Conflict often rooted in history
By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today
July is the month to honor the veterans who make up a substantial part of any Indian family. Indeed, any American family.
When my eldest brother came home from Korea we celebrated as we have done after every war and for every veteran. As I drive home daily on Highway #44, I pass by a plaque which honors the Korean War Veterans, and there are many of them throughout the country.
Today, as we sit down to dinner or barbeque, news comes that North Korea is “hostile” again. We are told it has the fourth-largest army in the world, over 200,000 highly trained Special Forces, 10,000 artillery pieces in the mountains north of Seoul and hundreds of nuclear weapons with more power than the Hiroshima bomb.
President Donald Trump hears the news of Korea’s recalcitrance as he has dinner at Mar-a-Lago and contemplates whether or not he should bomb what he has called “a grotesque regime.”
He stages “talks” and twits “his base” the American Public, with various and conflicting messages, but never seems to look into our country’s and Korea’s 72-year history of conflict. These matters are often rooted in a history that no one knows.
Trump never wonders what happened to the Peace Treaty that was signed as we watched and welcomed our fighting men home, nor does he speculate about the failed expectations and the U.S. participation in what seems to have gone wrong. No one pays much attention to the fact that Marines are going to be traipsing around North Korea in a “search and secure” operation, and that the Bush and Obama administrations ran a cyber-war against the North for years seeking to disrupt its missile program. These are acts of war, aren’t they?
Thus, Trump and most of our leaders have never wondered about our own U.S. urge to “change the infected regime” in support of our own policy provocations which prevent a lasting peace for which our brothers and uncles gave their lives in that part of the world.
There are sometimes “two sides” to history but now we have, after fifty years, decided that there is not, and therefore, no point in trying to test out that idea of “two sides” of understanding.
This is not to diminish the legitimate wars that have been fought by America’s people in defense of liberty, but, as is in the Korea case, there is never any effort on the part of the most powerful nation in the history of the universe to put itself in the shoes of the enemy and see the world as they did and do.
Can we try to understand Pyongyang’s point of view? As is often the case with bullies, the U.S. never puts itself in the shoes of the enemy. Or the victim. Native People in the Americas know that as well as anybody.
Contact Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at ecooklynn@gmail.com
Copyright permission Native Sun News Today
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