New, Rare and Unreleased Material from the DMZ Empire
New, Rare and Unreleased Material from the DMZ Empire
The Pentagon is trying to push through a trilateral alliance with Japan and South Korea before anyone noticed. But I did. My latest, from TomDispatch: Despite the attention being given to America’s roiling wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East,…
One year ago I had the incredible honor of having my work on the United States and South Korea featured in Hankyoreh, a newspaper founded by courageous journalists forced out of their jobs during the Park and Chun dictatorships. Hankyoreh posted this…
A few years ago, I was leaked a large trove of documents from a contractor deeply engaged in the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan. As I slowly made my way through them, I decided I had to go back to my…
I spent most of the last three weeks in South Korea, primarily in Gwangju, Jeju and Seoul. I was invited to Gwangju by the city, along with three American journalists who witnessed the uprising and the final military takeover on…
President Obama will visit Hiroshima on May 27, accompanied by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Should he apologize, pundits ask? Absolutely. My thoughts, just posted at The Nation. The idea that the atomic bombings brought an end to war has always seemed…
Noam Chomsky has long had a deep interest in Korea. Ever since his involvement in the antiwar movement of the 1960s, he’s paid close attention to the country and the controversial role played by the United States on the peninsula…
South Korean police raided the national offices of the Korean Federation of Public Services and Transport Workers Union (KPTU) on Friday but were thwarted by workers and union members. The raid is part of a broad crackdown on organized labor by…
We just love our proxy army, navy and air force. This is from the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Facebook page. Guess they think they need a lot of propaganda to overcome the deep aversion to the security bills that Abe – to…
Read how Samsung treats its workers, even dead ones, and you might reconsider the giant company for your next phone. From Hankyoreh, one of South Korea’s only independent newspapers. Members of the Samsung service workers chapter of the Korean Metal…
I was 12 when JFK was shot. At the time, I was living in Tokyo, where I’d arrived as a kid during the U.S. Occupation. Early on the morning of November 23, 1963, my father woke me and my siblings…
My latest, in The Nation: [On July 27], President Obama became the first US president to attend the official armistice commemorations at the Korean War Memorial. Addressing a phalanx of US and South Korean generals and hundreds of veterans, he…
I was in Seoul during the July 27 commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the armistice agreement that brought an end to the fighting in the Korean War, one of the most brutal conflicts of the 20th century. My visit…
My latest, in Salon – A look back at 15 years of U.S.-North Korean toil and trouble.
As soon as I can figure out how to upload the PDF, I will re-publish a short analysis and polemic I wrote in 1980 about the emergence of the Pacific Rim economy. I did this during a time of very…
I was on Democracy Now! this morning talking about the latest North Korean nuclear test and its implications for U.S. policy. As usual, I spoke out for direct U.S. negotiations with the DPRK and called for a halt in the…
My latest, from The Nation. An excerpt: The fact that so many media organizations had to fly journalists to Japan underscores how much that country has disappeared from our political discourse since the early 1990s, when Japan’s economic juggernaut was…
In 2002, Tokyo Electric Co. admitted to falsifying its records of nuclear inspections and hiding the facts for more than a decade. Ironically, the information came from a whistleblower at GE, which helped build the plants and has contracted with…
The latest e-mail dispatch from Alan G., my friend in Tokyo who’s lived in Japan for most of his life: The real question everyone has, both locally and here in Tokyo, is, just how much radiation has been released? And…
…With a coda on the Pentagon Papers, 1971 Last Sunday, angry and fed up at the media’s relentless attacks on WikiLeaks and its general refusal to report the details of the thousands of once-secret battlefield reports from Iraq leaked over…