Revenge

Dear Children:

A couple of you have written me privately about the sequence that’s followed to get from grievance to un-redressed grievance to frustration to revenge. Good question. It’s a good question, not only because the answer eludes me, but also because it points to the difficulty with discussing these matters. Let’s see if we can, at least parse the question.

As has been pointed out, there never seemed to be an opportunity for North Korea to be satisfied with an outcome different than the one she sought; that of unification under a Soviet-style system. The grievances, however, begin long before that in the 2^nd century CE when china cruelly colonized the peninsula as a buffer against the Japanese. That horrible condition existed until the 20^th century when Japan visited its own brand of cruelty and occupation on the people starting around 1910.

Skip to WWII. In what is now a laughable bit of statecraft, Mr. Truman allowed the surrender of Japanese forces to the Soviet Union north of the 38^th parallel and accepted surrender on behalf of the United States in the south.

The North, with Stalin’s rule in the USSR as a guide and Stalin’s active connivance, immediately attempted a forced reunification on the South. They nearly succeeded. Mr. Truman and the UN intervened attempting to force reunification under US hegemony. They nearly succeeded before Mao Zedong intervened. They nearly succeeded but fought to the stalemate that exists today.

By then, grievance was piled upon grievance upon grievance with no way to sort it out. In cases like these, wars usually settle things for awhile. Stalemated wars solve nothing and harden the grievances to boot.

Today, North Korea is a police state that cannot feed its population, has no access to hard currency, isolated diplomatically and militarily as well as falling behind in almost every area of human progress. It has two assets: a nuclear weapons program and thousands of artillery pieces pointed at Seoul. Its leadership is paranoid beyond belief and rules from behind a curtain worthy of The Great Oz.

History judges all of the parties to this tragedy harshly. At no time did the great powers care one whit for the gathering frustration of the Korean people. Check out the 8^th chapter in the book of Hosea. We have every reason to expect that what we have sown will ripen to a whirlwind.

Hosea’s prophecy reminds us that we can never really escape the consequences of actions. And, even in the face of a situation like Korea where there is plenty of blame to go around, we cannot escape our own part in it.

I’m just sayin’,

Poppy

www.poppylbs.blogspot.com