Only days after South Korea and the United States destabilized the Korean peninsula by holding military exercises in the Yellow Sea (and for the first time ever, in North Korea’s territorial waters) and soon after South Korea further destabilized the region by touching off a firefight between the two Koreas after lobbing artillery shells into waters Pyongyang claims as it own, the North Koreans began their own military drills.

South Korea—whose defense budget towers over that of the North—regularly holds drills by itself, and also with contingents drawn from the 28,000 US soldiers stationed on its soil and 40,000 stationed in nearby Japan. By contrast, there are no foreign troops in North Korea, and the North conducts its exercises alone.

To be sure, the North’s military drills do nothing to bring down the temperature, but they hardly compare in their destabilizing impact to the US and South Korean provocations of the last two weeks. A flyweight stepping up his sparring practice is hardly a threat to the middleweight who only goes into the ring with his super-heavyweight ally. And it’s clear that Washington and South Korea’s Lee government aren’t particularly interested in temperature-reduction anyway.

And yet, this headline appeared today in The Guardian:
North Korea military drills are destabilizing region, says US

It takes a lot of chutzpah to pick someone’s pocket and shout, “Stop thief!” but Washington has chutzpah aplenty, and in the Western media’s recounting of world events, Washington’s chutzpah is carefully concealed. And so it really does seem like North Korea is destabilizing South Korea, rather than the other way around.

What puts Washington’s complaint about North Korea’s military drills completely over the top is this: “South Korea is holding a nationwide set of artillery drills this week. And the United States and Japan are currently staging their largest-ever war games, including, for the the first time, South Korean observers.” And that’s not destabilizing?

Had I come across anything like the following headlines last week—which would have been a fair description of the situation from the North Korean side–I wouldn’t complain as bitterly.
Joint US-South Korea military drills are destabilizing region, says North Korea
US-South Korea wargames rehearsal for invasion, Pyongyang says

But I didn’t. Instead, I was bombarded by headlines about North Korean aggression.

And I still am.

It seems that no matter what the North Koreans do—or how destabilizing the actions of its southern neighbor and the United States are–the North Koreans will always be portrayed as the aggressors, the South Koreans as the victims, and the United States as the tough but fair peace-keeper.

If the ganging up on North Korea by the United States and South Korea–to say nothing of the Western media–weren’t enough, Washington has reminded Korea’s former colonial master, Japan, that it too has “a stake”. “We have to get to a place where there’s much more trilateral cooperation (among the US, South Korea and Japan against North Korea) than there has been in the past,” says chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, who is in Japan for discussions on creating “a truly historic trilateral” alliance–a kind of anti-North Korea three-power axis.

I guess Malcolm X was right. If you substitute “destabilize” for his original “oppress”, the following epigram pretty well sums up the dangers of newspaper reading: “If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people who are destabilized, and loving the people who are doing the destabilizing.”

It could also be pointed out that whether military drills are destabilizing or a way of containing “a rapidly evolving threat” depends on whose side you’re on: the side of the freedom of independent peoples to pursue their own peaceful development or the side of a military behemoth seeking to bring down another independent state.

December 8, 2010