Francesca's blog

For those trying to keep up on the latest tensions on the Korean peninsula, here is a mini compilation of articles to try and help.

Today on Democracy Now! Christine Hong of UC Santa Cruz provided context for the current crisis, reminding us that the terms of the 1953 Korean War Armistice Agreement—the negotiation of a permanent peace agreement and the removal of foreign forces from the Korean peninsula—have gone unfulfilled in these 60 years.

With this in mind, it is little wonder why in mid March North Korea called the Armistice Agreement invalid and effectively pulled out of it. This of course triggered outcry in the U.S. and at the U.N., despite the fact that the agreement was effectively void thanks to inaction by the U.S., China, and South Korea, which never even signed the armistice.

Foreign Policy in Focus has outlined the blunders in U.S.’ reaction to heightened threats from North Korea, as the Navy’s sending of missile destroyers to the Western Pacific was not intended to be the public of a show of force it wound up being. Not exactly a good moment to be moving battleships around.

Who exactly ordered those destroyers against Korea? http://ering.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/04/04/who_exactly_ordered_those_destroyers_to_korea

In the meantime the U.S. media hasn’t wasted a moment in its alarmist pre-emptive war coverage. The media watchdog group FAIR has reported on the militarist hysteria of CNN, which is beginning the regular circus of inviting retired generals to describe elaborate yet highly unlikely war plans.

Media warmongering. It’s almost an art at this point.

What is the way forward? Well if a lack of negotiations is the reason we are in this mess, negotiations are the way only out of it. North Korea has repeatedly requested peace negotiations and it’s the U.S. that has yet to return calls. The Working Group for Peace and Demilitarization in Asia and the Pacific has put out the statement Stop War Games, Start Peace Talks, that calls on the U.S. “to turn to diplomacy for common and human security rather than militarization, which will only undermine regional and U.S. security.”

It’s on us to inform ourselves and others on the issue, and support grassroots peace organizers in Korea. As the late and great policy analyst Chalmers Johnson wrote of this last remaining Cold War conflict:

“It is only in the U.S. that the departure of this generation seems to have created such a case of historical amnesia that a new generation is preparing to start a war there all over again.” 

Let’s make sure the dangers of military chest-thumping in Korea are not lost on this generation, so as to not find ourselves stumbling foolishly into yet another—nearly identical—war in the Pacific.

More resources:

North Korea: What's Really Happening?

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/north_korea_whats_really_happening/

Whether or not we voted for Obama, the Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or abstained from elections as a form of protest, I think everyone on the left breathed a sigh of relief knowing that yesterday the United States did not swear in a neoconservative to the presidency. Some might even feel joy, others resentment, and most probably a bit of both.

Being MLK Day and being the first Black president of the U.S., Obama took an oath of service to the country using the Bible that belonged to Dr. King. It was at once a symbolic act as much as it was as Cornel West put it “part of presidential pageantry” for a president who wouldn’t reach the knees of the civil rights leader if measured by his commitment to peace and justice.

And it is the discrepancy of this administration—between its progressive pageantry and its actual policies—that we on left need to work to close. For some this means shaking off disappointment, for others our cynical righteousness. For many it means understanding our personal political ideology as a “home base” rather than a place of hibernation that prevents us from alliance building. Thankfully an array of protests and alternative events surrounding the inauguration showed signs of a left that is doing just this.

Not willing to let Obama’s empty promise to shut down Guantanamo slide, Witness Against Torture organized a week of protest in the lead-up to the inauguration that included a fast, a series of vigils, and a blockade of the CIA headquarters in Virginia.

November 2, 2012

Buenos Aires

I wasn’t sure I’d have time to write this before Tuesday. But a recent scare ad put out by the Romney campaign featuring Hugo Chavez saying that if he were American he would vote Obama (and vice versa) has lit the fire under my fingertips.

Before the Romney campaign decided to use Chavez’s quote to once again mislabel Obama a socialist, I was struck by the Venezuelan president’s words. As a journalist and a radical who believes that the elite two-party political system in the United States needs a revolutionary makeover, I find voting Democrat a tough pill to swallow. But after four years living outside of the U.S. and witnessing and writing on the effects of U.S. economic and military intervention in the region, it is clear that the difference between a lesser of two evils while minimal, is vital. So vital that an actual socialist president, who has implemented bold social programs to lift many Venezuelans out of poverty and has put the country’s oil profits back into public hands, says that he himself would vote Democrat.

The truth is if Latin American had a vote in the U.S. elections, it would be for the Democrats. While Obama’s stance toward Latin America has been far from progressive – recognizing coup governments of Honduras and Paraguay; signing free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and Peru; and dragging feet on immigration reform – it is the "diet" imperialism to that of the neoconservative-led GOP.

July 4, 2012, Buenos Aires

It has been nearly two weeks since the parliament of Paraguay orchestrated an institutional coup that removed President Fernando Lugo from power and installed vice president Fernando Franco in his place, a mere 9 months before the next presidential elections.

Reading articles coming out of South America, I have been trying to wrap my head around not just what happened in Paraguay but what it could mean for the region. And I’m afraid it’s not good. When one connects the dots – many of which require further investigation–it suddenly feels as though the gains that countries in the region have made toward multi-lateral cooperation in order to guarantee economic and political sovereignty and are dangerously vulnerable.

I have always been skeptical of claims by Hugo Chavez or even anti-militarist voices here in the region that believe that the U.S. has not let go of its plans for the region in its fulfillment of “Full Spectrum Dominance”—controlling natural resources indirectly through elite puppet governments and directly through the threat of military force. Between the U.S’ refocus on the Middle East and the rise of left-leaning governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, and Uruguay, the idea of the region falling victim to the kinds of imperial/neoliberal bullying of the 70s, 80s, and 90s seemed both politically overblown and strategically unfeasible.

I am no longer so sure.