On North Korea.

Maybe in the light of North Korea being compared to the Nazi regime due to UN reports revealing the extent of its concentration camps and mass executions some in Britain might have cause for reflection that one prominent figures in the Stop the War Coalition actually look upon this totalitarian model state with sympathy.

The leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain called Andrew Murray, a sometime contributor to the Morning Star and Reader's Digest magazine, stressed this in 2003,

"Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea clear".

He wrote this with reference to 'the Party' because the US under the Bush administration had referred to North Korea as part of an "Axis of Evil" and was preparing to invade Iraq in that year. Those journalists who supported that invasion have been rightly criticised.

Yet those such as Murray are still allowed to shield behind their ostensibly good work in the Stop the War Coalition as something that is less important than their pronouncements in sympathy with mass murdering totalitarian regimes such as North Korea.

It is about time those truly concerned with being against senseless wars and militarism also were consistent in holding such vile individuals to account and refusing to countenance their position as leading voices in protest against intervention in Syria.

It is impossible to have a sane opposition to the growing trend towards militarism if those allowed to be leading voices in the 'official anti-war' groups in Britain are those who sympathise with a North Korean regime that starves and murders so many of its people.

But, then again, North Korea is a Lodestar for all those obsessed with the idea that it is uniquely, always and everywhere the US Empire that is the 'root cause' of every global ill and who remainn indifferent to the reality on the ground in North Korea.

There is little chance of any form of intervention to try and remove the regime of Kim Jong-un because none of the regional and global powers has any real ability to put pressure on North Korea let alone the willpower to intervene. The comparison with Middle Eastern regimes is also not a good one.

Unlike Iraq and Syria, there have not even been any attempts at internal revolt or rebellion so deeply entrenched and powerful is the hold of the Juche totalitarian state. The DPRK, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, functions as though it took Orwell's 1984 as a model of good governance.

Even China has failed to restrain Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions. The entire purpose of King Jong Il's nuclear programme and satellite missile launches was to impress upon the world not only that the leadership was erratic and dangerous but also the message to the people that nobody can liberate them.

The execution of Kim Jong-un's uncle in December 2013 was in continuity with the strategy of keeping those within and without North Korea in fear of the sheer unpredictability of the regime and not to be able to predict its next move and keep the world guessing.

The December purges meant that the opening up of free trade with China, a policy which Jang Song Taek was responsible for, would not lead to alien ideas that might disturb what the repellent British apologist for North Korea, George Galloway, called its 'coherent, pristine and innocent culture' .

The US and South Korea have no way of removing the North Korean dictatorship and both the latter and China and Russia fear the destabilising consequences of what would happen if the regime was to collapse or feel threatened enough with its nuclear weapons.

In addition, neither Russia not China has any geopolitical interest in a re-unified Korea that would be pro-US right on their eastern borders, so the DPRK acts as a sort of militarised buffer state in which no power has any real interest in destabilizing it.

China has its trade links and a policy across the globe of non interference with the internal policies of the dictatorships it deals with on a 'no strings attached' basis. Even increased trade has been incapable of any thawing of North Korea's stance towards the rest of the world.

Without any resources the world could be interested in, the North Korean regime seems set to last indefinitely .It is ethnically homogeneous. There are no sectarian divides. It uses its nuclear missiles and sabre rattling to intimidate the rest of the world into accepting it as a fact lest it do something crazy.

As Orwell put it in 1984-“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” 

The Realities Behind the North Korean Nuclear Programme.

 There seems to continue to be this myth that North Korea is testing nuclear missiles just because of "US Imperialism". The fact is UK and USA were never going to invade North Korea. Just because of messianic statements made back in 2003 by the Bush II administration about North Korea ( as with Iraq and Iran ) comprising an "Axis of Evil" does not mean it was ever really targeted as Iraq was.

The North Korean nuclear programme is about retaining scope for manoeuvre against both China and the USA, with China itself harbouring imperial ambitions with regards to an impoverished regime starving and in need of trade and aid.

A realistic assessment of North Korea's nuclear ambitions back in 2009 was offered by historian Mark Almond,

"North Korea's regime has spent decades controlling how its subjects see reality. Ordinary people routinely sing the praises of the bizarre Communist dynasty which has tyrannised and starved them since 1945. All that North Koreans know, or have been told, is that once again their ruler has successfully defied the hostile outside world. Whether it was a success or failure makes little difference to Kim Jong-il as long as he can keep his own people fooled.

The North Korean dictator's sabre-rattling is less about frightening the West as about intimidating his own people. In 1994, he inherited absolute power from his father, Kim il-sung and is grooming one of his sons to succeed him. North Korea's ruling family sees creating international tension as its best survival strategy. With its own nuclear bomb and now a ' successful' satellite launch, Kim's message to his people is clear: Nobody is coming to liberate you from my rule"
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So the notion the North Korea's programme and threats of a fourth bomb test are less about some reflexive "reaction" to the USA ( as advocated by supposed "peace activist Kate Hudson of CND ) but about retaining scope for manoeuvre with China against its potential encroachments and domestic control of the populace.

Update

Peter Hitchens has also written sensibly,

North Korea is pitiable, hopelessly poor, not very sober and almost derelict, trying to find its way out of a dead end.

That dead end, at present, leads only to Chinese domination, a fate which might well suit the rest of the world, but which North Koreans themselves greatly dread. As the Tibetans and the Uighurs know (in Tibet and Chinese Turkestan), Chinese domination means the end of national culture, probably the population of the national territory with Han Chinese until the Koreans become a minority in their own country. This is the form which modern Chinese imperialism takes, and I am always amazed that people who get hoity-toity about the wicked past of British imperialism are so uninterested in this development.

The Folly of Trident, CND and the StWC.

Using North Korea to scare British people into accepting the folly of renewing Trident is just the sort of ruse the pseudo-Tory PM Cameron uses as a PR man. Britain no longer has intelligent diplomats and statesmen. It has those who indulge in "Public Diplomacy" , an oily neologism for propaganda advocacy.

The problem is that neither New Labour nor the "Conservatives" have any foreign policy alternative nor vision beyond renewing Trident at a time of economic crisis. Popular opinion, such as that of CND, remains fruitless is regarded as laughable as it's chaired by former CPGB members as Kate Hudson.

The StWC is equally as absurd. The North Korean Juche regime craves nuclear weapons because it is run my megalomaniac generals who run a regime run by a generation of dictators living and dead .Even China is hostile to this rogue remnant of the high point of the Cold War in the 1950s and wants a diplomatic solution.

Yet instead of defining a principled stand, the StWC is more concerned with only blaming the USA for North Korea wanting to "defend itself". This is why those opposed to such wasteful expenditure on Trident will be sidelined. The vocal and insane ideologues just discredit credible arguments against Trident.

It's almost as though the StWC and CND are run by the sort of cliched paradies of left wing activists portrayed in the 1982 film Who Dares Wins, where anti-nuclearists are either naive idealists or sinister pro-Soviet ideologues and potential terrorists from whom we can only be saved by the SAS and our Special Relationship with the USA.

Such lunacy was expressed by Andrew Murray of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 2003. An apologist for the Soviet Union, a democidal regime unparalleled in history with a huge nuclear arsenal and itself devoted even as late as the 1970s to its version of global "regime change", he opined,

The drive to seize command of the world economy in the interests of its own monopoly groups now propels the US government to seek to seize command of every corner of the world itself. This does not need any amplification in relation to the Middle East at present. But we should also be alert to the very real dangers in the Fareast and around Peoples Korea. The clear desire of the USA to effect ‘regime change’ in its second ‘axis of evil’ target could well provoke an armed clash there, too. Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea clear.

Political report - March 2003 Executive Committee meeting

Removing the Juche regime, which has followed a nuclear programme whilst reducing its people to famine and mass starvation, would be a great acheivement if the diplomatic means were to be found. Despite crude neoconservative rhetoric in 2003, there were no plans to invade North Korea.

North Korea needs containment and not "solidarity" from truly Orwellian cranks such as Andrew Murray. Trident is redundant and useless in challenging North Korea. Only subtle and patient diplomacy can gain freedom for North Korea. And less messianic "Public diplomacy".

Yet i remain pessimistic for the prospects of Britain reneging on it's idiotic obsession with being a Global Player whilst some of the opponents of that vision remain apologists for totalitarianism that hijack the anti-nuclear movement to advance their petty self important careers as "activists".