moving on, there’s an interesting article at the atimes.com by henry liu regarding us policy towards china and nk. liu says us policy is to prevent reunification of n and s korea. that’s what i’ve been saying all along.

Anyway, we both agreed that the South Koreans keep appeasing the North because they’re not willing to pay for confrontation. Considering the situation they’re in, they should be spending at least 6% of GDP on defense. The last number I saw was something like 3%. So, really the South should be kicking in another 20-30 billion USD into defense — an amount that would certainly cut into the left’s desire to build an anti-work, anti-initiative welfare system. The leftist’s aversion to accountability definitely extends to the individual.

Before we skewer Roh and DJ, let’s consider history. Chamberlain has his place in history because he agreed to the appeasement of Hitler. What’s forgotten is that he was the prime minister of a parliamentary democracy. If he had confronted Hitler, the no-confidence vote would have been scheduled before he even got back to merry old England. So while the current and last presidents struggle to control their oral diarrhea, the people who elected them are also responsible for this nonsense. Kind of like how I have never voted for a Bush, but as an American, I am still somewhat responsible for the actions of my country.

My family is from Cholla and, yes, Baduk, my grandparents were communists. My grandfather was a resistance fighter and the only people who sustained the fight against the Japanese for the duration of the colonization were the communists. My grandparents were also yangban, so when the Norks came strolling down south, the family moved ahead of them. Seems that the Norks had a reputation for beheading yangban, regardless of what you had actually done in your life. Anyway, I have a fondness for DJ. It seems to me that he’s gone senile– he’s what, 80? I would say that the memory centers and the connections between brain hemispheres are quickly degrading.

Thucydides documented several situations like this 2400 years ago. The South is quickly becoming Melos, with China as Athens and the US as Sparta. Without changing their path, Koreans 100 years from now could wake up and find themselves as Chinese slaves. Koreans, culturally, are more similar to Chinese than the Tibetans are. Remember that the PRC, at its founding, defined Tibetans as Chinese without bothering to ask them. The tragedy is that Koreans have it within their power to stop this, but instead are focusing on the Americans who have no designs on Korean territory, independence or existence.

Kim Dae-jung: Our Nobel fraud, our pride!

Ah, you meant that KDJ criticized the summit that saved his life - I’d agree that that’s pretty low.

William Gleysteen also wrote about the deal (in fact, here is a pertinant page from his book, for the curious). Gleysteen criticized the speed with which Reagan ‘uncritically embraced’ him, as it ‘tarnished the image of the US in Korea’, but otherwise had been involved in the earliest stages of the attempt to save KDJ’s life and thought the deal a good one.