Opinion - The Korea Times

Fighting the fat cats

By Donald Kirk You can’t help but sympathize with the people camping out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, and the thousands of others in parks and plazas and street corners, protesting the inequities in American society. Here’s the country where ``all men are created equal” ― didn’t we learn that line from the Declaration of Independence in primary school? – and we’re now learning that the inequalities in American life are some of the most pronounced on the planet. The failure of American society to live up to the promises of its founders has deep repercussions abroad. U.S. propagandists, whether diplomats or missionaries or do-gooders or teachers or writers, are going to have a lot more trouble convincing anyone of the values of American-style democracy and capitalism when their own system is now betraying the country’s underlying values. Where are the checks and balances that were supposed to keep the executive, judicial and legislative branches in creative tension needed to prevent the rise of bullies and tyrants and proponents of special in

Oct 20, 2011By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

The greening of Korea

By Donald Kirk Everyone agrees something is going wrong, physically and visibly, with the world we live in. Every spring, the Korean Peninsula endures yellow dust blowing in from northern China and Mongolia. This year the rainy season lasted through August. Now that we’re into early autumn, we’ve come to realize we didn’t have a proper summer. What happened to it, people wonder. Oh, and the Han River is rising to flood levels with a frequency that seems to defy the best efforts of man and machine to keep it under control all year round. All these phenomena fall under the rubric of ``environment,” one of those turn-off words that has people changing the subject, surfing for another channel, turning to the next article in the paper. Please, let someone else worry about it. As long as I don’t toss trash out the car window, paste chewing gum onto the underside of a restaurant chair or spit in public, what else can I do? The topic only becomes really interesting when disaster strikes; a huge oil spill, a broken dam, flooding, a forest fire, a tsunami a count

Oct 6, 2011By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Questions for N. Koreans

By Donald Kirk The question of how much to aid North Korea’s impoverished people again is a top topic for diplomats, analysts, politicians and bureaucrats. Nobody wants to see starving kids suffering on video shot by the World Food Program. Nobody likes the images of ghostly women living on weeds by the roadside until collapsing almost before our eyes. Yet nobody knows how to be at all certain that a significant portion of the aid shipped into North Korea will go to the people who need it most, and nobody wants to have to admit, in return for all that aid, the North’s ruling dynasty is conceding nothing, absolutely nothing. Those are the doubts that have come to the fore in talks in Beijing between nuclear envoys from the two Koreas, in a visit here by the American envoy on North Korean human rights and maybe in President Lee Myung-bak’s trip to New York to address the U.N. General Assembly. The sense is the United States and South Korea may be moving closer to resuming aid to the North, halted except for occasional ``humanitarian” assistance, after Lee’s inaug

Sep 22, 2011By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Post-9/11: dangerous decade

By Donald Kirk Just about everyone remembers where they were 10 years ago, on September 11, 2001, when they heard two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I was on a bus in central Seoul and got the news in a call from a radio station. What did I think about it? I knew nothing, had no idea what to think. Half an hour, maybe an hour later, I saw, live on television, the first of the buildings at the World Trade Center collapsing in slow motion. Then the other WTC tower and the building beside it slowly crumbled too. ``9/11,” as the attacks that day are universally known, became all the more real to me the next time I was in New Jersey, my home state, driving toward New York on the Jersey Turnpike. The sight of the twin towers of the World Trade Center had been a beacon beckoning people into the city. Now there was emptiness. The decade since has been filled with violence, uncertainty, tremors of worries. Could this thing get bigger? Is this just the beginning? Having also hit the Pentagon but failed to get a fourth plane to the White House

Sep 8, 2011By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

No retirement for dictators

By Donald Kirk Uneasy rests the head of a dictator while mobs demonstrate against him and rebels rampage over his fiefdom. The problem really is there’s no retirement program for dictators. Nobody ever heard of a dictator, faced with the need to flee or be killed or thrown into a dungeon, saying OK, I quit, now it’s somebody else’s turn to be a dictator. Instead, dictators not only hang on for dear life but try to insure their progeny carry on if, heaven forbid, they prove to be mere mortals after all and pass on. That’s the problem across the Middle East, from Libya to Syria, and also in a number of other countries where dictators aren’t always in danger of losing their jobs but love to make life miserable for their long suffering people while amassing billions for themselves. Dictatorial bosses, unless they are owners figuring out how to divide their assets among their sons and daughters, have to step aside at some specific age. Dictators never fade away. If they’re lucky, they slip into forced exile. Otherwise they hang on until death do them part and they’r

Aug 25, 2011By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Loudmouths from right to left

By Donald Kirk WASHINGTON ― The United States it sometimes seems is swimming in a sea of vitriol. Turn on Fox News, and you’re likely to see and hear a cast of loudmouths shilling for the ``Tea Party” crowd and denouncing ``leftists” such as Nancy Pelosi or Paul Krugman. You don’t hear Fox talk about ``rightists,” though ``conservative” seems to be OK by those on the Fox side of what it calls ``fair and balanced” reporting. As for the ``liberals,” a word that’s only slightly less pejorative than “leftist” these days, they have a lot to say on MSNBC and elsewhere about the evils of the right, the conservatives, Christian evangelicals and right-to-bear-arms advocates. In the midst of this cacophony of contentious caterwauling, you have to wonder what any administration in Washington should do to head off disaster. As the stock market plunged after Congress came up with a compromise to head off the disgracer of going into default, the temptation was to ask, ``What if?” What if, for instance, President Obama had said no to compromise, no to any bill that did not req

Aug 11, 2011By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Washington’s hottest summer

By Donald Kirk WASHINGTON ― They never had a debate like this in the National Assembly in Seoul. Yes, assembly members have pushed and shoved, thrown chairs, punched one another, slammed doors and generally made scenes suitable for prime time TV. But did they ever go for days and days, in the midst of one of the hottest summers in years, totally stymied on a budget that’s gone out of control by any reasonable standards? That’s what’s happening here in the capital of the free and democratic world. Members of the U.S. Congress are totally fanatic about opposing views on what to do about the trillions of dollars it takes to run the government while the country goes trillions upon trillions in debt. Hour upon hour, the great debate goes on, topping the news except when horror news elsewhere interrupts the proceedings. The slaughter in Norway took the top spot for a day or two, but the impasse over the federal budget has by now moved back into first place again. What’s one to make of the inability of members of Congress to come to terms? The first instinct is tha

Jul 28, 2011By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Dateline: Pyongyang, DPRK

By Don Kirk The prospect of Western news agencies opening bureaus in Pyongyang is exciting. The possibilities for great stories from there are unbelievable. Think of all that’s going on in North Korea that we don’t know about ― the real truth about the health of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, intrigue at the highest levels surrounding the succession of third son Kim Jong-un to the throne, reports of restive workers and farmers plotting protests, arrests and sentencing of criminals to sprawling concentration camps and public executions. News correspondents in Pyongyang will have a lot of questions to ask and much hard digging to do if they’re to match the record over the past 60 or so years of correspondents in South Korea covering corruption, revolt, assassinations and political plotting for power. No doubt they’ll have the assistance of intrepid local reporters, lured by the money and glory of working for a Western news agency. These reporters, anxious to show off their journalistic skills, their ability to work in a foreign language and their wide range of cont

Jul 14, 2011By Don Kirk

Donald Kirk

Thats off the record

By Donald Kirk The other day someone prefaced and concluded whatever was said by those three little words, ``off the record.” That’s different from ``on background” in that you can’t breathe a hint about sources, diplomatic, official or whatever, can’t actually quote anything and probably shouldn’t say you heard anything at all from anyone. You just absorb what they tell you and let it infuse your writing and view. The rationale for accepting these conditions is you’re not going to hear anything whatsoever from these people except on these terms. You may be left with a notebook full of scribbling, but you better be sure whatever you repeat is passed off as your own, no quotes or attribution or reference to sources. The question, given these conditions, is whether you’ve been suckered into accepting someone’s line or have been privy to inside stuff that those on the outside are not going to hear. Reporters prefer to think the latter. Move to ``background,” however, and the game changes somewhat. You can negotiate whether to attribute a quote to a certain type

Jun 30, 2011By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Unending nuclear threat

By Donald Kirk In the rarefied atmosphere of luxury hotel meeting rooms, the horrors of nuclear warfare seem like a distant apparition, a mirage on a shimmering horizon. You don’t exactly worry about the holocaust while dining out on gourmet menus during and after sessions on ``our nuclear future,” sipping endless cups of weak coffee and nibbling on cookies during 15-minute breaks between panel discussions or buttonholing dark-suited, white-shirted ``experts” for their view of those contentious issues that think-tankers love to analyze to death. That’s how it was this week at a ``plenum” (I never really have grasped what that word means, what’s the difference between a plenum and a plain old conference) sponsored by the Asan Institute. The tone was conservative, and the message was clear. North Korea remains as always public enemy number one, and big brother China goes along as its willing collaborator in a contest of nerves to which no good end is in sight. For an event in which no effort was spared for luminaries ranging from retired American and Korean milit

Jun 16, 2011By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Read more

Fighting the fat cats

The greening of Korea

Questions for N. Koreans

Post-9/11: dangerous decade

No retirement for dictators

Loudmouths from right to left

Washington’s hottest summer

Dateline: Pyongyang, DPRK

Thats off the record

Unending nuclear threat

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