Begging
for War
By Robert
C. Koehler
September 07, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-“There are no good options,” Brian Williams
said the other night on MSNBC, launching a
discussion about North Korea with the
implication that war — maybe nuclear war — is
the only solution to the problem it represents.
We’ve
been cradling our own suicide for seven decades.
The baby’s eyes open . . .
And Williams was right, though not in a way that
he understood. When war — forceful domination,
victory through threat, carnage and, if
necessary, annihilation — is the ultimate limit
of one’s consciousness, there are no good
options. Even the peace negotiated in the
context of war is bound to be temporary and
grudging and therefore a bad option — sort of
like the “peace” achieved at the end of the
Korean War,
after which both sides still, as
Reuters
reports, “have thousands of rockets and
artillery pieces aimed at each other across the
world’s most heavily armed border.”
Only
beyond the context of war are there any options
at all. Only beyond the context of war does
humanity have any hope of avoiding suicide. And
contrary to the consensus viewpoint of
mainstream politicians and reporters, this is
not completely unexplored territory.
Because
Donald Trump is president, reaching for this
trans-war consciousness is as crucial as it has
ever been.
Maybe
the best place to begin is by noting that there
are some 22,000 nuclear weapons on the planet.
This fact is almost never part of the news about
North Korea, which has, as of this week, when it
detonated an alleged hydrogen bomb, conducted
six nuclear tests. The fact that Kim Jong-un’s
tiny, unpredictable country is a member of the
nuclear club is disconcerting, but the fact that
there’s a “nuclear club” at all — and that its
members are spending as much as a trillion
dollars a decade to modernize their nuclear
weapons — is even more disconcerting. And the
fact that the modernization process is happening
so quietly, without controversy or public debate
(or even awareness) exacerbates the horror
exponentially.
North
Korea may be “begging for war,” as U.N.
Ambassador Nikki Haley exclaimed, but it’s not
alone in doing so. None of the planet’s
nuclear-armed nations have abided by the 1970
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons, which explicitly calls for complete
nuclear disarmament. How easy this has been to
ignore.
As
Simon Tisdall
wrote recently in The Guardian: “. . . the past
and present leaders of the U.S., Russia, China,
France and the UK, whose governments signed but
have not fulfilled the terms of the 1970 nuclear
non-proliferation treaty, have to some degree
brought the North Korea crisis on themselves.
Kim Jong-un’s recklessness and bad faith is a
product of their own.”
Preparing for war produces, at best, obedience,
which usually comes with hidden resentments.
Because North Korea has displayed defiance
rather than obedience, the mainstream media have
portrayed the country and its leader as,
essentially, evil cartoon characters: a crazy
country that doesn’t know its place and is
therefore begging for war.
To reach beyond war, to reach toward the future
and create the possibility that it will arrive —
to create sensible options — first of all
requires dealing with one’s enemy with respect
and understanding. In the case of North Korea,
this means revisiting the Korean War, in which
some 3 million North Koreans died and, as
Anna Fifield
pointed out recently in the Washington Post,
“the U.S. Air Force leveled the North, to the
extent that American generals complained there
was nothing left to bomb.”
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“Ever
since,” she writes, “North Korea has existed in
a state of insecurity, with the totalitarian
regime telling the population that the United
States is out to destroy them — again.
“It is
in this context that, following the collapse of
its nuclear-armed benefactor, the Soviet Union,
the Kim regime has sought weapons of its own.”
She
points out that this is not irrational behavior
— certainly not for a small, isolated country in
the crosshairs of the United States. On a planet
with no good options, North Korea’s capacity to
produce a little mutually assured destruction
may be its best bet to curtail invasion. Indeed,
no nuclear-armed nation has ever been invaded.
With that understanding in place,
John Delury, a
professor at the Yonsei University Graduate
School of International Studies in Seoul, has
some further advice to offer:
“Now is
the time,” he wrote in the Washington Post in
April, “to jump-start a diplomatic initiative
that reopens channels, lowers tensions and caps
North Korea’s capabilities where they are. Then,
working closely with the new government in Seoul
and others, the United States should support a
long-term strategy that integrates North Korea
into regional stability and prosperity. . . .
“By
simply inflicting economic pain, threatening
military strikes and keeping tensions high, the
United States is playing into the worst
tendencies of the North Korean system. Kim’s
nuclear intentions will harden and North Korea’s
capabilities will only grow. It’s time to
reverse course.”
The
time is now: to stop pretending that war will
keep us safe, to stop cradling humanity’s
capacity to commit suicide.
And the
United States is not Donald Trump. Our
collective consciousness is bigger than that of
a bully. That means we have the capacity to
understand that the threat posed by North Korea
is a reminder that nuclear disarmament for the
whole planet is long overdue. There are no good
nuclear weapons.
Robert Koehler: Peace journalist.
This
article was first published by
Common Wonders
-