Nowhere Man
Why Ban Ki-Moon is the world’s most dangerous Korean
For such a seemingly crucial position, the secretary-generalship of the United Nations has historically had a rather low bar for success.
Kurt Waldheim?
In his memoir, A Dangerous Place, Daniel Patrick Moynihan recounted that Waldheim functioned as "a post office, a somewhat antique but reasonably efficient public service run along Austro-Hungarian lines.
As one sat down with him, he would be mentally sorting the mail while making small conversation."
Boutros Boutros-Ghali?
His arrogance and fecklessness as the Serbs laid waste to Bosnia prompted the Clinton administration to veto a second term.
Kofi Annan? Brought low by his son Kojo's financial peculation in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal.
Even in this unimpressive company, though, Ban Ki-moon appears to have set the standard for failure.
It's not that Ban has committed any particularly egregious mistakes in his 2½ years on the job.
But at a time when global leadership is urgently needed, when climate change and international terrorism and the biggest financial crisis in 60 years might seem to require some—any!—response, the former South Korean foreign minister has instead been trotting the globe collecting honorary degrees, issuing utterly forgettable statements, and generally frittering away any influence he might command.
He has become a kind of accidental tourist, a dilettante on the international stage.
Not for him bold speeches or attempts to mobilize public opinion behind what could be an organization that helps tackle nuclear proliferation or reconstruct Afghanistan.
Not for him championing human rights, or even rallying in defense of beleaguered civilians.
Visiting Malta in April for yet another honorary degree, he was evasive when asked about the island's penchant for sending illegal African immigrants packing off to Italy, saying, "I am not in a position to intervene."
As tens of thousands of Tamil refugees lingered under fire on a narrow strip of beach in Sri Lanka, Ban and his advisors did little more than huddle in New York and wring their hands, only making a trip to the war zone after hostilities ended.
Under his stewardship, the United Nations isn't merely an unhelpful place—it's a largely irrelevant one.
Ban's flaws were obvious dating back to his decades toiling in the South Korean foreign ministry, where he earned a telling nickname, "The Bureaucrat."
Luckily for Ban, if not for the rest of the world, The Bureaucrat was exactly what the Bush administration was looking for after years of tussling with the assertively anti-American Annan.
When it became Asia's turn to nominate a secretary-general, Bush's secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, made Ban's election her pet project.
But Ban failed to charm outside observers.
In his book The Best Intentions, James Traub recounts a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations during Ban's campaign to become secretary: "[B]etween his anodyne oratory and his unsteady grasp of English, I found that I had been lulled to sleep."
As secretary-general, Ban's soporific effect has never left him.
One U.N. watcher told me that Ban is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one around to witness its crash—if you don't hear him, does he really exist?
Aside from his role as a subsidiary of South Korea, Inc.—lining his office walls with Samsung televisions and hiring his South Korean buddies as senior advisors—his imprint has been negligible.
Even Ban seems aware of what a nonentity he is: Last August, speaking to senior U.N. officials in Turin, he described his management style as elevating teamwork over intellectual attainment.
But he went on to bemoan his difficulty overcoming bureaucratic inertia, ending with a gnomic admission of general defeat: "I tried to lead by example. Nobody followed."
At their best, U.N. secretaries-general can serve as a goad to the world's conscience and a genuine catalyst for change.
Dag Hammarskjold, for example, sought to expand the United Nations' mandate by undertaking high-profile and frequently risky missions, from meeting with Chinese leaders under Mao to securing freedom for 15 American pilots captured during the Korean War to traveling several times to the Congo in hopes of averting warfare during decolonization.
During the 1980s, the urbane Javier Pérez de Cuéllar earned high marks for conducting talks between Argentina and Britain after the Falklands War and for bringing about Namibian independence from South Africa.
So far, Ban has no such successes to his credit. It's not as if there aren't enough crises around the globe for him to make his mark, whether in Sri Lanka or Sudan or the Middle East.
But Ban hasn't given any indication that he's going to have an impact in any of these places—or even that he wants to.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Ban-chusa Is Coming To Town
ㅁAlas! Alack-a-day! Ban-chusa is coming to town
December 22 2006
“Santa Claus is coming to town…. I am making a list…checking a list twice…going to find who’s naughty or nice…Ban-chusa is coming to town.”
Author’s note 1: Ban, Ki-moon, the newly elected Secretary General of the United Nations, has been carrying an appellation, “Ban-chusa”, during the 35-something years of his bureaucratic life in the South Korean Government…the loose translation of “chusa” refers to a low-level mandarin in a duty of an administrative clerk who generally lacks of charisma and is chockfull of uninspiring character that only concerns about one’s tenure as a dull, bland, faceless, inoffensive, unexciting, and run-of –the –mill errand boy. Most typically, the “chusa” plays a role of an official lapdog to bark in behalf of one’s master whenever boss yells “sic’em!”
Author’s note 2: You may find a live video here where Ban-chusa mutters, fumbles, and croons in a foolish and botched manner. Watching the video first and then reading my article later may help considerably in understanding the main pillar of my argument, the duck principle: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck, period. )
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/nb_rm_fs.stm?news=1&nbram=1&nbwm=1&nol_storyid=6181719
“America with other members (of the United Nations)…have been making a great contribution to restore peace and stability…to the Iraqi people. We have a high admiration for all that the United States has been doing…we hope that the Iraqi people will be able to enjoy genuine stability.”
That was the exact words, Ban-chusa told the anchorman Bill Weir during his interview in Good Morning America’s weekend edition in October 15 2006 after he shot to super stardom, the Secretary General, shamelessly telecasting his “chusa-character” to his future master, USA, and butting head with current Secretary General Kofi Annan’s statement that the US invasion of Iraq was illegal and Iraqi people are suffering from the daily onslaughts of civil war brought on by the US military occupation.
Even the stray dogs in the street of New York City where Ban-chusa begins his new UN career in 2007 know well that the US military occupation in Iraq is not “making a great contribution to restore peace and stability” in the region and the Iraqi people are not “admiring highly for all that the US has been doing,” while the incoming Secretary General profusely thanked the American people for exporting democracy and bringing stability to Iraq.
What’s up, Doc?
How in the world do we expect Ban-chusa doing his job of a strong and unbiased arbiter, trouble-shooter, and problem-solver for the delicate and intense international conflicts like the Middle East conflicts, World Food Program, Refugee Programs, Human Rights and Atomic Energy Issues?
How in the world do we hope that Ban-chusa stands up against the big powers in favor of the weak member state, when he kowtowed 90 degree genuflecting on the mat squeaking “halleluiah America”?
Isn’t the job of the Secretary General just too big for a little known “chusa” whose main function is more a milquetoast secretary than an assertive General?
Nothing in his past indicates that Ban-chusa would function as a powerful statesman in a rule-setting international body like the past Secretary Generals Dag Hammarskjold and U Thant… he rather works a backroom boy as he’s been doing all in his public life, serving his masters from the Military dictators to the political hacks.
During the brutal totalitarian regime of despotic General Park CH when most of his friends in the university converged in the street for mass demonstration to gain freedom and democracy and were arrested, tortured, jailed and exiled from the country, he hid cowardly in an attic closing his eyes, plugging his ears, gagging his mouth, and studied hard in 24/7 fashion in order to become a “chusa”.
In other words, from the beginning he has carried a quintessential characteristic of “chusa” class-consciousness that borders on total obsequiousness toward his master.
In his academic years during the sixties, the South Korea was embroidered with massive student demonstrations that a majority of university youngsters poured out into the street day in and day out, demanding the rights of free speech in the campus, petitions of habeas corpus for jailed students, and the abolition of military dictatorship.
In response, General Park CH released a coterie of hundreds of goon squads armed with iron pipes and baseball bats against the demonstrating students, beating and cracking the skulls and bodies of unarmed youngsters, arresting en masse and corralling them in temporary holding pens and administering the torture of water boarding to the student leaders.
The prisons were flooded with students, professors, labor leaders, and ordinary people who valiantly protested against his tyranny and hundreds of detainees were met with various forms of tortures and long-term jail sentences that resulted in suspicious deaths of dozens of innocent people and in the judicial killings of dissident groups.
In this social ambience, Ban-chusa was warming up his ass glued on a chair, studied hard fueled by his desire becoming a “chusa” and then passed successfully for the state exam ignoring the desperate cries from his fellow students…and then he has cut his teeth on 35-something years of his public service as a kowtowing yes man toward the iron-fisted, torture-maniac, and tin-pot military dictators (Gen. Park, Chun and Roh), an enchilada of a corrupt political hack (YS Kim), an opportunistic and venal comprador (DJ Kim), and a plastic and tubby bullfrog (Roh MH).
In other words, he, like the all-season tire, appeared to be talented with accommodating the various wishes of any type of bosses, a perfect character of a loyal, bootlicking, insipid, spineless, and weathervane milquetoast “chusa” and he had a gall cum nicety to say sorry sheepishly to his “senior-chusas” when he was awarded unceremoniously with getting promoted ahead of them.
Contrary to his admirer’s accolades that he was fastidious and laborious in implementing rules and regulations with fine details, he once goofed up the international treaty with Russia and was booted out from his ambassadorship until the foreign minister of the South Korea ratcheted him up from the street for his excellent (?) skill in English and French language…that is, his execrable English skill is obviously good enough in Korean standard among the diplomatic bureaucrats at the Foreign Ministry where scores of malapropistic “chusas” huddle picking some lunch leftovers between their teeth with a wooden toothpick in the corridors of cafeteria.
As “Ban-chusa” himself admitted frequently that he learns English by rote as most of Koreans do, he, in the live interview, often mumbles or mutters in English with no intonation like a parrot and spews out a series of monotonous vocabularies like a robot with his squinty eyeballs desperately rolling to search the memorized words or phrases he prepared in his rehearsals for press conference.
There is also a disturbing press report that he might be a member of the Unification Church because he quoted himself a “non-denominational Christian”…it is possible he might briefly be joined with the Moonies during his school years, because it was a heyday for the Moonies to recruit and brainwash the Korean youngsters, considering Ban-chusa was somewhat a loner, a wonk, and a farm boy with little money away from his hometown…a desirable target for Moonies.
It also bodes evil if it were proven that he was a Moonies, because the notorious Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) at the time employed Moonies their agents in Korea for the domestic surveillance against the dissident group, in Japan for the covert operation to disrupt anti-government movement, and in US for a major conduit to distribute the hush money toward Korean resident sleepers who lobbied for the dictatorial South Korean military government.
In the academic sense of moral and political standard, the qualities of “Ban-chusa” squarely remain in the lowest rung of promotional ladder in the bureaucratic system.
Strangely, for Bonkers Bolton, the boneheaded US envoy to the UN, “Ban-chusa” became first an accidental, second a sought-after and then a god-send candidate for the UN Secretary General in his pursuit of reforming the UN organizations palatable to the US foreign policies of imperial expansionism…Bonkers Bolton has long dismissed the legitimacy of the UN, quipping that “If the US secretary building in New York lost ten stories, it would not make a bit of difference”, and he needs someone a “chusa”-class bureaucrat who loyally follows the orders of the superpower nation unlike Mr. Kofi Annan who frequently irks the US interests in the international arena.
In other words, Bonkers Bolton wanted to make the UN an unworkable organization only as good one as it dances according to the tune of US foreign engagements and “Ban-chusa” provides the choreograph for the tune accordingly.
And “Ban-chusa” appears to be carrying all the ingredients to a fault in his bureaucratic genes executing the US intention to make the world organization a spineless, wobbling, and “impossible” institute.
Luckily for the time being, “Ban-chusa” was spared from the barking orders by the abrasive, infantile, and boorish Bonkers Bolton when the US envoy failed to get the confirmation from the US Senate and was forced to resign, as “Ban-chusa” was about to move in to take the seat in the UN building
However, Ban-chusa’s honeymoon in town won’t last much long, since Uncle Sam would breathe down on his neck closely so as not to let him stray too far away from the peg that the South Koreans were tethered in the puppet/puppeteer relationship with the US occupation forces for over half a century.
For 35 something years, “Ban-chusa” has been sitting by the same peg so long that he might have no sensation of a leash around his neck, playing antics comically about 007 James Bond and singing boyishly a Christmas carol “Santa Claus is coming to town” at the press conference as the video shows.
He alluded to the similarity between Ban and Bond, and replaced lyrics with “Ban Ki-moon is coming to town” as if he were a Santa bringing gifts to the international community.
Some say “Ban-chusa” deserves to be seen as well a good administrator of the world organization as he claimed a harmonizer and bridge-builder among member nations…
But how on earth could world people have an image of “Ban-chusa” a man of integrity when he is as blind as an owl in daylight, shouting that “We thank America for all that they have been doing in Iraq”? He doesn’t follow the daily news of bombings, killings, and massacres that Americans have brought down to the streets, towns, and homes of Iraqi civilians?
Then, obviously, as the saying goes that “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck”, there are only two possibilities: “Ban-chusa” must be either an idiot when he says totally opposite images of catastrophes in Iraq that even the stray dogs in the street can attest easily his falsification. Or he is a liar wearing the pairs of USA-made goggles that show always Alice-in-Wonderland of incomplete projects and wishful thinking for freedom and democracy in the Islamic country of Iraq.
In either way, there is no attic to hide in his new playing field at the UN building as if he hid cowardly playing a game of peek-a-boo during his school years.
History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes,
Sadly, my bet is that “Ban-chusa” would be monikered more of a pipsqueak Secretariat who almost always kowtows to his master as he has done for three-decade-long career than an assertive General who stands up in his bully pulpit and barks back against the growling Superman, Uncle Sam, since “Ban-chusa” has neither intellectual mettle and temerity nor moral fiber and commitment to deal with the worldwide conflicts.
December 22 2006
“Santa Claus is coming to town…. I am making a list…checking a list twice…going to find who’s naughty or nice…Ban-chusa is coming to town.”
Author’s note 1: Ban, Ki-moon, the newly elected Secretary General of the United Nations, has been carrying an appellation, “Ban-chusa”, during the 35-something years of his bureaucratic life in the South Korean Government…the loose translation of “chusa” refers to a low-level mandarin in a duty of an administrative clerk who generally lacks of charisma and is chockfull of uninspiring character that only concerns about one’s tenure as a dull, bland, faceless, inoffensive, unexciting, and run-of –the –mill errand boy. Most typically, the “chusa” plays a role of an official lapdog to bark in behalf of one’s master whenever boss yells “sic’em!”
Author’s note 2: You may find a live video here where Ban-chusa mutters, fumbles, and croons in a foolish and botched manner. Watching the video first and then reading my article later may help considerably in understanding the main pillar of my argument, the duck principle: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck, period. )
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/nb_rm_fs.stm?news=1&nbram=1&nbwm=1&nol_storyid=6181719
“America with other members (of the United Nations)…have been making a great contribution to restore peace and stability…to the Iraqi people. We have a high admiration for all that the United States has been doing…we hope that the Iraqi people will be able to enjoy genuine stability.”
That was the exact words, Ban-chusa told the anchorman Bill Weir during his interview in Good Morning America’s weekend edition in October 15 2006 after he shot to super stardom, the Secretary General, shamelessly telecasting his “chusa-character” to his future master, USA, and butting head with current Secretary General Kofi Annan’s statement that the US invasion of Iraq was illegal and Iraqi people are suffering from the daily onslaughts of civil war brought on by the US military occupation.
Even the stray dogs in the street of New York City where Ban-chusa begins his new UN career in 2007 know well that the US military occupation in Iraq is not “making a great contribution to restore peace and stability” in the region and the Iraqi people are not “admiring highly for all that the US has been doing,” while the incoming Secretary General profusely thanked the American people for exporting democracy and bringing stability to Iraq.
What’s up, Doc?
How in the world do we expect Ban-chusa doing his job of a strong and unbiased arbiter, trouble-shooter, and problem-solver for the delicate and intense international conflicts like the Middle East conflicts, World Food Program, Refugee Programs, Human Rights and Atomic Energy Issues?
How in the world do we hope that Ban-chusa stands up against the big powers in favor of the weak member state, when he kowtowed 90 degree genuflecting on the mat squeaking “halleluiah America”?
Isn’t the job of the Secretary General just too big for a little known “chusa” whose main function is more a milquetoast secretary than an assertive General?
Nothing in his past indicates that Ban-chusa would function as a powerful statesman in a rule-setting international body like the past Secretary Generals Dag Hammarskjold and U Thant… he rather works a backroom boy as he’s been doing all in his public life, serving his masters from the Military dictators to the political hacks.
During the brutal totalitarian regime of despotic General Park CH when most of his friends in the university converged in the street for mass demonstration to gain freedom and democracy and were arrested, tortured, jailed and exiled from the country, he hid cowardly in an attic closing his eyes, plugging his ears, gagging his mouth, and studied hard in 24/7 fashion in order to become a “chusa”.
In other words, from the beginning he has carried a quintessential characteristic of “chusa” class-consciousness that borders on total obsequiousness toward his master.
In his academic years during the sixties, the South Korea was embroidered with massive student demonstrations that a majority of university youngsters poured out into the street day in and day out, demanding the rights of free speech in the campus, petitions of habeas corpus for jailed students, and the abolition of military dictatorship.
In response, General Park CH released a coterie of hundreds of goon squads armed with iron pipes and baseball bats against the demonstrating students, beating and cracking the skulls and bodies of unarmed youngsters, arresting en masse and corralling them in temporary holding pens and administering the torture of water boarding to the student leaders.
The prisons were flooded with students, professors, labor leaders, and ordinary people who valiantly protested against his tyranny and hundreds of detainees were met with various forms of tortures and long-term jail sentences that resulted in suspicious deaths of dozens of innocent people and in the judicial killings of dissident groups.
In this social ambience, Ban-chusa was warming up his ass glued on a chair, studied hard fueled by his desire becoming a “chusa” and then passed successfully for the state exam ignoring the desperate cries from his fellow students…and then he has cut his teeth on 35-something years of his public service as a kowtowing yes man toward the iron-fisted, torture-maniac, and tin-pot military dictators (Gen. Park, Chun and Roh), an enchilada of a corrupt political hack (YS Kim), an opportunistic and venal comprador (DJ Kim), and a plastic and tubby bullfrog (Roh MH).
In other words, he, like the all-season tire, appeared to be talented with accommodating the various wishes of any type of bosses, a perfect character of a loyal, bootlicking, insipid, spineless, and weathervane milquetoast “chusa” and he had a gall cum nicety to say sorry sheepishly to his “senior-chusas” when he was awarded unceremoniously with getting promoted ahead of them.
Contrary to his admirer’s accolades that he was fastidious and laborious in implementing rules and regulations with fine details, he once goofed up the international treaty with Russia and was booted out from his ambassadorship until the foreign minister of the South Korea ratcheted him up from the street for his excellent (?) skill in English and French language…that is, his execrable English skill is obviously good enough in Korean standard among the diplomatic bureaucrats at the Foreign Ministry where scores of malapropistic “chusas” huddle picking some lunch leftovers between their teeth with a wooden toothpick in the corridors of cafeteria.
As “Ban-chusa” himself admitted frequently that he learns English by rote as most of Koreans do, he, in the live interview, often mumbles or mutters in English with no intonation like a parrot and spews out a series of monotonous vocabularies like a robot with his squinty eyeballs desperately rolling to search the memorized words or phrases he prepared in his rehearsals for press conference.
There is also a disturbing press report that he might be a member of the Unification Church because he quoted himself a “non-denominational Christian”…it is possible he might briefly be joined with the Moonies during his school years, because it was a heyday for the Moonies to recruit and brainwash the Korean youngsters, considering Ban-chusa was somewhat a loner, a wonk, and a farm boy with little money away from his hometown…a desirable target for Moonies.
It also bodes evil if it were proven that he was a Moonies, because the notorious Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) at the time employed Moonies their agents in Korea for the domestic surveillance against the dissident group, in Japan for the covert operation to disrupt anti-government movement, and in US for a major conduit to distribute the hush money toward Korean resident sleepers who lobbied for the dictatorial South Korean military government.
In the academic sense of moral and political standard, the qualities of “Ban-chusa” squarely remain in the lowest rung of promotional ladder in the bureaucratic system.
Strangely, for Bonkers Bolton, the boneheaded US envoy to the UN, “Ban-chusa” became first an accidental, second a sought-after and then a god-send candidate for the UN Secretary General in his pursuit of reforming the UN organizations palatable to the US foreign policies of imperial expansionism…Bonkers Bolton has long dismissed the legitimacy of the UN, quipping that “If the US secretary building in New York lost ten stories, it would not make a bit of difference”, and he needs someone a “chusa”-class bureaucrat who loyally follows the orders of the superpower nation unlike Mr. Kofi Annan who frequently irks the US interests in the international arena.
In other words, Bonkers Bolton wanted to make the UN an unworkable organization only as good one as it dances according to the tune of US foreign engagements and “Ban-chusa” provides the choreograph for the tune accordingly.
And “Ban-chusa” appears to be carrying all the ingredients to a fault in his bureaucratic genes executing the US intention to make the world organization a spineless, wobbling, and “impossible” institute.
Luckily for the time being, “Ban-chusa” was spared from the barking orders by the abrasive, infantile, and boorish Bonkers Bolton when the US envoy failed to get the confirmation from the US Senate and was forced to resign, as “Ban-chusa” was about to move in to take the seat in the UN building
However, Ban-chusa’s honeymoon in town won’t last much long, since Uncle Sam would breathe down on his neck closely so as not to let him stray too far away from the peg that the South Koreans were tethered in the puppet/puppeteer relationship with the US occupation forces for over half a century.
For 35 something years, “Ban-chusa” has been sitting by the same peg so long that he might have no sensation of a leash around his neck, playing antics comically about 007 James Bond and singing boyishly a Christmas carol “Santa Claus is coming to town” at the press conference as the video shows.
He alluded to the similarity between Ban and Bond, and replaced lyrics with “Ban Ki-moon is coming to town” as if he were a Santa bringing gifts to the international community.
Some say “Ban-chusa” deserves to be seen as well a good administrator of the world organization as he claimed a harmonizer and bridge-builder among member nations…
But how on earth could world people have an image of “Ban-chusa” a man of integrity when he is as blind as an owl in daylight, shouting that “We thank America for all that they have been doing in Iraq”? He doesn’t follow the daily news of bombings, killings, and massacres that Americans have brought down to the streets, towns, and homes of Iraqi civilians?
Then, obviously, as the saying goes that “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck”, there are only two possibilities: “Ban-chusa” must be either an idiot when he says totally opposite images of catastrophes in Iraq that even the stray dogs in the street can attest easily his falsification. Or he is a liar wearing the pairs of USA-made goggles that show always Alice-in-Wonderland of incomplete projects and wishful thinking for freedom and democracy in the Islamic country of Iraq.
In either way, there is no attic to hide in his new playing field at the UN building as if he hid cowardly playing a game of peek-a-boo during his school years.
History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes,
Sadly, my bet is that “Ban-chusa” would be monikered more of a pipsqueak Secretariat who almost always kowtows to his master as he has done for three-decade-long career than an assertive General who stands up in his bully pulpit and barks back against the growling Superman, Uncle Sam, since “Ban-chusa” has neither intellectual mettle and temerity nor moral fiber and commitment to deal with the worldwide conflicts.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Oy Vey! Pity The Nation
Oy Vey! Pity The Nation!
May 25 2009
“It is not the thief that is hanged, but one who is caught stealing.” Czech proverb
“The more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.” Bonaparte Napoleon 1817
Since the 1948 establishment of the South Korean Republic, the history of this country has been indeed no more than the register of social crimes, economic thievery, financial frauds, bureaucratic corruptions, brutal tortures, arbitrary incarceration, and wanton abuses of human right on its people by the various regimes of autocratic, military, and civic governments that were powered, aided and sanctioned as a puppet regime by the US imperialism.
These misfortunes of the S Korean people were supposedly to end when Mr. Roh Moo-hyun, a maverick and self-taught human right lawyer took office the President of Republic with the fanfare banner of clean and transparent government of average working stiffs.
So did people believe it and Mr. Roh himself trusted with pride that he would be the first politician who has gall not to kowtow to his overlord, Uncle Sam.
However when Mr. Roh and his family were snared in a bribery scandal with no way out, he killed himself by jumping off a cliff...in other words, there are no exceptions as if no one can live without crime in S Korea!
The S Korea has been no less a paradise than the lair for thieves, fraudsters, conmen, finaglers, palm-greasers, crooks, etc.
Last month, Mr. Kim, Dong-gill, the professor emeritus and a philosopher in Seoul, posted an article regarding Mr. Roh’s financial escapade, admonishing harshly that “there are only two ways for him to apologize to his people for his monkey business, either should he commit suicide or go to jail.”
In response to the article, the rah-rah group of the “netizens” swarmed over his website like African killer bees and blamed the Professor of soliciting and resulting in Mr. Roh’s suicide.
Even some mourners wailed and hollered: “We are sorry we failed to protect you.”
As usual, the incumbent government of President Lee, MB shudders that the large numbers of housewives, students, and Joe-six-packs may stir up the hornet’s nest of anti-Lee movement, announcing that the prosecutors suspend the on-going investigation over Roh’s scandals full stop.
And the nation is ready to mourn the death of a disgraced ex-President and to prepare the national rite of burial in the national cemetery, as previous regimes did for the entombment of autocratic, dictatorial, money-grubbing, torturous, libidinal, and murderous Presidents.
In the South Korean society where a majority of people one way or another believes in something called a religion or a myth, death is regarded as too sacrosanct to be criticized or violated no matter what degree or proportion the deceased did commit a crime before his final day.
Among the military dictators, General Park CH was the worst of its kind, committing an enchilada crime of murdering, torturing, beating, finagling, raping, etc. of his people in the name of economic development and prosperity and most of the South Koreans have prostrated on all four at the altar of the assassinated General thanking and calling him a father of modern day economic prosperity.
In this process of eulogizing a terrible criminal, all the victims that this culprit produced are completely neglected or forgotten...
A fan club member of “Rohsamo” strongly insisted that what Mr. Roh took a bribe was a pittance in comparison with the amounts of cash other Presidents carted off in a pile of apple boxes.
Here the quantities do not count, but only qualities apply, as Mr. Roh himself stated in his last statement: “I do not symbolize the values any more.”
Mr. Roh began his presidency claiming that there is nothing wrong being an anti-American and boldly continued to engage with North Koreans amicably and diplomatically rather than listening to the belligerent bullshits of his boss, George W Bush.
However, Mr. Roh eventually knelt down at the foot of Emperor George and agreed to send a contingent of army units to the colonial war fronts of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Later, his amateurish and puerile attitude as a sycophant factotum manifested in a bizarre form of facelift surgery...he summoned the best plastic surgeons from the Medical Centre at the Seoul National University and together with his First Lady he got the surgical adjustment to make his bullfrog’s eye-lid look more like a Caucasian one.
For more than a week, he and his wife were not able to stand out in front of camera or his beloved followers, “Rohsamo”, until his swollen eyes make a fake recovery of a kowtowing chink butler’s appearance.
And as expected, most of the S. Korean people never uttered in a whimper because they, almost all, took the same plastic surgery as the President family had...that is, all together nationwide, all S Koreans want to be a look-alike Caucasian!
Curiously, all Koreans, either North or South, become combative mode and show a strong nationalistic chauvinism when they talk about their past history of mere 36 something years in thrall to the Japanese colonialism.
They are typically angry about the Japanese policies of forcing Koreans to change their name to match as if Japanese name, to prohibit speaking Korean dialogue at school or public place, or to promote to wear kimono clothes.
Notoriously, the South Koreans now are voluntarily eager to speak in English, change their name as similar as American’s, and wear their attires in a Western fashion in addition to try to imitate to behave and look-alike Americans!
No one forced the S Koreans to monkey around and to emulate the ways Americans behave...they simply were led to behave like the willing subjects of the US Empire.
No wonder why the S Koreans never consider themselves as living for over half a century under the US occupational forces and still believe in an illusion that the Republic of Korea (South Korea) is an independent and sovereign state.
How and why, then, have the S. Koreans lost their gung-ho chauvinism against the American intrusion while keeping an anti-Japanese emotion alive?
We, human beings, inherit, evolve, mutate, compete, and develop via natural selection in two basic units, gene and meme.
A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution analogous in many ways to the gene (the unit of genetic information) and meme spreads most horizontally while gene vertically.
Examples of meme are tunes, catch-phrases, fashion, concepts, opinion, theories, ideas, beliefs, habits, etc.
As if Charles Darwin’s biological evolution, the mimetic evolution makes one idea may become extinct while other idea will survive, mutate, and spread through modification and becomes the prominent idea of the society.
The rub here is that memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive and prosper...rather, those memes which replicate the most effectively spread best which allows for the possibility that successful memes might prove detrimental to their hosts.
Memes always do not get copied perfectly and might become mixed, combined, or modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes.
The S Korea was a fertile ground for the social, cultural, and religious evolution waiting to be harvested when the US GIs in 1945 moved into the peninsular replacing the Japanese colonialism with chic, voguish, fresh, sweet, and amiable entities: democracy, capitalism, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, chewing gums, candies, crimes, waterboarding, shenanigan, corruption, bribery, etc.
As the GIs solicited, persuaded, and propagated a unit of memes, their ideologies of sociocultural values, the S Koreans gulped it down greedily and rapidly without any second thought and the Western notion of social, cultural, and religious mores become the prominent yardstick to judge and accept the concepts of rights and wrongs.
One of the good examples that the S Koreans were overwhelmingly affected by these mimetic processes can be found in the religious syncretism. (Syncretism refers to an attempt to reconcile or fuse disparate and contradictory belief, often melding and mixing practices of various thoughts.)
Unbeknownst to most devotees of various religions, religions have had syncretic elements to their theology or history, as Christianity is the ultimate product of religious syncretism that was nourished and catered by a Jewish womb (a mimetic ancestor) and mutated into a new god/man theology.
The Korean Christianity has the underlying structure of assimilated religions, such as Neo-Confucianism, Taoism, Mahayana Buddhism, and indigenous shamanism that are dissimilar in nature, quality, or form with the Western concept of “Jesus the Christ.”
And the Gospels narratives that the Korean preachers address in their pulpit are effectively contextualized in order to be palatable to their taste and to facilitate the mass conversion to the Christianity which eventually manifests as the political conversion.
In this perspective, Christianity played a major role for the S Koreans to be oblivious about the reality that they are not any more indigenous S Korean than a crop from the genetically modified organism (GMO).
In other words, the information and idea in their brains do not reconcile with their physical differences of the slit-eyed, low-bridged nose, and high-cheek-boned flat face until they stand in front of mirror every morning.
And so rush they go to the clinic, get knifed all over their body and voila! They are now look-alike Americans
The sad part is that their physical alignment can never be inherited genetically to their kids who have to get knifed on and on if the kids wish to avoid the parental abuses.
Monkey see and monkey do.
When you look like a monkey and ape like a monkey, you surely are a monkey.
And Mr. Roh took a frontal assault on Korean identity of a pair of slit-eyes in a monkey style and eventually falls off to a cliff where his ego rests in peace with the rah-rah gangs of monkey netizens.
In short, Mr. Roh is a coward and a petty criminal not worth a grain of salt, a simpleton as if a monkey see and a monkey do.
He killed himself because he can not face the music, period.
He should be interned in his village lot, not in the national cemetery.
May 25 2009
“It is not the thief that is hanged, but one who is caught stealing.” Czech proverb
“The more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.” Bonaparte Napoleon 1817
Since the 1948 establishment of the South Korean Republic, the history of this country has been indeed no more than the register of social crimes, economic thievery, financial frauds, bureaucratic corruptions, brutal tortures, arbitrary incarceration, and wanton abuses of human right on its people by the various regimes of autocratic, military, and civic governments that were powered, aided and sanctioned as a puppet regime by the US imperialism.
These misfortunes of the S Korean people were supposedly to end when Mr. Roh Moo-hyun, a maverick and self-taught human right lawyer took office the President of Republic with the fanfare banner of clean and transparent government of average working stiffs.
So did people believe it and Mr. Roh himself trusted with pride that he would be the first politician who has gall not to kowtow to his overlord, Uncle Sam.
However when Mr. Roh and his family were snared in a bribery scandal with no way out, he killed himself by jumping off a cliff...in other words, there are no exceptions as if no one can live without crime in S Korea!
The S Korea has been no less a paradise than the lair for thieves, fraudsters, conmen, finaglers, palm-greasers, crooks, etc.
Last month, Mr. Kim, Dong-gill, the professor emeritus and a philosopher in Seoul, posted an article regarding Mr. Roh’s financial escapade, admonishing harshly that “there are only two ways for him to apologize to his people for his monkey business, either should he commit suicide or go to jail.”
In response to the article, the rah-rah group of the “netizens” swarmed over his website like African killer bees and blamed the Professor of soliciting and resulting in Mr. Roh’s suicide.
Even some mourners wailed and hollered: “We are sorry we failed to protect you.”
As usual, the incumbent government of President Lee, MB shudders that the large numbers of housewives, students, and Joe-six-packs may stir up the hornet’s nest of anti-Lee movement, announcing that the prosecutors suspend the on-going investigation over Roh’s scandals full stop.
And the nation is ready to mourn the death of a disgraced ex-President and to prepare the national rite of burial in the national cemetery, as previous regimes did for the entombment of autocratic, dictatorial, money-grubbing, torturous, libidinal, and murderous Presidents.
In the South Korean society where a majority of people one way or another believes in something called a religion or a myth, death is regarded as too sacrosanct to be criticized or violated no matter what degree or proportion the deceased did commit a crime before his final day.
Among the military dictators, General Park CH was the worst of its kind, committing an enchilada crime of murdering, torturing, beating, finagling, raping, etc. of his people in the name of economic development and prosperity and most of the South Koreans have prostrated on all four at the altar of the assassinated General thanking and calling him a father of modern day economic prosperity.
In this process of eulogizing a terrible criminal, all the victims that this culprit produced are completely neglected or forgotten...
A fan club member of “Rohsamo” strongly insisted that what Mr. Roh took a bribe was a pittance in comparison with the amounts of cash other Presidents carted off in a pile of apple boxes.
Here the quantities do not count, but only qualities apply, as Mr. Roh himself stated in his last statement: “I do not symbolize the values any more.”
Mr. Roh began his presidency claiming that there is nothing wrong being an anti-American and boldly continued to engage with North Koreans amicably and diplomatically rather than listening to the belligerent bullshits of his boss, George W Bush.
However, Mr. Roh eventually knelt down at the foot of Emperor George and agreed to send a contingent of army units to the colonial war fronts of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Later, his amateurish and puerile attitude as a sycophant factotum manifested in a bizarre form of facelift surgery...he summoned the best plastic surgeons from the Medical Centre at the Seoul National University and together with his First Lady he got the surgical adjustment to make his bullfrog’s eye-lid look more like a Caucasian one.
For more than a week, he and his wife were not able to stand out in front of camera or his beloved followers, “Rohsamo”, until his swollen eyes make a fake recovery of a kowtowing chink butler’s appearance.
And as expected, most of the S. Korean people never uttered in a whimper because they, almost all, took the same plastic surgery as the President family had...that is, all together nationwide, all S Koreans want to be a look-alike Caucasian!
Curiously, all Koreans, either North or South, become combative mode and show a strong nationalistic chauvinism when they talk about their past history of mere 36 something years in thrall to the Japanese colonialism.
They are typically angry about the Japanese policies of forcing Koreans to change their name to match as if Japanese name, to prohibit speaking Korean dialogue at school or public place, or to promote to wear kimono clothes.
Notoriously, the South Koreans now are voluntarily eager to speak in English, change their name as similar as American’s, and wear their attires in a Western fashion in addition to try to imitate to behave and look-alike Americans!
No one forced the S Koreans to monkey around and to emulate the ways Americans behave...they simply were led to behave like the willing subjects of the US Empire.
No wonder why the S Koreans never consider themselves as living for over half a century under the US occupational forces and still believe in an illusion that the Republic of Korea (South Korea) is an independent and sovereign state.
How and why, then, have the S. Koreans lost their gung-ho chauvinism against the American intrusion while keeping an anti-Japanese emotion alive?
We, human beings, inherit, evolve, mutate, compete, and develop via natural selection in two basic units, gene and meme.
A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution analogous in many ways to the gene (the unit of genetic information) and meme spreads most horizontally while gene vertically.
Examples of meme are tunes, catch-phrases, fashion, concepts, opinion, theories, ideas, beliefs, habits, etc.
As if Charles Darwin’s biological evolution, the mimetic evolution makes one idea may become extinct while other idea will survive, mutate, and spread through modification and becomes the prominent idea of the society.
The rub here is that memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive and prosper...rather, those memes which replicate the most effectively spread best which allows for the possibility that successful memes might prove detrimental to their hosts.
Memes always do not get copied perfectly and might become mixed, combined, or modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes.
The S Korea was a fertile ground for the social, cultural, and religious evolution waiting to be harvested when the US GIs in 1945 moved into the peninsular replacing the Japanese colonialism with chic, voguish, fresh, sweet, and amiable entities: democracy, capitalism, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, chewing gums, candies, crimes, waterboarding, shenanigan, corruption, bribery, etc.
As the GIs solicited, persuaded, and propagated a unit of memes, their ideologies of sociocultural values, the S Koreans gulped it down greedily and rapidly without any second thought and the Western notion of social, cultural, and religious mores become the prominent yardstick to judge and accept the concepts of rights and wrongs.
One of the good examples that the S Koreans were overwhelmingly affected by these mimetic processes can be found in the religious syncretism. (Syncretism refers to an attempt to reconcile or fuse disparate and contradictory belief, often melding and mixing practices of various thoughts.)
Unbeknownst to most devotees of various religions, religions have had syncretic elements to their theology or history, as Christianity is the ultimate product of religious syncretism that was nourished and catered by a Jewish womb (a mimetic ancestor) and mutated into a new god/man theology.
The Korean Christianity has the underlying structure of assimilated religions, such as Neo-Confucianism, Taoism, Mahayana Buddhism, and indigenous shamanism that are dissimilar in nature, quality, or form with the Western concept of “Jesus the Christ.”
And the Gospels narratives that the Korean preachers address in their pulpit are effectively contextualized in order to be palatable to their taste and to facilitate the mass conversion to the Christianity which eventually manifests as the political conversion.
In this perspective, Christianity played a major role for the S Koreans to be oblivious about the reality that they are not any more indigenous S Korean than a crop from the genetically modified organism (GMO).
In other words, the information and idea in their brains do not reconcile with their physical differences of the slit-eyed, low-bridged nose, and high-cheek-boned flat face until they stand in front of mirror every morning.
And so rush they go to the clinic, get knifed all over their body and voila! They are now look-alike Americans
The sad part is that their physical alignment can never be inherited genetically to their kids who have to get knifed on and on if the kids wish to avoid the parental abuses.
Monkey see and monkey do.
When you look like a monkey and ape like a monkey, you surely are a monkey.
And Mr. Roh took a frontal assault on Korean identity of a pair of slit-eyes in a monkey style and eventually falls off to a cliff where his ego rests in peace with the rah-rah gangs of monkey netizens.
In short, Mr. Roh is a coward and a petty criminal not worth a grain of salt, a simpleton as if a monkey see and a monkey do.
He killed himself because he can not face the music, period.
He should be interned in his village lot, not in the national cemetery.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Never to Forgive and Never to Forget
Never to Forgive and Never to Forget
May 11 2009
Mahatma Gandhi once said: The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Contrarily, the Jewish attitude is never to forgive and never to forget about what had happened during the Nazi era, the Holocaust.
On the other hand, even the professor Norman Finkelstein, an arch enemy of the Jewish State of Israel and himself a Jew whose parents survived the German concentration camp, admired the tenacious attitude of Jewish “never to forgive and forget” reminding the spineless Arabs that no one respects kowtowing Arabs that spread the red carpet for Condoleezza Rice who remarks that the Israeli bombing on Lebanon in 2006 is “a birth pangs of new Middle East.”
Furthermore, professor Finkelstein emphasized that there was no other way to avoid the war in the Middle East unless Arabs choose to live as slaves to Israeli and American empire, because the militant resisting groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are never allowed to exist in the region.
In the Far East region, Japan and United States would never allow the North Koreans to possess the nuclear capabilities so that these two hegemonic countries hold sway in the region militarily and economically. They are determined to make the North Koreans “crying Uncle” and the South Koreans are collaborating willingly and happily with the former/current colonial powers.
The North should never to forgive and to forget the two colonial powers.
In the following video clip, Professor Finkelstein lambasted the sycophant Lebanese that welcomed the American Poobahs after Israeli bombardment destroyed the whole country with an American wink.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDe65-nF3FQ
May 11 2009
Mahatma Gandhi once said: The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Contrarily, the Jewish attitude is never to forgive and never to forget about what had happened during the Nazi era, the Holocaust.
On the other hand, even the professor Norman Finkelstein, an arch enemy of the Jewish State of Israel and himself a Jew whose parents survived the German concentration camp, admired the tenacious attitude of Jewish “never to forgive and forget” reminding the spineless Arabs that no one respects kowtowing Arabs that spread the red carpet for Condoleezza Rice who remarks that the Israeli bombing on Lebanon in 2006 is “a birth pangs of new Middle East.”
Furthermore, professor Finkelstein emphasized that there was no other way to avoid the war in the Middle East unless Arabs choose to live as slaves to Israeli and American empire, because the militant resisting groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are never allowed to exist in the region.
In the Far East region, Japan and United States would never allow the North Koreans to possess the nuclear capabilities so that these two hegemonic countries hold sway in the region militarily and economically. They are determined to make the North Koreans “crying Uncle” and the South Koreans are collaborating willingly and happily with the former/current colonial powers.
The North should never to forgive and to forget the two colonial powers.
In the following video clip, Professor Finkelstein lambasted the sycophant Lebanese that welcomed the American Poobahs after Israeli bombardment destroyed the whole country with an American wink.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDe65-nF3FQ
La Pasionaria
La Pasionaria
May 10 2009
Someone compares Korean woman, Liu Kwan-Soon with La Pasionaria, Nome de Guerre for Dolores Ibarruri Gomez.
(Ernest Hemingway, in his famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, wrote of La Pasionaria extensively.)
However, for me, the March 1st Movement against the Japanese Occupation was a myth...there has never had a follow-up movement and a majority (99 percent) of Koreans had chosen to live on their knees in order to save their necks.
Some, like Syngman Rhee, deserted one's native country taking up a comfortable residence in the US...others, like Gen. Park CH, actively joined Japanese colonial army.
Both came home much later and the former was given a title of "the Father of Nation" and the latter took the regime at gunpoint.
They were both entombed at the National Cemetry for their honorable(?) services for the nation.
Dolores Ibarruri once said: It is better to die on your feet rather than to live crawling on your knees.
She also insisted: It is better to be the widow of a hero rather than the wife of a coward.
Presently, for the Koreans, especially in the South, La Pasionaria is a rara avis...an endangered species that the Yankee cultural onslaught has been murdering constantly for over a half of century.
Watch the following youtube clip. I am sure you'd love to listen music and pictures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QFM-HdAvkg
May 10 2009
Someone compares Korean woman, Liu Kwan-Soon with La Pasionaria, Nome de Guerre for Dolores Ibarruri Gomez.
(Ernest Hemingway, in his famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, wrote of La Pasionaria extensively.)
However, for me, the March 1st Movement against the Japanese Occupation was a myth...there has never had a follow-up movement and a majority (99 percent) of Koreans had chosen to live on their knees in order to save their necks.
Some, like Syngman Rhee, deserted one's native country taking up a comfortable residence in the US...others, like Gen. Park CH, actively joined Japanese colonial army.
Both came home much later and the former was given a title of "the Father of Nation" and the latter took the regime at gunpoint.
They were both entombed at the National Cemetry for their honorable(?) services for the nation.
Dolores Ibarruri once said: It is better to die on your feet rather than to live crawling on your knees.
She also insisted: It is better to be the widow of a hero rather than the wife of a coward.
Presently, for the Koreans, especially in the South, La Pasionaria is a rara avis...an endangered species that the Yankee cultural onslaught has been murdering constantly for over a half of century.
Watch the following youtube clip. I am sure you'd love to listen music and pictures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QFM-HdAvkg
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The Eleventh Commandment: DO NOT GET CAUGHT
The Eleventh Commandment: DO NOT GET CAUGHT
April 8, 2009
I F Stone, an iconoclastic American investigative journalist in early 20th Century, lived by the motto: “All Governments Lie.”
This way of understanding has created the way many journalists have resigned from the post of mainstream media and have their own independent media like blogs, zines, and other local media outlets. (I was one of them who were kicked out from the S Korean mainstream media, because they stirred the hornet’s nest of scandals, bribery, and corruption in the political system.)
Most of the South Koreans were trusted in the amateurish honesty and integrity of former President Roh Moo-hyun who prided himself being morally and ethically truthful and trustworthy compared to other old fat-cat politicians.
Since his departure from the Presidency last year, he was the first President not to be tarnished by the corruption or bribery scandal that every S Korean Presidents or their families were charged or convicted of various corruption and bribery shenanigan.
And all hell broke loose when Mr. Roh admitted his wife had asked for, received, and used for debt-payment the huge sums of illicit money from the businessman.
Almost all politicians in the Republic of South Korea since its establishment in 1948 were involved in various forms of criminal activities like massacre, assassination, kidnapping, bribery, corruption, sexual misconduct, thievery, etc.
One of the Presidents, Kim DJ went beyond the national border, finagling the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE financed with the stolen taxpayer’s money.
Others were a bunch of tin-pot military dictators who snatched the power at the gunpoint and arrested, tortured, incarcerated, and killed many innocent people.
In other words, all S. Korean Governments cheat and lie, and Mr. Roh was not an exception. (There are other politicians during the Roh’s regime, including two ex-Speakers in the National Assembly, that were caught for accepting black money.)
It is puzzling and mind-boggling to see that there is no light at the end of the corruption tunnel, even though history records that every incoming administration proves into the wrong-doing of the previous government resulting in numerous convictions.
Why, then, are the S Korean politicians such oblivious enough to ignore the past records and continue to engage in the financial hanky-panky business?
Are they so dumb, stupid, or naïve not to read the history?
I look for an answer in an assumption that nurture may have as much to do with the South Korean nature of accepting bribe without any second thought.
Most of the S. Korean politicians are intrinsically not wealthy creatures, have had not worked or employed as a major bread-winner, and begin their political career as a way of employment opportunity.
In other words, they jump into the political arena with cojones but money, believing that their political success would bring forth the wealth, which also guarantees the power and position in the political community for good.
With no public funding in the election process, you are as dead as doornail if you don’t have a slush fund in an election campaign.
In the Ten Commandments, there are Dos and Don’ts, alleged given by God to Moses. (The fact of matter is that the lists were from the plagiarized copy of the Code of Hamurabi in the Sumerian Culture in the ancient Babylon.)
For the S. Korean politicians, the Ten Commandments are not enough to save their neck.
They have the last and most important Eleventh Commandment: DO NOT GET CAUGHT, when you accept the black money.
Ps: Recently the mainstream media went gaga over the ballistic missile launch by the North Korea and S. Koreans burned the effigy of Kim JI in Seoul for the violation of the UN resolution.
Just imagine if the North Korea would not have a nuclear capability in the sea of enemies around them...as the Baghdad City in the first Gulf War was engulfed with shock and awe, Pyongyang would be pummeled with napalm, cluster, and bunker-buster bombs from the B52 Bombers, killing tens of thousands of North Koreans.
I despise and condemn those protesters in the street of Seoul City as a bunch of sycophant puppets kowtowing at the altar of the US imperialism.
Please copy and paste the following website and have a second thought about the North Korea’s missile launch.
Don’t become a dittohead !
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/04/06/ron-paul-denounces-reaction-to-n-korean-rocket-launch/
www.dalehan.blogspot.com
www.pepesojourner.blogspot.com
dalehan1943@gmail.com
April 8, 2009
I F Stone, an iconoclastic American investigative journalist in early 20th Century, lived by the motto: “All Governments Lie.”
This way of understanding has created the way many journalists have resigned from the post of mainstream media and have their own independent media like blogs, zines, and other local media outlets. (I was one of them who were kicked out from the S Korean mainstream media, because they stirred the hornet’s nest of scandals, bribery, and corruption in the political system.)
Most of the South Koreans were trusted in the amateurish honesty and integrity of former President Roh Moo-hyun who prided himself being morally and ethically truthful and trustworthy compared to other old fat-cat politicians.
Since his departure from the Presidency last year, he was the first President not to be tarnished by the corruption or bribery scandal that every S Korean Presidents or their families were charged or convicted of various corruption and bribery shenanigan.
And all hell broke loose when Mr. Roh admitted his wife had asked for, received, and used for debt-payment the huge sums of illicit money from the businessman.
Almost all politicians in the Republic of South Korea since its establishment in 1948 were involved in various forms of criminal activities like massacre, assassination, kidnapping, bribery, corruption, sexual misconduct, thievery, etc.
One of the Presidents, Kim DJ went beyond the national border, finagling the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE financed with the stolen taxpayer’s money.
Others were a bunch of tin-pot military dictators who snatched the power at the gunpoint and arrested, tortured, incarcerated, and killed many innocent people.
In other words, all S. Korean Governments cheat and lie, and Mr. Roh was not an exception. (There are other politicians during the Roh’s regime, including two ex-Speakers in the National Assembly, that were caught for accepting black money.)
It is puzzling and mind-boggling to see that there is no light at the end of the corruption tunnel, even though history records that every incoming administration proves into the wrong-doing of the previous government resulting in numerous convictions.
Why, then, are the S Korean politicians such oblivious enough to ignore the past records and continue to engage in the financial hanky-panky business?
Are they so dumb, stupid, or naïve not to read the history?
I look for an answer in an assumption that nurture may have as much to do with the South Korean nature of accepting bribe without any second thought.
Most of the S. Korean politicians are intrinsically not wealthy creatures, have had not worked or employed as a major bread-winner, and begin their political career as a way of employment opportunity.
In other words, they jump into the political arena with cojones but money, believing that their political success would bring forth the wealth, which also guarantees the power and position in the political community for good.
With no public funding in the election process, you are as dead as doornail if you don’t have a slush fund in an election campaign.
In the Ten Commandments, there are Dos and Don’ts, alleged given by God to Moses. (The fact of matter is that the lists were from the plagiarized copy of the Code of Hamurabi in the Sumerian Culture in the ancient Babylon.)
For the S. Korean politicians, the Ten Commandments are not enough to save their neck.
They have the last and most important Eleventh Commandment: DO NOT GET CAUGHT, when you accept the black money.
Ps: Recently the mainstream media went gaga over the ballistic missile launch by the North Korea and S. Koreans burned the effigy of Kim JI in Seoul for the violation of the UN resolution.
Just imagine if the North Korea would not have a nuclear capability in the sea of enemies around them...as the Baghdad City in the first Gulf War was engulfed with shock and awe, Pyongyang would be pummeled with napalm, cluster, and bunker-buster bombs from the B52 Bombers, killing tens of thousands of North Koreans.
I despise and condemn those protesters in the street of Seoul City as a bunch of sycophant puppets kowtowing at the altar of the US imperialism.
Please copy and paste the following website and have a second thought about the North Korea’s missile launch.
Don’t become a dittohead !
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/04/06/ron-paul-denounces-reaction-to-n-korean-rocket-launch/
www.dalehan.blogspot.com
www.pepesojourner.blogspot.com
dalehan1943@gmail.com
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
A Dispatch from Cairo
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
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)