Thread of Korean War Threads🧵

Today marks the 72nd year of the ongoing Korean war. To this day, the US refuses to sign a peace treaty with the DPRK (north Korea).

To understand why, we need to grasp the origins of the war in the US's division & occupation of Korea before 1950. To start, an overview: after WWII self-organized People's Committees proclaimed the Korean People's Republic. In the south the US imposed direct military rule and eliminated its rivals. In the north the PC's formed the basis of an eventual socialist state

https://twitter.com/nodutdol/status/1426987082006806536?s=20&t=a8KA39xf0iwT-wR8SyNZwA

Kim Il Sung was born this day in 1912 in colonial Korea. His accomplishments are mostly disregarded in the west. A quick thread on his life Kim Il Sung was born Kim Seongju to a Presbyterian family. In 1920, the family fled to Manchuria. According to Kim, his parents were in the independence movement. US military archives acknowledge Kim’s uncle was a guerrilla leader who also went by the name Kim Il Sung

Is Russia imperialist?

"Russia can be ranked as one of the world’s most powerful states only based on its military strength. Economically it shares the characteristics not of an advanced capitalist state, but of one on the capitalist semi-periphery."

mronline.org/2019/01/02/is-… “Forbes listed the top 2000 corporations in the world based on total sales, profits, assets and market value…Russia has just 4 in the top 100, ranked 43, 47, 73 and 98. It has only 6 in the top 500, and 25 in the top 2000.”

Have we considered that mass media support for Ukraine has as much to do with US interests in Ukraine as an anti-Russia proxy as it does with the whiteness of Ukrainians? That if such a level of sympathy were replicated for non-white people it would actually be a bad sign? They used to run fluff pieces about the contras! That didn’t stop 40 years of media demonization of Central American refugees. Just look at how Taiwan is represented vs China, or north vs south Korea. The determining factor is who supports and who opposes the imperialist agenda

An understanding of the historical development of Korean nationalism against Japanese imperialism and waning Chinese suzerainty at the turn of the 20th century is v helpful for understanding how nationalism manifests across the political spectrum Around this time, as Korea became a Japanese protectorate and then colony, various intellectuals began pursuing a project to construct & defend the idea of the Korean nation against Japanese claims to Korea, as well as against more conservative loyalists to the Qing

Thread of questions that come to mind reading some of these criticisms of the DSA statement on Korea:

1. Why do you assume you’re in a position to offer critiques or denunciations of north Korea when you can’t even accurately describe its government structure? 2. Given your own ignorance, what purpose would criticism serve other than to reinforce ignorance and antagonism against Korea? Why do you consider denouncing the DPRK an ethical imperative over your country’s 70+ year division, occupation & siege of Korea?

This city spends billions each year paying cops to harass turnstile jumpers but won’t put up safety barriers, provide safe shelter to unhoused people, or lift a finger to stop anti-Asian violence beyond posting shitty bus stop ads. More police won’t fix this bc it’s not their job

https://twitter.com/CeFaanKim/status/1482402122616524806

If anything the bloated police budget is one of the many causes of the problem. When a city spends more on its police force than most countries spend on their militaries, it’s going to come at the expense of real services that actually prevent violence and keep people safe

Maybe I’m splitting hairs but I think it’s better to say Kim Jong Un is not head of govt rather than he isn’t head of state. Chair of State Affairs Committee does “represent the state” (usually what head of state means, think Queen vs PM in UK), but isn’t the highest govt office Most people will not know the difference but anyone interested in getting details right (which helps when the think tank tools come along) should take note

The problem with “stop Asian hate” is that racial violence isn’t produced by “hate” in the abstract. It’s produced by political economy, and therefore can’t either be reduced to or represented by individual instances of interpersonal violence, which can have multiple causes At the structural level, anti Asian racism manifests through institutional discrimination, policing, militarism, global supply chains and labor arbitrage, etc. All this disappears when we focus on individuals’ sentiments

Ok I’m gonna stop contributing to Squid Game discourse soon but the reason the apolitical consumption of it is so disturbing is that the show’s premise of mass killings being hidden from society isn’t fictional for south Korea. It’s a huge feature of our modern history The most famous of these outside Korea is the No Gun Ri massacre during the Korean War, when US soldiers massacred 400 refugees. During the Korean War the US actually ordered troops to fire on refugees in battle zones. Hundreds of these incidents have been recorded

Asians* are successful** bc of immigration policies designed to source highly specialized labor from peripheries & exclude economic/political “undesirables” (communists & the poor)

*a specific class of specific migrants & their descendants
**overrepresented in particular fields

https://twitter.com/TheLaurenChen/status/1372655731762204674

Idea of docile, smart & striving Asians comes from the US occupation of Japan. It’s the antithesis of the yellow peril after the “enemy” is conquered. It was applied to domestic US politics in response to our rising numbers as part of anticommunist & white supremacist ideology

i wish people would share grace lee boggs' cuddly quotes less and more of the ones where she tells everyone to get off their ass and do communism already From "Organization Means Commitment" which you can read here visionaryorg.electricembers.net/suggestedReadi…

The point of resisting carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence is not to fulfill some conspiracy to leave Asian people vulnerable to violence. It's because the imperialist state cannot be trusted to protect us; they will use that mandate to protect to brutalize others & us. Empowering law enforcement to "stop hate crimes" will not result in them going after the most dangerous threat to our communities: organized state, capitalist, vigilante white supremacist violence. Generally speaking, the police do not arrest their colleagues.

The richest country in the world uses money it could spend helping its people to bomb other nations, it’s true. But why is the US the richest country on earth? Because US wealth doesn’t just come from workers here, the surplus of the whole world is expropriated—at gunpoint. They have money for wars because wars make the money. Not only through arms deals, defense contracts etc but the ability to use force to ensure US finance sets the rules of the global economy. It’s not just about ending wars to reinvest domestically, but redistributing worldwide.

This is the logical conclusion of making media attention a metric of progress for our communities. We clamored for corporate media monopoly to “pay attention,” now here they are, distorting the story to their own ends, lifting up the most reactionary voices

https://twitter.com/lintroller10/status/1364083812540555264

Tbh part of why I find this convo less and less worth engaging is precisely this dynamic: we don’t control the means through which these discourses get generated. Media monopoly always broadcasts further, and people take things like this at face value as faithful reflections.