Irritating Facts About Korea that Many in the West Would Rather Not Know

Photograph Source: Signal Corps Photo

A huge amount of work in the US as well as in Korea, north and south, went into laying the groundwork for a successful summit in Hanoi, Vietnam at the end of February, but Trump recklessly threw it all away, apparently following the advice of the unelected Chief Advisor and Peace-Wrecking-Ball John Bolton. Possible reasons for the collapse of the summit that have been suggested include that Trump did not prep because he is lazy, that there wasn’t enough time for Korean or American officials to prepare, that the aDemocrats got in the way, and that the meaning of the phrase “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” was not clear. In The Economist we read, “Mr Trump and his aides seem to have concluded that walking away will do less harm to America’s security than showering North Korea with concessions without gaining much in return.” Well, what they call “showering North Korea with concessions” is what peace-loving Americans would call “ending the War and laying the groundwork for reconciliation.”

There were various factors that contributed to the failure of the Summit, but there is one more major factor that deserves attention. That is that our country suffers from a certain kind of denialism—denialism in which people avoid the facts about our history on the Korean Peninsula. As schoolchildren and even as adults in the US we have been fed the “Disney version” of our nation’s history. (Paul Atwood…

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