Another reason why I continue to lose faith in professional academics:
The answer, or a stab at one, comes in a piece called Bush and Kim: Brothers under the skin by John Feffer, the director of global affairs at the U.S. think tank International Relations Center (IRC). It was published in Foreign Policy in Focus, whose co-director Feffer is.
First of all, Feffer says, both grew up in privileged families, though they have both taken pains to present themselves as men of the people. Not surprisingly, then, they have tried to obscure their origins. Kim Jong-il claims his birthplace in the symbolic Mt. Baekdu rather than the Soviet Russia where he really saw the light of this world, while George W. Bush pretends to be from Texas but is actually a Connecticut-born WASP.
One Free Korea saves me the time of doing a quality fisking of Mr. Feffer:
Right! And one keeps 250,000 men, women, and children in concentration camps, while the other is fattening up 395 terrorists in Gitmo. Which makes them exactly the same! Other than one being a tall, skinny white guy who’s won two elections over the opposition of a hostile news media and the other being a dumpy Korean mass murderer who inherited a despotic regime of shriveling subjects from his father, there are absolutely no differences except for, you know, their entire psyches.
I couldn’t have done it better myself. Make sure you read the rest here.
Fortunately in regards to North Korea related issues there are many good academics and authors such as Lankov, Breen, Eberstadt, and Becker out there to off set Bruce Cumings clones like John Feffer. However, what really pisses me off, is that idiots like Feffer that pass themselves off as serious academics trivialize the human rights crisis in North Korea when they equate the US President with a brutal tyrant responsible for hundreds of thousands of starving and dying political prisoners in state operated gulags in North Korea. Even worse is that his garbage is being taught to students in American universities, which undoubtedly will only continue to trivialize the human rights situation in North Korea.
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8:52 am on February 10th, 2007 1
I question your use of the qualifier ‘useful’.
It implies that Mr. Feffer might actually have some sort of utility.
4:55 am on February 11th, 2007 2
I remember one of the items that helped me decide to give up on working toward a Phd.
It was a couple of weeks after 9/11, and I was watching CNN late at night, and they had on an academic from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation or something like that. He was talking against going to war in Afghanistan (this was before we were really invovled).
He was laying out all the typical excuses - you create 1,000 bin ladens for every one you kill —- the Russians were chewed up there —- yada yada yada…
Then the anchor did what few news people do - ask him what he would recommend if he were president.
And this probably fairly well paid man who was invited by CNN to give his views for the world to see said something pretty much close to, “Well, I’d like to see us do something like we did at Nuremberg. Work with the international community and bring Bin Laden and the Taliban to something like the International Criminal Court or other such legal, internationally recognized body —- instead of indiscriminately bombing people….”
I wanted to throw my TV out the window. It pissed me off for weeks after that —- remember this was just after 9/11.
What infuriates me about people like this is about how fucking stupid and moranic they are though they like to sound so intellectual and educated.
I wanted to grab the ass by the ears and say, “How the FUCK do you think those Nazis were put on trial in Nuremberg? you incredible piece of whale shit!!!! Remember that little thing called WOLRD FUCKING WAR II???!!!
Go to Dresden and ask about the kind of fucking bombing that was done to bring those guys before your precious court of law, you ignorant asshole…”
It is the same with this numbnuts.
All they care about is cotton candy thoughts they can verbally mull over while sipping a cappachino and hob-nobbing with the other (pseudo)intellectual elite.
They work hard to stick their heads so far up their asses, they can forget about the world war used to force Germany and Japan into unconditional surrender, and they can ignore the reality of what is North Korea — inorder to basically wack themselves and their ilk off….
It really is intellectual masturbation….
6:19 pm on February 12th, 2007 3
yeah this guy is a complete loser!! look at his picture for god sake
6:20 pm on February 12th, 2007 4
also clinton approached al-qaeda with a department of justice policy
which completely and directly led to 9/11
11:49 pm on February 17th, 2007 5
You guys are the idiots. Feffer was NOT saying that Bush and Kim are morally comparable; what he WAS saying was that they have similar psychological profiles. And I think that’s perfectly correct. They are both incompetent, strutting little narcissistic nincompoops. And Bush — because the reality of other people’s thoughts, needs and feelings clearly does not exist to him when they are in conflict with his own class loyalties — is clearly a sociopath, although, because he is more restrained by the system in which he works than is Kim, he can’t do as much actual damage as Kim.
By the way McNut, are you serious? It was CLINTON’S policies that “completely and directly led to 9/11″? How about a little thing called REAGAN’S SUPPORT OF THE ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISTS in Afghanistan, thereby helping to revive, encourage and radicalize a movement within Islam that had become more or less moribund? Yes of course the US had to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, but there were other ways to do it, other proxies available. Reagan and his people, because they are religious fanatics themselves, were sentimental about the Islamists. It is Reagan, more than anyone else except bin Laden and the terrorists themselves, who was “directly and completely” responsible for 9/11.
5:14 am on February 18th, 2007 6
Someone else with BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) . Do you really think Bush is a sociopath that would put 250,000 Americans into forced labor concentration camps? Or that he would be willing to starve millions of people to death to maintain his own political power if only given the chance?
Let me guess Bush committed 9/11 as well.
I used to think the people with Clinton Derangement Syndrome were bad but you people suffering from BDS take the cake.
7:08 am on February 18th, 2007 7
GI Korea: I think that Bush is a sociopath who, if he were operating in a political system that allowed him to act as Kim does, would act that way if he found such actions to be in his own or his class interests. That’s not derangement — he has shown over and over again that other people simply have no reality to him. And he’s shown over and over again that he considers himself a monarch who is not bound to obey Congress, the courts, or the law. Viz. his “signing statements,” his attempts to ignore habeous corpus, his claim of a right to use torture (just calling it something other than torture does not make it legal or right.)
No, of course I don’t think that Bush was behind 9/11. In fact I said above exactly who was responsible: bin Laden and his terrorist cadre. And I also said who was next in line for responsibility:
“It is Reagan, more than anyone else except bin Laden and the terrorists themselves, who was ‘directly and completely’ responsible for 9/11.”
8:27 am on February 18th, 2007 8
It sounds like you even have Reagan Derangement Syndrome as well. It is amazing how you can over look a little thing like Reagan was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union. The problem in Afghanistan was that the US did not stay engaged with Afghanistan to stabalize it, but back then nobody could envision airplanes flying into the WTC either. Reagan greatest terrorism failure was not Afghanistan, it was not responding to the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon. That encouraged future terrorism more than anything else during the Reagan years.
If people want to play the blame game there is plenty of blame that can be put on Clinton as well who had 8 years to do something about Afghanistan and terrorism however none it is useful because I’m sure Clinton did the best job he could and I don’t fault him for 9/11 happening.
I’m more interested in what we do now and people with Bush, Clinton, and now Reagan Derangement Syndrome add nothing constructive to the debate.
12:43 pm on February 18th, 2007 9
Reagan gets the credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union? A lot of people believe that, but no actual experts on the SU do. Reagan happened to be in the right place at the right time as the SU collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity, cruelty and illegitimacy.
It’s simply a myth that Reagan caused the SU’s collapse by spending it into the ground on things like Star Wars. According to the CIA, Soviet arms spending was constant throughout the Reagan years — except for a small blip in the mid-eighties that had been planned as part of a force modernization package back in the ’70s. The SU never TRIED to compete in Star Wars.
What defeated the SU was its own inefficiency, its inability to deliver a higher standard of living for its people, its political illegitimacy, and the fact that in an age in which overall power depends on things like the free exchange of information and competitiveness in foreign markets, sheer military power and smokestack industrial capacity no longer translated into more power on the world stage.
Perhaps Reagan speeded up the process a little bit by helping the mujahideen in Afghanistan (in the process helping to create the Islamic fundamentalist resurgence.) But the SU was on its way out, and would have been finished within a few years anyway. Chernobyl — a homegrown disaster — had MUCH more to do with the collapse than Reagan ever did. This popular myth that Reagan brought about this happy event through his sheer grit is just total nonsense in actual history — and no historians, or experts on the SU, buy it, only hardcore Republican ideologues do.