A funny thing happened to me last week. My two daughters and one of their boyfriends asked me what I thought about the recent menacing words being traded by the Most Esteemed Great Leader (or whatever he is being called these days) of North Korea, and President Trump. Honestly I had been out of the loop, helping deal with a death in the family. After doing a little catching up online on the situation I just said to them “oh no, not this again”. They looked a little, well, questioning at old pops. I just said – “Ugh – I have been hearing about the fiery end of the United States from some idiot in North Korea for the last 40 years. It gets tiring. He won’t do anything. We should sink the Pueblo next time he spouts off”.
That got them thinking. For a bit, anyways.
Good for you. Even the Cuba crisis was much exaggerated.
P.S. I like MEGL vs MAGA. It could be yuuuuge.
I had forgotten about the PUEBLO. Sinking her [actually vaporizing her so they cannot pull up “trophies” to display later] would be a non-strategic response that would drive both them and the American Left crazy. It would even be better if we recaptured her in a cutting out operation, but that is certainly not possible as she is 20 miles upriver before you even reach a tidal zone and given the lack of maintenance has no propulsion. Remember, she is still property of the US and we can do with her as we please.
OK, brain freeze. I cannot come up with an appropriate meaning for MEGL, but suspect it involves by context Make England Great L(?)
The only abbreviation I can find is an Indian energy company’s stock symbol.
Subotai,
I feel your pain in trying to keep up with all of the new acronyms but, in this case, take a gander at Dan’s second sentence. To whit: Most Esteemed Great Leader. :)
Cheers
Subotai Bahadur @ August 12th, 2017 at 3:46 pm Says:
OK, brain freeze. I cannot come up with an appropriate meaning for MEGL, but suspect it involves by context Make England Great L(?)
Read the original post again. dearieme’s comparison is asymmetrical: person vs slogan.
Ah, thanks for the correction. I tend to refer to MEGL as “the only fat person in North Korea”.
There is, by the way, something that makes MEGL’s actions more dangerous than before. The Norks are a dynastic regime. If someone other than the Kim family tries to take charge, all hell will break loose.
I am given to understand that MEGL’s only child is a girl. Not acceptable as a Leader in Nork-land.
And his remaining brother, in China, would fit in well on Castro Avenue in San Francisco. Also not acceptable in Nork-land.
The end of a dynasty is always dangerous, and much craziness becomes normal.
“I am given to understand that MEGL’s only child is a girl”: Henry VIII had a solution to that.
I forgot about the Pueblo.
What an awesome idea!
Oh, yes – a pin-point and focused attack on the Pueblo which would vaporize it entirely was suggested a couple of days ago – on Rantburg, I think. I agree, it would make a very neat demonstration to the Norks, should one be required. And it looks like such may be necessary.
The North Korean regime is evil, not crazy. Everyone needs to stop talking otherwise. They are entirely rational, in the sense that they know they will be strung up moments after they show the slightest weakness. Brutal oppression is their only chance for survival. And their domestic actions are so evil as to rouse mountains of outrage externally, which means they have to have the ability to kill as many foreigners as possible to deter anyone from trying to stop them killing as many of their subjects as possible. Because, let’s face it, we’ve shown we don’t care about North Korean lives, so the regime has to show they are capable of killing Americans in order to deter us.
They are now at the point where they can threaten to kill millions of Americans if directly threatened, rather than millions of South Koreans. So the question becomes whether that changes anything in our behavior towards them. Since the world has shown it is utterly feckless and morally bankrupt, I have to say that I don’t think it does.
And it must be said again that the Chinese regime is similarly evil. The fact that the world sits by and pretends that the regime responsible for the largest mass murders in history is somehow respectable now because those responsible for that murder (and their children) have decided to play a bit nicer with global corporations in order to make themselves colossally rich, is utterly obscene. They are the big brothers of the Kim family, and it is absurd to pretend otherwise.
Here’s what I have to say to the notion that we should laugh and joke about the North Korean “spouting off”:
“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
The idea that NK, and the malignant dwarf that pretends to be its leader, are independent agents is just one more diplomatic fiction that the world at large talks about, but no one really believes.
During the Cuban missile crisis, JFK made it very clear to the Soviets that any attack from Cuba would be considered an attack by Soviet Russia, and met with a total response by the US’ strategic forces.
It needs to be made absolutely clear to the Chinese that the same rule applies in this case, whether it is done quietly or very publicly.
This bizarre fiction that Kim is able to go to the men’s room without his handler’s permission, much plan nuclear attacks, must be discarded as the dangerous delusion it has always been.
You understand all he wants, to freeze all his missile and nuke testing, is for America to stop parading up and down just off his coast. You know, quit threatening me and I’ll put down this knife.
It’s exercises time again.
Veryretired,
I whole hearted agree with your comparison, China needs to be told….
and Whoa Fat is not evil…he is just an idiot…..and the Chinese…..are not evil….they just have a different outlook
“During the Cuban missile crisis, JFK made it very clear to the Soviets that any attack from Cuba …”: there wasn’t the remotest chance that a Soviet attack on the US from Cuba would be anything other than part of a wholehearted Soviet attack. Therefore if JFK said such a thing it was empty bombast.
The “missile gap” of the time was so hugely in favour of the US that the chances of a Soviet attack were exceedingly small, unless there had been a mistake or a seizure of power by madmen.
Dearieme—apparently the 1960’s are ancient history for you, and you are unable to understand a reference to a very real situation regarding nuclear gamesmanship.
The soviet leader had formed a very poor impression of JFK at an earlier meeting, and sincerely believed he could be pushed around and blackmailed into serious concessions by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.
JFK responded with a naval blockade, and a speech in which he stated exactly what I referred to above, that any attack from Cuba would be considered as an attack by the Soviet Union.
And, by the way, there was a very real madman involved, as Castro was very much in favor of launching an attack, and the Russians were very careful to keep control of the missiles in their hands so as to prevent their puppet from acting on his own.
This is all very well documented in the public record, if you wish to actually find out about what happened before you say something else as foolish as your first comment, you should check up on it.
” sincerely believed he could be pushed around and blackmailed into serious concessions by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.”
Which was largely true and demonstrated by the removal of US missiles in Turkey that was kept secret for many years.
Giving the benign civilized benefit of the doubt to someone who says he wants you dead, smashed, annihilated is the height of self-indulgent stupidity. So say the surviving European Jews.
“JFK responded with a naval blockade, and a speech in which he stated exactly what I referred to above, that any attack from Cuba would be considered as an attack by the Soviet Union.” And as I said that was empty bombast. There wasn’t a cat’s chance that the USSR would attack the US with nuclear weapons from Cuba without an all-out nuclear attack. The speech, in other words, was directed at the US population not at the USSR.
“The soviet leader … sincerely believed he could be pushed around and blackmailed into serious concessions by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.”
And as Mike said, the Cuban deployment worked in that it accelerated the removal of US missiles from Turkey. It should be said that the deployment in Turkey was a pretty foolish move in the first place but then that was Kennedy for you.
“the Russians were very careful to keep control of the missiles in their hands”: of course they bloody were. They were evil bastards but they weren’t reckless fools.
The Cuba crisis was mainly about Kennedy trying to save face, and maintain political popularity in the US. The strategic implications of the Cuban deployment were minor, as Kennedy well knew. This chap is rather interesting on the topic.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis/309190/?single_page=true
“It should be said that the deployment in Turkey was a pretty foolish move in the first place but then that was Kennedy for you.”
It was probably Eisenhower and they were old liquid fueled but golf is calling and I don’t want look it up.
Kennedy took great care to see that the negotiations his brother did were kept secret for a very long time. If I recall, Bobbie threatened the Soviets with a SAC coup against Kennedy if he backed down.
That might have been Curtis MeMay’s greatest contribution to world peace.
The PGA is on so have a nice Sunday.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Curt’s greatest contributions to world peace.
“It was probably Eisenhower and they were old liquid fueled …”
It was Kennedy. That they were liquid-fuelled was the problem: they could only be first strike weapons.
I surrender to the intellectual and historical weight of the Atlantic magazine.
How I regret having wasted all these hours reading books and such, when I could have just subscribed to a magazine and gotten the definitive answer to politics and the Cold War and all that stuff.
Oh well……
There wasn’t a cat’s chance that the USSR would attack the US with nuclear weapons from Cuba without an all-out nuclear attack.
Vasili Arkhipov might disagree.
Miscalculation is always possible. Hitler, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein all miscalculated. The point about the Cuban crisis is that JFK’s apparent weakness helped to convince the Soviet leaders that they could move missiles into Cuba with little risk. That was a miscalculation and the outcome was nearly catastrophic.
The Kim regime is threatening the USA because threats have worked in the past. Americans didn’t believe the Kims were an imminent threat. But as the Kims refine their weapons the US public and leaders reevaluate. At some point Kim may miscalculate, or Americans may decide that the threat is intolerable. In either case the fact that the USA is much more powerful than NK won’t be relevant.
“I surrender to the intellectual and historical weight of the Atlantic magazine.” The historian had access to information that was absent from many of your “books and stuff”, which probably mainly retold the great fraudulent story that JFK told.
‘Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: since 1997, they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the “ExComm”). Sheldon M. Stern … is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there’s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be applauded.’
Note that this isn’t editorialising: it’s a review of a book written by a chap who seems unlikely to be a Republican or Soviet apparatchik: ‘the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the ExComm tapes…’
‘Reached through sober analysis, Stern’s conclusion that “John F. Kennedy and his administration, without question, bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the onset of the Cuban missile crisis” would have shocked the American people in 1962, for the simple reason that Kennedy’s administration had misled them about the military imbalance between the superpowers and had concealed its campaign of threats, assassination plots, and sabotage designed to overthrow the government in Cuba””an effort well known to Soviet and Cuban officials.’
The JFK yarn about the Cuban missile crisis made little sense: Stern’s account makes much more sense, and is based on evidence that had been hidden for more than thirty years.
You had been repeatedly lied to, Mr Veryretired; cling to your old myths if you like. Hell, believe in Santa Claus if you like. As the reviewer said ‘there’s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail’: there comes a point where people who have been fooled should be the ones blamed for the success of the lies.
Based on this review my main criticism of the book under review is encompassed here: ‘although Stern and other scholars have upended the panegyrical version of events advanced by Schlesinger and other Kennedy acolytes, the revised chronicle shows that JFK’s actions in resolving the crisis””again, a crisis he had largely created””were reasonable, responsible, and courageous.’
That seems to me to be potentially rather gullible. Only Kennedy knew the meetings were being taped: his advisers did not. So given the sort of political animal Kennedy was, it would not be too surprising if he acted the reasonable chap for the microphones. His advisers, by contrast, might have spoken relatively frankly. After all, Kennedy might have been thinking of his reputation in later life: he didn’t know that he wasn’t going to have much of a later life.
Ah, yes, good old Santa. Wasn’t he the one who said this post and thread was actually about NK, China, and the US’ dispute about nukes in the present?
Silly old guy….
@Dan: maybe you could suggest that it’s just as well that Kim Jong-un is not faced by the great dictator Hee Lah-rhee.
@Dan: I see what you mean – ‘On February 12, 2003, CIA director George Tenet reported that North Korea might already possess missiles capable of reaching the continental United States.’
Mrs. Davis
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Curt’s greatest contributions to world peace.
I beg to differ. Curtis LeMay was a side player in dropping the bomb. Truman made the decision, and LeMay made sure it was carried out. A military operation which was more dependent on LeMay’s decisions were the bombing raids on Tokyo and other cities.LeMay made the decision to have the bombers fly in at 5,00-9,000 feet and at night instead of 30,000 feet. The firebombings were a horror, but by bringing the war home to the Japanese mainland, showed Japanese their war could result in unpleasant consequences on the home front. Before LeMay’s firebombing raids, the Japanese mainland was largely free of the destruction that Japanese forces had rained on China and other countries.