Reply #65: The history that Snow cites is very relevant to today's North Korea [View All]

[chenGOD]

http://www.history.navy.mil/books/field/ch1a.htm

Please read the above link and tell me that the history played out there does not bear relevance to the current situation. A history of getting attacked, getting treated as a pawn in negotiations with China and Japan.

The Sino-Japanese war in 1904-05 played large in the splitting of Korea after WW2, and the fact that the US has had nuclear missiles pointed towards the North at various points in time since the Korean war has done nothing to ease the paranoia.

And now seeing how the Americans operate (disarm completely or we'll attack you, and then when it's found that you don't have any weapons, they attack anyways) in Iraq, you think North Korea has no reason to be paranoid? And before you go on about how Kim Jeong Il is a brutal dictator, please keep in mind that hundreds of thousands of Americans are jailed yearly for drug crimes, innocent people have been executed in America (not to the degre that they have been in Norh Korea), and people do get sent to places where they have no rights for no reason (guantanamo bay).

Kim Jeong Il, yes he's surely not a friend of mine, nor would I ever dream of defending him, but the fact is that there is an awful lot of demonization going on when we would be better served by the US negotiating on good terms. That means not breaking the agreements that they make (and yes the Agreed Framework was broken first on the west's side with their failure to complete the LWR's that were promised). How hard would it be to make a promise not to attack North Korea in return for a gradual shut-down of weapons related nuclear activity? Not hard at all, considering that the North were in full compliance with the Agreed Framework until it became clear that the west had no intention of fulfilling their end of the bargain.

Now I'm not gonna say anything negative about you, but I'm willing to bet that Snow has a fair bit more insight into the way Koreans think than you do.