[KS] even literature types

[Jay Lewis]

David, the `literary type', is willing to speak out; why not the rest of 
us?  Where the hell have we been?  Lest we forget, the success of evil 
is only dependent on the willingness of good men to say nothing.  We're 
pathetic, aren't we?

Particularly the historians.  Where are we?  After all, historians study 
the past in order to predict the future, right?  And there are a lot of 
us, right?  Or, do I have some wires crossed about our disciplines and 
why we do what we do?  Is it for tenure or for the maintenance of 
civilization?
The barking dogs (Wolfowitz, Rove, etc.) are a dime-a-dozen, but the 
trend is where?  Where are we going? Certainly, the `collapse soon' 
crowd are too stupid, since they seem to know nothing of Korean history; 
not even of the Korean War.  You know, the Korean people, north and 
south, are tenacious.  Forgot that one, didn't you George?  But maybe 
not.  Germany collapsed in a fortnight.  Would the DPRK?  Maybe the 
Mercedes Benzs and the fabulous parties will bring down the DPRK.  But, 
what do we say?  Do we leave this discussion to the CIA hacks and their 
idiot analysts?  The same fools who brought us Afghanistan and Iraq, and 
who are lining up to target Syria or Iran?  There option is bombing. 
 What do we do?  Where is the intellectual debate?  Are we spineless? 
 I'm nearly sick to my stomach at the silence...............................

Jay Lewis
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David McCann wrote:

>Even literature types like me get asked about what's going on in Korea; and
>especially, what's up with the North; etc.
>
>In desperation, I ask those who want to know, what do you think is going
>on?  And my interlocutors wonder, why hasn't the regime collapsed?  W and
>his crowd seem to assume that it will, they add.
>
>Well, there you have it!  What more needs to be said, either way?  The W
>House either knows or doesn't.  Who are we to be perplexed by difficult
>amiguities?
>
>It could be added that people have been assuming the very same thing for
>fifty years, ever since economic and political embargos were put in place
>against North Korea at the end of the Korean War.  That's what such
>embargos are designed to do; starve a regime into collapse. Or maybe as a
>literature type I don't understand what an embargo is really meant to
>accomplish.
>
>Observers held their collective breath when Kim Il Sung died.  Gotta happen
>now, they seemed to be thinking.  If Poindexter's little parlor had been
>operating then, what a spike in the betting we would have seen!
>Predictably.
>And just a short while ago, during a 'state' visit to Seoul, one of the
>White House terriers was barking about the North Korean regime .
>
>So?  If the Washington types think the collapse is going to happen,
>prompted perhaps by the yapping of some minor official, and the think tank
>types do too, why not?  Here's where the literature type wanders off into
>reflections on, of all things, history.
>
>The later kings of Choson:  we have forgotten their example.  Regime
>collapse was constantly just around the corner, what with military
>ineptitude, fiscal chaos, and the debilitating factional wars.  But with a
>deep and wide bureaucratic state apparatus, and an officialdom trained and
>indoctrinated to see state service as the highest good, there were none of
>the internal structural contradictions that would lead to a collapse of the
>regime.
>
>It all ended remarkably quietly when Japan started pushing from outside, in
>the last decade of the nineteenth century.  We recall, though, that the US
>failed to make good on  promises to come to Korea's aid when Japan began to
>pursue its colonial ambitions on the peninsula in earnest.
>
>Ah well, now I am in a muddle.  But I wonder if there are historical
>examples, with a longer more complex narrative that might help to explain
>either the puzzling resilience of the North Korean state, or the failure of
>outside observers and policy-makers to frame their questions and plans in a
>meaningful or productive way.
>
>Regime collapse?  That's what some dictionaries would define as
>apocalyptic; an apocalyptic vision imposed from the outside.  It seems to
>be, If the North Korean state collapses, then the US will lift its
>embargos, and health will return to the body of the population.  One
>contradictory aspect of the idea is that it provides a very handy cause to
>blame for all the internal difficulties in the DPRK--  namely, the United
>States.  It is contradictory because it helps to support the very regime,
>in terms of North Korean public opinion, that it is intended to hamper and
>weaken.
>
>What sort of response follows from the North?  Apocalyptic, but in terms of
>nuclear weapons.
>
>Are the W House pronouncements, locally or abroad, just rhetoric?  Might
>there be efforts underway to avoid Armageddon?  One hopes so, encouraged at
>the moment by North Korean willingness to dismiss the barking dog and get
>back to discussions of multilateral talks.
>
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