@ggersh

Talk about NAILING IT! In 2014!

at the concert and are still in recovery mode!! Good on ya JS.

Glen Ford from back in 2014 telling us about Ukraine. Man he
nailed it!!

https://redsails.org/ford-on-ukraine/

Glen Ford
2023-01-14
Twitter
Original publication: youtube.com
Imperialism’s Death Spiral (2014)
English | Black Liberation

Glen Ford was one of the founding members of Black Agenda Report.

This is is a transcript of his contribution to the “Ukraine Teach-In” organized by the International Action Center in 2014, in the aftermath of the U.S.-organized “Euromaidan.”

This edition was transcribed by Joe Emersberger, and the RS title was selected from the contents of the speech.

I think that President Obama’s attempt to destabilize Russia will be seen by history as disastrous as George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Like the Iraq war, the de facto declaration of “war by other means” against Russia will accelerate the very dynamic that it intends to halt: the steady weakening of U.S. imperialism’s grip on the world. It will increase the resolve of a host of nations to disengage themselves from American madness and to strengthen collaboration and cooperation among many countries, and not just Russia and China.

The result will be the exact opposite of Washington’s intention. The attempt to isolate and destabilize Russia, the other nuclear superpower, may appear to some to be an act of brashness, a flexing of American muscle, an act of imperial overconfidence and recklessness. People thought the same thing when Bush went into Iraq. They were shocked and more than a little bit awed. [1] In fact, sometimes I think that Americans are more shocked and awed by the American military than anybody else. But the Iraq invasion, and the brazen offensive against Russia, as well as the so-called “Pivot Against China” and the octopus-like U.S. military entrenchment in Africa — these are really symptoms of weakness and desperation.

U.S. Imperialism is losing its grip on the world and responds to its weakening condition with massive campaigns of destabilization. Destabilization characterizes U.S. foreign policy today more than any other word. The purpose is to reverse the general dynamic of global affairs today in which U.S. influence and power shrinks in relative terms as the rest of the world develops. U.S. and European hegemony — and that is the ability to dictate the terms of economic and political life on the planet — has daily diminished in myriad objective ways, ways that we can measure by the numbers. China’s soon-to-be status as the world’s biggest economy is just one aspect of that decline.

The process is inexorable and it’s gaining momentum. The trajectory of imperial decline has been firmly set ever since the Western capitalists decided to move the production of things — that, is the industrial base — to the South and the rest of the planet. Inevitably power and influence follow and imperial hegemony diminishes. This is of course unacceptable to the rulers of the United States who now find themselves in objective opposition to all manifestations of collaboration and mutual development under terms that are not dictated by Washington. They are in objective opposition to all manifestations of independence by countries in the world. This applies not just to China, not just to China and Russia, but to the rest of the BRICS and to other developing nations. And it even applies to America’s closest allies.

That is because hegemons don’t really have allies. All they have are subordinates, and so the U.S. is quite prepared to do serious harm to European economic interests by pressuring them to break long established economic ties to Russia. They will ultimately do the same thing in the pacific region with China and cause great destabilization there. They do so not because of strength but because of growing relative weakness. Their desperation compels them to risk war because their only clear superiority is in weapons.

However, the net end result, if we survive these flirtations with all-out war, can only be further isolation of the United States and the further weakening of imperialism. I think there is on what passes for the left in the United States a tendency to describe U.S. aggressions like the Iraq war, like the current offensive against Russia, as mistakes and miscalculations: “They didn’t mean to do that.”

In reality the U.S. goes to the brink and beyond the brink of war because it perceives itself as having no other choice. Its soft power is fading. It has few other means beyond the military to strategically influence events. It recruits or buys allies where it can get them, be it jihadists or Nazis. As imperialism’s sway in the world shrinks, so do its options.

U.S. policymakers surveyed the world in 2002 and in 2003 and they concluded that the dynamic in Asia was going against them. They knew that most of the world would be horrified with a war against Iraq, but they rolled the dice anyway and invaded. The net result was the opposite of what they intended. The U.S. was humiliated and the U.S. was humiliated so badly that the rulers of the United States chose to put a dramatically different face on U.S. power — a Black face, Barack Obama.

Iraq was supposed to be a forward U.S. base in Asia to disrupt China’s growing ties in the region. Instead the Iraq war exposed U.S. imperialism’s weaknesses. In the days before that invasion, we wrote in Black Commentator that the U.S. had reached too far and succeeded only in accelerating the process of its own decline. Today Barack Obama is rolling the dice just like George Bush did. To sever Russia’s ties to Europe, Washington has surveyed the global scene and concluded that it has no other choice. The result will be a strengthening of ties between Russia and China, a great anxiety and rethinking among Europeans about their ties to the United States which is about to harm their economy, and an acceleration of imperialism’s death spiral.

Power to the people!

@ggersh The late Bruce Dixon sniffed out the role Bernie Sanders would play as sheep dog in 2015. I remember reading the article and thought naw. Was I and bunches of leftists played by Sanders.

Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016

Vermont senator and ostensible socialist Bernie Sanders is playing the sheepdog candidate for Hillary Clinton this year. Bernie's job is to warm up the crowd for Hillary, herding activist energies and the disaffected left back into the Democratic fold one more time. Bernie aims to tie up activist energies and resources till the summer of 2016 when the only remaining choice will be the usual lesser of two evils.

“The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there's no White House Democrat running for re-election.”

Spoiler alert: we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders' either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Surveys showed that Bernie supporters voted at higher rates for Hillary than Hillary supporter for Obama in the general election. Bernie supporters ended up more loyal to the democratic party than Hillary supporters.

at the concert and are still in recovery mode!! Good on ya JS.

Glen Ford from back in 2014 telling us about Ukraine. Man he
nailed it!!

https://redsails.org/ford-on-ukraine/

Glen Ford
2023-01-14
Twitter
Original publication: youtube.com
Imperialism’s Death Spiral (2014)
English | Black Liberation

Glen Ford was one of the founding members of Black Agenda Report.

This is is a transcript of his contribution to the “Ukraine Teach-In” organized by the International Action Center in 2014, in the aftermath of the U.S.-organized “Euromaidan.”

This edition was transcribed by Joe Emersberger, and the RS title was selected from the contents of the speech.

I think that President Obama’s attempt to destabilize Russia will be seen by history as disastrous as George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Like the Iraq war, the de facto declaration of “war by other means” against Russia will accelerate the very dynamic that it intends to halt: the steady weakening of U.S. imperialism’s grip on the world. It will increase the resolve of a host of nations to disengage themselves from American madness and to strengthen collaboration and cooperation among many countries, and not just Russia and China.

The result will be the exact opposite of Washington’s intention. The attempt to isolate and destabilize Russia, the other nuclear superpower, may appear to some to be an act of brashness, a flexing of American muscle, an act of imperial overconfidence and recklessness. People thought the same thing when Bush went into Iraq. They were shocked and more than a little bit awed. [1] In fact, sometimes I think that Americans are more shocked and awed by the American military than anybody else. But the Iraq invasion, and the brazen offensive against Russia, as well as the so-called “Pivot Against China” and the octopus-like U.S. military entrenchment in Africa — these are really symptoms of weakness and desperation.

U.S. Imperialism is losing its grip on the world and responds to its weakening condition with massive campaigns of destabilization. Destabilization characterizes U.S. foreign policy today more than any other word. The purpose is to reverse the general dynamic of global affairs today in which U.S. influence and power shrinks in relative terms as the rest of the world develops. U.S. and European hegemony — and that is the ability to dictate the terms of economic and political life on the planet — has daily diminished in myriad objective ways, ways that we can measure by the numbers. China’s soon-to-be status as the world’s biggest economy is just one aspect of that decline.

The process is inexorable and it’s gaining momentum. The trajectory of imperial decline has been firmly set ever since the Western capitalists decided to move the production of things — that, is the industrial base — to the South and the rest of the planet. Inevitably power and influence follow and imperial hegemony diminishes. This is of course unacceptable to the rulers of the United States who now find themselves in objective opposition to all manifestations of collaboration and mutual development under terms that are not dictated by Washington. They are in objective opposition to all manifestations of independence by countries in the world. This applies not just to China, not just to China and Russia, but to the rest of the BRICS and to other developing nations. And it even applies to America’s closest allies.

That is because hegemons don’t really have allies. All they have are subordinates, and so the U.S. is quite prepared to do serious harm to European economic interests by pressuring them to break long established economic ties to Russia. They will ultimately do the same thing in the pacific region with China and cause great destabilization there. They do so not because of strength but because of growing relative weakness. Their desperation compels them to risk war because their only clear superiority is in weapons.

However, the net end result, if we survive these flirtations with all-out war, can only be further isolation of the United States and the further weakening of imperialism. I think there is on what passes for the left in the United States a tendency to describe U.S. aggressions like the Iraq war, like the current offensive against Russia, as mistakes and miscalculations: “They didn’t mean to do that.”

In reality the U.S. goes to the brink and beyond the brink of war because it perceives itself as having no other choice. Its soft power is fading. It has few other means beyond the military to strategically influence events. It recruits or buys allies where it can get them, be it jihadists or Nazis. As imperialism’s sway in the world shrinks, so do its options.

U.S. policymakers surveyed the world in 2002 and in 2003 and they concluded that the dynamic in Asia was going against them. They knew that most of the world would be horrified with a war against Iraq, but they rolled the dice anyway and invaded. The net result was the opposite of what they intended. The U.S. was humiliated and the U.S. was humiliated so badly that the rulers of the United States chose to put a dramatically different face on U.S. power — a Black face, Barack Obama.

Iraq was supposed to be a forward U.S. base in Asia to disrupt China’s growing ties in the region. Instead the Iraq war exposed U.S. imperialism’s weaknesses. In the days before that invasion, we wrote in Black Commentator that the U.S. had reached too far and succeeded only in accelerating the process of its own decline. Today Barack Obama is rolling the dice just like George Bush did. To sever Russia’s ties to Europe, Washington has surveyed the global scene and concluded that it has no other choice. The result will be a strengthening of ties between Russia and China, a great anxiety and rethinking among Europeans about their ties to the United States which is about to harm their economy, and an acceleration of imperialism’s death spiral.

Power to the people!

@ggersh

The result will be the exact opposite of Washington’s intention.

Isn’t that what has happened to almost every empire just before it collapsed? And how damn stupid was this move?

The trajectory of imperial decline has been firmly set ever since the Western capitalists decided to move the production of things — that, is the industrial base — to the South and the rest of the planet. Inevitably power and influence follow and imperial hegemony diminishes.

Unless it was part of the plan set in motion back in 1992 like the tweet I posted earlier in the OT. Companies and hedge funds are still getting huge profits from the slave labor that they outsourced overseas and from prison labor while keeping wages low here for the number of businesses that couldn’t be offshored.

Their desperation compels them to risk war because their only clear superiority is in weapons.

Too bad that Glen died before he saw the new weapons Russia has created that surpasses ours. The military has given up on creating hypersonic weapons. Gee I wonder if it’s because the brains are just not up to speed anymore after years of dumbing down students?

at the concert and are still in recovery mode!! Good on ya JS.

Glen Ford from back in 2014 telling us about Ukraine. Man he
nailed it!!

https://redsails.org/ford-on-ukraine/

Glen Ford
2023-01-14
Twitter
Original publication: youtube.com
Imperialism’s Death Spiral (2014)
English | Black Liberation

Glen Ford was one of the founding members of Black Agenda Report.

This is is a transcript of his contribution to the “Ukraine Teach-In” organized by the International Action Center in 2014, in the aftermath of the U.S.-organized “Euromaidan.”

This edition was transcribed by Joe Emersberger, and the RS title was selected from the contents of the speech.

I think that President Obama’s attempt to destabilize Russia will be seen by history as disastrous as George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Like the Iraq war, the de facto declaration of “war by other means” against Russia will accelerate the very dynamic that it intends to halt: the steady weakening of U.S. imperialism’s grip on the world. It will increase the resolve of a host of nations to disengage themselves from American madness and to strengthen collaboration and cooperation among many countries, and not just Russia and China.

The result will be the exact opposite of Washington’s intention. The attempt to isolate and destabilize Russia, the other nuclear superpower, may appear to some to be an act of brashness, a flexing of American muscle, an act of imperial overconfidence and recklessness. People thought the same thing when Bush went into Iraq. They were shocked and more than a little bit awed. [1] In fact, sometimes I think that Americans are more shocked and awed by the American military than anybody else. But the Iraq invasion, and the brazen offensive against Russia, as well as the so-called “Pivot Against China” and the octopus-like U.S. military entrenchment in Africa — these are really symptoms of weakness and desperation.

U.S. Imperialism is losing its grip on the world and responds to its weakening condition with massive campaigns of destabilization. Destabilization characterizes U.S. foreign policy today more than any other word. The purpose is to reverse the general dynamic of global affairs today in which U.S. influence and power shrinks in relative terms as the rest of the world develops. U.S. and European hegemony — and that is the ability to dictate the terms of economic and political life on the planet — has daily diminished in myriad objective ways, ways that we can measure by the numbers. China’s soon-to-be status as the world’s biggest economy is just one aspect of that decline.

The process is inexorable and it’s gaining momentum. The trajectory of imperial decline has been firmly set ever since the Western capitalists decided to move the production of things — that, is the industrial base — to the South and the rest of the planet. Inevitably power and influence follow and imperial hegemony diminishes. This is of course unacceptable to the rulers of the United States who now find themselves in objective opposition to all manifestations of collaboration and mutual development under terms that are not dictated by Washington. They are in objective opposition to all manifestations of independence by countries in the world. This applies not just to China, not just to China and Russia, but to the rest of the BRICS and to other developing nations. And it even applies to America’s closest allies.

That is because hegemons don’t really have allies. All they have are subordinates, and so the U.S. is quite prepared to do serious harm to European economic interests by pressuring them to break long established economic ties to Russia. They will ultimately do the same thing in the pacific region with China and cause great destabilization there. They do so not because of strength but because of growing relative weakness. Their desperation compels them to risk war because their only clear superiority is in weapons.

However, the net end result, if we survive these flirtations with all-out war, can only be further isolation of the United States and the further weakening of imperialism. I think there is on what passes for the left in the United States a tendency to describe U.S. aggressions like the Iraq war, like the current offensive against Russia, as mistakes and miscalculations: “They didn’t mean to do that.”

In reality the U.S. goes to the brink and beyond the brink of war because it perceives itself as having no other choice. Its soft power is fading. It has few other means beyond the military to strategically influence events. It recruits or buys allies where it can get them, be it jihadists or Nazis. As imperialism’s sway in the world shrinks, so do its options.

U.S. policymakers surveyed the world in 2002 and in 2003 and they concluded that the dynamic in Asia was going against them. They knew that most of the world would be horrified with a war against Iraq, but they rolled the dice anyway and invaded. The net result was the opposite of what they intended. The U.S. was humiliated and the U.S. was humiliated so badly that the rulers of the United States chose to put a dramatically different face on U.S. power — a Black face, Barack Obama.

Iraq was supposed to be a forward U.S. base in Asia to disrupt China’s growing ties in the region. Instead the Iraq war exposed U.S. imperialism’s weaknesses. In the days before that invasion, we wrote in Black Commentator that the U.S. had reached too far and succeeded only in accelerating the process of its own decline. Today Barack Obama is rolling the dice just like George Bush did. To sever Russia’s ties to Europe, Washington has surveyed the global scene and concluded that it has no other choice. The result will be a strengthening of ties between Russia and China, a great anxiety and rethinking among Europeans about their ties to the United States which is about to harm their economy, and an acceleration of imperialism’s death spiral.

Power to the people!

@snoopydawg

Good grief they can tell he is unarmed and yet they go through the process like he’s strapped to the nines with weapons and of course it’s all filmed so that we can all share the experience.

This is just ringing too many bells.

Video: The arrest of the alleged leaker.
-> The circus they make for one unarmed dude seems like a show. https://t.co/h9NhcPLk5g pic.twitter.com/vilteMCd1p

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) April 13, 2023

Funny how an intelligence agent that helped spy on the US president was a valued whistleblower, but Teixeira will be treated like Manning, Assange and Snowden. Gotta love double standards.

And speaking of… Trump took classified documents to his home and he’s in all kinds of he’ll for it and he was raided by the FBI, but Biden took even more and his lawyers were allowed to retrieve them. Pence and Obama are rarely mentioned for taking some too.

@snoopydawg

Not unlike the DNC hacking.

There is definitely good reason to believe so.

MISC:

As in the case of Seth Rich, the stolen docs were transformed into a psy-op after the documents were stolen,

This story has already been splashed accross the world's newspapers, with the US blaming Russia for the theft/and/or/forgery of the leaked docs. (via Reuters) (This fact will soon be forgotten.)

The White Helmets are already at work. I find that the best open source intelligence can be be found in the very earliest news reports (no older than 36 hours after an event like this). I now archive the first news reports. The hold a lot of secrets.

I notice that this current "live op" is already being analyzed as a psyop in one Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/bidetmarxman/status/1646176686227193857?s=46&t=EHg7s...

The timeline is very important. When was this "classified" report first produced? Reports suggest that they are older docs that were already passed around and forgotten. So they knew Ukraine was being sacrificed to weaken Russia. That being said, it is possible that the young leaker, for all the wrong reasons, might be providing data that could speed negotiations and save the lives of many, many Ukrainians.

This post-leak psyop likely serves another purpose altogether. It is not about the so-called intelligence about the Ukraine Proxy War that was revealed. And the swat-team demo of capturing a clueless leaker of data about the US proxy war atrocity, also feels like a footnote. A commenter at another forum speculates:

This is definitely a case of Federal entrapment. The goal being to push the Restrict Act. Most of the "intel" that was "leaked" wasn't particularly interesting, and some of it was clearly fabricated (i.e. the parts regarding how the CIA had thoroughly infiltrated the Russian general officer corps, which beggars belief).

Whoever is writing the script for all these psyops wants to make it obvious. This sounds even less legitimate than the Nordstream cover story. They like their package deals so this is probably also a pretext for a forthcoming power grab

The Restrict Act is coming to a vote. I'm going to go out on a limb that this shitshow is the instigating incident that will push the Restrict act past Congress.

.
Another one:

So a 21-year-old boy, with the lowest pay grade in the Nationa Gards, without top security clearance, was somehow able to access top-secret documents and compromise the largest and most expensive security network ever created in human history.

Right. Sounds like the sailboat blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines BS story. Ask yourself, how is it that the Nord Stream bomber still at large ??

Growing disgust is probably a good sign.....

Video: The arrest of the alleged leaker.
-> The circus they make for one unarmed dude seems like a show. https://t.co/h9NhcPLk5g pic.twitter.com/vilteMCd1p

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) April 13, 2023

Funny how an intelligence agent that helped spy on the US president was a valued whistleblower, but Teixeira will be treated like Manning, Assange and Snowden. Gotta love double standards.

And speaking of… Trump took classified documents to his home and he’s in all kinds of he’ll for it and he was raided by the FBI, but Biden took even more and his lawyers were allowed to retrieve them. Pence and Obama are rarely mentioned for taking some too.

@soryang

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/north-korea-says-it-tested-new-solid-fue...

Seoul: North Korea said its latest weapons test was of a "solid-fuel" intercontinental ballistic missile, with leader Kim Jong Un saying it marked a major step in Pyongyang's capacity to conduct a nuclear counterstrike, state media said Friday.
The new "Hwasung-18" ICBM "was test fired on Thursday as the key means of strategic military force," the KCNA news agency reported.

Kim said the ICBM's development "will greatly reorganise our strategic deterrence and reinforce effectiveness of our nuclear counterattack," according to KCNA.

Seoul's military said Thursday it had detected one "medium range or longer" ballistic missile launched on a lofted trajectory -- up not out -- from the Pyongyang area at 7:23 am (1023 GMT), which flew 1,000 kilometres (620 miles).

All of Pyongyang's known intercontinental ballistic missiles are liquid-fuelled, and solid-fuel ICBMs that can be launched from land or submarines have long been at the top of Kim's wish list.

Such missiles are easier to store and transport, more stable and quicker to prepare for launch, and thus harder to detect and destroy pre-emptively.

At a military parade in Pyongyang in February, North Korea showed off a record number of nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missiles, including what analysts said was possibly a new solid-fuel ICBM.

The announcement comes days before North Korea is set to mark one of its most important political anniversaries, the Day of the Sun on April 15.

Fear and confusion in Japan’s Hokkaido as North Korean missile triggers evacuation order

Seoul, South Korea
CNN
—
A North Korean missile sparked fear on the Japanese northern island of Hokkaido Thursday after the government’s emergency alert system warned residents to take cover.

Millions of people received a J-alert, or evacuation order, shortly before 8 a.m., urging them to seek shelter as the missile could land on or near the island.

But soon after, fear turned into anger and confusion as the evacuation order was lifted amid reports that it had been sent in error, with local officials saying there was no possibility of the missile hitting the island and Tokyo later confirming it had fallen outside Japanese territory, in waters off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula.

Many residents were critical of the decision to send the alert.

“What is the use of the J-Alert, which warns of a missile falling when you do not know where it will fall?” asked one Twitter user. “In the end, it serves no purpose other than to instill in the Japanese people the feeling that Japan is being targeted, and to scare them.”

One of the South Korean analysts I follow, Kim Jong-tae, predicted that the new real time launch detection intelligence information flow provided by South Korea to Japan under what is basically a new GSOMIA intelligence sharing agreement with Japan would lead to mistakes and potentially dangerous overreactions by Japan. They are simply not in a situation where they can accurately assess launch and flight track data immediately after launch. This missile with a highly lofted trajectory didn't even land on Japan's side of the Sea of Japan/East Sea. Kim had suggested that previously launch and flight intelligence information was passed on after assessment by South Korea and the US.

The other school of thought, is that Japan is deliberately trying to induce war fears to gain public support for large increases in its defense budget and a new policy to acquire "offensive strike" weapons.

To hear about Marcos offering greater access to additional military bases to US forces reminds me of the old days before Corazon Aquino. This Democracy Now episode was pretty good.

Tim Shorrock is plugging this article by Doug Bandow in Responsible Statecraft on tri-lateral relations because Doug quotes Tim briefly. Tim is in Japan now. I think he went there for a Dylan concert.

"A little alliance tending? US shouldn’t make SoKo-Japan row worse." Quoting yours truly. https://t.co/HwjCMThDPQ

— Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) April 13, 2023

I think Bandow misses some key aspects of South Korean domestic politics and Yoon's motivation for pursuing US-Japanese Indo-Pacific policy. Yoon is incurably corrupt and authoritarian, for this reason alone he desperately needs foreign support to bolster his unpopular administration. There really isn't much the US can do to sweeten that pot. At the same time, the recent US disclosure of "wiretapping" the South Korean presidential office, suggests that rather than putting pressure on Japan to lighten up on South Korea, the US is in the position of manipulating and potentially blackmailing Yoon's administration, as well as highlighting the Yoon administration's national security incompetence. So Yoon has no option other than to bend to US and Japanese demands. The whole US-Japanese perspective is WWII revisionist denialism. Nothing could be more damaging to Yoon's image and humiliating for South Koreans. Not even a North Korean drone flying with impunity over his presidential office.

This from Bandow really takes the cake-

The administration should indicate that Washington is under increasing fiscal pressure and has global responsibilities. Thus, it expects friendly powers, especially treaty allies, to do much more on their own behalf. Seoul’s and Tokyo’s cheap ride is ending. Cooperation is imperative.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/04/12/a-little-alliance-tending-u...

South Korea spends more on its own defense than almost all other US allies by percentage of GDP. By this commonly accepted standard it spends more than twice as much as Japan. They recently spent more than 10 billion dollars to try to get the US military out of central Seoul by building new base facilities for US Forces Korea at Camp Humphreys in Pyongtaek. Compared to other US "allies" South Korea ranks higher on military spending than all except Saudi Arabia and Israel. Anyway, anyone who is informed knows that this sort of approach by the US will only worsen the situation. South Korea to this point has been giving more and getting less from the US and Japan.

Bandow argues that almost everyone involved has passed away and Japanese young people today shouldn't be held responsible for something they didn't do. I know this is a common sentiment in Japan and the US. However, there is saying in Korea, "ten thousand years is not too long to avenge a grudge."

Bandow refers to a South Korean judgement against private Japanese corporations that profited off of human slave labor during WWII as a "judicial diktat." This is some kind of back handed attack on a court decision in an allegedly free country. So much for shared values.

Westerners can turn on a dime for Machiavellian geopolitical gain. However, in Asia what your ancestors did to my ancestors to despoil and loot my country doesn't go away without proper ceremonies, gestures and apologies. Japan cannot continue to lie in their text books to their younger generations about their WWII crimes. What Japan and the US are doing is making further demands on a corrupt politician whose political base in South Korea is crumbling under his feet. Good luck. I think the damage is already done.

Thanks for EBs Joe.