Politics

ON MY MIND | Korean Americans, the U.S. Military Is Not Your Friend

By |

This past Friday, June 27, 2018, marked the 65th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, a ceasefire agreement signed in 1953 between North Korea and the United States/United Nations that (1) did not officially end the Korean War, (2) established the Demilitarized Zone at the 38th parallel as the de jure border between North and South Korea, and (3) did not include the input or signatures of any South Koreans. The anniversary underscored what has been an exciting, albeit precarious period of swift developments in the triangulated relations between the governments of North Korea, South Korea, and the United States in recent months. April of this year saw South Korean president Moon Jae-In and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un meet at the historic 2018 Inter-Korean Summit at Panmunjom, out of which came a declaration affirming both countries’ commitments to working towards reunification, demilitarization, and peace on the peninsula. The North Korea-United States summit in Singapore followed soon after, with U.S. president Donald Trump breaking a 65-year tradition of presidential anti-diplomacy towards North Korea’s sitting leader—and going even further by agreeing to take unprecedented steps towards the normalization and de-escalation of DPRK-U.S. relations. For Korean Americans who are part of a larger diaspora scattered across the globe, these developments have elicited a mixed bag of reactions and responses.

Olympics Week

ON MY MIND | In PyeongChang, a Vision of Korean Peace

By |

I haven’t seen Black Panther yet, but I know enough of the story’s basic premise — what might an African nation, untouched by centuries of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, look like in the 20th/21st century? — to use it as a generative point of speculation within my own interests in the history of the Korean War and its aftermath. Thinking, then, along the lines of the Wakanda’s Afrofuturism, I’m prompted to ask a similar question as I watch the international spectacle and geopolitical maneuvering of the 2018 Winter Olympics unfold in Pyeongchang: what might the Korean peninsula look like today if it had never been invaded and brutalized by the United States? But wait, you might be asking, when did the United States ever invade Korea? Didn’t the U.S. military defend the South against the evil Communist regime of the North?