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June 2020

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe’s Statues and Limitations Churchill and Gandhi are out, Lenin is in, and Marx never went away.

By on June 25th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-statues-and-limitations-11593040923?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The U.S. isn’t alone in grappling with whom to commemorate in public monuments. Europe is having its own debates, and as in America the results are sometimes positive and just as often ridiculous.

In the positive column, there’s Belgium’s rethink of statues honoring King Leopold II, and Bristol’s removal of monuments to Edward Colston in the United Kingdom. Leopold’s personal rule of Belgian Congo was marked by brutality on an industrial scale, with mass amputations a favored means of controlling a population enslaved in service of Leopold’s rubber interests. Colston made his fortune in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The problem in both places is that the statues have been attacked by mobs rather than removed by local governments after reasoned debate. That absence of reasonable discussion also explains the other mob targets.

Those include statues of Winston Churchill, one of which in London’s Parliament Square had to be boarded up to protect it. The role of Churchill’s government in exacerbating a Bengal famine that killed several million Indians in 1943 is worth debating. But Churchill’s leadership in defeating Nazi Germany counts for more to any rational mind.

Speaking of India, Gandhi isn’t immune. A move is afoot in addled corners of the left to remove statues of the leader of India’s independence movement due to racist remarks he made about Africans.

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HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

70 Years After the War, No Resolution in Korea The dynamics driving conflict remain strong. Full reconciliation is as likely as open conflict. Walter Russell Mead

By on June 25th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/70-years-after-the-war-no-resolution-in-korea-11593039440?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The Korean War began 70 years ago, on June 25, 1950, when Kim Jong Un’s grandfather sent troops across the 38th parallel into the South. Pyongyang seemed bent on commemorating that event this year by trash-talking—literally. North Korea plans to retaliate for packages sent over the border by defectors containing derogatory information about Kim Jong Un along with South Korean soap operas on memory sticks. According to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, “12 million leaflets of all kinds reflective of the wrath and hatred of the people from all walks of life” have been printed, and 3,000 balloons are being prepared to unleash a massive propaganda blitz against the offending South.

The master strategists of Pyongyang plan to include bundles of trash with the propaganda. “South Korea has to face the music,” the North’s news agency said. “Only when it experiences how painful and how irritating it is to dispose of leaflets and waste, it will shake off its bad habit. The time for retaliatory punishment is drawing near.”

Or maybe not. On the eve of the anniversary, North Korea announced that Mr. Kim had told officials to put the campaign on hold.

The forces behind the conflict on the Korean Peninsula are as strong as ever. The Kim dynasty is grimly determined to hang on, and its estimated stockpile of 30 to 40 nuclear warheads plus its proximity to China ensures that none of its enemies dare to attack the North. The South longs for national reunification, but the South poses an existential threat to the Kim dynasty simply by flourishing as a democracy. Of the great powers nearby, neither China nor Japan really wants Korean unification. The U.S. would like to see North and South move closer together, thus reducing the chance that American troops would be ensnared in a second Korean War. But North Korean hostility poses riddles that no U.S. president has been able to answer.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The No Debate Democrats Forty-five Senators block a police reform from hitting the floor.

By on June 25th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-no-debate-democrats-11593041122?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

A minority of the Senate, 45 Democrats to be exact, voted Wednesday to close off any debate on a police reform bill. Not against the bill, mind you. Against even allowing the Senate to debate or offer amendments to Republican Tim Scott’s proposal.

The calculation is pure election-year cynicism: Block the Senate from passing a bill that Republicans could campaign on, then denounce Republicans for refusing to pass the bill that House Democrats will pass this week that would micromanage local police departments. Blame Republicans for opposing reform when Senate Democrats were the real opponents.

Much of the press corps will play along by reporting on the House vote but treating the Senate vote as a GOP failure. The election-year calculation will go largely unmentioned as Democrats maneuver to return the Senate to Democratic Party control in 2021. It’s no accident that California Senator Kamala Harris led the filibuster as she campaigns to be Joe Biden’s running mate.

The loser here is the chance for bipartisan agreement on police reform, which shows that Democrats don’t really care about the substance of chokeholds and the rest. Their priority is using George Floyd’s unjust killing as a campaign issue to regain power.

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