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UPDATE: Massive weekly candlelight demonstrations that began last fall on Oct. 29 and that brought an incredible 2.3 million into the streets of central Seoul on Dec. 3 have been transforming South Korea’s politics and society, pressuring the National Assembly to impeach and oust the corrupt President Park Geun-hye and now bringing about the election of a peace candidate from the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), Moon Jae-in.

Moon’s election is a historic moment pregnant with new opportunities.

A human rights lawyer and former student activist, Moon is calling for an end to threats by the US against North Korea and for the adoption of a policy of friendship and peaceful negotiation with the north.

His biggest challenge though will be ending the subservient colonial-status that lies at the heart of the US-South Korea relationship, dating back to the US military occupation of South Korea that began in 1945 with the end of World War II.

Many Americans may know that the Korean War never really ended, and that rather, with the armies of China and the US and their respective North and South Korean “allies” having battled to a stalemate at roughly where the border was at the start of the war, an armistice was signed. What Americans don’t know is that since the Korean War began, ostensibly under the authority of a United Nations Security Council resolution, the US, under the facade of calling itself the “UN Command,” has continued to exercise full and unfettered control over the armed forces of the Republic of Korea.

This unprecedented situation even led a prominent US commander, the late Gen. Richard G. Stilwell, to call the relationship “the most remarkable concession of sovereignty in the entire world.” Gen. Stilwell went on to note that relying upon a twisted interpretation of the UN resolution that authorized war against North Korea, the US has asserted that it has full authority, acting supposedly in South Korea’s interest, even to use nuclear weapons against the North.

An attempt was made by an earlier peace-advocating candidate from the DPK elected to the presidency to eliminate the U.N. Command but it was rejected on June 24 1994 because the US simply would not allow it. The Security Council, under US influence, merely “recommended” the creation of a unified command, specifying that “it be under the authority of the United States” — a meaningless change in phraseology. Technically, in 1994 the South Korean government was granted control over its military during peace time, but the US would retain control over the country’s military during any time of conflict with the North. That situation is projected to remain in force into some unspecified time in the 2020s.

Thus, the US alone, 67 years after the start of the Korean War, still claims the authority to “decide on the continued existence or the dissolution of the United Nations Command.”

This cancer, which leaves South Korea — the seventh largest national economy in terms of GDP right behind the UK and one of Asia’s most modern countries — as little more than a vassal state or colony of the US, needs to be excised. We will see how the new Moon administration grapples with it and how far the US will go to try and preserve this pathological relationship.
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Test launch of US THAAD missile defense system now installed in South Korea against the popular wishes — and amid doubts that it would work anyway against a real missile attack. (Army.mil photo)
 

North Korea today is not the North Korea of 1994 when President Bill Clinton seriously considered a preemptive strike against the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. Back then North Korea did not possess any nuclear weapons.

Now North Korea possesses the knowledge of nuclear weapons technology and any US cyberattacks can only slow the process of weapons development but not stop it. Most likely the North’s ability to reconstitute nuclear weapons technology is there for good — and it is proceeding with ICBM experiments too.

 
The Pentagon — and the United States government in thrall to it — is congratulating itself on overcoming a hurdle that other nations have long gotten beyond or never faced in the first place. Feminists and progressives sympathetic to women’s rights are expected to be delighted that women can now officially be assigned to combat roles in the US military. The overcoming of this great hurdle follows a long tradition, in that the Pentagon’s self-congratulatory run around the field operates to distract Americans from arguably the most critical problem relevant to their future.

Happy women geared up in Afghanistan 2010

America is a hugely powerful nation caught in the headlights of history. We desperately need to forge a new social contract to accommodate an inevitable future of diminishing resources and comforts. But, at the same time, we’re a nation that desperately wants to hold onto the sense of “exceptionalism” preached to its citizens incessantly.

We fear real change like it was some kind of plague.

The fact is, women have served in combat roles since the beginning of time. Many European nations are quite comfortable with women in their ranks; Israel and Canada currently come to mind. Women have certainly operated in harm’s way as spies from Mata Hari to Valerie Plame. Muammar Ghaddafi had a special unit of armed women to guard him.

In the so-called developing world, Vietnam is a great example. If we recall, Vietnam won a long, cruel war to overcome an American invasion. They thoroughly employed women as combatants, many of these women now heroes of their nation. I met such a female Vietcong officer in Alaska in 2005. It’s possible a male could have kicked her ass and might have been better suited to haul a 300-pound wounded male comrade from the battlefield, the big test much touted right now by opponents of women in combat. But all that misses the point entirely.

My wife and I live on a 2.3-acre plot of forested land in a pre-Revolutionary house with a run-down old barn. When we first moved here, there was a rather large set of grassy areas, one in front of the house, another behind the kitchen, a large field in the back, behind the barn, a smaller lawn in front of the barn, and a hidden glen, as well as an island of grass in the middle of a circular gravel driveway.

It used to take me all day to mow all that grass, but over the years, because of my workload — particularly several books that were very time-consuming both to write and to promote — and the challenge of raising two kids, I allowed nature to reclaim much of it. Now I can mow what’s left in two hours. The glen is filled with brush, and the other lawns have shrunken dramatically as the forest has encroached in on them from all directions.

Now suddenly, I have to at least temporarily push back this march of nature, because my daughter’s getting married and she and her boyfriend have decided they’d like to have their secular jewish/hindu wedding at our place. This means that besides making the place look less derelect, I need to enlarge the big lawn out back to a size that could hold a large tent, in the event of rain, capable of accomodating 80-plus guests.

I have been struck as I set to work today by the astonishing amount of new growth that there has been this year already. Leaves on plants like the ubiquitous poison ivy and chokeberries are huge, and the asiatic bittersweet is growing so fast you can actually see its tendrils advancing out into the air as you watch them in the sun. Something frightening is clearly happening. Plants didn’t grow at this prodigious pace when we first moved here. That something, of course, is the increased CO₂ in the atmosphere, now approaching 400 ppm, a level not seen on earth in nearly a million years (and that is 14% higher than it was back in 1988, when it was at just 350 ppm).

The Lindorff barn, in the midst of a re-roofing project by the author

As I headed out in my ’94 Volvo to drive from Philadelphia to Washington for the first day of October2011.org, the occupation of Washington, I spotted some trouble: the ABS warning light on my dashboard panel was lit. Stopping at my neighborhood mechanic to get his okay for the drive, I found him busy inflating the tire of a new white Mercedes. As the driver, a well-dressed middle-aged woman, looked on, he asked me what my problem was. I asked if it was safe to drive the car to D.C. with the ABS not working.

After telling me my brakes were fine and I just didn’t have skid prevention, he asked why I was going to the capital. “To cover the first day of the occupation there,” I said.

The woman interjected, “Oh, is that part of those protests against corporate greed?”

As I pulled onto the Interstate and headed for Washington, I thought about her question. Clearly, something huge has just happened. Occupy Wall Street, and the wave of occupations that have spread to over 100 cities across the country, have broken through some invisible wall in American consciousness. If this member of the upper class, or at least upper middle class, with her $50-60,000 car, can casually talk about “corporate greed,” a term that is also starting to appear in the nation’s mainstream media, we are in a new place.

I got the same sense of being in some kind of alternate reality or new world as I joined thousands of people marching through the streets of Washington, first denouncing President Obama at a stop in front of the White House, then briefly blockading the entrance and shutting down the US Chamber of Commerce building just down the street from the White House, and then finally blocking traffic on K Street, the home of the big corporate lobbying offices. Unlike at prior anti-war demonstrations I’ve attended over the past decade in Washington, nobody heckled or cursed us out this time for inconveniencing them at rush hour. Nobody derided our signs or our rousing chant of “Banks got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out!” In fact, we got cheers, beeping horns, and raised fists and peace signs from passing drivers and people standing along the sidewalks–including men in tailored suits and women in heels.
Chris and Jerry McDonough, union activists from Madison, WI, came to occupy Washington (photos by Lindorff)

 
Second in a series: “Rediscovering America”
 

Leading black-skinned representatives of the “hegemon”, as Cynthia McKinney calls President Barak Obama and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, could hardly expect to win any votes from the standing-room-only crowd at her anti-war tour last night at Calvary Church in Philadelphia.

Speaking before nearly 300 people–two-thirds of them black, the remainder white and hispanic–in her T-shirt proclaiming that “war kills”, the former U.S. congresswoman said:

“We need someone in the White House who thinks like us and not just one who looks like us. We have to act like we’re free if we want to be free. We have to liberate ourselves from war-mongering political parties.”

Philadelphia was one of the last cities on McKinney’s International Action Center-sponsored “Report from Libya: Impact of U.S. war in Africa” tour, which hit 21-plus cities. The Philadelphia meeting was co-sponsored by several community groups and left-wing political parties, including the Green Par,ty which ran Mckinney as its candidate during the last presidential campaign.

In addition to McKinney, representatives of the community and Sara Flounders, co-director of the IAC, spoke. Pam Africa of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal said, “This meeting is about action to stop the wars over there and here at home. And Amy Goodman [Democracy Now anchor] needs to stop ignoring the word brought to us by Cynthia McKinney.” A brust of applause reenforced this viewpoint.

A representative of an anti-police brutality group encouraged people to vote for Diop Olugbala for mayor as the only anti-imperialist running against the pro-corporate Mayor Michael Nutter.

McKinney led a delegation to Libya last May-June in opposition to the US-NATO assault on that country, which began in March and destroyed much of Tripoli and other cities that were controlled by the government of Muamar Gadsafy. She witnessed some of the bombing and its destruction of life and of the country’s infrastructure.

“I speak with a heavy heart, knowing that places I visited no longer exist. Migrant workers camped out in tents close to ‘The Door to Africa’ as Gaddafi’s residence, Bab al-Azizia, is known. They are gone now, many split into pieces; only rubble remains,” said McKinney.
Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney on Libyan state TV displaying anti-personnel weapons dropped by NATO forces..

(This article is Part II of journalist Ridenour’s political autobiography, Solidarity and Resistance: 50 Years With Che. Click here for Part I)
 

Wilfred Burchett was a key source of information for many of us who wanted to understand what the United States was doing against Southeast Asians. Burchett was an intrepid reporter for decades. He was the first correspondent to enter Hiroshima after the nuclear bombing and brought the world the military-censored news of its horrors.

Burchett’s journalist code influenced my journalism:

“It is not a bad thing to become a journalist because you have something to say and are burning to say it. There is no substitute for looking into things on the spot, especially if you are going to write on burning international issues of the day. Make every possible effort to get the facts across to at least some section of the public. Do not be tied to a news organization in which you would be required to write against your own conscience and knowledge.”

I later met Burchett. We spoke of doing some writing about Cuba but we never got around to it.

I had begun working as a reporter in 1967. The written word for me is a tool I wield for our liberation from exploitation and oppression. My first reporting was for the Communist Party’s California weekly, People’s World. My last articles for that publication were first-hand accounts from Prague just after the Soviet invasion. They were not published however–a decision taken by top party leaders over the editor’s objection–and I ceased writing for the People’s World.
Che was with me in more ways than I knew at the time. His image and revolutionary thoughts were often present at demonstrations in which I participated, especially anti-imperialist actions. But what I did not know, until I worked in Cuba in 1988, was that he had a flare for writing journalistically.

On June 14, 1988, Cuba’s Journalist Union published Che Periodista (Journalist Che) commemorating his 60th date of birth. It is a collection of chronicles, battle accounts, critiques of imperialism, ideological think pieces, and an homage to Camilo Cienfuegos, a close comrade killed in an airplane accident after the revolutionary victory.

Che’s reportage originally appeared in Verde Olivo (Olive Green), the Cuban revolutionary army magazine, written between October 1959 and April 1961. I found Che’s writings concise, freshly formulated in a crisp style.

After my Czechoslovakia report was ideologically censored by the Communist Party, I sought employment in the mass media, or mainstream media (MSM). My first job was as sports editor in central California at the Hanford Sentinel (1969-70). Not knowing anything about sports writing, I learned on the job. Then, I moved up to general reporting and features. I was soon fired, because I wrote about a taboo subject: racist covenants in housing.

The editor ran my piece, “Titles Include Race Restricting Provision,” on the front page, January 29, 1970. The lead read: “Said premises shall not be sold, conveyed, rented or leased to or occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race.” I had found this restriction on deeds at a real estate agency.
Ron Ridenour

America’s wars came home today in the mail, with a letter from the Selective Service. Enclosed was my son Jed’s draft card, just a week ahead of his 18th birthday.

The card, which unlike the ones in my day, comes in technicolor, arrived along with a glossy brochure advertising the US military as: “The career you were born to pursue.”

The card featured a color photograph of a bunch of Army recruits jogging towards the reader wearing gray T’s and camo pants. Over the head of each of these runners was a career: scuba diver, computer software engineer, occupational therapist, firefighter, public relations, accountant, human services assistant, interpreter, musician, journalist…etc.

The journalist, appropriately, was buried behind the pack, so all you could see was about two thirds of her face. You might say she was “embedded” in the group.

Left out of these military careers were some important ones though: trained killer, sniper, spy, mass murderer, propagandist, wheelchair-bound amputee, depleted uranium cancer victim, homeless untreated PTSD sufferer, guilt-ridden survivor, incarcerated or dishonorably-discharged war resister.

The mailing also said nothing about the option of declaring one’s self a conscientious objector against war.
Jed Lindorff, potential draft resister