Opinion - The Korea Times

Pandemic of violence

By Donald KirkNEW YORK ― The latest news crackles over my car radio. Five killed in a night of violence, 40 injured. Two dead in another shootout, three injured. Two policemen suffering gunshot wounds.You might think we were in a civil war. Maybe a skirmish in some remote jungle. Low-level shootouts between guerrilla soldiers armed and equipped by mysterious masters.No, we're talking about everyday humdrum life in America's biggest city ― the center of arts and culture, high finance, and home of President Donald Trump and his enemy, the New York Times. Speaking of the Times, this kind of news is so routine, the paper hardly covers it. Minor stuff for deep-inside pages while COVID-19 and the presidential campaign fill large swaths of page one and inside layouts.No, New York is not a battleground or “war zone,” though some journalists might like to describe it that way. It's just a huge sprawling city caught up in everyday violent crime, like every other American city. Generally, you cruise down the broad avenues and narrow cross streets of Manhattan with nothing more to fe

Aug 27, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Korean baseball on ESPN

By Donald Kirk NEW YORK ― One thing about waking up early in the U.S. is you get to see Korean baseball on ESPN. Six days a week, beginning about 5:30 a.m., 6:30 p.m. in Korea, ESPN carries a Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) game with play-by-play and commentary by two American announcers keeping their eyes on the screen by link from Korea.These guys have a lot of feeling for the game, which is not surprising considering that ESPN is a sports powerhouse with plenty of broadcasting talent that's capable of making any game, anywhere, an entertaining event. What's surprising about the live broadcasts of the KBO games on ESPN, however, is how little time these jokers devote to the game that's being played before their very eyes.You've gotta believe ESPN knows how to attract American viewers and listeners, but in one game I watched the announcers seemed preoccupied with anything but the game. They persisted in talking, quite knowledgeably, about the brilliant performance of the Yankees against the Red Sox and other stuff that might interest American fans, interspersing their commentary w

Aug 20, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Media freedom at stake

By Donald KirkIf “truth is the first casualty,” newsrooms around the world are piled high with the wounded, the dying and the dead. The whole concept of a truthful, free and objective press has always been more myth than reality, a goal held up by politicians and journalists alike but never remotely realized. What's true to one bunch is fake news to another. The line between truth and falsehood wavers every day in Washington while President Donald Trump accuses his worst enemies in the media of purveying lies, and they fire off editorial barrages that sometimes make their opinion pages look like propaganda sheets concocted by the very dictatorships they so abhor.That brings us to Hong Kong, once a fairly free-wheeling quasi-independent entity known for at least an appearance of free speech, including a free press. Not content with having staved off mobs of protesters last year, Chinese authorities have just arrested the media mogul whose carping and criticism was obviously right on target. Jimmy Lai, his two sons and staff members of Apple Daily were last seen in handcuff

Aug 13, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Avoiding bad news

By Donald KirkVIRGINIA BEACH, Virginia ― The pandemic is deceptive. You know it's here, all around you, but you can't see it or hear or feel it. You cruise down near-empty streets that once were filled with commuter traffic, you go into restaurants that have only two or three customers or maybe none, and you see a majority of people wearing face masks.That's a majority, not most. A lot of people don't wear them for all the usual reasons. They're inconvenient, they're not needed. A young woman who works at the counter of a clothing store tells of one customer who had a fit and walked out when told she had to wear one. At hotels you can't enter the lobby without having a mask on.That's still not stopping people from flocking to the beaches of this coastal city at the height of the tourist season. Business isn't as good as in previous years but crowds still gather in alarming numbers, oblivious to fears of a virus they say affects only a few, surely not us. And then there are the protesters flooding the downtown areas of some cities with “agendas” ranging from “reform&

Aug 6, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Comparing protest movements

By Donald KirkWASHINGTON ― The mayhem on the streets of some American cities may be more shocking to foreign TV watchers than to Americans. No other nation would permit such nonsense to go on for days on end. Where else would duly elected metropolitan mayors defend the trouble-makers as merely exercising their constitutional rights?Oh sure, the right to protest, as enshrined in the American constitution, may be more highly prized in the U.S. than in many other countries. Urban protest American-style, though, turns to violence that goes on and on with the blessing of significant, maybe predominant, sectors of the ruling elite, meaning members of Congress, state governors and lesser lights, all to the delight of prestigious news organizations. President Donald Trump and his henchmen, they say, are to blame for sending in “storm troopers” and “the gestapo,” for bullying poor people as they exercise their right to free speech.The way federal forces from the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have sought to defend federal buildings in Portland, Seat

Jul 30, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

America's global retreat

By Donald KirkWASHINGTON ― The United States is at a tipping point in terms of military power worldwide, nowhere more so than in Korea.President Donald Trump would love to withdraw a few thousand U.S. troops from South Korea if only to punish President Moon Jae-in for not acquiescing to U.S. demands for a vast increase in the costs of maintaining America's 28,500 troops in the country. South Korea, however, is not the only U.S. ally to face huge cuts in U.S. defense spending.Trump has already said he's slashing the number of U.S. troops in Germany from 34,500 to 25,000, and the U.S. has reduced its troop strength in Afghanistan from 12,000 a few months ago to about 8,000 on the way to 4,000 by the November election. Trump may talk tough in the face of violent protests on the streets of American cities, but he's ordering a massive retreat from alliances and commitments from Europe to the Middle East to Asia.Probably the most unsettling aspect of the global American drawdown is that no one knows exactly what Trump is thinking, and he's likely to make decisions without consulting allied

Jul 23, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Fighting China's wars

By Donald KirkChina is behaving like a caged beast growling, menacing, lashing out and baring its teeth at potential enemies on all sides. In the far northern reaches of India, Chinese forces have challenged Indian troops along what's called a “Line of Actual Control” (LAC) established after the Chinese nipped off portions of Indian territory in a flare-up nearly 60 years ago.I was in India at the time, and I was there again seven years ago when the Chinese again challenged India along the LAC. Now the conflict is much worse. About 20 Indian soldiers were killed in the latest clash, and India would not seem to have the strength to stand up to incessant Chinese bullying even after moving up tanks in a defensive posture that the Chinese could probably brush aside if they decided to invade in earnest.China, however, is facing so many hot spots that President Xi Jinping, masterminding his forces as if he were standing before a huge map, arrows pointing here and there, is constantly deciding where to go and how hard to push, might think it's not a good idea to press deeper int

Jul 16, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

News for North Koreans

By Donald KirkThe insistence of a pair of brothers on scattering hundreds of thousands of leaflets from balloons fired over North Korea confronts the South with tough questions. Is it worth upsetting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his sister, Kim Yo-jong, knowing the negative effects the leaflets are having on North-South rapprochement? For sure, Kim is not going to agree on denuclearization, but how about just returning to talks?Or, as the leafleteers keep saying, don't they have the right to spread real news to North Koreans who otherwise might not know about the evil deeds perpetrated by Kim in his desperate desire to ensure his sway over his kingdom? Park Sang-hak, the older of the brothers, both of whom defected to the South 20 years ago, believes in telling ordinary North Koreans what they otherwise would not have known and would have believed unimaginable. One flyer spreads the news that Kim ordered the murder of his older half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, at the airport in Kuala Lumpur by two young women who thought they were carrying out a harmless prank. Hundreds o

Jul 9, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Celebrating July 4th

By Donald Kirk Most people hardly need reminders of their mortality. Mere mortals know there's a time to live and a time to die, but surely a statue should insure immortality in history if not in person. Not so, as Americans are reminded in assaults on statues of people seen as bad guys, traitors, villains to be dumped onto the ash heap of history, no longer venerated as heroes in stone or bronze.Attacks on statues have a long history. Red Guards on the rampage in China in the 1960s and 1970s destroyed hundreds of reminders of people they hated. Russian mobs tore down statues of Vladimir Lenin after the demise of the Soviet Union 70 years after he had arisen in triumph as the communist regime's first leader. The statue of Saddam Hussein in a circle in Baghdad beneath a hotel where I stayed was toppled after U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003. In Afghanistan, the Taliban in 2001 blew up ancient images of Lord Buddha that were more than mere statuary. They were revered works of art, irreplaceable and irretrievable, even if the Taliban called them “idols.”So it is that tomorr

Jul 2, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Trump's failed diplomacy

By Donald KirkThe timing of John Bolton's tell-all, “The Room Where It Happened,” was positively diabolic. Could it be mere coincidence that it hit the book stores in a month of significant anniversaries?Few Americans know or care, but the book went on sale two days before the 70th anniversary of the invasion of South Korea by North Korean troops on June 25, 1950. That date, so important in modern Korean history, is as little remembered in the U.S. as the day the Korean War truce was signed on July 27, 1953.The “Forgotten War,” however, may not be quite as forgotten by Americans now as it was for the first few decades after it ended. That's because North Korea's nukes and missiles remind the world of a threat that's not going away. While the dates for when the war began and ended may be meaningless for most of his readers, Bolton lets us know just how hopeless those three meetings were at which President Donald Trump pleaded with North Korea's Kim Jong-un, please give up your nukes.It's hard to believe it was two years ago, on June 12, 2018, that those two sat

Jun 25, 2020By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

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Pandemic of violence

Korean baseball on ESPN

Media freedom at stake

Avoiding bad news

Comparing protest movements

America's global retreat

Fighting China's wars

News for North Koreans

Celebrating July 4th

Trump's failed diplomacy

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