North Korea - what the hell is happening?

[teamsaint]

Simon, do you not think that Reagan, thatch and Gorby took us out of the frying pan and into the fire?

We still have huge nuclear arsenals, and proliferation.
The gap between rich and poor grows ever bigger.
War and the arms industry flourish as ever.
China remains a huge "issue" on various fronts.

And so on.

[Bryn]

Simon is no Healey. Howe, of course, knew his sheep well, and would readily have helped his neighbours rescue theirs. Many farmers in what Simon claims to be his neck of the woods need all the help they can get, I was hoping that Simon might be more usefully employed being a good neighbour, rather than an nth rate amateur military historian.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Hey, this is a "Radio 3 board" (I'm beginning to think perhaps not) and I would have thought that a sentence with the use of "GI" alongside "Japanese" might jar (almost in the Yeats sense, you'll understand) - so much better to use the common words Jap and GI. Now: Nip, and GI; that would have been offensive . . .

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Simon is no Healey. Howe, of course, knew his sheep well, and would readily have helped his neighbours rescue theirs. Many farmers in what Simon claims to be his neck of the woods need all the help they can get, I was hoping that Simon might be more usefully employed being a good neighbour, rather than an nth rate amateur military historian.

And you're so much better?

Well Beckmesser: Fanget An!

[Bryn]

I never went further than ACE III during my limited military career. However, it was Simon, not I, who posted here posing as one versed military history and slighting another contributor 're. their supposed lack of grasp of the discipline.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Well I hardly think Simon was posing as one versed in military history any more than Muesli was. But I suppose you just decided to pop along here and make some feeble quip for the hell of it. Nothing odd about that, even the moderator does it.

[Boilk]

The gap between rich and poor grows ever bigger.

If Accountant X's daily wage is £100 more than mine, and we both get a 10% rise, his salary is now more than £100 ahead of mine - so yes the gaps widens, as you'd expect. But that gap is generally unlikely to be as widening proportionally as linearly (unless you focus on a few select professions).

The gap doesn't matter as much as whether the lot of poor people is improving, and it has and is. Where I grew up in the 70s, any family with a car or a land line was considered privileged. Compare that to the affordability today of hatchbacks, colour TVs, mobiles phones, internet, flying, foreign holidays. Cheap overseas manufacturing has benefited everyone in Britain, making all materially richer without a corresponding increase in how hard we work to acquire those things.

Unfortunately, I think we're generally morally poorer.

[richardfinegold]

Only one country has ever used nuclear weapons against another, and that country is supposed to be our friend. :erm:

Yes, well if the Brits had had the resources to develop nuclear weapons, do we think they would have held back? The Country that invented Concentration Camps
in the Boer War? Or that first developed Civilian bombing campaigns in Mesopotamia in the 1920s? The Country that deliberately targeted the Civilian Population for Incendiary Bombing in Hitler's Germany?
Have you ever read accounts of the firestorms in Hamburg or Dresden, Alpie? Do you think that the Country that perfected the art of burning people alive from 30,000 feet in the air would have hesitated to drop Fat Man or Little Boy? It was lack of British technical sophistication, not British Willpower, that prevented England from acquiring the dubious distinction of being the first Nuclear Aggressor.
I don't know what other decision could have been made than to drop the bomb. Imperial Japan was a nation beyond the pale, that had committed mass murder across Asia, and that treated British and American P.O.Ws horribly. Hundreds of thousands of British and Americans would perished bringing their
murderous military to it's well deserved demise. There was no easy end to the Pacific War
North Korea isn't going to be attacking the US or the UK. They are crazy, but not suicidal. Their pattern is to sabre rattle, get what they want, swear to play nice, and repeat the whole thing a few years later. If other countries don't prop up their nuclear fantasies with extorted blackmail, they will probably implode in a few years.
And for those of you who find no moral distinction between the Democratic Republic of North Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States, please feel free to take the next plane to beautiful downtown Pyongyang and send your posts from an Internet Cafe on whatever topic you like. The rest of us shall count the minutes before you end up in the Gulag.

[Julien Sorel]

And for those of you who find no moral distinction between the Democratic Republic of North Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States, please feel free to take the next plane to beautiful downtown Pyongyang and send your posts from an Internet Cafe on whatever topic you like. The rest of us shall count the minutes before you end up in the Gulag.

Are there Internet Cafes in beautiful downtown Pyongyang?

However vile successive North Korean regimes have been (there have been some vile South Korean ones, of course) it's undeniably true that the United States (and in a subsidiary capacity the United Kingdom) have been responsible (or their governments have been responsible, with variable popular support) for the deaths of many more human beings over the years since WWII than North Korea (those people generally living outside the United States and the United Kingdom). Or would you disagree? (or agree but see those deaths as perhaps unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage, as it were?)

[Pabmusic]

Yes, well if the Brits had had the resources to develop nuclear weapons, do we think they would have held back? The Country that invented Concentration Camps in the Boer War? Or that first developed Civilian bombing campaigns in Mesopotamia in the 1920s? The Country that deliberately targeted the Civilian Population for Incendiary Bombing in Hitler's Germany?
Have you ever read accounts of the firestorms in Hamburg or Dresden, Alpie? Do you think that the Country that perfected the art of burning people alive from 30,000 feet in the air would have hesitated to drop Fat Man or Little Boy? It was lack of British technical sophistication, not British Willpower, that prevented England from acquiring the dubious distinction of being the first Nuclear Aggressor.
I don't know what other decision could have been made than to drop the bomb. Imperial Japan was a nation beyond the pale, that had committed mass murder across Asia, and that treated British and American P.O.Ws horribly...

I don't disagree with the thrust of your post, but there's a surprising number of myths that need exposing:

1. The British did not invent concentration camps. Although there had been earlier examples of enforced captivity of populations, the most recent had been on Cuba after the 1895 uprising that led eventually to the Spanish-American War. This is one of many sites that mention the actions of the Spanish Governor: http://www.infoplease.com/encycloped...auses-war.html

The relevant passage is: "After efforts to quell guerrilla activity had failed, the Spanish military commander, Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, instituted the reconcentrado, or concentration camp, system in 1896; Cuba's rural population was forcibly confined to centrally located garrison towns, where thousands died from disease, starvation, and exposure".

Britain started to do something similar (for similar reasons and with similar results) in 1900. Their English translation of reconcentrado was 'concentration camp'. So that's what they gave us - the name. By the way, the US used concentration camps to a limited extent in the Philippines during the first few years of the 20th century, though straightforwardly massacring the population was the preferred option (learnt well in the Indian Wars) - 250,000-500,000 died this way.

2. The bombing of civilians began in 1849, when Austria dropped a single bomb on Venice from a balloon, during the first war of Italian independence. Bulgaria bombed Adrianople during the Balkan wars in 1912, and Mexicans bombed Mazatlan during the revolution in 1914. Germany bombed Britain many times during WW1, beginning with Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and King's Lynn in January 1915. They attacked London from May 1916 (Elgar's wife recorded her thoughts on this). In all, the 51 raids killed 557 people and injured 1358. You can see bomb damage from 1916 on the Embankment to this day. After WW1, Britain did bomb the Kurds, the Afghanis and the Dervishes, but an international agreement was reached in 1923 to limit the bombing of civilian targets. Then came the Berber rebellion of 1925 in Morocco. The Spanish had no useable air force, so they used American pilots with the blessing of their government (and despite their being signatories to the agreement) in the full-on 'carpet-bombing' of Chechaoune in Morocco. Everyone has heard of Guernica, very few of Chechaoune.

3. WW2 allied carpet-bombing was developed and carried out by the allies, led by Britain. The usual tactic (used both at Hamburg and Dresden) was that the British bombed at night, the Americans during the day, thus providing 24-hour continuous bombing. Disgusting though it was, it was part of the allied strategy.

4. At the end of WW2, Japan was trying hard to complete its own nuclear weapon. Japanese submarines had been loading up at Nazi-occupied ports since 1943 with uranium, mined in Czechoslovakia and supplied under an agreement brokered by General Kawaishima. Hitler dispatched U-234 in April 1945 to Japan, loaded with uranium ore and two Me-262 jet fighters. Germany surrendered on May 10th, when the German crew (but not the two Japanese officers on board, who committed suicide) voted to surrender and made for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was apparently clear from the shipment that the Japanese bomb project was well advanced.

The Japanese plant was at Hungnam in Korea, very much under threat from capture if Russia declared war on Japan, which she was expected to do soon. Russia was in a good position to invade Japan easily ahead of the Americans, and there is an excellent case for believing that Truman gave the go-ahead to use the atomic weapons in a dual attempt to prevent the Japanese using nuclear weapons and to wrong-foot the Russians.

Russia did declare war two days after Hiroshima and invaded Korea, taking Hungnam. That's where Russia got its initial nuclear know-how.

[Sydney Grew]

. . . To be honest, the N. Koreans seem mad as a box of frogs . . .

Oddly enough, that is what I have always thought about the Northern Americans, since before the time of Kennedy. The "United States" with all their bombs and bullies constitute one of the few countries of this world in which I would never wish to reside.

[teamsaint]

If Accountant X's daily wage is £100 more than mine, and we both get a 10% rise, his salary is now more than £100 ahead of mine - so yes the gaps widens, as you'd expect. But that gap is generally unlikely to be as widening proportionally as linearly (unless you focus on a few select professions).

The gap doesn't matter as much as whether the lot of poor people is improving, and it has and is. Where I grew up in the 70s, any family with a car or a land line was considered privileged. Compare that to the affordability today of hatchbacks, colour TVs, mobiles phones, internet, flying, foreign holidays. Cheap overseas manufacturing has benefited everyone in Britain, making all materially richer without a corresponding increase in how hard we work to acquire those things.

Unfortunately, I think we're generally morally poorer.

I don't know if we are all morally poorer. The people at the top certainly seem more selfish, and society takes their lead.
Relative levels of income do matter. All the research I have ever read about shows that the more equal the society in terms of income and wealth, the better and happier they are. But it may be that starting the discussion from the income end is putting the cart before the horse....perhaps we should look first at what would make society work better.
Of course that probably doesn't suit the agenda setters with the sky rocketing incomes.

[Bryn]

Oddly enough, that is what I have always thought about the Northern Americans, since before the time of Kennedy. The "United States" with all their bombs and bullies constitute one of the few countries of this world in which I would never wish to reside.

How delightful to find my views on this matter in concurrence with your own.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

I don't disagree with the thrust of your post, but there's a surprising number of myths that need exposing:

. . .
3. WW2 allied carpet-bombing was developed and carried out by the allies, led by Britain. The usual tactic (used both at Hamburg and Dresden) was that the British bombed at night, the Americans during the day, thus providing 24-hour continuous bombing. Disgusting though it was, it was part of the allied strategy.

Richard Overy in Why the Allies Won is interesting (and agrees) on this point.

[Flosshilde]

Yes, well if the Brits had had the resources to develop nuclear weapons,

Rather skating over where & how the USA got the knowledge resources from.