RNA - The United States continues to send wildly conflicting signs on their intentions toward North Korea, with President Trump following up assurances that no war would happen so long as the situation is “manageable”, but with a warning that “there is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely.”
Silly how Trump continues at the same time to suggest that China might be able to clean his mess; that President Xi “certainly doesn’t want to see turmoil and death.” What kind of silly assumption is that? Of course President Xi doesn’t want to see turmoil and death at his doorstep, particularly if it’s a catastrophe of America’s making. In fact, no one in his right mind would ever want to see that happen to his country, no one.
But is it really up to President Xi or the rest of the international community to make that rational decision? The answer, of course, is a big NO. Quite the contrary, it’s up to the Trump White House to keep the War Party “manageable for as long as possible,” and to “show patience.” More so, unlike what war-party Washington would like to suggest, the US cannot and will not “defeat any attack,” and also time is not running out for peace and security - not just in the Korean Peninsula, but across the globe, particularly in the Middle East, which is another catastrophe of America’s making.
However, these are still the worst of times, the scariest, most violent, threatened times humans have ever faced. The world feels scary because the War Party in Washington compel the scary choices other peaceful nations “have to make”. The latest entry is North Korea, a nation that has perceived the risk of another “major, major war” by the United States and is doing every rational thing possible to respond to this potential danger already in the making.
North Korean people’s fears and worries, and their behaviors, are the product not of the facts alone, but how they feel about those irrefutable facts and threats. They see the dark and troubled side of Trump’s permanent war doctrine, when they see Washington’s regime change statistics in the Middle East show that the wars of choice and genocide and murder and rape and slavery and civilian assault are going up. North Koreans don’t want to be part of this 21st century story. They face the existential threat of yet another US invasion and all the other harms its forces and duped allies and terror proxies are doing right now to the Middle East on which they depend to thrive. They see that America’s next war of choice is a matter of when, not if.
The sky is hardly cloud free. The international civil society should wake up and see that storm clouds are gathering; that it is because of America’s wars of choice that the glass of our modern existence is half empty and half broken. The question that matters more is why so many governments in the West only seem to see the empty part, and what that worry does not do to the choices they make and how they get along with it. They even blame North Korea’s rational worries on the news media and their constant dramatic alarms about the latest threat du jour.
This is true, to a degree. The study of human cognition has found that we overestimate the likelihood of whatever is on the radar screen of our consciousness, and the radar screen in the “fakestream” media world is full of blips about the latest possibility that the sky may be falling not because of America’s wars of choice but because some sovereign nations are not willing to do what the War Party tells them to do.
Blaming these sovereign nations is simplistic and insufficient. The broader explanation for North Korea’s excessive concerns (if not fears) is the inherently arrogant, irresponsible, colonial nature of risk perception of America’s war of choice itself. People around the world need to ask themselves to consider the facts and judge things rationally, analytically, objectively; as the only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count the body bags America continues to pile up in places like Syria and Yemen.
Given all the evidence, it is naïve to suggest that the only sound way is for the international civil society to sit on its hands and appraise the state of the situation first. Far from it. People around the world should band together to fight one of the world’s most pressing new problems: America’s next war of choice, this time in the Korean Peninsula.
They should gather, and are expected to gather, in cities across the globe to condemn Washington’s new warmongering antics and to push for peaceful solutions to America’s wars of choice and threat of nuclear war. These American-made crises and threats have gotten so bad globally that the world community needs much bolder and faster policy changes to really try and address them. It is wrong to argue, or worse to assume, that whatever happens in the Korean Peninsula will stay in the Korean Peninsula. It won’t.
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