A dispatch from Cairo (1)
December 31 2008
The Israeli Jews will never allow Palestinians to have a viable and contiguous nation “till salt grows flowers.”
Setting a foot on the tarmac in the Cairo International Airport after 4-hour-long flight from Frankfurt, Germany, I felt the same macabre feeling of home-coming to Seoul from a Canadian exile in 1983, where tin pot military dictators had been imposing brutal policies of subjugation, oppression, and torture on the South Korean population.
The City of Cairo was a look-alike of Seoul City in 80s...the whole city was armed a security-tight fortress...in the streets, plaza, hotels, schools, parking lots, thousands of security agents dotted the city perimeter in endless and invisible chains of barbed-wire.
The agents were not invisible or discreet in plain-cloth attire...they were displaying their strong urge to shoot to kill when the order arrives from their President, Hosni Mubarak who has kept tight reining on the country for three decades.
During a short stay in Cairo, I got stuck for about half an hour in the middle of city traffic during a taxi ride to suburban area.
And all the traffics refused to move an inch forward and sat idle spewing toxic black fogs from their various sizes of the tailpipe.
Our taxi driver nonchalantly blurted out: “an f**king pig is going for a tee-off.”
Along the main thoroughfare, I noticed that every 50 feet apart a chain of plain-clothed agents stood facing the commercial buildings and the high-rise apartments.
All of a sudden, a convoy of black SUVs, limousines, and jeeps, with a blare of high-pitched siren zipped through the emptied thoroughfare in a deadly high speed and disappeared over the elevated overpass.
The half-an-hour event was a carbon-copy of scenes that I have had experienced in the streets of Seoul City during the military regimes, whenever General-cum-Presidents travel to somewhere, golf game, military parade, safe houses, geisha or karaoke party,
President Mubarak appeared to be seriously worrying about his safety as if South Korean Generals went crazy in keeping tabs with every possible violation of security measures. (One of Generals, ironically, was assassinated by his own security chief at the geisha party.)
In an interview with a reporter from the Time magazine, Anwar Sadat, an assassinated Egyptian President in 1981 after his peace deal with Israel, quipped: “I have to choose the most stupid and moronic chap as my vice president, because I don’t want him too wise and smart to betray me.”
Then Sadat picked an off-colored nerd Mubarak, the Major General in the Egyptian Air Forces, for his shadow that would never sell him out.
And voila!
Mubarak has been in power for 28 years with no end in sight at the Presidential tunnel, single-mindedly devoting himself to keep his neck safe but politically, socially, and culturally remain an inept and stupid nincompoop. (Recently, Gamal Mubarak, his second son, was appointed as the general secretary of the political committee in the ruling National Democratic Party, throwing a rampant speculation that Mubarak is grooming his son as an heir for his Kingdom of Egypt.)
I came here, the land of ancient civilization, to eyewitness the culture of Pharaohs ...Pyramid, Sphinx, the Valley of Kings, Tutankhamen, hieroglyphs, a religion of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, and most importantly, to look at the Pharaonic past to gain a perspective on the contemporaries in Egypt, including on the issues of the Middle East conflicts.
And I have become miserable and despondent in the depths of despair after two-week tour of Nile River, the Nile Delta, Nubian communities, the site of Pyramid and Sphinx, the Roman catacombs in the Alexandria City on the Mediterranean Shore, and the dilapidated, heavily-congested, and mind-bogglingly corrupt city of Cairo.
Simply put, I found the tragic reality that modern-day Egypt had not so much inherited the brilliant and magnificent civilization of the Ramses Dynasty whose achievements have captured the imagination of the world, but had been totally disconnected with the glorious and celebrated past, exhibiting an endless chain of human degradation in the urban development which resulted in creating a fragmented, tribal and visibly corrupt society
In the urban area where most of 80 million Egyptians live under the hawkish eyes of national security agents, it is not difficult to locate the powerful standing in vivid contrast against the powerless...clad in dark-colored suit, the powerful displays a well-fed and muscular physique with his two arms in akimbo, incessantly chatting with a clan of close-knit tribes.
And the powerless always stoop low in constant fear of being arrested and never-ending anxiety of being hungry in a network of tribal connection that determines one’s pecking order.
Here in Egypt like many other Arab countries, the tribal connections are an essential and determinant factor in sustaining one’s livelihood and in advancing one’s career.
Without any sort of connection, you would be swept under the rug in the society where many grievances are only heard in the Islamic mosque.
Across the region, where 60 percent of population is under 25 year-old, many young people with no connections find justice in Islamic movement of the Muslim Brotherhood that has been the region’s largest, most influential religious, social, and political entity since its establishment in Egypt in 1928.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Sunni movement and the largest political organization in Arab world that many authoritative Arab regimes including Egypt, Jordan, and Syria have been harshly cracking down Islamic political activism.
The Hamas in Gaza, an arch enemy of Israel, traces its root back to the Muslim Brotherhood, which slogan “Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution” is widely prevalent from Algeria to Indonesia. (Ironically, unbeknownst to many people, Hamas is a creation of Israel in 70s through 80s as a counterweight to the Fatah Group in Yasir Arafat’s PLO and Jews actively and openly supported the growth of the Hamas gaining the strength militarily and politically until late 1980s.)
In this environment, the Mubarak regime in Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood was officially outlawed, has been working hard to contain the public outcry against its corrupt administration, by over-stuffing the security positions with reckless youngsters with the money accrued from the US aids and tourist enterprises
President Mubarak recruited hundreds of thousands of youngsters as private security guards, police, soldiers, and spies, manning every nook and corner of streets, plaza, hotels, tourist zones, and countryside, arming them with a cornucopia of weaponry, handgun, Kalashnikov, machinegun, bazooka, and rocket-propelled grenade.
These Egyptian youngsters are standing guard not against the Israeli threat (in fact, Israel has never been an enemy of Egypt since the Camp David Accord) but against their own people...people who do not have a connection or network to the powerful.
Egypt has been the second largest recipient nation for the US Foreign Aids after the State of Israel since the Camp David Accord in 1978, receiving $1.3 Billion in military aid and average $800 Million in economic assistance annually.
The US largesse ($50 Billion total) is seen solely as a payback for bolstering the US foreign policy in the Middle East region...that is, Egypt will guarantee the security of Israel, collaborate with US and Israel in mediating the recalcitrant Hamas faction, and make sure that the Arab League headquartered in Cairo will never reach a consensus in the matter of the Palestinian issues.
The Arab League since it’s founding in 1945 and headquartered in Cairo Egypt has been most ineffective, powerless, and quarrelsome organization that has propagated the Pan-Arabism in public but never reached in one consensus on the Palestinian issues.
Among the 22 member nations, Egypt and Jordan that border on the Palestinian land have almost always sided as the fawning puppet regime with the wishes and policies of the USA and consequently of Israel, rendering the Palestinian independence in tatters in order to curry favor with American overlord. (Jordan’s late King Hussein was on a CIA payroll during his whole life span.)
The Israel’s blockade and economic sanction against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were never being implemented or successful if Egypt has refused to collaborate with Israel, as in the Israelis post-Christmas invasion to Gaza in 2008 that Mubarak had plotted with Israeli Foreign Minister, resulting in 1300 Palestinian death.
Why the Jews would consider to come to terms with the Palestinian independence when they have Mubarak in their pocket?
Mubarak is constantly in needs of the US largesse in order to contain the internal disorder and he believes that nothing could stop the flow of the US money into his coffer as far as the Palestinian pot is boiling over the region.
Mubarak poses as an official mediator representing the Arab world with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.
In fact, he’s been playing a role of a colonial satrap destroying the growth of the Hamas movement and enhancing the power of the US-made PA President Abu Mazen (aka Mahmoud Abbas) whose presidency expired on January 9 2009.
The Gazan blockade and invasion by Israel was partly an Abu Mazen’s bidding with Mubarak’s nod to root out the Hamas from the Palestinian theatre that coincided with the concerted policy of US/Israel.
Adding one more puppet regime, Iraq, in the region, American Empire would keep expanding its regional hegemony toward Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan with a help from Muslim sellouts like Mubarak, Mazen, al-Malik, Karzai, et al.
In this perspective, it takes quite a stretch of the imagination to believe that with Obama’s new initiative the Middle East peace is on the horizon and the Palestinians would soon have the sovereign nation.
In an Arab idiom, there is a saying that it will never happen ‘till salt grows flowers.”
As salt never, never, never in million years, grows flowers, the Middle East peace will never happen “till the US Empire comes to an end” as if Roman Empire expired.
So seems also apparent in South Korea where the unification between North and South will never happen “till the US occupying forces vacate from the peninsular.”
dalehan1943@gmail.com
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Thursday, December 25, 2008
The Three Big Lies and Opera Bouffe
Seven Years later
June 15, 2007
The Three Big Lies
The following article, written some years ago, still aptly summarizes the ongoing North-South Korean détente that the Korean aspiration of the national unification remains as a fallacy, deception, prevarication, machination, Machiavellianism, illusion or delusion under the ever-lasting claws of the half-century-long and no-end-in-sight US Occupation Forces. You pick one.
There are Three Big Lies in the world that people are endlessly ingested and entertained by the mainstream media in cahoots with and in concert with a gaggle of sleazy and money-grubbing politicians around the globe:
1. The US Government withdraws completely its invading forces from Iraq in near future and, Americans never intended to remain in Iraq forever, from the inception of the war.
2. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be settled with either the one or two-state solution eventually, and Jews will give up all territories occupying since 1967 War.
3. The North-South Korean issues could be hammered out peacefully while the South ride piggyback on Yankee imperialism.
The facts of matters are:
1. The Americans (either Democrats or Republicans) will never cut and run from Iraq as they did from Vietnam in 1975 and remain there as they have been occupying in the South Korean peninsular.
2. The Zionist Jews will never allow a viable independent Palestinian State in the region and keep finding some ways of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian Arabs without cease.
3. The South Korea remains a puppet regime for the New Rome, USA, for another century or more until the North Koreans starve to surrender under the altar of global capitalism.
I dare to declare that you are at least a dumb fool and idiot, if you ever anticipate the above-mentioned three big lies becoming the reality during your life-span.
I also dare to challenge that you are a sycophant dittohead and pig-headed dimwit if you ever anticipate the above-mentioned facts of matters going the antipodal ways during your lifetime on the earth. (I will elaborate it later in details in other essay.)
Now you are entering the Theater of Opera bouffe, “A Feel-Good North-South Summit Talk” in 2000
Five years later
June 15 2005
It has been passed 5 years since DJ Kim, the comprador-par-excellence, had returned from a “historical” summit talk with Chairman Kim Jong-il at Pyongyang for the North-South détente.
After his retirement from the presidency, DJ Kim was accused of
1. Bribing the North with billions of taxpayer’s money to have a summit talk,
2. Snatching the Nobel Prize for Peace with a sleight of hand,
3. Betraying ultimately South Koreans with a delusional fantasy that the North-South unification is achievable under his “Sunshine Policy”, which sanctions the permanent occupation of the nation by the US imperial forces.
In one of the famous Korean folklore, “Bong-yee, Kim Sundal” has conned his foolish neighbors by selling the water from “the River of Daidong” in the City of Pyongyang, convincing them that he is the owner of the River.
As a modern Kim Sundal, DJ Kim robbed the public coffer of billions and presented the money to his Northern brother as if the money came from his own pocket in return for getting invitation card from the North.
And voila! He became the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!
Since his con game of the North-South Summit, DJ Kim has cooped up in his 7-room, 8-bath, and sunken garden palace that was built with the Prize money, contemplating another con game that betrays the South Koreans, and suggested he wants to be a special envoy to go to the North if the South Koreans are ready to pay his trip.
After all, he was a money-grubbing con man during his presidency that sold a lot of public facilities and financial institution to the Wall Street robber barons as if he owns the national properties.
At any rate, as fools outnumber the wise in very country in the world, only Korean fools still believe that the national unification could be achieved under the occupational thumbs of Uncle Sam whose hegemonic and imperialistic endeavor knows no bound and spans around the globe.
Pity the Koreans!
One year after the North-South Summit Talk
June 14 2001
The following article was written by Dale Han, a.k.a. Pepe Sojourner at the time of North-South Summit meeting last year in Pyongyang and posted the same day in various Internet forum sites and other zines.
At that time, Sojourner criticized the summit nothing more than a feel-good meeting that dine, wine, hug, cry, and banzai with lots of sentiment under the close watchful eyes of their mentor and colonial governor-general, USA.
In retrospect, Sojourner was correctly analyzing a year ago that DJ Kim’s engagement policy on North would hit the red-scare wall of new Republican government in the US, accurately predicting the election of George W. Bush as a new emperor.
A year later, the South Koreans are still in an illusion that Chairman Kim’s return visit to Seoul would somewhat bring the peace in the region, without realizing that George holds all the cards and obsequious DJ Kim is leashed on the US demarche.
Sojourner assures again that the second summit, if it ever occurs, would not produce anything substantial development with regard to easing half-a-century conflict in the peninsular, as far as the US maintains its imperial forces in the region no matter how many times two Koreans meet, wine, dine, and holler banzai with lots of tears.
A Feel-Good Summit Talk
June 15, 2000
1. Banzai mentality
Koreans are characterized generally with the tendency to display an unfettered and emotive feeling in public when they are either extremely sorrowful or pleased with the events, such as in the funeral process they openly cry loudly and shed tons of tears or in greeting their political leaders they shriek banzai with abandon.
When DJ Kim returned from the North-South meeting, there have been an explosion of rapturous emotion and delusory euphoria among the South Koreans that only appear in the society where nincompoops, hypocrites, and sellouts have an upper hand and coolheaded, logic-minded, and sagacious people slump in an awkward atmosphere.
A TV anchorman has put on a smiley face and ducktalks DJ’s bromide: we, Koreans, can settle our dispute on the issues of the reunification without any interference from anyone, a grandiose delusion of self-indulgence.
DJ has assured his people that the threat of the war on the peninsula has disappeared since his visit to the North, the same braggadocio when he told a lie the South has graduated from IMF bailout a few months ago. It was an amazing and blatant chicanery that one stroke of signature could eliminate the menace to peace that every souls of live and dead Koreans desperately have sought after for 50 years and he did it with a single visit to the North!
Oh, please give me a break!
There couldn’t have been such an apropos occasion for DJ Kim, who was dumped by his people at the recent parliamentary election and humiliated with an unsavory pursuit for his erstwhile bedfellow JP Kim in order to obtain the majority in the national assembly.
He appears to shed an image of the treacherous and Machiavellian political hack as if a duck sheds water off its back.
However, it is a matte of time when the people become sober, cool headed, and realize that the so-called formulas he proposed to the North are not the officially sanctioned one but his own personal opinion that was formulated during his untoward political life in the early 90s.
His people and the national assembly have never mandated him to proceed with his personal formulas that smell stink in a way to cut corner in achieving his personal popularity.
2. Reality Check
In reality, the North-South Talk is a non sequitur and the proposed three-phased formula for the reunification has a close similarity with an inverted form of Pyramid scheme that would give birth to a multi-headed chimera.
In the first place, DJ’s proposal for the unification process that promotes a confederation of two independent states was to avoid the thorniest issues of US presence in the South and the nuclear armament in the North, stipulating that the each state has the intrinsic rights with regard to the foreign affairs and military capabilities. These issues are sine qua non of many other agendas that have to be dealt with the South Koreans who have not been told of what the official formula would be.
DJ should call for the referendum, seek for the approval from the parliament, or at least put his personal formula on the public forums to debate prior to his departure to the North.
Secondly, DJ Kim should be charged with the violations of the National Security Acts (NSA) and other 20-some statutes that punish anyone to praise or promote the ideology of the North. Since his inauguration, DJ has arrested over 700 people for breaking the NSA and many of them are still in jail for the same offense that DJ himself is ipso facto committing with impunity.
He seems to become more cunning, arrogant, and tyrannical dictator than any other oppressive general-turned-presidents in disregarding the violation of the constitution and other statutory laws.
His attempt to revise the NSA has been stalled in the parliament since last year and his people have refused to give him the absolute majority mandate in recent election. And he still has the gall and arrogance to pledge some pies in the sky to his first-met blood brother in the North.
Thirdly, one of the investment firms in the United States has calculated that the North requires to have over $1 trillion to revitalize its economic infrastructures that have been devastated and moribund for last few years, and the South does neither have the financial capacities nor willingness to help out their pariah brothers.
The South has its own financial problems, and one of pivotal industrial giant Hyundai has been limping around due to the lack of cash flows that was partially caused by annual infusion of over $1 billion into the North.
On the other hand, the North is not ready to accommodate the massive inroads of the investment capitals, materiel, and greedy carpetbaggers.
Finally, the issue of the unification has always been internationalized and placed on the cutting boards of the Super powers since 1945, and China and Uncle Sam have been breathing heavily on the necks of the North and the South that Koreans just dine, wine, and shoot the shits.
That’s why there has been a train of meetings before the summit between the North Korea and China, and the South Korea and the United State.
Since Koreans have been sitting by the peg leashed around their necks for centuries, it is the natural corollary that they have no sensation of restraining tug until they stray from the pegs of China, Russia, Japan and the United States.
Only a fool believes that Koreans are capable of minding their shop while Chinese and Uncle Sam suck their fingers.
3. The talk between China and the North Korea before the summit:
tutor (Jiang Zemin) vs. urchin (Kim JI)
Tutor: Long time no see, son. I gather that you have not forgotten that we saved you during the Korean War.
Urchin: No sir. How could we forget you? I am here to ask some helpful directives in dealing with the South and the imperialist Uncle Sam.
DJ Kim has been pestering me constantly for tete-a-tete, sending tons of fertilizers, US dollars, and tourists. I know he desperately wants a Nobel Prize, but he won’t get it without me.
Tutor: Son, watch out that bastard. He is a sellout who can somersault and pirouette in tune with any music if it gives him an upperhand.
Urchin: Should I up the ante for another talk with him, such as another one billion dollars for the exchange of the special envoy, reunion between the lost families etc?
Tutor: Of course, you should note that you wouldn’t expect too much from Uncle Sam when the new guy, Governor Death, comes into the White House next year armed with TMD and NMD systems. You should milk DJ Kim as much as possible until he drops dead.
Urchin: Should I barter nuclear bombs with foods?
Tutor: What a naïve son! Do you think DJ and Uncle Sam fetch a bucket of food because they commiserate you so much? You are a dead man if you did not have the tool of Mutually Assured Destruction.
But don’t be too stupid to pour the cold water on the eager guest. In a Confucian culture, the manners matter. Give him a bear hug. Show the world you are not a moody and irascible playboy tyrant as the Western media has been brainwashing the people, but a smiling, affable, happy-go-lucky and talkative leader. You don’t have the complexion of a horrible terrorist like a kaffiyehed Arab but rather an amiable dunce like Ronald Reagan. I know you have a knack to make your counterpart loose in the chess game.
Urchin: Sir, can I rely on your help when Uncle Sam ever launches the preemptive nuclear strike against us?
Tutor: My poor son, don’t succumb to the Yankee bluffs. They have too many problems in their backyard to engage in an all-out attack. Be sure to continue working on the ICBM and nuclear capability. The Samson Option on Americans in the peninsula and Japan can be an effective deterrent against the US attack.
Urchin: Thank you for your advice. I will call you back soon.
Tutor: Wait a minute. I’ve heard that the Russian bear wants to see you in July. What does he have to do with you?
Urchin: Don’t worry my dear teacher. The Russians are broke and I don’t trust them because they are already in Uncle Sam’s back pocket. They don’t want to be left out in the power game of the Far East. I need as many supporters as possible to show our enemy that we are not as hapless as pariah.
Tutor: Good luck, son. We, Chinese, would thank you very much, if you’d be able to make a deal with the South that deprives the American military of a pretext for its forward bases in the South right on our doorstep.
4. The talk between the United States and the South Korea before the summit talk:
Master (Bill Clinton) vs. servant (DJ Kim)
Master: Nice to see you again, boy. I’ve seen you on television frequently these days and you must have been a good poster boy for globalization.
Servant: Dear master, thank you very much for your benevolence that allows me to play ball with the North.
Master: Boy, you know who the boss is and it’s good for you not to forget it. But I want you to tell your counterpart that we mean business when we talk about the north’s nuclear and missile stuffs. On the other hand, you should not give any hint or suggestion about the presence of US forces in the South. Simply ignore him and tell him that it is none of their business.
Servant: But my revered master, I can’t raise the missile and nuclear issues without responding for their inquiry about your presence in the peninsula. It is a well-known fact that both issues remain to be settled as symbiotic as body and soul in order to achieve the reunification of the country.
Master: Don’t play dumb, boy. I know you have a lot of sleazy and cunning ways to escape the embarrassing occasions like telling your people full of white lies about your horse tradings and financial difficulties. I know you have made treachery and duplicity your bywords.
Servant: Please be generous and pity with me, my master. I will serve you obediently and loyally, forever. Look at what I have done for you. I have placed whole land, banks, factories, and even my people on the shelf of the international flea market for fire sale as you have instructed me. I have even eaten the humiliating crow when I told my people that you could keep occupying my country even after the unification. Who would believe that Koreas could be united with the American occupation remain intact? Only stupid and dumb people like the South Koreans buy it.
Master: Bottom line is that the hegemonic foreign policies of the United States have never predicated on the logical, moral, humanistic, altruistic and democratic principles since its birth.
Do you think that we have lost over 30,000 young American lives in the Korean War and have kept over 37,000 GIs in order solely for the democracy? What do you take me for, a fool?
Wake up boys! The hegemonic control in the region is sole and ultimate raison detre for the US occupation forces in the Korean peninsula. I find that you South Koreans have been going too far…like SOFA revision, abolition of the bombing range, and Nogun-ri massacre.
How do you servant demand a right to prosecute your master under your own barbaric and unreliable judicial system? (Shh…. frankly speaking, I don’t trust our system neither. I shuddered when one of the governors released 13 convicts among 56 inmates waiting to be executed because they were wrongfully sentenced to die. Imagine what if you, as innocent as a god, were one of other inmates who still sits in the deathrow waiting to be executed. But most of my people are untoward to believe the principle of justice for all as your people do.)
Servant: master, your wishes are my command, and I will do whatever you ask me to do. But please give us mercy of Lord. Thank you for your advice. Thank you, thank you, and thank you…
5. The North and the South Summit:
Comprador (DJ Kim) vs. Hermit (Kim JI)
DJ Kim, a superb Machiavellian comprador, duck-walks in with rictus smile of a bowing undertaker and shakes hand with JI Kim, a recently spelunked-out hermit, and they waltz together for the inspection of the People’s Army at the airport where the national flags of the North flutter in the breeze with no sign of the South’s flag.
The mise-en-scene are carefully choreographed and staged with pomposity and dignity in order to show the world that they are two heads of each fully sovereign countries and are serious in dealing with their own fate by themselves without any interference form the super powers.
. During his three-day stay, DJ has been strangely reticent and short-versed in responding with his gregarious counterpart who has been bad-mouthed as an eccentric recluse by the Western media. It seems that DJ walked on the eggshells as a loyal comprador for Uncle Sam, and also become dumfounded when he realizes that his counterpart is not that stupid to be duped as his opponents in the South.
However, he did not hesitate to expose his treacherous and cunning characters when a high-ranking official of the North has challenged him about the intent and purpose of three alliances (US, Japan and South Korea) talk.
DJ replied that the alliances are to benefit both the South and the North as a sort of win-win policy and it is not aimed at harming the North.
What a Bull Shit! He has been a pathological liar to cheat his people, and now in the historical meeting of the Koreans he did not feel sorry to tell the Northern brothers a white lie.
Surprisingly, the alleged hermit has danced jubilantly as an artificially propped-up debutante on the international spotlight and showed the sharp awareness with full strength of testosterone and courtesy, quite contrary to what DJ was briefed as a rude and tyrannical curmudgeon by his NIS men and the CIA agents of his Uncle Sam.
During a limousine ride to the guesthouse, it is anybody’s guess what they talk and exchange something under the table.
Comprador: Thank you for car-pooling with me. You are an ultimate gentleman.
Hermit: Never mind, but I’d like to make sure that your car is not bugged.
Comprador; Frankly speaking, I myself can not be 100 percent sure even though my people fumigated thoroughly the entire car to find the bugs.
Hermit: I know Yankees are poor in Humint (intelligence gathered by katsa (agents) in the field), but pretty good for Comint (Acronym for communications intelligence). My people already employed for ECM (electronic countermeasure).
Day One
Comprador: Comrade, it is my honor to meet you, and I come along a long way to meet my blood brother.
Hermit: Well, happy to see you with so much freebies and a sack of greenbacks. Thanks for help upgrading me from terrorist, womanizer, drunkard, recluse, psycho, and dictator to instant CNN celebrity.
Comprador: Oh, well, don’t thank me. Just thank my revered master, Mr. Clinton.
Hermit: Wait a minute, are you here to market a philandering capitalist who fucked 20-something wench?
Comprador: Oh no, no, no…I am just pulling your leg. You know, I am the people’s president of the Republic of Korea, very independent and totally unfettered representative of the South Koreans.
Hermit: Really? Then how come you have lost popularity in last April election and how dare your uncle dictates what we can or we can’t talk here?
Comprador: Shhhh. I might be wired for taping by CIA, I don’t know if my entourage was tampered with a katsa from the National Security Agency. You never know what my master would do to check my integrity.
Hermit: I will break their neck if I catch them.
Comprador: By the way, my Big Daddy wants me to ask you about your intention that you would put off your nuclear projects indefinitely and stop selling your missile technology to other rogue states like Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
Hermit: Here goes again, you never stop being a factotum of the imperialist Yankee. Your Big Daddy was not faithful to implement the provisions of the Agreed Framework I had signed with, and I am ready to go along with the agreement if Americans fulfill their promises.
By the way, I believe it is my turn to ask you: what about the 37,000 Yankee soldiers in the South? You said it’s okay to stay in the peninsula permanently…how thick face you have to come to see me to talk about the unification without recanting this two-bit and oxymoronic double-talk?
Comprador: I’m sorry I can’t respond with your inquiry…I have to consult with my master before I can give some suggestion because I was not allowed to talk about it, otherwise my master would raise Cain over me.
Instead, let us deal with the family reunion issue. I think that we can at least settle this matter once and for all.
Hermit: I am with you on this matter if you are ready to release my people in your prison and repatriate them to the North. They have been incarcerated over 30 years for the violation of the National Security Acts that only are comparable in its cruelty and heinous penalty with the Israeli administrative detention act, and they were denied of liberty only because they refuse to sign the release form that infringes the basic rights of freedom of thought. You have released and pardoned many treacherous generals who committed the atrocious massacre of your own people for the sake of your own political convenience, and now you can’t ask me the humanitarian reunion of separate families while ignoring the plea from the North. These people have already served longest jail term and deserve to be reunited with their family in the North.
Comprador: I am sorry I can’t give you an answer about this matter. I am afraid of being accused as a red sympathizer. Let us talk about the economic cooperation. Would you guarantee the repatriation of the profit from the North if South Korean businessmen invest in the North?
Hermit: I’ve heard that the South Korean businessmen are characterized as greedy and money-grubbing carpetbaggers…wherever they go, they leave a pile of refuse, a devastation of environment, and exploitation of human workers including children and women. Innocent Koreans have got beaten up during overseas trips by the disgruntled foreign workers who were maltreated in the South. I am afraid that you Southerners gobble up everything in the North like a school of piranhas and leave a pile of junks in order to make profits. We are at a crossroads which way to go…to keep the country under the present communal system that fails to feed my people or to allow your market economy that brings eventual demise of the North.
Comprador: are there any agenda that we missed to talk about it?
Hermit: Yea, how about cold noodle soup? Have you enjoyed it?
Comprador: Have we agreed any item up to now? I can’t go home without any gift for my people. Would you give me anything, anything that we can tell the people that we have achieved something in addition to the agreement for the taste of cold noodle?
Hermit: You have come here with full bag of shits and you ask for something. How could I have a talk with someone who can’t commit himself for anything. I don’t need to see my tutor for his approval every and each time as you have to with your master. The only thing I can suggest you is I might see you again in the future, if you promise me more freebies and a sack of greenbacks.
And for the reunion of separated families, you release my people in your jail first and send some more fertilizers and let Hyundai have more investment here, then I am with you to have “a party of tears and cries” for CNN consumption. Have a good sleep and come to see me again tomorrow.
Day two
During the sleepless night, DJ Kim instructed his communication officer to establish a secured line with the South and made a coded call to his master for the instruction, and has received the go-ahead signal for his formulas that has been under the scrutiny of the National Security Agency of the United States.
Hermit: How was the bed? Is it too soft for you and your wife?
Comprador: No, no, no…I have had a good sleep last night.
Hermit: You must have received a positive answer from your master, I guess.
Comprador: Here is the synopsis of my proposals.
First, I’ll repatriate your people in jail and abolish the NSA when I go home and we let the separated families have reunion party on August.
Second, I’ll send Hyundai boss with a bag of cash and aid plan right away and announce that the South would build the cross-country railroad and allow the cultural exchange of the artists, musicians and writers immediately.
Third, we should make our unification formula as vague and nebulous as possible, so no one knows what it really means at all.
Hermit: You are a smart Alec really. I accept your offers and let us have a signing party.
Comprador: Thank you my brother comrade, you have saved my life. Thank you. Thank you.
Day Three
Comprador: The Pope told me he is interested in seeing you if you invite him.
Hermit: You must be kidding… A Satan holding hand with a God? Heh, heh, heh, good for the Photo-Ops. What the heck, let him know I allow him to have an audience with me. It’s really worthwhile to live longer to see a god coming to see me, an archenemy of religion.
Comprador; also I would like to invite you to the South in very near future. We should not let our people mired into the post-summit fatigue. I think it is very important that various forms of fool’s parades are vital to make people feel good about the prospect of our talk.
Hermit: I totally agree with you. But, are you sure you can guarantee my safety from the marauding band of the Delta Forces in the US Army who are happy to snatch and ship me out on Apache helicopters for the international tribunal?
Comprador: Oh, come on, I can give you my assurance.
Hermit: Let me put it this way. Tell your people I accepted your invitation in some appropriate time, if it fits your propaganda scheme.
Comprador; Thanks again. You are really a courteous, Confucian-loving yangban (a man of the upper caste who prides oneself in aloof position beyond the reaches of hoi polloi).
Finally, DJ Kim wants to exploit the summit event for his faltering popularity in the South and asked Hermit if he would be allowed to go home on a motorcade through the country road crossing the DMZ.
Hermit was gaped with disbelief that his guest tries to give him the coup de grace…a motorcade escorted by his palace guards for hour-long drive on CNN with Larry King? What the fuck this bastard takes me for? A sucker? Or a dumb imbecile? He was furious of his guest’s sinister and manipulative character, but his anger subsided when he was reminded of his Chinese mentor that manners matter in a Confucian society.
So Hermit gave Comprador a bear hug and said adios.
June 15, 2007
The Three Big Lies
The following article, written some years ago, still aptly summarizes the ongoing North-South Korean détente that the Korean aspiration of the national unification remains as a fallacy, deception, prevarication, machination, Machiavellianism, illusion or delusion under the ever-lasting claws of the half-century-long and no-end-in-sight US Occupation Forces. You pick one.
There are Three Big Lies in the world that people are endlessly ingested and entertained by the mainstream media in cahoots with and in concert with a gaggle of sleazy and money-grubbing politicians around the globe:
1. The US Government withdraws completely its invading forces from Iraq in near future and, Americans never intended to remain in Iraq forever, from the inception of the war.
2. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be settled with either the one or two-state solution eventually, and Jews will give up all territories occupying since 1967 War.
3. The North-South Korean issues could be hammered out peacefully while the South ride piggyback on Yankee imperialism.
The facts of matters are:
1. The Americans (either Democrats or Republicans) will never cut and run from Iraq as they did from Vietnam in 1975 and remain there as they have been occupying in the South Korean peninsular.
2. The Zionist Jews will never allow a viable independent Palestinian State in the region and keep finding some ways of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian Arabs without cease.
3. The South Korea remains a puppet regime for the New Rome, USA, for another century or more until the North Koreans starve to surrender under the altar of global capitalism.
I dare to declare that you are at least a dumb fool and idiot, if you ever anticipate the above-mentioned three big lies becoming the reality during your life-span.
I also dare to challenge that you are a sycophant dittohead and pig-headed dimwit if you ever anticipate the above-mentioned facts of matters going the antipodal ways during your lifetime on the earth. (I will elaborate it later in details in other essay.)
Now you are entering the Theater of Opera bouffe, “A Feel-Good North-South Summit Talk” in 2000
Five years later
June 15 2005
It has been passed 5 years since DJ Kim, the comprador-par-excellence, had returned from a “historical” summit talk with Chairman Kim Jong-il at Pyongyang for the North-South détente.
After his retirement from the presidency, DJ Kim was accused of
1. Bribing the North with billions of taxpayer’s money to have a summit talk,
2. Snatching the Nobel Prize for Peace with a sleight of hand,
3. Betraying ultimately South Koreans with a delusional fantasy that the North-South unification is achievable under his “Sunshine Policy”, which sanctions the permanent occupation of the nation by the US imperial forces.
In one of the famous Korean folklore, “Bong-yee, Kim Sundal” has conned his foolish neighbors by selling the water from “the River of Daidong” in the City of Pyongyang, convincing them that he is the owner of the River.
As a modern Kim Sundal, DJ Kim robbed the public coffer of billions and presented the money to his Northern brother as if the money came from his own pocket in return for getting invitation card from the North.
And voila! He became the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!
Since his con game of the North-South Summit, DJ Kim has cooped up in his 7-room, 8-bath, and sunken garden palace that was built with the Prize money, contemplating another con game that betrays the South Koreans, and suggested he wants to be a special envoy to go to the North if the South Koreans are ready to pay his trip.
After all, he was a money-grubbing con man during his presidency that sold a lot of public facilities and financial institution to the Wall Street robber barons as if he owns the national properties.
At any rate, as fools outnumber the wise in very country in the world, only Korean fools still believe that the national unification could be achieved under the occupational thumbs of Uncle Sam whose hegemonic and imperialistic endeavor knows no bound and spans around the globe.
Pity the Koreans!
One year after the North-South Summit Talk
June 14 2001
The following article was written by Dale Han, a.k.a. Pepe Sojourner at the time of North-South Summit meeting last year in Pyongyang and posted the same day in various Internet forum sites and other zines.
At that time, Sojourner criticized the summit nothing more than a feel-good meeting that dine, wine, hug, cry, and banzai with lots of sentiment under the close watchful eyes of their mentor and colonial governor-general, USA.
In retrospect, Sojourner was correctly analyzing a year ago that DJ Kim’s engagement policy on North would hit the red-scare wall of new Republican government in the US, accurately predicting the election of George W. Bush as a new emperor.
A year later, the South Koreans are still in an illusion that Chairman Kim’s return visit to Seoul would somewhat bring the peace in the region, without realizing that George holds all the cards and obsequious DJ Kim is leashed on the US demarche.
Sojourner assures again that the second summit, if it ever occurs, would not produce anything substantial development with regard to easing half-a-century conflict in the peninsular, as far as the US maintains its imperial forces in the region no matter how many times two Koreans meet, wine, dine, and holler banzai with lots of tears.
A Feel-Good Summit Talk
June 15, 2000
1. Banzai mentality
Koreans are characterized generally with the tendency to display an unfettered and emotive feeling in public when they are either extremely sorrowful or pleased with the events, such as in the funeral process they openly cry loudly and shed tons of tears or in greeting their political leaders they shriek banzai with abandon.
When DJ Kim returned from the North-South meeting, there have been an explosion of rapturous emotion and delusory euphoria among the South Koreans that only appear in the society where nincompoops, hypocrites, and sellouts have an upper hand and coolheaded, logic-minded, and sagacious people slump in an awkward atmosphere.
A TV anchorman has put on a smiley face and ducktalks DJ’s bromide: we, Koreans, can settle our dispute on the issues of the reunification without any interference from anyone, a grandiose delusion of self-indulgence.
DJ has assured his people that the threat of the war on the peninsula has disappeared since his visit to the North, the same braggadocio when he told a lie the South has graduated from IMF bailout a few months ago. It was an amazing and blatant chicanery that one stroke of signature could eliminate the menace to peace that every souls of live and dead Koreans desperately have sought after for 50 years and he did it with a single visit to the North!
Oh, please give me a break!
There couldn’t have been such an apropos occasion for DJ Kim, who was dumped by his people at the recent parliamentary election and humiliated with an unsavory pursuit for his erstwhile bedfellow JP Kim in order to obtain the majority in the national assembly.
He appears to shed an image of the treacherous and Machiavellian political hack as if a duck sheds water off its back.
However, it is a matte of time when the people become sober, cool headed, and realize that the so-called formulas he proposed to the North are not the officially sanctioned one but his own personal opinion that was formulated during his untoward political life in the early 90s.
His people and the national assembly have never mandated him to proceed with his personal formulas that smell stink in a way to cut corner in achieving his personal popularity.
2. Reality Check
In reality, the North-South Talk is a non sequitur and the proposed three-phased formula for the reunification has a close similarity with an inverted form of Pyramid scheme that would give birth to a multi-headed chimera.
In the first place, DJ’s proposal for the unification process that promotes a confederation of two independent states was to avoid the thorniest issues of US presence in the South and the nuclear armament in the North, stipulating that the each state has the intrinsic rights with regard to the foreign affairs and military capabilities. These issues are sine qua non of many other agendas that have to be dealt with the South Koreans who have not been told of what the official formula would be.
DJ should call for the referendum, seek for the approval from the parliament, or at least put his personal formula on the public forums to debate prior to his departure to the North.
Secondly, DJ Kim should be charged with the violations of the National Security Acts (NSA) and other 20-some statutes that punish anyone to praise or promote the ideology of the North. Since his inauguration, DJ has arrested over 700 people for breaking the NSA and many of them are still in jail for the same offense that DJ himself is ipso facto committing with impunity.
He seems to become more cunning, arrogant, and tyrannical dictator than any other oppressive general-turned-presidents in disregarding the violation of the constitution and other statutory laws.
His attempt to revise the NSA has been stalled in the parliament since last year and his people have refused to give him the absolute majority mandate in recent election. And he still has the gall and arrogance to pledge some pies in the sky to his first-met blood brother in the North.
Thirdly, one of the investment firms in the United States has calculated that the North requires to have over $1 trillion to revitalize its economic infrastructures that have been devastated and moribund for last few years, and the South does neither have the financial capacities nor willingness to help out their pariah brothers.
The South has its own financial problems, and one of pivotal industrial giant Hyundai has been limping around due to the lack of cash flows that was partially caused by annual infusion of over $1 billion into the North.
On the other hand, the North is not ready to accommodate the massive inroads of the investment capitals, materiel, and greedy carpetbaggers.
Finally, the issue of the unification has always been internationalized and placed on the cutting boards of the Super powers since 1945, and China and Uncle Sam have been breathing heavily on the necks of the North and the South that Koreans just dine, wine, and shoot the shits.
That’s why there has been a train of meetings before the summit between the North Korea and China, and the South Korea and the United State.
Since Koreans have been sitting by the peg leashed around their necks for centuries, it is the natural corollary that they have no sensation of restraining tug until they stray from the pegs of China, Russia, Japan and the United States.
Only a fool believes that Koreans are capable of minding their shop while Chinese and Uncle Sam suck their fingers.
3. The talk between China and the North Korea before the summit:
tutor (Jiang Zemin) vs. urchin (Kim JI)
Tutor: Long time no see, son. I gather that you have not forgotten that we saved you during the Korean War.
Urchin: No sir. How could we forget you? I am here to ask some helpful directives in dealing with the South and the imperialist Uncle Sam.
DJ Kim has been pestering me constantly for tete-a-tete, sending tons of fertilizers, US dollars, and tourists. I know he desperately wants a Nobel Prize, but he won’t get it without me.
Tutor: Son, watch out that bastard. He is a sellout who can somersault and pirouette in tune with any music if it gives him an upperhand.
Urchin: Should I up the ante for another talk with him, such as another one billion dollars for the exchange of the special envoy, reunion between the lost families etc?
Tutor: Of course, you should note that you wouldn’t expect too much from Uncle Sam when the new guy, Governor Death, comes into the White House next year armed with TMD and NMD systems. You should milk DJ Kim as much as possible until he drops dead.
Urchin: Should I barter nuclear bombs with foods?
Tutor: What a naïve son! Do you think DJ and Uncle Sam fetch a bucket of food because they commiserate you so much? You are a dead man if you did not have the tool of Mutually Assured Destruction.
But don’t be too stupid to pour the cold water on the eager guest. In a Confucian culture, the manners matter. Give him a bear hug. Show the world you are not a moody and irascible playboy tyrant as the Western media has been brainwashing the people, but a smiling, affable, happy-go-lucky and talkative leader. You don’t have the complexion of a horrible terrorist like a kaffiyehed Arab but rather an amiable dunce like Ronald Reagan. I know you have a knack to make your counterpart loose in the chess game.
Urchin: Sir, can I rely on your help when Uncle Sam ever launches the preemptive nuclear strike against us?
Tutor: My poor son, don’t succumb to the Yankee bluffs. They have too many problems in their backyard to engage in an all-out attack. Be sure to continue working on the ICBM and nuclear capability. The Samson Option on Americans in the peninsula and Japan can be an effective deterrent against the US attack.
Urchin: Thank you for your advice. I will call you back soon.
Tutor: Wait a minute. I’ve heard that the Russian bear wants to see you in July. What does he have to do with you?
Urchin: Don’t worry my dear teacher. The Russians are broke and I don’t trust them because they are already in Uncle Sam’s back pocket. They don’t want to be left out in the power game of the Far East. I need as many supporters as possible to show our enemy that we are not as hapless as pariah.
Tutor: Good luck, son. We, Chinese, would thank you very much, if you’d be able to make a deal with the South that deprives the American military of a pretext for its forward bases in the South right on our doorstep.
4. The talk between the United States and the South Korea before the summit talk:
Master (Bill Clinton) vs. servant (DJ Kim)
Master: Nice to see you again, boy. I’ve seen you on television frequently these days and you must have been a good poster boy for globalization.
Servant: Dear master, thank you very much for your benevolence that allows me to play ball with the North.
Master: Boy, you know who the boss is and it’s good for you not to forget it. But I want you to tell your counterpart that we mean business when we talk about the north’s nuclear and missile stuffs. On the other hand, you should not give any hint or suggestion about the presence of US forces in the South. Simply ignore him and tell him that it is none of their business.
Servant: But my revered master, I can’t raise the missile and nuclear issues without responding for their inquiry about your presence in the peninsula. It is a well-known fact that both issues remain to be settled as symbiotic as body and soul in order to achieve the reunification of the country.
Master: Don’t play dumb, boy. I know you have a lot of sleazy and cunning ways to escape the embarrassing occasions like telling your people full of white lies about your horse tradings and financial difficulties. I know you have made treachery and duplicity your bywords.
Servant: Please be generous and pity with me, my master. I will serve you obediently and loyally, forever. Look at what I have done for you. I have placed whole land, banks, factories, and even my people on the shelf of the international flea market for fire sale as you have instructed me. I have even eaten the humiliating crow when I told my people that you could keep occupying my country even after the unification. Who would believe that Koreas could be united with the American occupation remain intact? Only stupid and dumb people like the South Koreans buy it.
Master: Bottom line is that the hegemonic foreign policies of the United States have never predicated on the logical, moral, humanistic, altruistic and democratic principles since its birth.
Do you think that we have lost over 30,000 young American lives in the Korean War and have kept over 37,000 GIs in order solely for the democracy? What do you take me for, a fool?
Wake up boys! The hegemonic control in the region is sole and ultimate raison detre for the US occupation forces in the Korean peninsula. I find that you South Koreans have been going too far…like SOFA revision, abolition of the bombing range, and Nogun-ri massacre.
How do you servant demand a right to prosecute your master under your own barbaric and unreliable judicial system? (Shh…. frankly speaking, I don’t trust our system neither. I shuddered when one of the governors released 13 convicts among 56 inmates waiting to be executed because they were wrongfully sentenced to die. Imagine what if you, as innocent as a god, were one of other inmates who still sits in the deathrow waiting to be executed. But most of my people are untoward to believe the principle of justice for all as your people do.)
Servant: master, your wishes are my command, and I will do whatever you ask me to do. But please give us mercy of Lord. Thank you for your advice. Thank you, thank you, and thank you…
5. The North and the South Summit:
Comprador (DJ Kim) vs. Hermit (Kim JI)
DJ Kim, a superb Machiavellian comprador, duck-walks in with rictus smile of a bowing undertaker and shakes hand with JI Kim, a recently spelunked-out hermit, and they waltz together for the inspection of the People’s Army at the airport where the national flags of the North flutter in the breeze with no sign of the South’s flag.
The mise-en-scene are carefully choreographed and staged with pomposity and dignity in order to show the world that they are two heads of each fully sovereign countries and are serious in dealing with their own fate by themselves without any interference form the super powers.
. During his three-day stay, DJ has been strangely reticent and short-versed in responding with his gregarious counterpart who has been bad-mouthed as an eccentric recluse by the Western media. It seems that DJ walked on the eggshells as a loyal comprador for Uncle Sam, and also become dumfounded when he realizes that his counterpart is not that stupid to be duped as his opponents in the South.
However, he did not hesitate to expose his treacherous and cunning characters when a high-ranking official of the North has challenged him about the intent and purpose of three alliances (US, Japan and South Korea) talk.
DJ replied that the alliances are to benefit both the South and the North as a sort of win-win policy and it is not aimed at harming the North.
What a Bull Shit! He has been a pathological liar to cheat his people, and now in the historical meeting of the Koreans he did not feel sorry to tell the Northern brothers a white lie.
Surprisingly, the alleged hermit has danced jubilantly as an artificially propped-up debutante on the international spotlight and showed the sharp awareness with full strength of testosterone and courtesy, quite contrary to what DJ was briefed as a rude and tyrannical curmudgeon by his NIS men and the CIA agents of his Uncle Sam.
During a limousine ride to the guesthouse, it is anybody’s guess what they talk and exchange something under the table.
Comprador: Thank you for car-pooling with me. You are an ultimate gentleman.
Hermit: Never mind, but I’d like to make sure that your car is not bugged.
Comprador; Frankly speaking, I myself can not be 100 percent sure even though my people fumigated thoroughly the entire car to find the bugs.
Hermit: I know Yankees are poor in Humint (intelligence gathered by katsa (agents) in the field), but pretty good for Comint (Acronym for communications intelligence). My people already employed for ECM (electronic countermeasure).
Day One
Comprador: Comrade, it is my honor to meet you, and I come along a long way to meet my blood brother.
Hermit: Well, happy to see you with so much freebies and a sack of greenbacks. Thanks for help upgrading me from terrorist, womanizer, drunkard, recluse, psycho, and dictator to instant CNN celebrity.
Comprador: Oh, well, don’t thank me. Just thank my revered master, Mr. Clinton.
Hermit: Wait a minute, are you here to market a philandering capitalist who fucked 20-something wench?
Comprador: Oh no, no, no…I am just pulling your leg. You know, I am the people’s president of the Republic of Korea, very independent and totally unfettered representative of the South Koreans.
Hermit: Really? Then how come you have lost popularity in last April election and how dare your uncle dictates what we can or we can’t talk here?
Comprador: Shhhh. I might be wired for taping by CIA, I don’t know if my entourage was tampered with a katsa from the National Security Agency. You never know what my master would do to check my integrity.
Hermit: I will break their neck if I catch them.
Comprador: By the way, my Big Daddy wants me to ask you about your intention that you would put off your nuclear projects indefinitely and stop selling your missile technology to other rogue states like Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
Hermit: Here goes again, you never stop being a factotum of the imperialist Yankee. Your Big Daddy was not faithful to implement the provisions of the Agreed Framework I had signed with, and I am ready to go along with the agreement if Americans fulfill their promises.
By the way, I believe it is my turn to ask you: what about the 37,000 Yankee soldiers in the South? You said it’s okay to stay in the peninsula permanently…how thick face you have to come to see me to talk about the unification without recanting this two-bit and oxymoronic double-talk?
Comprador: I’m sorry I can’t respond with your inquiry…I have to consult with my master before I can give some suggestion because I was not allowed to talk about it, otherwise my master would raise Cain over me.
Instead, let us deal with the family reunion issue. I think that we can at least settle this matter once and for all.
Hermit: I am with you on this matter if you are ready to release my people in your prison and repatriate them to the North. They have been incarcerated over 30 years for the violation of the National Security Acts that only are comparable in its cruelty and heinous penalty with the Israeli administrative detention act, and they were denied of liberty only because they refuse to sign the release form that infringes the basic rights of freedom of thought. You have released and pardoned many treacherous generals who committed the atrocious massacre of your own people for the sake of your own political convenience, and now you can’t ask me the humanitarian reunion of separate families while ignoring the plea from the North. These people have already served longest jail term and deserve to be reunited with their family in the North.
Comprador: I am sorry I can’t give you an answer about this matter. I am afraid of being accused as a red sympathizer. Let us talk about the economic cooperation. Would you guarantee the repatriation of the profit from the North if South Korean businessmen invest in the North?
Hermit: I’ve heard that the South Korean businessmen are characterized as greedy and money-grubbing carpetbaggers…wherever they go, they leave a pile of refuse, a devastation of environment, and exploitation of human workers including children and women. Innocent Koreans have got beaten up during overseas trips by the disgruntled foreign workers who were maltreated in the South. I am afraid that you Southerners gobble up everything in the North like a school of piranhas and leave a pile of junks in order to make profits. We are at a crossroads which way to go…to keep the country under the present communal system that fails to feed my people or to allow your market economy that brings eventual demise of the North.
Comprador: are there any agenda that we missed to talk about it?
Hermit: Yea, how about cold noodle soup? Have you enjoyed it?
Comprador: Have we agreed any item up to now? I can’t go home without any gift for my people. Would you give me anything, anything that we can tell the people that we have achieved something in addition to the agreement for the taste of cold noodle?
Hermit: You have come here with full bag of shits and you ask for something. How could I have a talk with someone who can’t commit himself for anything. I don’t need to see my tutor for his approval every and each time as you have to with your master. The only thing I can suggest you is I might see you again in the future, if you promise me more freebies and a sack of greenbacks.
And for the reunion of separated families, you release my people in your jail first and send some more fertilizers and let Hyundai have more investment here, then I am with you to have “a party of tears and cries” for CNN consumption. Have a good sleep and come to see me again tomorrow.
Day two
During the sleepless night, DJ Kim instructed his communication officer to establish a secured line with the South and made a coded call to his master for the instruction, and has received the go-ahead signal for his formulas that has been under the scrutiny of the National Security Agency of the United States.
Hermit: How was the bed? Is it too soft for you and your wife?
Comprador: No, no, no…I have had a good sleep last night.
Hermit: You must have received a positive answer from your master, I guess.
Comprador: Here is the synopsis of my proposals.
First, I’ll repatriate your people in jail and abolish the NSA when I go home and we let the separated families have reunion party on August.
Second, I’ll send Hyundai boss with a bag of cash and aid plan right away and announce that the South would build the cross-country railroad and allow the cultural exchange of the artists, musicians and writers immediately.
Third, we should make our unification formula as vague and nebulous as possible, so no one knows what it really means at all.
Hermit: You are a smart Alec really. I accept your offers and let us have a signing party.
Comprador: Thank you my brother comrade, you have saved my life. Thank you. Thank you.
Day Three
Comprador: The Pope told me he is interested in seeing you if you invite him.
Hermit: You must be kidding… A Satan holding hand with a God? Heh, heh, heh, good for the Photo-Ops. What the heck, let him know I allow him to have an audience with me. It’s really worthwhile to live longer to see a god coming to see me, an archenemy of religion.
Comprador; also I would like to invite you to the South in very near future. We should not let our people mired into the post-summit fatigue. I think it is very important that various forms of fool’s parades are vital to make people feel good about the prospect of our talk.
Hermit: I totally agree with you. But, are you sure you can guarantee my safety from the marauding band of the Delta Forces in the US Army who are happy to snatch and ship me out on Apache helicopters for the international tribunal?
Comprador: Oh, come on, I can give you my assurance.
Hermit: Let me put it this way. Tell your people I accepted your invitation in some appropriate time, if it fits your propaganda scheme.
Comprador; Thanks again. You are really a courteous, Confucian-loving yangban (a man of the upper caste who prides oneself in aloof position beyond the reaches of hoi polloi).
Finally, DJ Kim wants to exploit the summit event for his faltering popularity in the South and asked Hermit if he would be allowed to go home on a motorcade through the country road crossing the DMZ.
Hermit was gaped with disbelief that his guest tries to give him the coup de grace…a motorcade escorted by his palace guards for hour-long drive on CNN with Larry King? What the fuck this bastard takes me for? A sucker? Or a dumb imbecile? He was furious of his guest’s sinister and manipulative character, but his anger subsided when he was reminded of his Chinese mentor that manners matter in a Confucian society.
So Hermit gave Comprador a bear hug and said adios.
Monday, December 15, 2008
This is a farewell kiss, you dog!
Finally, A Journalist We Can Look Up To!
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi
To watch a video, please copy/paste the following website.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2008/12/14/if-the-shoe-fits-duck/
When Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi heaved his two shoes at the head of President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad, he did something that the White House press corps should have done years ago.
Al-Zaidi listened to Bush blather that the half-decade of war he had initiated with the illegal invasion of Iraq had been “necessary for US security, Iraqi stability (sic) and world peace” and something just snapped.
The television correspondent, who had been kidnapped and held for a while last year by Shiite militants, pulled off a shoe and threw it at Bush—a serious insult in Iraqi culture—and shouted “This is a farewell kiss, you dog!”
When the first shoe missed its target, he grabbed a second shoe and heaved it too, causing the president to duck a second time as al-Zaidi shouted, “This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!”
I’ll admit, listening to Bush lie his way through eight years of press conferences, while pre-selected reporters played along and pretended to get his attention so they could ask questions which had been submitted and vetted in advance, I have felt like throwing my shoes at the television set.
Al-Zaidi, who paid for his courageous act of protest by being brutally beaten by security guards, is a hero of the profession.
He stopped taking the president’s BS and called him what he is: a murderer and a criminal, with the blood of perhaps upwards of a million Iraqis on his hands.
Al-Zaidi used what was supposed to be a staged photo-op for the president as an opportunity to speak up for those whose lives have been ruined by this president—the ones our suck-up journalists routinely ignore.
I’m not suggesting that journalists should routinely leave presidential press conferences in their stocking feet.
We have different ways of expressing our sentiments to people we feel have insulted our intelligence than throwing shoes at them, but it would be nice to see a journalist or two flip the president the bird when he lies so blatantly to them.
Or they could all get up and just walk out, leaving him standing alone at the presidential lectern.
It’s time for the press corps to stop treating presidents like royalty.
If he accomplished anything at all in eight years in office, President Bush has demonstrated that, to the contrary, the president is a very ordinary—and in his case a rather less than ordinary—man.
The office of president deserves no more respect than that of the mayor of Detroit, or of Wasilla.
My suggestion is that the press corps use the remaining five weeks of the Bush administration to develop a new relationship with the presidency—one in which they drop all the phony propriety and tradition and start acting like boisterous newshounds of old, barking questions, laughing cruelly at inane answers, demanding follow-ups when they are given the run-around, and, where necessary, walking out, or perhaps tossing the occasional shoe.
The journalism profession was a full-blown disaster and an utter disgrace during the Bush administration, and with all the crises facing the country and the world, in part because of that failure on their part, we cannot afford to have them continue that failure into the Obama administration.
With the Bush administration reduced to a running joke at this point, it gives the journalism profession a chance to redeem itself by using these few remaining weeks to establish a new tradition for presidential press conferences and photo-ops—one that can continue on into the new presidency.
Meanwhile, I’m suggesting that my alma mater, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, hire al-Zaidi to teach a class in press conference journalism techniques.
They should make it a multi-year appointment, because if he left after just one year, his would be difficult shoes to fill.
NOTE: Speaking of shoes and the White House, Skip Mendler of Honesdale, PA has a great idea.
He suggests that everyone who is disgusted with the outgoing Bush/Cheney administration send a shoe to the White House.
Just imagine a pile up of a million smelly old running shoes in the White House mailroom! I think he's got something. Spread the word!
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi
To watch a video, please copy/paste the following website.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2008/12/14/if-the-shoe-fits-duck/
When Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi heaved his two shoes at the head of President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad, he did something that the White House press corps should have done years ago.
Al-Zaidi listened to Bush blather that the half-decade of war he had initiated with the illegal invasion of Iraq had been “necessary for US security, Iraqi stability (sic) and world peace” and something just snapped.
The television correspondent, who had been kidnapped and held for a while last year by Shiite militants, pulled off a shoe and threw it at Bush—a serious insult in Iraqi culture—and shouted “This is a farewell kiss, you dog!”
When the first shoe missed its target, he grabbed a second shoe and heaved it too, causing the president to duck a second time as al-Zaidi shouted, “This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!”
I’ll admit, listening to Bush lie his way through eight years of press conferences, while pre-selected reporters played along and pretended to get his attention so they could ask questions which had been submitted and vetted in advance, I have felt like throwing my shoes at the television set.
Al-Zaidi, who paid for his courageous act of protest by being brutally beaten by security guards, is a hero of the profession.
He stopped taking the president’s BS and called him what he is: a murderer and a criminal, with the blood of perhaps upwards of a million Iraqis on his hands.
Al-Zaidi used what was supposed to be a staged photo-op for the president as an opportunity to speak up for those whose lives have been ruined by this president—the ones our suck-up journalists routinely ignore.
I’m not suggesting that journalists should routinely leave presidential press conferences in their stocking feet.
We have different ways of expressing our sentiments to people we feel have insulted our intelligence than throwing shoes at them, but it would be nice to see a journalist or two flip the president the bird when he lies so blatantly to them.
Or they could all get up and just walk out, leaving him standing alone at the presidential lectern.
It’s time for the press corps to stop treating presidents like royalty.
If he accomplished anything at all in eight years in office, President Bush has demonstrated that, to the contrary, the president is a very ordinary—and in his case a rather less than ordinary—man.
The office of president deserves no more respect than that of the mayor of Detroit, or of Wasilla.
My suggestion is that the press corps use the remaining five weeks of the Bush administration to develop a new relationship with the presidency—one in which they drop all the phony propriety and tradition and start acting like boisterous newshounds of old, barking questions, laughing cruelly at inane answers, demanding follow-ups when they are given the run-around, and, where necessary, walking out, or perhaps tossing the occasional shoe.
The journalism profession was a full-blown disaster and an utter disgrace during the Bush administration, and with all the crises facing the country and the world, in part because of that failure on their part, we cannot afford to have them continue that failure into the Obama administration.
With the Bush administration reduced to a running joke at this point, it gives the journalism profession a chance to redeem itself by using these few remaining weeks to establish a new tradition for presidential press conferences and photo-ops—one that can continue on into the new presidency.
Meanwhile, I’m suggesting that my alma mater, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, hire al-Zaidi to teach a class in press conference journalism techniques.
They should make it a multi-year appointment, because if he left after just one year, his would be difficult shoes to fill.
NOTE: Speaking of shoes and the White House, Skip Mendler of Honesdale, PA has a great idea.
He suggests that everyone who is disgusted with the outgoing Bush/Cheney administration send a shoe to the White House.
Just imagine a pile up of a million smelly old running shoes in the White House mailroom! I think he's got something. Spread the word!
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
America the Illiterate
By Chris Hedges
We live in two Americas.
One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world.
It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.
The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system.
This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.
It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. I
t is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés.
It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection.
This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level.
Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year.
But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence.
A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school.
Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.
The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information.
American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives.
Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology.
Political campaigns have become an experience.
They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills.
They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation.
Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal.
They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness.
They thrust us into an eternal present.
They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia.
It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives.
We prefer happy illusions.
And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates.
We confuse how we feel with knowledge.
The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless.
They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies.
They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. T
hey watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed.
They are hostages to brands.
Brands come with images and slogans.
Images and slogans are all they understand.
Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus.
And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures.
This is our brave new world.
Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest.
They only need to appear to have these qualities.
Most of all they need a story, a narrative.
The reality of the narrative is irrelevant.
It can be completely at odds with the facts.
The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount.
The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice.
Those who are best at artifice succeed.
Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail.
In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty.
We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both.
The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of an uncontested truth.
We are repeatedly fed words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or war on terror.
It feels good not to think.
All we have to do is visualize what we want, believe in ourselves and summon those hidden inner resources, whether divine or national, that make the world conform to our desires.
Reality is never an impediment to our advancement.
The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.
It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text.
During the 2000 debates George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In the 1992 debates Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3).
In the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon the candidates spoke in language used by 10th-graders.
In the debates of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were respectively 11.2 and 12.0. In short, today’s political rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level.
It is fitted to this level of comprehension because most Americans speak, think and are entertained at this level.
This is why serious film and theater and other serious artistic expression, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of American society.
Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th century.
Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse.
In our post-literate world, because ideas are inaccessible, there is a need for constant stimulus.
News, political debate, theater, art and books are judged not on the power of their ideas but on their ability to entertain.
Cultural products that force us to examine ourselves and our society are condemned as elitist and impenetrable.
Hannah Arendt warned that the marketization of culture leads to its degradation, that this marketization creates a new celebrity class of intellectuals who, although well read and informed themselves, see their role in society as persuading the masses that “Hamlet” can be as entertaining as “The Lion King” and perhaps as educational. “Culture,” she wrote, “is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”
“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect,” Arendt wrote, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”
The change from a print-based to an image-based society has transformed our nation.
Huge segments of our population, especially those who live in the embrace of the Christian right and the consumer culture, are completely unmoored from reality.
They lack the capacity to search for truth and cope rationally with our mounting social and economic ills.
They seek clarity, entertainment and order.
They are willing to use force to impose this clarity on others, especially those who do not speak as they speak and think as they think.
All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.
As we descend into a devastating economic crisis, one that Barack Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of millions of Americans who will be ruthlessly thrust aside.
As their houses are foreclosed, as their jobs are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy and watch their communities collapse, they will retreat even further into irrational fantasy.
They will be led toward glittering and self-destructive illusions by our modern Pied Pipers—our corporate advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television news celebrities, our self-help gurus, our entertainment industry and our political demagogues—who will offer increasingly absurd forms of escapism.
The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying.
Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that awaits us.
We live in two Americas.
One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world.
It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.
The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system.
This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.
It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. I
t is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés.
It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection.
This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level.
Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year.
But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence.
A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school.
Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.
The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information.
American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives.
Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology.
Political campaigns have become an experience.
They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills.
They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation.
Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal.
They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness.
They thrust us into an eternal present.
They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia.
It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives.
We prefer happy illusions.
And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates.
We confuse how we feel with knowledge.
The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless.
They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies.
They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. T
hey watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed.
They are hostages to brands.
Brands come with images and slogans.
Images and slogans are all they understand.
Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus.
And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures.
This is our brave new world.
Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest.
They only need to appear to have these qualities.
Most of all they need a story, a narrative.
The reality of the narrative is irrelevant.
It can be completely at odds with the facts.
The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount.
The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice.
Those who are best at artifice succeed.
Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail.
In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty.
We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both.
The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of an uncontested truth.
We are repeatedly fed words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or war on terror.
It feels good not to think.
All we have to do is visualize what we want, believe in ourselves and summon those hidden inner resources, whether divine or national, that make the world conform to our desires.
Reality is never an impediment to our advancement.
The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.
It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text.
During the 2000 debates George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In the 1992 debates Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3).
In the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon the candidates spoke in language used by 10th-graders.
In the debates of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were respectively 11.2 and 12.0. In short, today’s political rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level.
It is fitted to this level of comprehension because most Americans speak, think and are entertained at this level.
This is why serious film and theater and other serious artistic expression, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of American society.
Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th century.
Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse.
In our post-literate world, because ideas are inaccessible, there is a need for constant stimulus.
News, political debate, theater, art and books are judged not on the power of their ideas but on their ability to entertain.
Cultural products that force us to examine ourselves and our society are condemned as elitist and impenetrable.
Hannah Arendt warned that the marketization of culture leads to its degradation, that this marketization creates a new celebrity class of intellectuals who, although well read and informed themselves, see their role in society as persuading the masses that “Hamlet” can be as entertaining as “The Lion King” and perhaps as educational. “Culture,” she wrote, “is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”
“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect,” Arendt wrote, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”
The change from a print-based to an image-based society has transformed our nation.
Huge segments of our population, especially those who live in the embrace of the Christian right and the consumer culture, are completely unmoored from reality.
They lack the capacity to search for truth and cope rationally with our mounting social and economic ills.
They seek clarity, entertainment and order.
They are willing to use force to impose this clarity on others, especially those who do not speak as they speak and think as they think.
All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.
As we descend into a devastating economic crisis, one that Barack Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of millions of Americans who will be ruthlessly thrust aside.
As their houses are foreclosed, as their jobs are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy and watch their communities collapse, they will retreat even further into irrational fantasy.
They will be led toward glittering and self-destructive illusions by our modern Pied Pipers—our corporate advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television news celebrities, our self-help gurus, our entertainment industry and our political demagogues—who will offer increasingly absurd forms of escapism.
The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying.
Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that awaits us.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The two cheeks of same derriere (2008)
The Coke vs. Pepsi War
September 28, 2008
Aristotle: “Democracy is the political stage immediately following aristocracy and immediately preceding oligarchy.”
Americans are spouting gaga over their upcoming presidential election and pouring millions of dollars for “the dog and phony shows” in Denver CO and St. Paul MN, as if there has been any difference in policies, domestic or foreign, between the Republican and Democratic Parties: they are dumb enough to argue over a difference between tweedledum and tweedledee.
It’s like a Coke vs. Pepsi contest, in which product is better taste for the American suckers…a senseless and recurring argument in every four years.
Two parties are actually One Big Party representing an imperial corporate America that has been on a warpath since the America-Spanish War to expand its territorial and colonial policies around the globe.
This lust for corporate largesse is as wanton among Democrats as Republicans--right up to the current presidential campaign.
According to the Phoenix Business Journal,
Obama and McCain . . . have accepted a substantial amount of campaign money from Wall Street bankers, investment and securities firms and their executives during this election cycle.
Investment firms have donated $9.9 million to Obama and $6.9 million to McCain this campaign thus far, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Commercial banks have given Obama $2.1 million and McCain $1.9 million. Private equity firms and hedge funds have given Obama $2 million and McCain $1.4 million, according to CFRP.
Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase & Co., UBS and heavyweight law firm DLA Piper are among Obama's top contributors. JP Morgan acquired Bear Stearns with the federal government taking on as much as $30 billion Bear assets as part of the deal. McCain's top donor sources include Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Blank Rome and Greenberg Traurig LLP law firms.
Both conventions are nothing but the masquerading ballrooms that cost each over $100 million paid for by corporate interests.
On an Iraqi quagmire and Afghanistan conflict, McCain and Obama are almost on the same boat: McCain goes further than Bush to do all-out war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama fumbles on Iraq withdrawal promise and put more troops in Afghanistan…that is, they both are determined to continue the hegemonic policies of expanding the Pan-American imperialism around the globe.
On the foreign policy, few Americans realize that they have been fighting a proxy war in the Middle East for half a century for the benefit of a tiny state of Israel…US and Israeli policies and actions with respect to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf States and even most recently Georgia are all tied together in a bundle of inter-related linkages, each of which affects all the others.
The theory is that pro-Israeli lobby group and Neo-cons in the US all have worked together to bring more wars, regime changes, and instabilities, specifically breakup of any Middle East Arab states, like Iraq and Iran, that might conceivably threaten the existence of Jewish Israeli State.
Jews got George W Bush’s balls tight for eight years with a gaggle of the Jewish neocons apparatchiks in every corner of his Administration who dictate and execute the pro-Israeli war in the Middle East region.
And McCain simply takes over what George left out in his foreign policies that benefit the interests of Jewish Israeli State.
Obama pledged his loyalty at the Jewish altar of American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), claiming that he would never compromise when it comes to Israeli security and picking Joe Biden who is a crypto Jew and declared Zionist.
On the domestic side, the basic American consensus has been a proposition that government must do for people what people can not do for themselves, in which both parties abandoned since Reagan and Clinton Administration and replaced it with a winner-take-all “free market” virtue, resulting in 45 million Americans with no healthcare, 43millions under the poverty line, and two millions in jail, while the elite upper class (2 percent) enjoy billions of tax-cuts and largesse from the Government subsidies.
Faced with a tsunami wave of financial collapse in Wall Street that metastasizes the whole aspect of the global economy, both Republican and Democrat are scrambling in strong bi-partisan fashion to save the billionaire’s neck with taxpayers’ money…”Let the free market run the economy” slogan disappears and “Let’s socialize the debt” zeitgeist flickers on the mainstream media screen.
Few months ago, Americans were supplied with $145 billion growth package for $800 each family and encouraged to go shopping in order to stimulate the sagging economy…giving people more money to spend—many of whom are already spending beyond their means—is to spend our way out of this mess, it was a fantasy.
Greek philosopher taught that death is inherent to life and transition and impermanence prevail…birth/growth/ contraction/death is nature’s way. All living things follow this natural cycle. Everything that lives perishes.
American economy has been built on a growth-always fiction, a false economy…gravity is a basic law of physics; things go up and then have to come down.
US economy is not nature-based but extremely conflicted with nature’s rhythm and now chickens are coming home to roost.
When Presidential candidates of both parties do engage in the shouting match about the economy, the basic strategy both parties employ is to fight the November election over who has the nicest DREAM plan for what people would like to believe in…
So which one should Americans pick between two Siamese twins joined by the corporate rumps, McCain or Obama?
One school of thought insists: a defeat for a reckless McCain is necessary to show the world that Americans care for the global peace, and with limited option, a vote for Obama is an answer.
But, would Americans care for world peace that impedes their prosperity via imperial colonialism and territorial exploitation?
Finally and critically, what about the racial misgivings the White Americans still carry on the black Americans in their daily life, 143 years after the slavery was abolished…would the whites be comfortable at the family dinner every night to watch a Negro president addressing them at the White House? I guess not!
I would like to bet my ass while the dice is still in the air…they will elect McCain as their next naked Emperor in order to show the world that Americans are always on top, in control, in domination, and remain forever in a super-power status.
From Toronto Canada
dalehan@verizon.net
The Coke vs. Pepsi War
September 28, 2008
Aristotle: “Democracy is the political stage immediately following aristocracy and immediately preceding oligarchy.”
Americans are spouting gaga over their upcoming presidential election and pouring millions of dollars for “the dog and phony shows” in Denver CO and St. Paul MN, as if there has been any difference in policies, domestic or foreign, between the Republican and Democratic Parties: they are dumb enough to argue over a difference between tweedledum and tweedledee.
It’s like a Coke vs. Pepsi contest, in which product is better taste for the American suckers…a senseless and recurring argument in every four years.
Two parties are actually One Big Party representing an imperial corporate America that has been on a warpath since the America-Spanish War to expand its territorial and colonial policies around the globe.
This lust for corporate largesse is as wanton among Democrats as Republicans--right up to the current presidential campaign.
According to the Phoenix Business Journal,
Obama and McCain . . . have accepted a substantial amount of campaign money from Wall Street bankers, investment and securities firms and their executives during this election cycle.
Investment firms have donated $9.9 million to Obama and $6.9 million to McCain this campaign thus far, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Commercial banks have given Obama $2.1 million and McCain $1.9 million. Private equity firms and hedge funds have given Obama $2 million and McCain $1.4 million, according to CFRP.
Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase & Co., UBS and heavyweight law firm DLA Piper are among Obama's top contributors. JP Morgan acquired Bear Stearns with the federal government taking on as much as $30 billion Bear assets as part of the deal. McCain's top donor sources include Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Blank Rome and Greenberg Traurig LLP law firms.
Both conventions are nothing but the masquerading ballrooms that cost each over $100 million paid for by corporate interests.
On an Iraqi quagmire and Afghanistan conflict, McCain and Obama are almost on the same boat: McCain goes further than Bush to do all-out war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama fumbles on Iraq withdrawal promise and put more troops in Afghanistan…that is, they both are determined to continue the hegemonic policies of expanding the Pan-American imperialism around the globe.
On the foreign policy, few Americans realize that they have been fighting a proxy war in the Middle East for half a century for the benefit of a tiny state of Israel…US and Israeli policies and actions with respect to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf States and even most recently Georgia are all tied together in a bundle of inter-related linkages, each of which affects all the others.
The theory is that pro-Israeli lobby group and Neo-cons in the US all have worked together to bring more wars, regime changes, and instabilities, specifically breakup of any Middle East Arab states, like Iraq and Iran, that might conceivably threaten the existence of Jewish Israeli State.
Jews got George W Bush’s balls tight for eight years with a gaggle of the Jewish neocons apparatchiks in every corner of his Administration who dictate and execute the pro-Israeli war in the Middle East region.
And McCain simply takes over what George left out in his foreign policies that benefit the interests of Jewish Israeli State.
Obama pledged his loyalty at the Jewish altar of American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), claiming that he would never compromise when it comes to Israeli security and picking Joe Biden who is a crypto Jew and declared Zionist.
On the domestic side, the basic American consensus has been a proposition that government must do for people what people can not do for themselves, in which both parties abandoned since Reagan and Clinton Administration and replaced it with a winner-take-all “free market” virtue, resulting in 45 million Americans with no healthcare, 43millions under the poverty line, and two millions in jail, while the elite upper class (2 percent) enjoy billions of tax-cuts and largesse from the Government subsidies.
Faced with a tsunami wave of financial collapse in Wall Street that metastasizes the whole aspect of the global economy, both Republican and Democrat are scrambling in strong bi-partisan fashion to save the billionaire’s neck with taxpayers’ money…”Let the free market run the economy” slogan disappears and “Let’s socialize the debt” zeitgeist flickers on the mainstream media screen.
Few months ago, Americans were supplied with $145 billion growth package for $800 each family and encouraged to go shopping in order to stimulate the sagging economy…giving people more money to spend—many of whom are already spending beyond their means—is to spend our way out of this mess, it was a fantasy.
Greek philosopher taught that death is inherent to life and transition and impermanence prevail…birth/growth/ contraction/death is nature’s way. All living things follow this natural cycle. Everything that lives perishes.
American economy has been built on a growth-always fiction, a false economy…gravity is a basic law of physics; things go up and then have to come down.
US economy is not nature-based but extremely conflicted with nature’s rhythm and now chickens are coming home to roost.
When Presidential candidates of both parties do engage in the shouting match about the economy, the basic strategy both parties employ is to fight the November election over who has the nicest DREAM plan for what people would like to believe in…
So which one should Americans pick between two Siamese twins joined by the corporate rumps, McCain or Obama?
One school of thought insists: a defeat for a reckless McCain is necessary to show the world that Americans care for the global peace, and with limited option, a vote for Obama is an answer.
But, would Americans care for world peace that impedes their prosperity via imperial colonialism and territorial exploitation?
Finally and critically, what about the racial misgivings the White Americans still carry on the black Americans in their daily life, 143 years after the slavery was abolished…would the whites be comfortable at the family dinner every night to watch a Negro president addressing them at the White House? I guess not!
I would like to bet my ass while the dice is still in the air…they will elect McCain as their next naked Emperor in order to show the world that Americans are always on top, in control, in domination, and remain forever in a super-power status.
From Toronto Canada
dalehan@verizon.net
Monday, September 1, 2008
Barak Hussein Obama II: A Shabbat Goy?
Barak Hussein Obama II: A Shabbat Goy?
Obama as his middle name, Hussein, indicated that he carries a Muslim bloodline (Obama Sr. is a Kenyan Muslim), no matter whether he claims he is a Christian.
Now, Obama declared that he would fight tooth and nail, among the US presidential candidates, for doing Jew’s bidding as a Shabbat Goy.
Jews are prohibited to do certain thing during the Sabbath… for example, Jews are not allowed to drive a car, ride a bike, or ride a carriage, turn the light switches on, light a candle or fire for heat, so on.
To its extremities, a Jewish physician is not allowed to care for a Goy patient during the Sabbath. (excluding a Jewish patient.)
So Jews need a Shabbat Goy, a gentile who performs tasks for Jews in the home or Synagogue on the Sabbath or holy day that are forbidden Jews on such occasions as mentioned above.
Someone calls the US President as Israel’s US Governor as if Jews calls Mahmoud Abbas as their West Bank Governor.
In this perspective, Obama is more a Head Negro to serve his massa than a Good Black
Obama as his middle name, Hussein, indicated that he carries a Muslim bloodline (Obama Sr. is a Kenyan Muslim), no matter whether he claims he is a Christian.
Now, Obama declared that he would fight tooth and nail, among the US presidential candidates, for doing Jew’s bidding as a Shabbat Goy.
Jews are prohibited to do certain thing during the Sabbath… for example, Jews are not allowed to drive a car, ride a bike, or ride a carriage, turn the light switches on, light a candle or fire for heat, so on.
To its extremities, a Jewish physician is not allowed to care for a Goy patient during the Sabbath. (excluding a Jewish patient.)
So Jews need a Shabbat Goy, a gentile who performs tasks for Jews in the home or Synagogue on the Sabbath or holy day that are forbidden Jews on such occasions as mentioned above.
Someone calls the US President as Israel’s US Governor as if Jews calls Mahmoud Abbas as their West Bank Governor.
In this perspective, Obama is more a Head Negro to serve his massa than a Good Black
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Obama picks a crypto Jew as his running mate
Obama picks a crypto Jew as his running mate
August 23 2008
Just before the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Barak Husssein Obama picked Joseph Biden as his Vice President candidate.
Joseph Biden is a stalwart of Corporate Capitalism in support of the Multi-national Corporation and an ardent Zionist for the interests of Zionist Israeli State for his entire career of 30-some years in politics as a Washington insider.
Most importantly, Delaware Senator Biden, unbeknownst to many Americans, is of Iraqi Jewish descent… his great-grand father was an Iraqi Jew. (publicly, he claimed he is an Irish Catholic as other many former US Presidents deliberately hid their ethnicity of Jewishness. For example, Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon B Johnson were of Jewish descent.)
On behalf of money power, Senator Biden leaves his fingerprints on most of the bills that benefit the wealthy corporations…the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 was just one of his devotion to serve the money power in order to protect the credit card company.
For the Zionist Israeli State that seeks the hegemonic dominance in the Middle East region, Senator Biden in 2006 unveiled his plan to divide Iraq into a federation of autonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions while keeping a weak central government in control of border defense and foreign affairs.
In other words, Senator Biden wants Iraq remaining a helpless, weak and divided Arab nation compared with the Saddam regime that once threatened the existence of the Jewish State.
Obviously, Obama desperately sought after someone that the Israeli lobby group inside and outside of the Democratic Party endorses the candidate… like Gen. Wesley Clark, another hidden Jew.
And Obama found Biden who has proved himself Israel’s unwavering acolyte in the Senate.
Obama also picked Biden for the same reason both Michael Dukakis and John F Kennedy picked their running mates, Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 and Lyndon Johnson in 1960 for marriage of youth and experience, reassuring the elites that he would not do any harm to the status quo politically and financially. (for the black African Americans, Obama is nothing but a Pied Piper… either they can sit out without voting for him or follow him for oblivion.)
Obama initially opposed the launching of the US attack on Iraq in 2003 when he was not yet in the US Senate, but he has voted unhesitantly for all the war bills after he was in Senate.
Biden himself voted enthusiastically for the attack and supported George Bush.
The following is what Biden said in the Senate debate in October 2002.
"I do not believe this is a rush to war.
I believe it is a march to peace and security.
I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur… Saddam Hussein possesses…
For four years now, he has prevented United Nations inspectors from uncovering those weapons…"
"The terms of surrender dictated by the United Nations require him to declare and destroy his weapons of mass destruction programs. He has not done so…
Many predicted the administration would refuse to give the weapons inspectors one last chance to disarm…"
"Mr. President, President Bush did not lash out precipitously after 9/11.
He did not snub the U.N. or our allies.
He did not dismiss a new inspection regime.
He did not ignore the Congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation…"
"For two decades, Saddam Hussein has relentlessly pursued weapons of mass destruction.
There is a broad agreement that he retains chemical and biological weapons, the means to manufacture those weapons and modified Scud missiles, and that he is actively seeking a nuclear capability…"
"We must be clear with the American people that we are committing to Iraq for the long haul; not just the day after, but the decade after…(Biden confided to his colleagues that this would be a long fight, but he was still for it.)
I am absolutely confident we will enhance his (Bush) ability to get the world to be with us by us voting for this resolution."
Now, to the poor American folks, would you still believe what Obama said “Change” and “Hope” would follow suit if you elect him and Biden?
My answer is: Democrats and Republicans, they both are two cheeks of the same derriere, as I said so often whenever they have had a dog and pony show every four years apart.
What’s your thought?
August 23 2008
Just before the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Barak Husssein Obama picked Joseph Biden as his Vice President candidate.
Joseph Biden is a stalwart of Corporate Capitalism in support of the Multi-national Corporation and an ardent Zionist for the interests of Zionist Israeli State for his entire career of 30-some years in politics as a Washington insider.
Most importantly, Delaware Senator Biden, unbeknownst to many Americans, is of Iraqi Jewish descent… his great-grand father was an Iraqi Jew. (publicly, he claimed he is an Irish Catholic as other many former US Presidents deliberately hid their ethnicity of Jewishness. For example, Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon B Johnson were of Jewish descent.)
On behalf of money power, Senator Biden leaves his fingerprints on most of the bills that benefit the wealthy corporations…the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 was just one of his devotion to serve the money power in order to protect the credit card company.
For the Zionist Israeli State that seeks the hegemonic dominance in the Middle East region, Senator Biden in 2006 unveiled his plan to divide Iraq into a federation of autonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions while keeping a weak central government in control of border defense and foreign affairs.
In other words, Senator Biden wants Iraq remaining a helpless, weak and divided Arab nation compared with the Saddam regime that once threatened the existence of the Jewish State.
Obviously, Obama desperately sought after someone that the Israeli lobby group inside and outside of the Democratic Party endorses the candidate… like Gen. Wesley Clark, another hidden Jew.
And Obama found Biden who has proved himself Israel’s unwavering acolyte in the Senate.
Obama also picked Biden for the same reason both Michael Dukakis and John F Kennedy picked their running mates, Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 and Lyndon Johnson in 1960 for marriage of youth and experience, reassuring the elites that he would not do any harm to the status quo politically and financially. (for the black African Americans, Obama is nothing but a Pied Piper… either they can sit out without voting for him or follow him for oblivion.)
Obama initially opposed the launching of the US attack on Iraq in 2003 when he was not yet in the US Senate, but he has voted unhesitantly for all the war bills after he was in Senate.
Biden himself voted enthusiastically for the attack and supported George Bush.
The following is what Biden said in the Senate debate in October 2002.
"I do not believe this is a rush to war.
I believe it is a march to peace and security.
I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur… Saddam Hussein possesses…
For four years now, he has prevented United Nations inspectors from uncovering those weapons…"
"The terms of surrender dictated by the United Nations require him to declare and destroy his weapons of mass destruction programs. He has not done so…
Many predicted the administration would refuse to give the weapons inspectors one last chance to disarm…"
"Mr. President, President Bush did not lash out precipitously after 9/11.
He did not snub the U.N. or our allies.
He did not dismiss a new inspection regime.
He did not ignore the Congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation…"
"For two decades, Saddam Hussein has relentlessly pursued weapons of mass destruction.
There is a broad agreement that he retains chemical and biological weapons, the means to manufacture those weapons and modified Scud missiles, and that he is actively seeking a nuclear capability…"
"We must be clear with the American people that we are committing to Iraq for the long haul; not just the day after, but the decade after…(Biden confided to his colleagues that this would be a long fight, but he was still for it.)
I am absolutely confident we will enhance his (Bush) ability to get the world to be with us by us voting for this resolution."
Now, to the poor American folks, would you still believe what Obama said “Change” and “Hope” would follow suit if you elect him and Biden?
My answer is: Democrats and Republicans, they both are two cheeks of the same derriere, as I said so often whenever they have had a dog and pony show every four years apart.
What’s your thought?
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