{"id":110137,"date":"2018-04-30T12:01:33","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T11:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=110137"},"modified":"2018-04-30T12:28:46","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T11:28:46","slug":"may-the-korean-peace-deal-trigger-anti-militarist-anti-fascist-movements-in-asia-and-globally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/04\/may-the-korean-peace-deal-trigger-anti-militarist-anti-fascist-movements-in-asia-and-globally\/","title":{"rendered":"May the Korean Peace Deal Trigger Anti-Militarist, Anti-Fascist Movements in Asia–and Globally"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

27 Apr 2018 – <\/em>My most heart-felt congratulations to the people of two Koreas.\u00a0 \u00a0 May the new development also trigger a new social thought within Asia and beyond that all wars are evil and that militarism is anti-Human.<\/p>\n

Any anti-human thoughts and systems of deeds ought to be confronted and eliminated.\u00a0 Total elimination of systems of exploitation, bloodletting, militarism and Fascism should be made an ideal worthy of people’s collective pursuit.<\/p>\n

As unrealistic and romantic as it seems, there need to be new political and intellectual movements to criminalize wars.<\/p>\n

Already some of the intellectuals, activists and politicians have embarked on criminalizing wars and total abandonment of armed forces.<\/p>\n

Orwell got it wrong when he wrote memorably about the Ministry of Truth and its double-speak\u00a0 – War is Peace.<\/p>\n

No, W-A-R is P-R-O-F-I-T.<\/p>\n

Think of the war spoils (oil, uranium, rare earth materials, territories, subjugated populations as labour or serfs, etc.), expansion of military budgets that feed the insatiable Beast of Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial Complex,\u00a0 private security corporations, so-called “war on terror”.\u00a0 Every time a missile is fire arms industry makes millions.<\/p>\n

To take a brief detour here, little known fact about Orwell’s classic “1984” is this:\u00a0 \u00a0Orwell, a former colonial police officer stationed in the colonial Burma before the Great Depression of the late 1920’s, modelled his Ministry of Truth on BBC – the British Broadcasting Corporation – that was back-seat-driven by Britain’s war time Military Intelligence Unit 5 (MI5).<\/p>\n

Indeed 1984 wasn’t a futuristic fiction.\u00a0 It was based on Orwell’s part time employer post Orwell’s disillusionment with the Communists and Socialists among whom he counted himself as one.\u00a0 \u00a0Orwell in fact ended his short life as a SNITCH for the British intelligence, naming progressive and leftist intellectuals.<\/p>\n

Now back to the two Korean leaders taking a giant leap forward – in a manner that was completely un-expected – I cannot help but feel encouraged and hopeful by the monumental decisions made by two Korean leaders to officially turn 70-years of insure truce into official peace between what they call “blood relations” on the Korean Peninsula.<\/p>\n

The Kingdom of Korea was totally destroyed by the rising imperialist Japan in the 1920’s, and until Japan’s total surrender in Aug 1945 Tokyo’s Fascist\/racist militarists – the likes of Togyo tried and executed at the Tokyo Tribunal (Japan’s equivalent of Nuremberg) Korean people bore the brunt of Japan’s barbarity and inhumanity.<\/p>\n

Even after the WWII, Japan continued to denigrate the sufferings of the subjugated and colonized Koreans – living in Japan.<\/p>\n

Some 30 years ago, I lived in Tokyo, as a young student and “illegal labourer”, I heard tales and saw with my own eyes racist treatment against Japanese-born Koreans by the dominant post-WWII Japanese employers or co-workers.<\/p>\n

A few years ago I visited the Peace Museum in Hiroshima.\u00a0 \u00a0The narrative of Hiroshima Peace Museum – that expansionist militarism was really a self-defence against Western imperialism – was horrid.<\/p>\n

Lost in that disingenuous, defensive nationlist narrative – both popular and official in post-WWII Japan – is the facts of the sufferings and death of Koreans and Chinese forced labourers working in a military industrial town of Hiroshima who perished by the thousands when the first atomic bomb fell in the mid-morning of one fateful day in August 1945.<\/p>\n

The Second World War did NOT in fact end for the Korean people, just as it did NOT end for us the Burmese.<\/p>\n

The Peninsula became the theatre of proxy Hot War for the Cold War rivals such as Harry Truman’s USA and Mao’s China.\u00a0 The American attacks on N. Korean side was nothing short of GENOCIDAL:\u00a0 Washington wanted to make life impossible for the N. Korean side.\u00a0 \u00a0It dropped more than 160,000 bombs on N Korea – as opposed to 150,000 dropped in the Pacific theatre during the entire WWII since Togyo’s Japan launched a surprise attack on Pear Harbour, Hawaii.\u00a0 \u00a0The American pilots infamously – and inhumanly complained that they were “running out of targets” in N. Korea!.\u00a0 For they were bombing anything of any use and value to a human community.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0As far as I am concerned it was a genocidal war waged by the United States after having signed the 1948 Genocide Convention.\u00a0 (No Cold War power used or gave any consideration about the Convention until 1991 – Srebrenica – anyway).<\/p>\n

Today – 27 April 2018 – will likely be chronicled in history as the day that gave little people like us, grassroots activists, to feel that PEACE is possible and that PEACE is the way.<\/p>\n

I hope Western mass media will stop its demonization of N. Korea which has, with good historical reasons, lived with the fear of being genocided by the United States.<\/p>\n

\n

READ: Full declaration of North and South Korean summit<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>, <\/em>former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center \u2013 Cambodia.\u00a0 His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the <\/em>New York Times, The Guardian and<\/em> the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are <\/em>The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar\u2019s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), <\/em>An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and <\/em>Myanmar\u2019s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal, forthcoming). He holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education) , National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today–27 April 2018–will likely be chronicled in history as the day that gave little people like us, grassroots activists, to feel that PEACE is possible and that PEACE is the way. I hope Western mass media will stop its demonization of N. Korea which has, with good historical reasons, lived with the fear of being genocided by the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":110138,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}