In 2018, after seven decades of a constant state of war halted only by a shaky armistice, North and South Korea began a series of peace talks. Unsurprisingly, these efforts for peace and the unprecedented tension reduction steps by North and South on the DMZ itself, have puzzled and outraged many US hawks as well as the leadership of the Democratic Party, who both seem to desire a continuation and even escalation of tensions between the US and North Korea. However, even though these peace initiatives are supported by a majority of South Koreans and nearly all of the South Korean left and its populist forces, a number of US liberal commentators and politicians have also attacked them–from the right. This has been further complicated by the fact that Donald Trump, whose previous bellicose rhetoric seemed to indicate the US was on the path to renewed war with North Korea, has embraced negotiations with Kim Jong Un’s DPRK.
For this Socialist Night School sessions, the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America will host Tim Shorrock to talk about the current peace process, its origins from within both South and North Korea, and how the South Korean left views the reconciliation peace process. Shorrock will also situate the current negotiations within the legacy of a US war that killed up to 20% of the North Korean population and was preceded by a vicious US counterinsurgency campaign in the late 1940s that has been compared with the savage right-wing repression in Spain during its civil war. He will speak with an eye on what recent developments – such as Trump’s recent firing of his national security adviser, John Bolton, might mean for the future of the Koreas and the current US military dominance in the region.
Register here: https://mdcdsa.org/wp-event/the-korean-peace-process-and-the-legacy-of-us-imperialism-in-asia/
Speaker
Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist who has lived in DC since 1982. He was raised in Japan and South Korea and has been covering the intersection of national security and capitalism since the late 1970s. Tim Shorrock is a correspondent for The Nation, where he has been covering the ongoing Korean peace talks (as well as the raging dispute with Japan over its historical refusal to acknowledge its wartime crimes – see https://www.thenation.com/article/south-korea-japan-cold-war/.) He is also a correspondent for the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism in Seoul and is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. He comes to his work with a long history of working with the antiwar and labor movements, starting during the Vietnam War, and as a participant and creator since the 1970s of a national coalition of US and Korean activists in solidarity with Korean people’s movements.