Elder South Korean statesmen/scholar Jung Se-hyeon, once likened US diplomats to an "Indian killing long haired white general," alluding to US policy in the Far East as essentially an extension of its wars against indigenous Americans.
The west's outlook really hasn't changed that much in more than a century and half since the Opium Wars. Their gunboats still cruise off the Chinese coast looking for confrontations to secure territorial concessions from both the subjected powers in the so called Indo-Pacific alliance and China itself. Hey can I use your airfields here for my military? Can I set my missile launchers here? Can we build new military bases over here to protect you from China? Let's put an ammo dump, and some leaky fuel tanks over here. Remember our agreement- we are not subject to your jurisdiction. We need to have Taiwan for our first island chain strategy against China. According to the US and its allies, Taiwan is already independent, Tibet is not part of China, and Xinjiang should be independent because "genocide."
Russia was never really a favored member of the de facto alliance. Britain and the US had no problem making agreements with Japan which allowed Japan to engage in a war with Russia to secure effective dominance and control of the Korean peninsula when they defeated Russia in 1905 in the Russo-Japanese War. The western powers were content with their holdings elsewhere in East Asia including their concessions inside China. (The de facto alliance with the western imperial states only ended when Japan got too greedy.) When hundreds of thousands of peaceful Koreans rose up spontaneously in March and April 1919 to obtain their independence from Japanese colonization, thousands were killed and imprisoned by Japanese troops. Wikipedia noted this about Reuters reporting at the time-
In 1919, a number of Reuters reports falsely described the anti-colonial March 1st Movement protests in Korea as violent Bolshevik uprisings. South Korean researchers found that a number of these reports were cited in a number of international newspapers and possibly negatively influenced international opinion on Korea.
Ya think? Not much has changed since. In fact, Reuters which has some nonsense claim about objectivity in its journalism had a report today implicitly lamenting the fact, that propaganda loudspeakers aimed at North Korea weren't as effective in terms of range as they should have been in accordance with the South Korean purchase contract. Too bad, so sad. The irony here is that the official US diplomatic and military presence in South Korea last week, totally out of character, basically asked the South Korean Defense Minister Sin Won-shik, a far right ideologue, to cool it with the loudspeakers and the "free speech" leaflet balloon campaign being conducted against North Korea along the DMZ. The South Koreans close to the DMZ or maritime Northern Limit Lines don't like it either. It's a dangerous and reckless military provocation. But the Reuters article goes on to laud the effectiveness of propaganda loudspeakers as a means to bring "free ideas" to North Korea.
The US official requests may have, in part, been motivated by Putin's upcoming visit to North Korea expected to be tomorrow in some reports. There are also 2+2 talks slated to occur in Seoul between China and South Korean officials about the same time.
South Korea's loudspeakers face questions over reach into North
Still, for North Koreans who hear the South Korean messages or catchy K-pop tunes that are banned in the North, the broadcasts can have a significant psychological impact, Kim Sung-min said.
"These broadcasts play a role in instilling a yearning for the outside world, or in making them realize that the textbooks they have been taught from are incorrect," he said.
...
The angry North Korean reaction to the broadcasts also suggests the loudspeakers strike a nerve with the authoritarian country, said Steve Tharp, a retired U.S. Army officer who spent years working along the border.
"We know that the North Koreans find them partly effective because they have spent a lot of time getting them turned off," he said.
This is all bs. In fact, the use of loud noise in this political and military context is a weapon, a psychological weapon. It can be a form of psychological torture. Right wing thugs in South Korea, allegedly with a contact in the Yoon presidential office set themselves up outside former president Moon Jae-in's home not too long after Yoon took power, blasting the former president's residence and community with unacceptably loud noise broadcast in the immediate vicinity at all hours of day and night. A bogus claim of free speech was made in court to protect the harmful nuisance but was rejected allowing time and distance restrictions to be placed on the practice. Go figure. The content of the sound is completely immaterial as those subjected to it seek to escape the noise by any means possible, and if not suffer substantial mental duress from the physical intrusion of the noise into their sensory perception. It is sometimes labeled as low impact, allegedly leaving no signs of physical damage, yet very effective in causing distress.
I left out the sentence in the excerpt above about the two North Korean defectors saying they defected because they were influenced by the loudspeakers. The contention is not worthy of serious consideration for two reasons. First, defectors to South Korea say what that are told to say, by their intelligence minders. Second, even it if were true, is that worth it? Is it justified to place the lives of hundreds or thousands of people who may be injured, killed, or displaced by a military skirmish near the DMZ because the benefit might be that two persons from North Korea may take the chance to get shot at the Military Demarkation Line in a desperate bid for freedom? The contention is ridiculous on its face.
*6.19.24 note-corrected second paragraph quote and corrected attribution to Jung Se-hyeon vice Moon Chung-in.
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