Tag: Korea

What About The Korean War?

All the bravado surrounding the Korean incident got me to thinking about a war that many Americans know very little about…….it was the war between the end of World War Two and the mash up to Vietnam…..a war that has been all but forgotten bu many of our citizens.

I watched a documentary on the AHC about this war and it was entitled “America’s First War On Communism”….it was all about the start of the Korean War in 1950…although it is a lie…the first war on communism was in 1920’s….but I will let that go for now.

Anyway I got to thinking about the situation of the peninsula these days and how it relates to 1950……and I cam across this article from a couple of years ago…..

The sixtieth anniversary of the “end” of the Korean war saw President Obama attempt to rescue that classic example of interventionist failure from history’s dustbin. Addressing veterans of that conflict, he declared:

“That war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When 50 million South Koreans live in freedom, a vibrant democracy…a stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North, that is a victory and that is your legacy.”

This is a fairytale: it wasn’t a victory, or even a tie: the US public was disenchanted with the war long before the armistice, and Truman was under considerable pressure at home to conclude an increasingly unpopular conflict. As for this guff about “democracy”: whatever the US was fighting for, from 1950, when the war broke out, to 1953, when it ground to a halt, democracy hardly described the American cause.

Source: Who Really Started the Korean War? by — Antiwar.com

The US hides behind the guise of “democracy” too often.

Your history lesson has concluded……

Is It Jail For Korean Adulterer?

This one is for a very good friend at Culturepress.

South Korean prosecutors have demanded an 18-month jail term for a popular actress who admitted breaking the country’s strict laws on adultery.

Ok So-ri had sought to overturn the 50-year old legislation, which carries a maximum jail sentence of two years.

She said it was an infringement of human rights and amounted to revenge.

Ms Ok has admitted having an affair with a well-known pop singer and her husband, Park Chul, is said to be seeking “a severe sentence”.

She blamed her infidelity on a loveless marriage to Mr Park, also an actor, and launched a legal challenge against the adultery law itself.

But the court ruled that the adultery law did not violate the right to “sexual self-determination and privacy” and that the available punishment was appropriate.

Ms Ok’s lawyers have said the legislation “has degenerated into a means of revenge by the spouse, rather than a means of saving a marriage”.

The Korean Times says that in the past three years about 1,200 people have been indicted annually for adultery, but very few have been jailed.

courtesy of BBC News

Americans are damn lucky that the Puritans did have the foresight of including this in the Constitution.  This is a damn silly law in the 21st century and is aimed at keeping women as second class citizens.

Enuff said?

Asia Readies For Bailout

Leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the heads of their three partners China, Japan, and Korea have agreed to create an $80-billion fund by next June to avert a regional financial crisis.

“Precautionary actions are needed to send a clear and unequivocal signal that Asean is resolute and better prepared than 10 years ago when the financial crisis hit the region in 1997,” the Asean+3 leaders said in a statement after their meeting Friday morning.

The leaders agreed that the group’s finance ministers and central bank governors should set up a working group to study proposals from the Philippines and Thailand on the new regional facility that would supersede the Chiang Mai Initiative of bilateral currency swap arrangements.

Thailand, in particular, proposed to increase the pooled reserve to $350 billion, while the Philippines pushed for fewer conditions in the facility.

The purpose of the new fund is to allow a country in danger of a foreign exchange crisis to rapidly call up financial firepower by swapping its currency for those of its neighbors’.

The aim would be to sell the borrowed money in the foreign exchange market to stem pressure on the currency under attack, thus preventing a repeat of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.