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CounterPunch
January
17, 2003
American Journal
Paranoid? North Korea? Oh Surely
Not; Cop Work, Safer than Retail Clerking; Bulldog Patton, KIA
on I-40; "Mom Took Me To The Demo": Antiwar Actions
of the Early 60s; Pheasants: How To Hang Them
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Those Inscrutable
Orientals
There's much fluttering among the pundits about
the enigmatic North Koreans, much puzzlement about that nation's
motives in withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty and
telling the US it's pressing forward with nuclear manufactures.
Now let's see. President George W. Bush announces at the start
of last year that North Korea is part of the Axis of Evil, and
therefore a sworn foe of the US, just like Iraq and Iran. Then
President George Bush emphasizes that the United States has reserves
the right to "First Use" of its nuclear arsenal. Then
President George Bush says the United States will not hesitate
to exercise this privilege.
Is the North Korean response so mysterious?
It's not as though North Koreans have listened to some pretty
serious nuclear saber rattling before. In the winter of 1950
General Douglas McArthur asked the Joint Chiefs to give the go-ahead
to his plan to drop "between thirty and fifty atomic bombs"
across the neck of the Korean peninsula. The Joint Chiefs, according
to the account given by Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings in their
book Unknown War, came close to giving him the green light.
Late in 1951, in Operation Hudson Harbor, a lone B-52 was sent
over Pyonyang, as if on a nuclear bombing run.
From 1957 on, as Gavan McCormack reminds
us in the current edition of New Left Review, the US kept an
intimidating stockpile close to the DMZ, when the North had
no nuclear capability. Only pressure from the peace movement
in South Korea prompted the US to remove this in 1991. If we
are to believe Hans Kristensen in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
(Sep-Oct 2002) the US ran rehearsals for a long-range bombing
strike on North Korea up to 1998, maybe even to this very day.
As McCormack writes, the DPRK does want "an end to the threat
of nuclear annihilation under which it has lived for longer than
any other nation.
The North Koreans made the usual mistake
of believing Bill Clinton, who signed onto a deal brokered by
Jimmy Carter in 1994, known as the Geneva "Agreed Framework".
North Korea would drop its plutonium based nuclear program, and
would get in return two electricity-generating light-water reactors.
The US also pledged tit would move towards normalization of political
and economic relations. The US Congress wouldn't sign on, and
so nothing happened. Then President George Bush broke off all
discussions. North Korea, with a million or two already starved
to death, 200,000 out of a population of 23 million in labor
camps, and saddled with terror and leader-worship, started to
play their lone nuclear card once more. And one has to say,
they're playing it pretty deftly. The man who seems to have made
an utter hash of things is President George Bush.
Cops and Death
Police work continues to be a relatively
safe occupation, Associated Press reports that in 2002 147 officers
killed in 2002. In the 1970s an average of 220 officers died
each year. In the 1980s, 185 officers were killed on average,
with the average number dropping to 155.
Craig Floyd, chairman of the memorial
fund, commented that "law enforcement remains the most dangerous
occupation in America today, and those who serve and make the
ultimate sacrifice are true portraits in courage," Floyd
said. This is nonsense. Compared to the perils of being a
retail clerk in a 7/11 or toiling on a construction site, let
alone working on a trawler in the Gulf of Alaska, logging in
the Pacific North West or working in a deep mine, police work
is pretty safe.
The public apprehension that cops are
often border-line psychotic, hair-trigger ready to open fire
on the slightest pretext, virtually immune for serious sanction,
is growing apace, fuelled by such incidents as the recent dog
slaughter on an interstate in Tennessee. Last week CNN featured
a grainy film of the episode taken from one of the police cruisers.
James Smoak plus wife Pamela and son
Brandon were traveling from Nashville along Interstate 40 to
their Saluda, N.C., home on New Year's Day when they noticed
a trooper following him. In Cookeville, about 90 miles east of
Nashville, the Smoaks were pulled over by the trooper and three
local police cars. The cops ordered them out of the car, made
them kneel, and handcuffed them.
At this point the Smoaks family implored
the police to shut the doors of their car so the two family dogs
couldn't jump out. The cops did nothing. Out hopped Patton the
bulldog. A cop promptly raised his shotgun and blew its head
off, amid the horrified screams of the Smoaks family.
Of course the cops later said Patton
was acting in a threatening manner and that the uniformed shotgunner
"took the only action he could to protect himself and gain
control of the situation," but the film seems to show Patton
wagging his tail the moment before he was blown away.
Why were the Smoaks stopped by the 4-car
posse? Mr Smoaks had left his wallet on the roof of his car at
the filling station and someone phoned in a report he'd seen
their wallet fly out of a car and fall onto the highway with
money spilling out. Well, I guess Mr Smoaks won't make that silly
mistake again.
Scroll through some Middle America websites
and you'll find much fury about what happened to Patton, as an
episode ripely indicative of how cops carry on these days. Here's
"Police State In Progress" by Dorothy Anne Seese writing
in the sparky Sierra Times, which bills itself as "An Internet
Publication for Real Americans", on Thursday January 09,
2003. After relating the death of Patton, Smoaks brought up other
recent police rampages:
"A couple of months ago, a woman
was shot to death in her car at a drive-through Walgreen's pharmacy
for trying to get Soma by a forged prescription. The officer
who shot the woman--who had a 14-month old baby with her in the
car--claimed self-defense because the woman was trying to run
over him. However, the medical examiner found she had been shot
from an angle to the left and rear of her position in the driver's
seat. Self defense? The officer is under investigation for second-degree
murder and has been fired from the Chandler police department.
However, a child is motherless, a man has been deprived of his
wife and companion, the mother of his child, because his wife
tried to get a drug with a phony prescription. Florida Governor
Jeb Bush's daughter did the same thing and got a slap on the
wrist. It seems the law now considers everyone guilty until proven
innocent, with people in high places excepted. The number of
horror stories increases daily in Amerika."
There was a time when "Amerika"
was a word solely in left currency. Not any more, if the conservative,
populist Sierra Times is any guide. Check out its Whack 'n Stack
feature about killings by cops and you'll sense the temperature
of outrage.
"No to
War!" Is Anyone Listening?
Who has not clambered onto a bus, headed
off to a protest demonstration and stood amid sparse company
in the rain, thinking "What's the use". Who has not
listened to some plucky orator rasping through a bullhorn, "Let
our message go forth" and thought privately, "Forth
to whom? Who's Listening? Who cares?"
These days there's a spirited movement
growing across the US, opposing a war against Iraq. There have
been some big events, like the rallies in Washington DC and San
Francisco, attended by vast throngs. But there have also been
rallies and vigils by the score, in small towns.
Are they making
a difference?
Of course they are, just like the demonstrations
in Europe, the middle East, Australia and elsewhere. US ambassadors
and CIA heads of station may deprecate and downplay the world
protests in their reports, but they cannot dismiss them, any
more than can the White House. How can you ignore a turnout of
500,000 in Florence?
In short, protests count, just as they
did in the very earliest days of organizing against the war in
Vietnam. This organizing was undertaken by far-left groups, small
Trotskyist and Maoist sects, moving far ahead of the mainstream.
When did these efforts begin? Back in
1963 and even earlier, half a decade before the huge throngs
began to muster in Washington DC. In the past few weeks many
veterans of these early marches have been pooling their memories.
Here's a recollection to me of one of the earliest, from Lawrence
Reichard, who these days works as an organizer in Stockton, California,
defending rural workers.
"In the spring of 1962," Reichard
says, " when I was three years old, my mother dragged me
to a demonstration against the U.S. war in Laos in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa. There were five people at that demo. My mom, my older
brother, me and two others." Then, "In 1969 I rode
in a VW bus from Charlotte, N.C. to Washington, D.C. for an anti-war
demo that drew 500,000. According to Daniel Ellsberg that demo
made Nixon reconsider the madman recommendation of his joints
chiefs of staff to nuke Vietnam within a few miles of the Chinese
border."
That trip was especially memorable for
him, Reichard continues, because he made it with the family
of Norman Morrison, who immolated himself in front of the Pentagon
in protest over the war. Reichard recalls that he read later
that LBJ's aides cut mention of Morrison's death out of his newspapers
so he wouldn't see it.
"On the rare occasion that I'm
asked to speak at a demo, and the turnout is low," Reichard
concludes, " I speak about the turnout in Cedar Rapids,
and the turnout in D.C. years later, as a way to rally the troops
and lift spirits. Imperialism and colonialism are not stopped
in a day!" He points out that "It is also noteworthy
that in 1954 or 1955 the American Friends Service Committee wrote
a letter to the Eisenhower administration warning against U.S.
involvement in Vietnam.
Needless to say, the anti-war movement of today is way ahead
of the movement that brought out five demonstrators in Cedar
Rapids in the early 60s."
Reichard ended thus, "The anti-war
movement has much to be proud of. To the absolute fury of the
right wing, the anti-war movement of yesterday and today still,
to this day, shackles this country's ability to wage unfettered
war. Right off the bat they have to forget about any war that
might last more than six months or cost more than a few hundred
U.S. lives. For this you can thank the peace movement and the
Vietnamese, who, at tremendous cost, beat us militarily. The
entire world owes a tremendous debt to the Vietnamese."
Pheasants:
The Aftermath
I wrote here about getting some pheasants,
and an Indian who works at UIUC/Urbana wrote promptly to the
effect that socialist principle required me to send him a brace
of pheasants right away. I responded that the 24 were my year's
supply and I also give them to local friends. See what you can
find locally , I suggested. Here's his answer. This guy was hungry
for pheasant!
"Dear Mr.Cockburn,
"Thank you for writing, explaining
your position (re: pheasants) and providing suggestions.
"I could not wait for your reply
(or the pheasants) and so I managed to locate MacPharlane Pheasant
Farm in Wisconsin (see www.pheasant.com).
I pre-ordered 6 plump fresh pheasants and drove (through snow)
to pick them up. Remarkably good birds. Two of them were promptly
cooked and eaten.
"Anyway, just for your information,
MacPharlane is the largest pheasant farm in the US. Their birds
are sort of free-range, reared in large pens in the open that
I examined carefully (one can never be too careful in these matters).
The people there are also very courteous country folk. All in
all, your article made me fiercely determined to get my own birds."
Meanwhile, CounterPuncher Susan Davis,
also at UIUC advised that she's ordering pheasants one hour north
of Urbana/Champaign, from a family operation run by Mrs. Dianne
Moore in Watseka. Ms Moore also raises lamb, beef, pork, turkey
and chicken, all organic free range plus heritage turkeys.
The man raising my pheasants is Mike
Giacomini, forty miles north-east of Petrolia in Rohnerville.
Mike used to do butchering in Fernbridge and I had a freezer
locker in his establishment. The Eel river ran behind his place
and, in the great flood of '64, came in. They had to evacuate
all the freezer lockers In Europe they hang pheasants until they
get a bit high, though this is sometimes taken to absurdity.
In the days when he was trying to be an Irish country squire
Charlie Glass once served pheasant at a dinner outside Lismore,
near where I grew up and the birds were so far gone they practically
flew off the plate. Best is to hang the pheasant unplucked for
three or four days so the meat absorbs the volatile oils from
the feathers.
Anyone wanting my photo essays on Petrolia's
local produce can email beckyg@counterpunch.com,
credit card in hand. Every penny goes into the CounterPunch treasury.
They take the form of eight placemats, with vivid photographs
by yours truly and my reflections on the reverse, forming a conversation
piece of the most useful kind when chit chat is going poorly
and the in-laws seem more than usually ill-at-ease as the crockery
flies by the heads and the bairns brawl on the floor. "Oh
look, a dead sheep"
Yesterday's
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rancis A. Boyle
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Yigal Bronner
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Jason Leopold
When
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CounterPunch Wire
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Ryan Nominated for Nobel Prize
JoAnn Wypijewski
Workers
Against War
Carl Estabrook
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30 Years Later
Abortion and the Left
Bernard Weiner
Inside Saddam's War Diary
Hot Damn! It's Showtime!
Maria Tomchick
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William Hughes
Give Me That Old Time Republic
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January 11
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