opposing the apparently illegal division of their country (engineered by the US) from the start.

They are angered at being blamed for starting a war that they see as a civil war between a minority of collaborators with the Japanese who occupied their land (those Koreans supporting South Korea) and the majority of Koreans (those Koreans supporting North Korea). They are proud that they held off the US and its UN allies during the war.

For these acts, which they see as heroic, they feel they have been unfairly tagged as “hostile nation”.

A couple of new books** have come out in the past couple of years advocating attack on North Korea. The nonsense about the North’s petty nuke that reverberates from the media machine is downright frightening. For those who wish to hear an antidote to the insane drumbeat of warmongering hostility against North Korea, consider this a beginning primer.

References

Meredith Woo-Cummings, The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons, Asian Dev. Bank Inst., Tokyo, 2001

Jasper Becker, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 300 pp., and Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004. 868 pp.

The North Korean Mess

Here.

Man goes to North Korea and interviews his North Korean tour guides about what is happening there. They are surprisingly intelligent and well informed.

First of all, I would like to say that I support North Korea 100% in their confrontation with the US. However, they are not going to shoot a nuke at us. What is bothering them is the yearly, in this case highly aggressive, war games that the US is playing South Korea right now. This always sets the north off. We really ought to stop these belligerent war games and quit antagonizing them.

North Korea is not going to start any kind of war with anyone and they are not going to shoot any missiles, nuclear or otherwise, at anyone. So we might as well calm down. But the response of Obama, to send B-1 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons to fly up and down the South Korean peninsula, was an extreme provocation. There was no need for this.

Why did the North Koreans build nuclear weapons? Because the lesson they learned after Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan is that countries without nuclear weapons tend to get attacked by the United Snakes. This lesson was absolutely correct.

The US has been threatening to attack North Korea ever since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The US presently has an incredible 1,000 nuclear weapons in South Korea now, including nuclear artillery, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombers and nuclear mines. The US has had these nuclear weapons in South Korea for decades, and they have been threatening to attack the North with them all this time. Under nuclear control treaties, all nations being threatened with nuclear weapons have a right to develop nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Therefore, the North has a right to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent against constant nuclear threats by the US. This is right and proper.

How many nukes does the North have? At the moment, they may have around 3 working nuclear weapons, however, they have enough material for more. And thankfully, they have just started up some of their nuclear reactors so they can make more fissile material and hopefully more bombs. The bombs seem to be small, and the general theory is that they are around 1/3 the size of a Hiroshima bomb. They are apparently plutonium bombs and not uranium bombs. Keep in mind that the North also wishes to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes and they have that right under nuclear treaties.

The north also has missiles, but they don’t work very well. They often fall apart in mid-air. Their longest range missile can hit the eastern part of Alaska. The north has no missiles that can reach the US mainland. Missile technology is however rapidly improving.

The most important thing that we do not know is whether the north has mastered the technique of putting a nuclear warhead on a missile in such a way such that it can be detonated. You need a detonation device to do this and it must be accurate down to the thousands of a second. If you don’t get it right, you will shoot your nuke, and it won’t even blow up. Getting this detonation device correct is maddeningly difficult for any nation. However, with this latest underground test, observers feel that the north may have an operational warhead.

The US embargoes the North, and now the whole world has leveled sanctions on the North via the UN, which is just a tool of US imperialism anymore (I strongly supported the Iraqi resistance car bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in the early days of the Resistance.). These sanctions have been strengthened three times now.

These are “dual use sanctions” of the sort that completely devastated Iraq, murdering 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, via the US and the UK sanctions. Remember how utterly devastated the Iraqi economy was due to dual use sanctions, especially Iraqi medical care? Iraq didn’t have a Communist government, and the sanctions ruined them. These sanctions will destroy the economy of any state.

Under the dual use rubric, most medical supplies and drugs coming into the North are banned under sanctions rules. This is the same mess that devastated Iraqi medicine and the water supply. North Korean medicine has been completely devastated by these dual use sanctions.

In addition, the sanctions mean that most countries have to decide if they are going to trade with North Korea or they are going to trade with the rest of the world. That is because the sanctions also apply to any nation trading with North Korea. The US threatens and punishes any nation who tries to trade with North Korea. Most of the world has decided to trade with the rest of the world instead of trading with North Korea alone, so the North is completely isolated. Almost all of their trade is with China alone.

It is true that agriculture has collapsed, but North Korea fed themselves just fine for 40 years under the same collective agriculture. Soviets ate very well under collective ag until 1991. Cubans eat just fine under a system of collective agriculture. So it’s dubious that collective agriculture can be blamed for North Korea’s food problems.

The US has repeatedly withheld food aid to North Korea, and then they scream that people are harmed or killed by malnutrition. So the US is basically deliberately starving North Koreans to death. In addition, the US bullies and threatens any other country or group who tries to provide food aid to the North. The US’ reason for withholding food aid to the North is that most of it is diverted to the military, but this is not true, and at any rate, the military has to eat too, and obviously they get first priority.

The US under Democratic and Republican Presidents has torn up every agreement that they ever signed with the North. Clinton demanded that the North stop developing nukes in return for providing them with a light water reactor. The reactor was never forthcoming because Clinton was trying to make the regime collapse. Along the same lines, sanctions and suspension of food aid are all intended to cause the collapse of the North Korean regime. It hasn’t happened.

The North’s position is completely reasonable, and I support them 100% in their resolve to stand up to US aggression.

That Long Newspaper Spoon

Repost from the old site.

Let’s see what’s on the end of that long newspaper spoon… William Burroughs, “Naked Lunch” (1959).

This book really ought to be mandatory reading for all second graders, by the way.

On the end of that long newspaper spoon? A mean gruel and lies, cons and mind-heists.

Let us look at a few recent topics: How I Helped Moved a Factory To Mexico, from Business Week, actually a pretty good business publication. This article goes to show you the sheer insanity of the US government. Sure, global forces often more or less mandate taking plants out of the country.

The factory in the US closes, and $18/hour workers lose their jobs. The jobs go to Mexico, where the same work pays $3/hour, including benefits. Since $3/hour is not nearly as good as $18/hour, the flood from Mexico to the US continues.

Almost no one in Mexico is starving. As an illegal alien farm worker from Oaxaca told me over drinks at the bar about Oaxaca, “Comida, si. Dinero, no.” In Oaxaca, there is plenty of food, but no money. So everyone heads up here. Why, cuz they are starving? No, so they can buy 27 inch color TV sets.

US workers lose when US jobs are shipped overseas, then lose once again with the mad, lunatic illegal alien invasion that is ruining US working class jobs all over our nation. We have been shipping jobs to Mexico wildly since NAFTA in 1994.

One would think that this flood of jobs to Mexico would have resulted in a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration, but in fact, 1994 approximately coincides with a total explosion in the illegal immigrant tsunami to the US.

After NAFTA, workers and consumers in the US, Mexico and Canada all lost ground. Got that? Workers in Mexico, the US and Canada all got screwed by NAFTA. Some say they never made it up since either. Only business cleaned up, and only some businesses at that.

All free trade agreements between disparate nations, that I can tell, are going to have the exact same effects as NAFTA. Probably all free trade agreements that the US has negotiated since NAFTA have had similar effects, probably on a smaller scale.

Workers, consumers and public all get screwed. The environment takes a massive hit. Crappy Mexican trucks flood our highways and destroy them. All free trade agreements are always sold with the same load of crap that NAFTA was, as benefiting workers, consumers, the public, and hell, even the environment, why not?

Nearly the entire US media, from top to bottom, is in on this lie, and if you only read the MSM, you will never figure out the con. Workers, consumers, the public, the environment, and lots of small businesses get screwed by NAFTA-bullshit, and on top of that, we get an avalanche of illegal aliens.

Wow, what a deal! Hail NAFTA! Hail free trade!

File under lies, lies, and more lies: As reasonable folks may have guessed, Business Week (once again, heads up to a good capitalist magazine) columnist Ed Wallace informs us that there is no gas shortage. No gas shortage, no oil shortage, no nothing like that.

Has the media ever told us that? No. Have the politicians ever told us that? No. What do the media and pols tell us? That there is a gas and oil shortage! Why is there a gas and oil shortage? Oh, so many things! Especially, rising demand in China and India! Oh, but what a load of crap that is!

We are also told that we are somewhere near Peak Oil (but no one knows when that hits or what it even means) and this is the cause of the problem. Forget it. Peak oil implies a supply-demand equation, and no such mathematics is working like that here.

The cheerleaders for capitalism tell us that one of the great things about capitalism is supply and demand. It is true that this is an excellent way of fixing prices, and it is possible that socialist economies ignore this at the risk of their extinction. But oil prices have nothing to do with supply and demand! Nothing!

The fundamentals of the oil and gas market are exactly the same as when oil was $60/barrel back in 2006. Whether the market can go back to the $20/barrel in 2002 is not known; possibly it cannot. Check out this great, prophetic Tom Friedman column from that year wondering if the Iraq War will shoot oil to the horror of $60/barrel.

But as far as supply and demand go, oil ought to be no more than $60/barrel and I assume that gas should be no more than $2/gallon or so. So why is it $120/barrel instead of $60?

Because capitalism doesn’t necessarily work on supply and demand. The rest is just sheer speculation. Traders are pulling their money out of the sinking dollar and plunking it right into oil and other commodities, and it’s sure been a nice ride all right. Just a bunch of speculators bidding the price up like crazed buyers at an auction; that’s all it is. That’s the cause of your $4/gallon gas.

Oil reserves are at their highest levels since 1999. Gasoline reserves are at their highest levels since 1993 (!) But surely demand is rising, China and India and all that? Nope, demand has been falling all year now and will probably fall even into the summer.

On the other hand, oil refineries are not necessarily doing that well at all, at least according to them. They are getting killed by high oil prices on the one hand and low gasoline demand on the other. In order to make a decent profit, refineries have deliberately cut back oil production. The purpose of running the refineries at low speed is to push up the price of gas even further.

Distillates such as airline fuel and diesel have seen their prices so through the roof, and there are shortages of these, but they are deliberately created by the industry. If there were, why are we exporting more distillates than we are importing. Not only that, but imports of distillates have crashed by some 40% in a year.

It would seem that in all of this insanity something like a National Industrial Policy would be called for. For decades, countries South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and now China, not to mention most of Western Europe, have done just that.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that capitalism with no government (free market neoliberalism) is an orchestra of great musicians with no composer. At some point, it’s the economic equivalent to an insane asylum or an elementary school playground.

We can also see that that all of the feverish nostrums peddled by the politico-media Lying Classes are loads of garbage? We need to fly to Saudi Arabia and beg the Saudis to turn up the oil spigots! We need to drill in the Arctic!

We need to drill everywhere, off the beach next to your house! We need to get rid of environmental regulations and taxes that make gas so expensive! And last but not least, the favorite of right-wing liars everywhere, we need more refineries!

We do not really need any of these things, at least at the moment. The oil refineries lie is one of the most evil of them all. It is probably peddled by the stinking garbage in human forms that run the oil industry itself.

The line goes like this:

-Oil is high!
-Why is it high?
-Hardly any new refineries since (insert year)!
-Why not?
-Evil environmentalists! Evil regulations! They’ve made it impossible to build new refineries!
-(sputtering) Bastard environmentalists and regulators! Get rid of them so we can build more refineries!
-Yes, yes, yes!

The thing is, this whole line is just an incredibly devious lie peddled by Oil Company Scum and their gargoyle allies in government and media and rightwing politics. No regulations have gotten in the way of building any new refineries in the US.

The industry itself has flat out refused to build new oil refineries in the US because industry does not want to create more refinery supply. Low numbers of refineries are good for keeping gas supply low and prices high. The conversational ruse above is designed to get rid of existing environmental and other regulations at existing plants.

This ethanol mandate crap is about to do the same thing to food prices. My advice if you are worried about your money to put it into food stockpiles, preferably non-perishable. Food is going to go up in value quite a bit soon – it is already – and it is not going to be pretty.

It’s looking ugly and it’s going to get uglier. We socialists have in general done a superb job of feeding people and a way better job of feeding people than capitalism has (despite the Mt. Everest of capitalist lies about how socialism starves people) and hopefully a hungrier world will find more socialist-oriented policies are better for filling the belly.

My bullshit detector was screaming the other day when Yahoo Headlines shouted in my ear that Congress was going to be briefed on how evil North Korea was helping wicked Syria build a diabolical nuclear reactor.

I remember well when Israel bombed the plant in question.

I looked into the story extensively at the time and my conclusion was that Syria was building a chemical weapons plant, not a nuclear reactor plant, at the site. The North Koreans are experts at chemical weapons stuff and the Scud missiles to shoot them with, and that was apparently why they were there.

Now there is reportedly a new video showing that evil Syria was just about this far (index and thumb nearly touching) from building a devilish nuclear power plant, to build nuclear bombs with, to load on missiles, to shoot at Israel, to kill all the Jews!

To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews!

Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2.

This is obviously a Jewish media cabal influenced article, and all such articles include the Holocaust Porn fetish typical of most Jews nowadays.

The Holocaust traumatized them, but they’d already predicted it for millenia, and it had already been attempted over and over according to them, because Jews really do love to believe that their enemies have been trying to exterminate them all from day one!

The whole history of the Jews, according to them, is Jews fending off mad Final Solution attempts by Persia-Nazis or Roman-Nazis, or Russian-Nazis, or Arab-Nazis, or This-Nazis or That-Nazis.

You can’t understand the Jew until you get to the Holocaust Porn thing. It’s not just his own death; that’s bad enough. The baddies are never going to be satisfied with one Jew. They are going to do every single last one of them.

Understanding this helps shed light on phenomena like Zionism: Go Nazi ourselves, steal some land, arm to the teeth with nukes, and dare the anti-Semites to wipe us out.

How bout Iran? Does Ahmadinejad want to kill one Jew? Course not. He wants to kill them all.

Does the PLO and Hamas just want to kill a Jew here and there for sport? Nope, they want to “destroy Israel” = code for kill all the Jews.

Why do Jews need to go to Israel? Because evil whatever-Nazis in the Diaspora are getting ready to kill all the Diaspora Jews.

For Chrissake man, it’s porn! It’s Holocaust Porn! It’s a fetish already. How else to explain the absolutely sickening and clearly unhealthy Jewish obsession with the horrors of the Holocaust. Holocaust museums, coming soon to a city near you. Holocaust Museum, my Jewish girlfriend took me to visit her very own, this was an essential part of our romance.

What’s a Jew reading these days? Oh, a Holocaust novel. Or maybe some non-fiction, surely with a Holocaust twist somewhere in there. Hollywood has a Holocaust hardon . Seems every year there’s more and more Shoah tales.

I do not have enough information yet to look into the North Korean – Syria reactor thing yet, but I have studied Syria’s nuclear program in the past. My take was that Syria has been working on a nuclear program for about 25 years now but has made little headway due to shortages of money, technology, brains, etc.

This is actually quite common; many smaller countries have similar nuclear projects in the ruts. People just do not get it. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was any nuclear program. They require a highly developed economy and always take years and often take decades to even get going.

Even when they do, there is one problem after another. The super brains like A. Q. Khan of Pakistan are few and far between, and he’s under house arrest.

So let us say I am somewhat skeptical that Syria was about “this close” to building a nuclear weapon.

Questions of Meritocracy under Capitalism and Socialism

Galton, an HBD type, writes:

First, there is nothing wrong with inequality, join in the same country a population heterogeneously cognitive and you will never be able to achieve equality and social justice, really.

You do not really know what you’re saying, Chile seems a great country, much better than mine, Brazil. Venezuela and Brazil believe in education, but it does not work miracles. If you have a population stupid not believe that with education they will become intelligent or politicized. Education can polish a rough diamond, but never an ordinary stone.

Socialism, Trotskyite style, is the death of meritocracy and all its qualities.

This is a socialist blog. We don’t believe in extremes of inequality such as you see in Chile, Brazil and the US. It’s just wrong! And inequality is actually a catastrophe. It’s bad for society in countless ways. It’s even bad for the individual on the medical health level.

The truth is that there are no Trotskyite projects happening in any nation anywhere on Earth. There aren’t even many Soviet-style Marxist programs. That project had so many problems that the truth is that no one wants to copy that model anymore. And that’s what my Leftist, Marxist-sympathetic friends tell me.

Even Cuba,which has copied the Soviet model, has a model that no one wants to copy anymore. Cuba itself is probably going to copy the Vietnamese doi moi market socialism model. The Cuban project as it stands has not been able to overcome the problems of the Soviet model “We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us.” Overcrowded housing with a huge backlog. Shortages in state stores. Lousy state products. Low productivity on state farms. Mass theft from state institutions.

North Korea has removed all statues of Marx and Lenin. Market socialism is alive and well in Vietnam and Laos.

So the specter of Marxism is basically an idiotic boogeyman raised by the Right.

The modern socialist projects look a lot like what is happening with the Leftist governments in Latin America who are instituting a variety of Leftist and socialist type projects. These are occurring in Cuba,Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. There is talk of one in Peru, but it may not materialize. Leftist projects were overthrown by US-backed coups in Paraguay and Honduras.

I never liked the socialist model whereby a doctor doesn’t make much more than a ditch-digger. Why go to school for all those years to be a doctor then. Under a proper socialist society, I think there should be a graded pay scale, say 1-8

Let us say that Scale 1 is the minimum wage in the US of 14,250 year.

Grade 1 (lowest level workers): $14,250/year.

Grade 3 (Bachelors Degree) $42,750/year.

Grade 4 (highly skilled blue collar workers such as mechanics, tool and die, welders, plumbers, electricians) $ $57,000/year.

Grade 6 (Master’s Degree or Secondary Degree like Teaching Credential) – $85,500/year.

Grade 10 (highest level workers at the doctorate level – physicians, professors, vets, pharmacists, professors, physical therapists, dentists) – $142,000/year.

There is your meritocracy right there. Education = IQ. I don’t see why society should pay you a whole lot more than that Grade 10 though. Why should we?

Now, if we allow a market to exist, maybe you could go try your hand in the market and see what you can make. Despite the nonsense of free market idiots, successful businessmen are not necessarily the best and brightest at all, and many only have average IQ’s.

There’s nothing meritocratic about capitalism in the market sense as far as entrepreneurs go. Sure, a few inventors get rich, and now there is a “brains capitalism” whereby smart, nerdy types set up companies, often in IT and the like, using the cognitive talents to make money as entrepreneurs.

But businessmen in general all down through history have simply had good people smarts, a lot of ruthlessness, extroversion and mostly a lot of luck. Capitalism is hardly a meritocracy!

Anyway, states like China, the USSR and Cuba did have relatively equalized wages without great differentials for persons of radically different intelligences, so it’s certainly possible to set up a society on that basis.

join in the same country a population heterogeneously cognitive and you will never be able to achieve equality and social justice, really.

So the comment above is just not correct.

History’s Forgotten: Mao Anying

A rarely seen photo of Mao and his martyred son,. Anying.

Mao Anying was the first son of Mao Zedong and his martyred widow, Yang Kaihui. Yang along with Anying was captured by the Kuomintang in 1930 and interrogated. She resisted all interrogation and instead said she would proudly go to her death. Young Anying was only 7 years old when he was forced to watch as his Kuomintang captors executed his own mother.

Anying’s life between that moment and 1950 is little known, but it is known that he spent time in the USSR. Anying and his younger brother fought against Nazi Germany in the Soviet Army in an act of international solidarity and heroism.

In the Korean War, when the Chinese troops flooded across the Yalu River (this was the proper thing for them to do actually) as the UN forces neared, the war was turned completely around. Anying volunteered for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Leading party officials were concerned because he was Mao’s son. Mao supported his son’s patriotic enlistment in the military. “He is, after all, my son,” Mao said.

One month after the Chinese invasion, Anying and others were holed up in caves near the Chinese military headquarters. They were under constant UN bombardment, but the caves provided good protection. One day, Anying and others left the caves to go to a nearby farmhouse to cook lunch in violation of PLA regulations. A UN bomber targeted the farmhouse with a bomb and Anying was killed.

When Mao got the news, he was shaken up and was silent for a long time. Finally, he spoke, “In war, there are sacrifices.”

Mao Anying, revolutionary hero.

The Ugliest Woman in the World

Interesting story about about Lizzie Velasquez, a woman who has a terrible and rare genetic disorder that effects her adipose tissue. Only two people in the US have this condition, which she was born with. At one point, the illness caused her to go blind in one eye. It was also disfigured her to a large degree and it makes her look pretty homely.

A short 9 second video of her called The Ugliest Woman on Earth was made a while back and became a hit on Youtube. The comments were filled with all sorts of nasty remarks, many advising her to kill herself. She read through all the comments, though it was quite a painful exercise.

Then she decided to fight fire with fire, made her own video channel and decided to go public. She also authored a book and wants to become a motivational speaker.

In this video, she talks about bullying, which she has had to experience a lot of. Now it is mostly stares when she goes out, but when she was growing up, she was treated very cruelly by other kids in school. Even now there are whole websites devoted to bashing her and ridiculing her. There are a lot of folks involved in hating on her. They are mostly kids, but there are a number of adults in on it too.

I hope that if I knew her, I could be her friend and be a good friend to her. She seems like a pretty cool person, and I bet she would be a good friend.

It really all boils down to what kind of a society you have. This is one reason I am a socialist.

I remember a Bruce Cummings article about North Korea. He spoke about a man who was badly burned over much of his body by US bombs in the Korean War. The wounds gave him an ugly, monstrous and horrific appearance. There are many North Koreans with war wounds derived from the Americans like this man.

Cummings once accompanied this man around town. He said once they were in an elevator and a South Korean man completely freaked out upon being stuck in the elevator with the wounded man, treating like he was some kind of a circus freak who might contaminate him. He could hardly wait to get away from the burned man.

But Cummings said that everywhere they went, all North Koreans were very kind to him and treated him like he was a normal person, even doting on him. The burned man told Cummings that South Koreans always freaked out when they saw him, and his fellow North Koreans were always very good to him.

Cummings chalked this up to the different set of values fostered in Communist North Korea as opposed to the super capitalist South.

Is There Anything Good About North Korea?

Steve wants to know if there is anything good about North Korea.

If there are good things in north Korea, I would like to hear about them. I just heard about scarce food, electricity and petrol, a crippled economy and a brainwashed, repressed population. Sounds like a God awful place to live. Give me South Korea any day- highly developed and free.

As a general rule, if the state has any extra money at all, it goes to the workers and the ordinary people to better their lives. People only work 6 hours a day in Pyongyang, and there are no food shortages in Pyongyang. Workers are treated with respect, kindness and dignity, unlike almost everywhere in the capitalist world, where workers are treated with extreme contempt and society is organized around a “Fuck the workers!” capitalist mindset. Everyone has a place to live and nice clothes to wear.

The suicide rate is almost zero, lower than just about any other state on Earth. This is probably the most amazing statistic of all, the very low suicide rate. There is so much insecurity in a capitalist system, and in neoliberal capitalism, the insecurity is extreme.

A friend of mine recently lost her house. She had not prepared for it beforehand, and she left at a moment’s notice as they were getting ready to sell her house. She left almost all of her possessions that she had worked a whole life to obtain behind in the house. All that stuff is now someone else’s property.

She was extremely depressed for a long time due to not being able to find a job. No one would take her in even after months of looking. She finally found someone at the very last minute who would take her in, but she had to drive 1,500 miles to get there.

A lot of other folks are not so lucky. Some of my friends are homeless as we speak and others have been homeless in the past. A friend of mine who had their house foreclosed on recently attempted suicide but failed.

In a socialist society, no one is ever going to throw you out of your house and make you homeless. You’re never going to lose every possession you ever owned because you can’t pay to move it form one place to the next. You’re never not going to be able to find a job, and even if so, the state will give you enough money to get by anyway.

It’s probably the freedom from having these life-shattering worries that explains North Korea’s shockingly low suicide rate.

Housing in the rural areas is excellent, in comparison with most 3rd world rural areas, where housing is terrible. Education is free through the graduate level. Many ordinary party cadres that you meet if you take a real tour of the country are absolutely dedicated to serving the people. How many other political party officials anywhere on Earth have as their dominant ethos, “Serve the people?” Virtually none.

The state just build a very nice Disney-style amusement park in Pyongyang that is cheap enough that any ordinary worker can easily go visit there.

There is actually quite a bit of capitalism creeping in, such the farmer’s markets and swap meet style markets all over the country. You can buy DVD’s from South Korea and the West in an underground market right underneath one of the most official buildings in Pyongyang.

In the north, there is a Gold Rush boom, and the people taking advantage of it are generally capitalist-minded. Small “firms” are springing up to mine the gold. The state knows about them and you have to cut the state in X amount of gold, then you get to keep the rest. There are also a lot of freelancers up there just mining gold on their own.

The crime rate is about zero, and a woman can walk around the streets of Pyongyang at 3 AM without having to worry about a thing.

Day care is free and taken care of by the state. It’s open 24 hours a day. Workers just drop their kids off and go to work. That’s totally cool!

Society is not based on fuck the workers as hard as you can and workers are the enemy and give as much of society’s income to the rich and the corporations, and take as much as you can from the workers, which is the way most of the rest of the world is set up.

On the downside, there is a lot of poverty in the rural areas, the roads are falling apart, even in Pyongyang, medical services have been crippled, the prison camp system is horrific and the brainwashing is nutty.

To tell the truth though, most of problems are due to sanctions. There are “dual use sanctions” in place against North Korea due to the nuclear program. These sanctions were put in place by the US. These sanctions are the same sanctions that utterly ruined the economy of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (remember that)? The economic situation in North Korea is very similar to that of Saddam’s Iraq under sanctions.

They are also locked out of the world banking system and many states either refuse to trade with them or are banned from trading with them under sanctions rules. The US has been embargoing them since 1945, 66 years. Juche sprang up for a reason, you know.

North Korea’s economy was as good or better than the South’s until 1980. Since then, they have been falling behind.

Two Movies About North Korea

This one is made by the North Korean government. Very interesting and well done.

This one is a bit boring. All in Korean. Kim Jong Il and his son visit a new apartment complex that is very modern and well built on the outside. On the inside, it also looks modern and well-done from a 1st World point of view. Pretty nice to get a guaranteed apartment that you will never be thrown out of for any reason as long as you work and don’t break the law! That’s one great thing about Communism – a guaranteed roof over your head. Got to love it.

We all know about the horrors of the North Korean regime. In particular, the prison camp system is a catastrophe from a human rights POV.But I really tire of the endless anti-North Korean “hate propaganda” in the form of videos, documentaries and news stories that we get fed in the West. We know the story! We’ve heard it a thousand times! Do you think we could hear the other side of the story for once?

But things do seem to be opening up. There are now 1 million cellphones in the country and the government can no longer control information so well so that with the launch and failure of the latest rocket, the government admitted the failure of the rocket since they figured people would find out about it anyway.

The place needs to be a lot more open. North Korea spent $1 billion on the rocket and they will spend $2 billion on Kim Jong Il’s funeral celebration. Supposedly North Korea can cure its food crisis for the next few years by spending only $1 billion. Why not cut the celebration spending in half – $2 billion instead of $1 billion, and solve your food problems for a few years? Any decent Communist country would put basic food supply above rockets and especially state celebrations.

So you can see why so many of us on the Left are exasperated with North Korea.

The Great Satan Versus The Axis of Evil

In wars between the Great Satan and the Axis of Evil, who do you support?

The first GS-AOE war was the Iraq War in 2003. In that war, of course I could only support the Iraqi people who fought the invaders alongside their leader Saddam Hussein. Although Hussein was a monster, it should be obvious to anyone that Iraq was much better off under his rule. In recent years, Saddam had been killing ~1,500 people per year, usually by torturing them to death. That’s about 4 people a day.

However, since then, 1.4 million Iraqis have died due to the war that the Great Satan started with help from the Little Satan (Israel) who helped gin up the case for war. That’s about 500 a day. Every day, 125 times more Iraqis died than would have under Saddam. If Saddam had stayed in power and there had been no major internal strife, he would have killed 12,000 in the past 8 years.

Now, if you were an Iraqi, which one would you rather take? 12,000 dead over 8 years or 1.4 million dead over 8 years? If I’m an Iraqi, I want to stay alive. I want my relatives and friends to stay alive. The better chance I have of staying alive, the more I support that system. Getting rid of Saddam hasn’t done one bit of good for Iraq. Instead, Iraq has been completely destroyed by our Nazi-like war of aggression. In addition, much of the surrounding region has been destabilized.

Now, if the Iraqi people themselves want to rise up and start a civil war to get rid of Saddam, that’s their own prerogative. If people die, people die. People have a right to self-determination and to decide their own destiny. If they want to have a civil war to overthrow a government or for whatever reason, that’s up to them. But Nazi-like wars of aggression to “liberate” people? No.

Now the Great Satan and the Little Satan are ginning up another war, this one with Iran. In that case, I would always support the Axis of Evil, Iran. That’s the only progressive thing to do.

In the case of the Great Satan versus another partner of the Axis of Evil, North Korea, we would have to support North Korea.

This assumes that the Great Satan would attack the Axis of Evil and not the other way around. This would always be the case. None of these countries are crazy enough to attack the US.

The Survival of North Korea

Here.

Nice and actually sane review of a book called The Survival of North Korea in Foreign Policy in Focus. They are one of the few sane American groups writing about foreign policy. As the review points out, legions of idiots have been predicting the oncoming doom of the North Korean regime for the past 20 years. They’ve all been wrong, over and over. Various US Administrations have also been predicting the looming demise of North Korea. The Bush Administration actually had a policy designed to make the regime collapse.

There is one thing I would like to say.

Yes, there is malnutrition in North Korea. At its worst, it was at the exact same level as India’s malnutrition and starvation is year in and year out. You never heard that in the capitalist press, now did you?

If North Korea’s food problems are evidence of the failure of Communism (despite the fact the Communist nations generally did an excellent job of providing basic caloric intake for their citizens), then why is the capitalist world’s chronic malnutrition and starvation crisis (capitalism starves 14 million humans to death every year, mostly in South Asia) not evidence of the failure of capitalism?

But one thing makes me absolutely sick. And that is that the US, the West and South Korea have been playing politics with food aid to North Korea. At the same time that the West is screaming that North Korea is starving its people (A lie – the regime is not deliberately starving its people – there is just not enough to go around), the West is cruelly withholding food aid to the nation, frankly killing and sickening North Koreans. What bullshit is that?

I would also like to take this opportunity to come out in strong support of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. They should absolutely not dismantle this program, and they need to expand it greatly. They also need to come up with some missiles that have a long enough range to actually hit the mainland US. The problem is that this is the only thing that US imperialist dogs will listen to.

Western imperialists are intent on regime change. In general, regimes have a right to national sovereignty and certainly have a right to resist regime change by Western imperialism. North Korea watched with dismay as one regime after another – Serbia, then even worse Iraq, and most recently Libya, fell to imperialist regime change for the simple reason that they did not have nuclear weapons. The only way to head off Western regime change imperialists is to get yourself some nuclear weapons.

So this is what North Korea has done. That decision was correct, proper and above all moral. A nation has a moral duty to preserve its state from enemy invaders, which is what regime changers are.

Continued cooperation with South Korea will result in many benefits for both nations.