Korea.
There are Americans alive today who cannot tell you a single thing about Korea before the war.
Before the 38th parallel.
Before the "police action" that killed three million people.
They don't know that Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945, during which the Japanese conducted a systematic campaign to erase Korean language, culture, and national identity.
They don't know that when Japan was defeated in 1945, Korea was arbitrarily divided at the 38th parallel.
Not by Koreans.
By two American military planners, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, working with a National Geographic map.
The division had nothing to do with Korean geography, Korean politics, or Korean consent.
They don't know that the division immediately produced a humanitarian catastrophe, splitting families, separating farmers from their land, dividing an economy that had functioned as a unit.
They don't know that both the northern and southern governments believed in Korean reunification and that the question of who started the Korean War is genuinely more complicated than American history acknowledges.
They just know:
North Korea is the enemy.
A crazy, nuclear, cartoon villain of a country whose people are starving.
They do not know that the United States bombed North Korea so comprehensively during the war that American commanders reported there was nothing left to bomb.
That 75 to 80 percent of North Korean cities were destroyed.
That a generation of North Koreans grew up with no memory of a time before American bombers overhead.
You want to know why North Korea wants nuclear weapons?
Ask what happened to countries that didn't have them when America decided they were the enemy.
Iraq.
Libya.
Then ask what happened to North Korea itself.
The nuclear program is not insanity.
It is the lesson.
Perfectly, rationally learned.
I’ll soon be sponsoring a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock (and other style) cameras to surveil law abiding citizens.
no healthcare. no vibrant middle class. crumbling infrastructure. grifters in every office. so all we have are tools and symbols of violence to flaunt that are antiquated useless to win wars but only useful to bomb poor third world countries. happy 250th