The Prospects for Peace in Korea

DOWNLOAD FULL EPISODE

Opening Theme

Hello brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, this is Back in the USSR on CFRU, I am Siegfried.  Although I wasn’t actually here last week, life happened and things got rather chaotic, the past episode that I aired was very appropriate and provides the essential backstory for what I’m going to talk about tonight.  If you listened in last week, or have listened in the past to the show I did last fall on the conflict on the Korean peninsula, you’ll definitely know the historical context for the current and potentially game-changing developments that have taken place in Korea from the beginning of this year.  To re-cap, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un reached out to South Korean leader Moon Jae-In during his new year’s address, calling for dialogue between the two nations and a coming together of the Korean people around the Winter Olympic games in Seoul.  Moon Jae-In reciprocated and, in spite of an altogether negative reaction from the United States, the imperial power whose agenda has driven South Korean foreign policy from 1945 on, worked to initiate a series of talks, visits of official delegations between the two countries, a joint women’s hockey team at the Olympics and other sports related co-operation which saw a large North Korean delegation attend the games, and now he might have just succeeded in doing the unprecedented by getting the leaders of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the United States of America to sit down for face to face talks sometime this spring.  Whether that will happen remains to be seen, but this marks a dramatic shift from where we were last fall when we had Donald Trump’s “Fire and Fury” speech and it looked like the United States was about to initiate a new war on the Korean peninsula which might have resulted in the death of millions of people.  So this is a positive development for the cause of peace in Korea.

 

I’d like to read a statement by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) on the potential of Trump-DPRK negotiations because I think it gets to the heart of the matter and puts it in historical context, which, needless to say, the mainstream corporate media does not.

(Read: PSL orientation: On the potential of Trump-DPRK negotiations by Brian Becker)

Empire Files War With North Korea - Propaganda vs.Reality (An excellent overview of the conflict on the Korean peninsula and the decades-long struggle of the DPRK to maintain its self-determination in the face of sustained aggression from the American Empire)

Can Trump, Kim, and Moon Make Peace in Korea (An analysis of the new round of negotiations between the DPRK and ROK and the likelihood of any sort of constructive involvement on the part of the Trump Administration)

After Hawaii Scare, Trump Worsens Nuclear Danger (An analysis of America's belligerent nuclear posture under Trump)