Tag: asia
Kim Jong Un meets Donald Trump

Kim Jong Un 'Welcomes' Trump Back With Harsh Anti-American Rant

Just three weeks before Donald Trump is inaugurated for a second term as president, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un said his nation plans to engage in the “toughest” anti-U.S. policy to date. The aggressive tone follows years of Trump coddling the rogue nuclear state, breaking with the approach of previous Democratic and Republican administrations.

At a meeting of the Workers’ Party, which is the sole political party in North Korea, Kim called the U.S. “the most reactionary state that regards anti-communism as its invariable state policy” and slammed America’s alliance with South Korea and Japan.

North Korea’s state news agency said Kim’s speech laid out a “strategy for the toughest anti-U.S. counteraction to be launched aggressively.”

Kim’s comments come a few weeks after he slammed the United States under President Joe Biden for backing Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. Kim has cozied up with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war and sent 10,000 troops to help Russia fight against Ukrainian forces.

Trump said earlier this year that North Korea “misses” him, echoing his longtime coddling of the closed-off dictatorship. When he was president, Trump broke from U.S. tradition and engaged in face-to-face meetings with Kim, posed for pictures with him, saluted his generals, and wrote so-called “love letters” to the leader of the regime that deprives its citizens of basic rights.

In addition to North Korean leadership undermining human rights for decades, the nation has continued to develop nuclear capability and used tests of its military weaponry to threaten democratic nations in the Pacific region like South Korea and Japan. The actions have made North Korea into an international pariah that is shunned by most of the world, except for its ties to Russia and China—and Donald Trump.

In contrast to Trump’s openness to the rogue country, President Barack Obama referred to North Korea in 2014 as a “pariah state that starves its people” and made clear that under his administration, America would defend its regional allies against North Korean aggression.

Trump’s embrace of the dictator allowed North Korea to claim a propaganda coup, hailing the meeting of the two leaders as “historic” in 2018. Trump has expressed admiration for a host of similar authoritarian leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

After Biden defeated Trump in 2020, U.S. policy moved to a more traditional role in opposition to North Korea. Biden hosted South Korea’s president at the White House last year for a state visit and said, “Look, a nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies ... or partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of whatever regime to take such an action.”

Trump’s love-letter diplomacy did little to decrease North Korea’s hostility to democratic nations, and whether his second turn as president will once again bolster Kim’s global standing remains an open question.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Seoul Survivor: Could Martial Law Happen Here?

Seoul Survivor: Could Martial Law Happen Here?

The short answer is: look who the voters of this country, in all of their alleged collective wisdom, elected as the president of the United States. The even shorter answer is, you bet your fucking ass it could happen here with Hitler’s illegitimate son in the White House.

Donald Trump started rattling what could have been our chains since he first took office in 2017. He struts around fluffing his feathers all proud that he didn’t get us involved in a foreign war in his first term, but he came this close to loosing the 82nd Airborne Division on George Floyd protests in 2022, stymied only by a united front at the Pentagon, both military and civilian, who threw down a gauntlet in formalized letters to the troops and messages to each other that the U.S. military would not be engaged in politics. Gen. Mark Milley was the ringleader of this quiet protest, but Secretary of Defense Mark Esper made his feeling clearly enough known that Trump fired him and replaced him with a lapdog and then appointed Kash Patel as his chief of staff to keep an eye on him.

Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1792 during the Floyd protests, and that dastardly law passed by an ancient Congress has been mentioned by an increasingly large collection of his puppets since he was elected last month. The Insurrection Act contains this gem of a paragraph which seemingly gives a president an open-ended ability to do whatever the fuck he wants with our active duty soldiers any time he wants to:

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”

The succeeding paragraph is equally scary:

“The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

It’s followed by two subparagraphs that talk in a rather unfocused way about using the powers of the militia or the armed forces if “the execution of the law” is hindered, or “the course of justice” is “impeded,” or the “equal protection of the law” is obstructed.

You take Donald Trump and put him in the Oval Office with Kash Patel and Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth, or in the event he isn’t confirmed, the equally disgustingly fascist Ron DeSantis, and you tell me that rotting meatball of a brain trust wouldn’t endorse any justification Trump came up with as an excuse to put armed soldiers on the streets if so much as a single brown-skinned shoplifter stole a stick of deodorant from a Target store in Sheboygan.

The Insurrection Act does not, as South Korea’s declaration of martial law did, suspend the Constitution, impose limits on the press or threaten punishment for publishing “fake news,” dismiss the legislature, ban strikes by unions and public gatherings, or ban “political activities.” But see if this doesn’t sound familiar, if not likely, to come from the lips of a certain makeup-caked burger-chomper: The South Korean president cited the “destabilizing force” of a foreign nation with which South Korea shares a border and the possibility of that country causing South Korea to “fall to ruin” under pressures brought to bear by “anti-state forces” within South Korea.

Haven’t we heard the phrase “enemies within” about eleventy-thousand times over the last year? How about “enemies of the people,” identified as members of the dastardly media? Stephen Miller has been calling undocumented immigrants “invaders” for eight years.

A poorly written and ill-defined law, passed in contemplation of being enforced more than two centuries ago, can be made to mean whatever the fuck Trump wants it to mean when he is surrounded by lackeys and “yes sir” men and women, backed up by a Supreme Court that seemingly didn’t even need a hearing to issue its lockstep allee-allee-in-come-free ruling removing Donald Trump of the constraints of the rule of law that have been in force since the signing of the Constitution.

The point I’m making is this: You can use the words Insurrection Act or martial law, it’s the same thing when you put the words “Donald Trump” in the same sentence with either.

In South Korea, the reaction to the imposition of martial law was immediate. Thousands took to the streets. Legislators climbed barricades to get into their capitol to cast a unanimous vote lifting the executive order of martial law. The defiance of the people and lawmakers alike was absolute, total, without question.

Raise your hand if you can see Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mitch McConnell and Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson and the rest of them breaking into the nation’s Capitol to do anything other than vote to add a crown and scepter to the trappings of the Trump presidency. Take one step forward if you think that the governors of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho or any other red state will be on the phone to the White House telling Trump to get his troops off their states’ soil.

Donald Trump and every one of his MAGA mouthpieces have already referred repeatedly to immigrants coming across the southern border as an “invasion.” The first paragraph of the Insurrection Act spells out the right of any governor to request the president to order active-duty troops into his or her state to “suppress insurrection” within its borders. You tell me how Republican governors are likely to define what is an “insurrection” in their states. Gregg Abbott might drive past a Home Depot and eyeball a clutch of Latino laborers looking for work as “insurrectionists” and pick up his cell phone and call Trump and ask him to turn out the troops to help him suppress it.

Given the results of the election in November and a look at the list of suck-ups and house pets Trump wants to serve in his Cabinet, the short answer, the long answer, every answer is, we are so fucked.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Satellite Photos Show North Korea Expanding Missile Base

Satellite Photos Show North Korea Expanding Missile Base

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

On Wednesday, CNN reported that satellite evidence shows North Korea is upgrading a major missile base — and constructing what appears to be a new site:

The satellite imagery offers evidence that the Yeongjeo-dong missile base and a nearby, previously unreported site remain active and have been continuously upgraded, underscoring the reality of just how far apart Washington and Pyongyang are on the issue of denuclearization despite five months of sporadic talks.

While the base at Yeongjeo-dong has long been known to US intelligence agencies and analysts, researchers at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey told CNN that the images reveal construction on a new facility just seven miles away from the older site that had not been previously publicly identified.

The revelation is yet another blow to President Donald Trump, who after first trying to face down North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and belittle him as a “Little Rocket Man” who would be met with “fire and fury,” then sought to prove his dealmaking prowess by getting Kim to agree to denuclearization. After a series of dubious talks, Trump claimed that he and Kim “fell in love” and that denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula would come “very, very quickly.”

It hasn’t. And experts were warning Trump all along that it wouldn’t, because Kim sees nuclear weapons as an essential tactic for his own survival.

Unlike the Iran nuclear deal, in which President Barack Obama and our international allies imposed measurable objectives for nuclear non-proliferation with mechanisms of enforcement in case the Iranians cheated, Trump essentially handed Kim a major public relations victory in exchange for vague, unmeasurable promises to draw down their nuclear program. It is clear they have no intention of doing so — and Trump fell victim to his own ego.

Matthew Chapman is a video game designer, science fiction author, and political reporter from Austin, TX. Follow him on Twitter @fawfulfan.

 

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