[KS] Tariq Ali's Diary about North Korea
Afostercarter at aol.com
Afostercarter at aol.com
Sun Jan 22 06:05:00 EST 2012
Scott Bug beat me to it. This period piece
- a 40 year old 'diary'? Surely that's an archive! -
is valuable for its fascinating anecdotage.
But caveat lector: it's also full of howlers when
the author pontificates about Korean history.
For instance:
The Red Army marched into North Korea, with Kim Il-sung reportedly in one
of its tanks;
or
Who the hell was Kim Il-sung? Where did he come from?
Had he ever operated as a guerrilla leader?
... It is possible that Kim Il-sung operated as a guerrilla in China
and then fled to Russia. We don’t know for sure.
In the US, serious magazines employ fact-checkers.
It's a pity the LRB didn't do the same.
Kind regards
Aidan FC
Aidan Foster-Carter
Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds
University, UK
E: _afostercarter at aol.com_ (mailto:afostercarter at aol.com)
_afostercarter at yahoo.com_ (mailto:afostercarter at yahoo.com) W: _www.aidanfc.net_
(http://www.aidanfc.net/)
W in Korea:
_http://web.archive.org/web/20090202080126/http://aidanfc.net/index.html_
(http://web.archive.org/web/20090202080126/http:/aidanfc.net/index.html)
________________
In a message dated 1/21/2012 11:49:44 GMT Standard Time,
jsburgeson at yahoo.com writes:
In the current issue of the London Review of Books, there is rather
amusing and dishy account of two of Tariq Ali's visits to North Korea in the
early 1970s:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n02/tariq-ali/diary
Ali makes some interesting claims, especially near the end:
"At one stage it appeared that the United States was going to buy out the
North Koreans. Clinton despatched Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang in 2000
to do a deal – loadsamoney for the Kims, denuclearisation of sorts followed
by a soft reunification with the South – but it didn’t go through. Bush had
no interest at all in contact. Why? I got an answer of sorts after a
public debate on the Iraq war in Berlin in 2003. My opponent was Ruth Wedgwood
from Yale, an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld. Over lunch I asked her about their
plans for North Korea. She was cogent. ‘You haven’t seen the glint in the
eyes of the South Korean military,’ she said. ‘They’re desperate to get
hold of the North’s nuclear arsenal. That’s unacceptable.’ Why? ‘Because
if a unified Korea becomes a nuclear power, it will be impossible to stop
Japan from becoming one too and if you have China, Japan and a unified Korea
as nuclear states, it shifts the relationship of forces against us.’"
Fun stuff!
– Scott Bug
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