US News: 2011

By Harry “Truman” Lee

Editor-in-Chief

US News

Note: This is a special contribution commemorating the Inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44^th President of the United States of America. The writer is well known in the world of journalism as Emil Zola of Korea.”

A new Era of Changes

I deem it a great pleasure to observe with you the dawning of a new era when, with the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44^th President of the United States of America, the horizon of a Main Street of the people seeking a new paradigm of access to justice in the domestic as well as international order and economic system comes to light. This is a beginning of a new age of change as well as an end of the age of barbarism under George W. Bush, symbolized by the capitalistic system of the Wall Street choked with greed and exploitation and the militaristic system of the Pentagon which had turned the world into a killing field.

An overall review of news, dispatched from around the globe ever since the choice of Barack Obama as the new President was formally declared in the November 4^th presidential elections, confirms the outpouring hope and prayers of the people for a change in Washington and Paris, London and Moscow, Seoul and Pyongyang, New Delhi and Karachi, Jerusalem and Palestine, Bagdad and Tehran, Mexico City, Lisbon and Buenos Aires, and major cities of the U.S. and the world; the people made it clear that they hope for the coming of a new age when the fall of the Wall Street’s capitalistic structure of greed and abuse by the bourgeoisie will bring justice in the international order and a new economic system that will guarantee equal opportunities to all societal stratum and equal distribution of wealth.

The world no longer needs to be concerned and timorously panicky about the invasion and exploitation of the U.S. economic and military hegemony, or the threat thereof. In the last Presidential elections, the American people gave a coup de grace to the Neocons, making them irreparable and unable to comeback. This was a decided message of the ballots cast by the masses wrapped in with their hopes and prayers, including those outsiders who had never cast their votes, in New Hampshire, Upstate New York, in the villages hidden in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, in the snow-capped mountains of Colorado State, in the Mojave deserts of California where the underprivileged had picked the Grapes of Wrath, and in the Stone Mountains of Georgia, at the Lookout of Tennessee and along the riversides of the Mississippi.

One year before I was assigned to Washington, D.C., as a KPI-News correspondent in 1995, I was invited to Seattle to work as editor of The Pacific Life, a monthly newsmagazine published both in Korea and the U.S. Seattle was a beautiful city, looking far out to the peaceful Puget Sound with the magnificent Cascade Mountains, which run from the North to the South in the Northwest ranges, as a backdrop. A towering monument called ‘Space Needle’ stood majestically at the western tip of the extreme promontory of this town - a symbol of challenge to the vast Universe seeking an opportunity to open a new horizon in the un-trodden space.

The Space Needle was the first monument I had paid a visit to when I moved to Seattle. I took a lift to climb to the gazebo suspending on the top of the colossal tower precariously and was lost in watching a tantalizing scene the dots of secret islands playing out that was seemingly akin to Paul Cezanne’s landscapes, when a blue-eyed guide approached me and said, “This Space Needle came to be erected here with the hopes and passions of the American pioneers, frustrated when they found themselves with no more lands to explore and later found a way out in a challenge to explore the universe.”

The fact that Boeing Co., a flagship company of the American aerospace industry, and Microsoft Co., which leads the computer age, are both headquartered in this city confirms the trailblazer spirit of this city. Ironically enough, this city that represents the aerospace industry of America, which is a third Industrial Revolution, became a hotbed of large-scale street demonstrations on November 29-30 of 1999. This was the largest turnout since the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in 1950s. When the city sank to a total disorder, the Washington State authorities had to declare an emergency.

Conspiracy of New Liberalism

These massive rallies were a joint action by the NGOs who converged on this city from all over the U.S. to abort the ministerial conference of the WTO which was being held in this city at the time. On the scene to cover the events, with a keen attention to the protestants, who accurately read the intention of the conspiracy hidden behind the New Liberalism, or the globalization, and exerted their all-out effort to expose its threat to the world, I at one point found myself thinking that this could be a preview of the last civil revolt that would bring an end to the world exploitation of the American capitalism with the IMF as a mask.

The borderless free trade, better known as globalization, is a strategy of the New Liberalists which reflects the best interests of the American hegemony, to say the least. Some scholars of international politics call this the Post-Imperialism. Professor Geoffrey Harcourt of Cambridge University once warned, “The imperialism of the end of 19^th Century is coming back alive in the name of globalization, and this is a pitfall intended to press for Imperialistic interests.”

As you know very well, the Imperialism led to competition for colonies in the end of the 19^th Century with the U.S., Germany, Japan and other late industrial powers encroaching on the edges of markets pre-occupied by the no-sunset British Empire in India, China and other colonies throughout the world where they could explore a new market and at the same time conspire to exploit natural resources and raw materials. This competition had imposed annihilations, oppression, unlimited violence and exploitation and global suffering on the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asia, Africa, Mideast, Middle and South America and elsewhere in the world.

The colonial predominance did not stop simply at violations on the sovereignty, and acts of oppression and exploitation; it was accompanied by the crimes of barbarity and inhumanity. The ‘ministers’ of the Imperialism made inroads into every nook and cranny of the world and claimed, “We need to discharge our responsibility to civilize the primitives of the colony.” What they did was destroy the traditional culture and value system in such fields as religion, education and even the arts.

The colonial system of the Imperialism with capitalism as a front came to debacle in the national liberation movements by the oppressed people who opened their eyes at the noble ideal of the Nationalism during two World Wars. That was an inevitable conclusion of the development of history. The struggle of the masses against the Ancienregime of feudalistic society ignited by the Bolshevik Revolution quickly spread throughout the world like a wild fire, and once it seemed to bring a dawn ending the long night of darkness of oppression and exploitation at long last.

However, the U.S., after having halved the world with the former Soviet Union at the end of the 2^nd World War, emerged as a leader of the so-called capitalistic system and pursued the Imperialistic interests in a new approach, in which it secured a safety valve of obtaining enough excess profits by evangelizing the ideologies of ‘free markets’ and ‘free trade’ and diluting the concept of the nation state. It did not need to brandish the sword of ‘colonialism.’ But the world had to suffer again the tribulation of another form of aggression by a world power leading the age of post-Imperialism.

The territorial and market expansion by means of colonialism in this age was unproductive as well as unnecessary, as it became possible for American capitalists to impose an exclusive control on the world market. But the encroachment could not last forever, for the people in many parts of the globe got awakened to the market manipulation by the financial Mafias, with the colossus of capital behind them, trying to tighten up their dog lead.

The Second Crusade

I cannot forget the moment of an emotional exuberance with tears running down the cheek when we were told of Ahn Joong-Geun in a middle school history class that dealt with his sublime love of our nation demonstrated in his act of sacrificing his own life; Ahn Joong-geun shot to death Ito Hirobumi, the first Japanese Governor-General in Korea after Japan’s colonization of Chosun, at the Harbin train station in China on October 26, 1906, in a ultimate attempt to reveal to the world the atrocities of our nation suffered in the days of Japanese colonialism, when Japan pirated our country and sent millions of Koreans to serve as a shield of bullets in the frontline of the Pacific War and made hundred thousands of our innocent girls as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers.

A group of young zealots of the Third World countries, each one of them an Ahn Joong-geun, laid their lives for their people in an audacious revolt on September 11, 2001, in which they hijacked airplanes and assaulted the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Their goal was to dramatically bring to justice before the eyes of the denizens of this planet the American capitalism for its exploitation of the world and the American militarism for it had turned the world into a killing field. The 9/11 revolt was a flogging whip for the American arrogance and injustice. However, the Bush government, instead of taking it as a lesson for injustice of American foreign policy and showing the world the courage to re-orient its policy, got to start a second war of Crusade.

The so-called second Crusade, or the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan railroaded by the father and son George Bushes has caused the deaths and wounds to 1.5 million people, the tragedy of family separations to the 10 millions, aroused hatred among 100 million people with the religion of Islam towards the U.S. Moreover, the excessive expenditure of the wars was one of the direct causes that led to the debacle of the Wall Street economic structure.

In fact, the debacle of the Wall Street structure of capitalism that was aimed to contrive domination of the world with massive military power was a consequence envisaged by Karl Marx. Anyhow, the current financial crisis that is sweeping throughout the world is presenting us with a new opportunity.

In the process of formulating a new administration in Washington, and in fact, a host of governments in London and Paris, in Bonn and Moscow and Tokyo, even the outgoing Bush government included, compete each other in finding solutions to the situation relying on a positive governmental involvement. This turn from the market economy of the Laissez-faire, the golden rule followed by students of Adam Smith, to the Keynesian intervention policy means that Capitalism has knelt down before Karl Marx’s Socialism.

After the first Industrial Revolution, the proletariat became but a tool for production, and the capitalists had exploited them systematically. Furthermore, in the 19^th Century when the religion was prostituted as a emasculator of human reason, the struggle of the humanity needed a political idealism that looked forward to a society where the people were assured of a value system appropriate for human beings.

At this crucial moment, Marx had planted a dream and romance in the hearts of the humanity that envisioned the possibility of constructing a political system and order that would free the people from the shackles of inequality and the destruction of universal value of human beings by peculium, or the property ownership system. He emphasized the necessity of human struggle to liberate the people from the class limitations as an alternative to the hypocrisy of democracy, and the necessity to fight to be free from the oppression on our liberty, labor exploitation, the gap between the wealth and poverty, destruction of humanity, and the exploitation by capitalism. He raised the torch of a political idealism for freedom and equality, opening wide a window of hope to the proletariat of the world moaning in the valley of despair.

A Procrustean Bed

Karl Marx once protested that his teacher Frederick Hegel’s subjective idealism was a Procrustean bed. It is my firm belief that the understanding of Marxism should start from reflecting the situation of the age when the people had to call for the overthrow of capitalism. The same is true even today when the Wall Street capitalism is falling down.

I, for one, am of the opinion that our Unification Movement, or our approach to that objective, should be free from one’s subjective view. It is important to accept the fact that the other side’s system and viewpoint are different than our own, and we must approach dialogues between the North and South. We, the comrades working for the reconciliation and unification of our fatherland, are not except from this principle. The utterly divided and disconnected lines of our unification movement organizations and the enmity among them, not to mention the ‘Conflicting Outcries of One Hundred Houses,’ are but an element of impediment holding up the legs of our unification movement themselves. That’s a contradiction of our unification movements if we call for unification while actually running against it.

North Korea and South Korea are identical twins. The reality is, if the South hit the North to vent out its hatred of the other side, both sides will fall asunder. And the opposite case will bring the same result, and in view of the harsh reality of international geopolitics it would be reckless for South Korea and the U.S. or Japan to maintain the policy of hitting the North as long as China and Russia stand firmly behind her. The forces of ultra-conservatives in South Korea, including the elements of the New Right Movement, should realize the fact that the stability of the relationship between the North and South is vital to both sides for the economic and social developments across the board. That is to say that the awareness of the fact that the North is a counterpart for dialogue for the South and vice versa and in a more positive sense a partner is a prerequisite to constructing a structure of peace on the Korean peninsula. How long do we have to waste our national energy in the confrontation between the North and South before we get a grip?

And we also need to comprehend the fact that the subjects of our national unification are our compatriots living under a different system, not the political parties and ideologies. My point is we had better see the forest and not just individual trees in the mountains. If the anti-Unification forces in the South say they do not want to see the nation unified because they hate the system under Kim Jong Il, they are seeing only the trees and not the forest. If the North Korean unification forces are reluctant to engage in dialogues with South Korea for national unification because they hate the ultra-conservatives in the South, they likewise are neglecting to distinguish the forest from the trees. If the determination for unification on both sides is strong enough that it takes priority over all other matters, this will open a new era in which our compatriots - our brothers and sisters - living under different systems can come together and share the joys and sorrows of life, and the difference itself can be an asset to our national resources.

The Theorem of Antigone

I was once greatly moved by a drama called Antigone, written by Sophocles of ancient Greece. I saw it in a small theater where I happened to find myself in, when I paid a visit to Strasbourg, a canal town near the border with Germany in the summer of 1973 while I was working as a Paris correspondent. Sophocles, who was one of the three tragedy playwrights famed in ancient Greece, put on the stage of Antigone the duty of an individual formed in one’s relationship with the society as a social animal and the problem of pursuing one’s own values as an independent individual.

This drama, with the spotlight focused on the tumults and ramifications of the environs in which Antigone suffers from her refusal to follow King Creon’s orders that the theatrical heroine believes run against her inborn conscience and conviction, dealt with a tragedy arising from the clashes between the principles and interests of the universal value system - the human conscience and ethics - and the despotic system based on the positive law, or the existing legal system.

J. Annouille, a French playwright, following the footsteps of Andre Gide, Jean Giraudoux, Jean Cocteau, etc. reproduced Antigone in one of his dramas, making her a heroine fighting for the resistance of national liberation during the Second World War, and the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht idolized Antigone as a pacifist in his works.

Antigone believed that humanity, morality and the human conscience and justice were an absolute value not to be compromised at any price or on any term, and according to this belief she had no other choice but to take a stand against the order of the law. Here exists the reason why Antigone dwells in the depth of our heart as a heroine for the deliverance of human beings, who refused to compromise with empiricism and the injustice, even at the risk of their own lives.

The advancement of human history is a trophy of our struggle for truth and justice. The Heliocentric Theory of Copernicus, Magna Carta of England, Martin Luther’s Reformation, The July Revolution of France, the Declaration of Independence in the U.S., Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration, Mahatma Gandhi’s Nonviolent Resistance, and our own Donghak Revolution, the March 1, 1919 Independence Movement, the April 19, 1960 Student Revolution and the May 18, 1980 Kwangju Uprising for Democracy against military dictatorship, etc. are all a manifestation of the Spirit of the Times based on the universal values. History proves that these sorts of sacred wars cannot be crushed by any form of violence.

For our nation unification is an absolute good. The authoritarian regimes and the conflicts of regionalism, the absence of economic justice and the comprador economy and others, the structure of all these and other vices our fatherland is suffering from today in the North and South is caused in their roots by the division and confrontation and the hatred between them. Therefore our national unification is our most demanding, pressing and pivotal task of our nation, and this is a mandate from Heaven.

It has already become a thing of the past that took place some 17 or 18 years ago, when I watched the documentary film called “The Flower of Unification” that featured Yim Soo-kyung participating in the Pyongyang Festival in the North, the first such audacious act in defiance of the dreadful National Security Law of South Korea. I was greatly moved and thought of Antigone. A young and seemingly fragile girl disregarded the South Korean military government’s decision not to allow students to go north and take part in the Pyongyang Spring Festival and confronted the Goliath of the division structure. At the time I found myself associating it with Yoo Gwan-soon, the Korean Jeanne d’Arc, who sacrificed her young life in a fight against the Japanese Empire, flying across the stars in the depth of outer space.

The Love for the Nation, Its Sublime Love

An Ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho, the first Western poet in the written history, wrote in one of her poems, “Love is akin to the last piece of reddened apple left high on the top of a tree our hand could not reach.”

Frederick Nitze, who predicted the fall of European civilization with his declaration “God is Dead,” had presented us with new principles through the star characters of new personalities who spoke in poetic words in his works such as “Ubermensch,” “The Will to Power,” “Eternal Return.” “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” for example, have its main character, the founder of Zoroaster, come down to the mundane world after having finished 10 years of meditation in the mountain to disseminate a new gospel he had been awakened to. He held a lantern in his hand and made rounds in a busy market street looking for ‘a man.’ The man he was looking for was a human who practices love. But he failed in his endeavor to find such a person. The postulation he assumed was if there was God, he would most probably find at least a few of such individuals. Nitze used this metaphor to predict the fall of civilization.

Our forefathers regarded love a taboo, just as if it was a secret code that should be kept hidden behind the dark curtain of night. Take a Koryo ballade for instance:

That daughter-in-law of our neighbor complains too much.

For she could not play it in the light of day.

Oh, ya, play it out madly in the darkness of night.

Oh, ah, uh, uh,

Oh, ah, uh, uh.

In those old days when the act of expressing love liberally was oppressed, this ballade was a sigh of cries our grandmothers had to give out.

However, the code of love which had been looked upon as a taboo came sweeping the world like a modern, new popular religion along with the dawning of the 20th Century. Ulich Beck, a German social science scholar, said: “Whereas the modern man is free from the yoke of the class and tradition, he is forced to take freedom, a vague choice. He needs love to bring an end to the uncertainty of freedom.”

I rarely go to the movies, but Titanic which I saw quite a long time ago still stays alive vividly in my memory. Kate Winslet, the heroine of this film, went on her trip to America, a new world, on a runaway from the hypocrisy and oppression of the high society of the 19^th century. Aboard the boat she fell head over heels in love. But this Titanic, the pride of Great Britain constructed with all best brains cajoled of the humanity in the 20^th century, met her tragic fate on her first sail. But the sinking Titanic failed to come down with the innocent love of Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio. The secret code of love locked behind the wall of the illiberal, or narrow-minded stereotype for a long time had freed itself from shackles at long last and won its freedom, opening up a new horizon of feminism onto the history of the 20^th century.

And I eye-witnessed the relation between man and woman transformed from a perpendicular to horizontal position when I paid a visit to South Korea at the invitation of Seoul National University, my alma mater, celebrating its 60th founding anniversary some two years ago. It was a fresh air of new trend in this century that raised women’s rights to a higher plateau, breaking to pieces the “Three Bonds and Five Moral Rules,” a code of Confucian ethics in our traditional social system. Frankly speaking, it was a shock to me. Probably because of the repulsive current of waves from women’s long pent-up volcano of anger against male superiority, it was, as I saw it, a reversed position with the women on top, not the horizontal one, and this made me, a man rather used to the American custom, brimming with surprises.

What I want to relate today is the truth that of all these beautiful and enduring forms of love, the highest and most sublime form of love is a racial love, or the love for our compatriots.

The Tsunami Sweeping the Garbage of Neocons

On December 26, 2004, a submarine earthquake near Sumatra sent tsunami sweeping through the coastlines of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, and left more than 175,000 dead and almost 2 millions flood victims. At the time, I was visiting with my daughter in New York. The news clips on TV were indeed horrendous. We all went wild when a powerful political Tsunami swept away the political garbage of Neocons who held strings behind Bush, the Warren Harding of the 21^st Century, in the November 4^th presidential elections in the United States. This was a reflection of the people’s resistance to the bad government of George W. Bush and the expectation of a change Barack Obama advocated.

The November election, I evaluate, was a sort of the people’s revolution; it was indeed a great incident in which the dream of our great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, twinkling brightly like a star in the dark was realized in Obama’s ‘Change.’ At last, the time has come when the individual is to be judged by the “content of his or her character,” and not by the skin color or mere outer appearance. With the opening of the Obama Age, I expect a new order, in which the principles of democracy are applied across the board in the U.S., where they were applied only selectively in the era before Obama.

The night of November 4, 2008, was a long night we had been waiting for so long; all of us couldn’t take a wink all night. From the early morning hours of that day, an endless stream of voters, including the social outcasts who had thus far never even thought of casting their ballots - hopeless that their votes would be counted - came out and waiting in line for one to three hours and even longer in some cases outside in the cold, cast their ballots in Washington, Boston, Chicago and Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle, and all other cities, suburbs, farm villages, and small townships hidden behind mountains throughout the U.S.

The ballots these people cast, or the voice of the people had moved the Providence and made the President of this nation out of a descendent of millions of Africans brought to this continent in shackles as slaves. We made this seemingly impossible possible. This is an ultimate victory of our civil rights movement.

At this moment, we need to remember that the civil rights movement in the United States had in fact derived from a seemingly minor incident. It was a cold day in December, 1955 that took place on a street of Montgomery City of Alabama, a southern state. Rosa Parks, a slight young black woman got onto a bus and took an empty seat in the front of the bus, when the driver told her to move to a seat in the back, saying that the front seats were reserved for white people. She refused to accept such a raw deal.

Parks said later that she felt bad for the unfair treatment, for she paid the same price for the ticket as any white passenger did for the city bus ride and that she wanted to be treated with same respect given to the whites. Her refusal to accept the order from the bus drive was tipped to the police and she was arrested; this incident angered the African Americans who united in the fight, boycotting the public bus system.

The 26-year-old young leader of this movement was Rev. Martin Luther King, who later came to be called the father of the civil rights movements in the United States. The small demonstration of courage of a young woman resulted in a nationwide struggle for the enhancement of civil rights in this country.

Why are we so wild about Obama’s appearance on stage? Because we expect that believe that his call for “Change” will usher us into a new international, as well as domestic, order of value system never trodden before. And I want to tell you that we now see the possibility that the light that is rising from the dark horizon of the Atlantic is dawning upon us as a sign of the beginning of a new chapter of history.

Kaesung, a Milestone of our Long March to Unification

Several weeks ago, I read an article Professor Ahn Yong-ku, a paragon of our national unification movement through music, had written and published in the weekly newsmagazine Korea Monitor. In the piece titled “A Rendezvous’ in 65 Years,” he gave us a moving account of his meeting with his cousin in Pyongyang during his latest visit after that many years of separation. What he revealed in the article besides a testimony of the agony of separated families was the heart-wrenching fact that the bulk of the first generation of 10 million families separated between the North and South has perished, and the remaining few would be gone in the matter of years, not decades.

This being the harsh reality, it’s an anachronistic for the government of Lee Myung-bak to stop most of the exchange programs between the two Koreas. And it seems very ironic at a time when even Bush was seeking reconciliation with North Korea. I, in fact, foresaw a negative side of this government’s policy toward our national unification when attempts were reported in some quarters of this new power group in the process of transition from the previous administration in the South.

However, not many people thought that Lee would make such reckless anti-national steps, negating the June 15 Declaration and October 4 Declaration adopted at top-ranking talks of the two Korea in 2000 and 2007, calling for peace, reconciliation and unification. These noble accords are a Magna Carta of our nation – one of the most important milestones in our long march to national unification -- the result of our 50-odd years of bleeding struggles waged at the sacrifice of the innumerable people.

The Kaesung Industrial Complex, a joint project located north of the military demarcation line between the North and South, near Panmunjom, was the fruit of our decades-long national unification movement. It’s an epitome of our jumping board where the North and South will join hands in their march toward peace and prosperity and a test ground for our co-existence in reality. Not only that but also it is an exit to survival and recovery of the economic crunch that has driven South Korea to a dead end.

The government in Seoul should immediately stop trampling down the dreams for unification of our 25 million brethren in the North and 45 million in the South with the excuse that one South Korean tourist got killed in the security area of Mt. Diamond Tourism Zone in the North. Some say the incident was deliberately formulated a band of ultra-right elements of South Korea as an impediment to a peace process on the peninsula.

In a word, this joint project is one of the most important milestones in our long march toward national unification. Any regime either in the North or the South should refrain itself from any attempt to bring down this milestone. Why on earth the Pyongyang authority didn’t come out and say, “We’re sorry for what has happened in our security zone and a precious life was lost. It seems like there was a mistake. We’re really sorry about this,” before or even after the Seoul authorities made a mountain out of a molehill?

I think our unification movement should be based on the principle of “Hongik Ingan,” the idealism on which our nation was founded some 5,000 years ago. This idealism Dangun, the founder of our nation, proclaimed is Humanism itself in a modern sense. Standing on this principle, we need to carry out the Kaesung project successfully and use this as a model for more projects of free-trade zones in Shineujoo City and other places, and further push forward with grand designs which I would like to call a second Marshall Plan.

This is a way for our nation to make progress and prosper. The Korean people are a great nation who should take price in the fact that it had produced the Book of Chun-Boo-Kyung, which is believed to have led to complete the Book of Changes. The Book of Changes treats the harmony of the male and female principles and the Book of Chun-Boo-Kyung speaks of the two opposite elements and warns that if the two clashes, the people are thrown into the darkness, but when the two opposing elements conciliate and cooperate, a new roadway to happiness and blessing is opened.

As a student of political science, I more often than not spend time pondering on what would be an ideal form of government for the future of our fatherland. I put two and two together and concluded in the game of this puzzle that before anything else, it’s imperative for us to secure a balanced regional representation system.

That is, the same numbers of representatives elected from each province, or state, throughout the two Koreas should constitute a National Assembly where the United States of Korea is formed. We should not accept the current situation where a particular province wield power and commit an unlimited oppression over the other regions and a regional clash is the order of the day.

The Obama Age and Policy toward Northeast Asia

North Korea is a symbol of failure of the American military and foreign policy. I think the Obama government should, first and foremost, adopt an approach to settle the problem of Korean Peninsula positively with recognition of North Korea as a partner, not as an opponent of confrontation any more, to open the door together toward peace. What we expect from Obama’s administration is a firm determination and policy to meet its responsibility for our national unification – a duty neglected far too long.

This will be possible only when and, with a big IF, the new administration recognize the fact that the U.S. had divided the Korean Peninsula north and south in the process of realigning the international order at the end of the Second World War. I want to see “the change” in the new U.S. policy toward Korea.

Obama once said that the absence of talks between the top-level authorities of North Korea and the United States was to blame for the failure of finding a solution to the problem of Korean Peninsula and, he proclaimed that when inaugurated as the President, he would open up the door to the bilateral dialogue “without condition.” His appointment of his presidential election rival Hillary Clinton to head the State Department is construed as much reflecting his practical consideration in achieving the pressing historical duty of establishing the structure of peace in Northeast Asia, which has thus far remained unsettled since the end of the Korean War as being aimed to bring the divided house together.

The most important first step toward that end is to replace the Korean War Truce Agreement with an accord for peace. This not only means the settlement of the problem of the Korean peninsula but is more importantly, when seen in a larger picture, is related to the grandiose strategy of the Democratic Party to remove the last legal obstacle, a remnant of a Sino-U.S. relation of conflict that started when China stopped the invading forces of the U.S. and its Allies during the Korean War. I expect that Obama’s foreign policy team will no longer leave this problem unsettled, for the current worsening situation of Korea will apparently cause a much more adverse effect of the relations between China and Japan and China and South Korea.

The problems related to Iran and Palestine would need quite a long time in finding clues to their settlement, for the thread of interests has become very badly entangled with the Neocons conspiring to impose biased policies, but the Northwest Asian problem will find a practical effect to its settlement in no time once Obama’s foreign policy team gets started on this. And therefore, I am sure President Obama will focus his first step on Asia in his policy of foreign relations. One thing which is more than apparent with this regard is Obama’s foreign policy will be acclaimed worldwide as success, when a peace structure in Korea, or in a larger sense, in Northeast Asia, is secured.

And it would be a matter of time for us to see a Tsunami phenomenon in the relation between North Korea and the United States. Once the truce agreement is replaced with a peace agreement, it will be followed by a normalized diplomatic relation and embassies of two countries will be opened in Washington and Pyongyang. Then Seoul and Tokyo will compete shaking a leg to get onboard a bus destined for Pyongyang.

The history of Ancient Rome would be non-existent if Julius Caesar did not cross the Rubicon in the year 49 B.C. The role of grassroots of our unification movement may probably be akin to what Rosa Parks did on that bus in Alabama in 1955. Let’s all hold our hands together and go forward vigorously to cross the Rubicon

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