“What the Media Won’t Tell You About North Korea” (ReallyGraceful, 2017)
ReallyGraceful is quickly becoming a useful source of alternative information on topics the Western mainstream news media refuse to touch – like the real reasons that the US is threatening North Korea with invasion and war, and why North Korea seems to act in such a paranoid way vis-a-vis the US and South Korea. Narrator Grace tunnels back into the 20th century to show viewers that the Korean peninsula was for the first 40 years of that period a colony of Japan – and like most colonies, once its overlord was vanquished in World War II, Korea was up for grabs by the victors. The peninsula became divided into a Communist north and a US-dominated capitalist south, and a vicious war soon followed. The Korean War claimed over a million lives in North Korea – in those days, that was nearly 20% of the country’s population – and every city including the capital Pyongyang was razed to the ground. Grace disabuses her audiences of the view (which she admits she also once held) that the war was a result of the conflict of ideologies: the real reason for the war was geopolitical – the Korean peninsula represented (and still does represent) a beach-head for the US to penetrate and eventually undermine China and the Soviet Union in their far frontier regions.
This video isn’t so much about North Korea as it is about the threat its neighbours in China and the Russian Federation pose to the US domination of the world through the US dollar as the international reserve currency and the currency in which oil is sold and bought. The fact that Russia and China are moving away from trade in US dollars threatens US global financial and economic leadership, with potential dire consequences for the American economy and the wealth of American elites: a situation Washington will not tolerate. On top of that comes news that North Korea is sitting on a treasure trove of rare earth minerals worth trillions of dollars and may have the largest deposit of particular rare earths, and if there’s a possibility of killing two birds (attacking China through attacking North Korea, and claiming North Korea’s mineral wealth) with the one stone, the US will not hesitate to seize it.
As for North Korea itself, Grace doesn’t have much to say about the country that’s not been said before: there’s not a great deal about the ruling Kim family (other than current leader Kim Jong-un’s friendship with basketball celebrity Dennis Rodman) or the political and economic context of the unstable and uncertain 1990s after the downfall of the Soviet Union that led North Korea to invest in developing a nuclear bomb that would deter US-South Korean invasion. After seeing countries like Iraq and Libya attempt to appease the West, only to suffer invasion and the overthrow of their leaders (and those leaders’ abject deaths), North Korea’s leaders decided to take no chances with their country’s future. Having a nuclear bomb makes eminent sense: not only does that policy have a deterrent effect, it also makes possible space for diplomacy, and is better use of scarce money than equipping an army made up of conscripted farm labour with weapons that would be useless against US and South Korean fire-power.
Grace could have mentioned the fact that every year the US and South Korea hold large military exercises in which tens of thousands of soldiers participate – in 2016, some 15,000 US soldiers and 290,000 South Korean soldiers participated in exercises that included beach invasions and assassinating North Korean leaders – and which spook the North Korean leadership. Any sane country, no matter how wealthy or technologically advanced its military is, would be paranoid at seeing two strong enemies practising invasion strategies and assassination tactics in military drills every year.
As it is though, the video is very informative and packs a lot of information and some eye-opening visual montages in its 10-minute running time.