Takes up: Italy’s Premier Giorgia Meloni reversing progress on Queer rights; Queer Trans K-pop group QI.X performing at the Seoul Queer Culture Festival; and Mount Dora, Florida, voting in August to be a Safe Place Initiative city.
South Korea
Handicap This!: November-December 2022
November 11, 2022Disabled women have joined anti-U.S. Supreme Court demonstrations as they are eleven times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth; Disabled South Koreans protested in subways over lack of access to essential services, abuse in institutions, and elevated death rates; a disabled woman in Pakistan founded two organizations which manufacture and donate wheelchairs, employing mostly the disabled.
World in View: Korea’s labor camps
September 25, 2022From the mid-1960s through the 1980s, South Korea’s military dictators created “welfare centers,” which were more like concentration camps. One of those was Brothers Home, in which grave human rights violations took place.
World in View: Militant truckers strike in South Korea
July 12, 2022More than 7,000 truckers took part in an eight-day strike for better pay and fewer hours. A measure dubbed the “Safe Trucking Freight Rate,” which ensures minimum pay, is set to expire this year.
Queer Notes: January-February 2022
February 7, 2022Queer Notes on Nobody’s Darling, a new Queer bar in Chicago; the death of Rebecca Juro, radio host and advocate for Trans rights; LGBTQ+ reaction to the election of Gabriel Boric in Chile; and LGBTQ+ discrimination in South Korea.
Squid Game: capitalism’s essence
November 16, 2021The popularity of Squid Game is a sign that people are realizing the starkness of their situation under our current economic system. It struck a nerve with the 99%, driven by our realization that we live in a modified version of this game.
Youth in Action: May-June 2021
May 8, 2021Young climate activists prepare for the next UN climate change conference, COP26; the French Senate’s reactionary vote to dissolve the National Union of Students of France; youth protest a Japanese plan to dump more than 1 million tons of irradiated water from the Fukushima reactor site into the ocean; and more than 60,000 schoolchildren in Japan signed a “Stop Extreme School Rules” petition.
Being LGBTQ in the COVID-19 era
June 8, 2020The COVID-19 pandemic is hitting minority communities especially hard. The LGBTQ community is no exception and Transgender people are particularly hard hit. This is an international phenomenon.
II. The true pandemic war
April 29, 2020Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part II. The true pandemic war: A. The capitalists’ class war; B. Subjects of revolution fight back; and C. Pandemic class war reveals the social structure.
Women WorldWide: March-April 2019
March 10, 2019Women WorldWide takes up the South Korean Escape the Corset movement, Greta Thunberg’s work against global warming, and the struggle by BethAnn McLaughlin to draw attention to the harassment of women in science by prominent men.
Readers’ Views, September-October 2018: Part 1
September 29, 2018Readers’ Views takes up: attacks on immigrants; Syria and the Left’s failure; Democratic Party’s selling out women; Women’s Liberation; Serena Williams; ending money bail the right way; Trump-Kim “peace”; genocide and war heroes; and a discussion on sex crimes and their fallout.
Students and adults protest S. Korean airport
September 20, 2018Hundreds of South Korean students and adults hold a three-day protest against the building of a second airport in the city of Jeju-Doin in defense of the environment, an elementary school and farmers.
Protesters march against planned airport in South Korea
September 3, 2018Nearly 200 students and 150 adults participated in a three-day march in opposition to the construction of a second airport on Jeju-Do, South Korea.
Editorial: Trump-Kim ‘peace’ threatens masses
July 18, 2018Marxist-Humanist analysis of the Trump-Kim summit and G7 summit shows Trump is not charting a path to world peace but rather toward a more openly brutal world order. .
#MeToo, Women’s Marches show the resistance deepens
March 8, 2018Women have changed the world through an incredible and sustained activism based on a humanism that runs like a revolutionary red thread through an amazing array of actions, demonstrations and statements. This development is based on over 50 years of a movement that the founder of Marxist-Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, characterized as “Woman as Revolutionary Force and Reason.” .
World in View: Japan, North Korea in Asian military spiral
November 16, 2017Trump makea genocidal threats to “completely destroy” North Korea, as in a similar way, North Korea’s doctrine of “self-defense” is based on the threat to destroy Seoul, South Korea, and its 10 million people.
World in View: Korea war threats
May 15, 2017The U.S. is increasing its military activity in the far East as tensions rise between it and North Korea that could lead to an unthinkable and devastating nuclear and chemical war that could affect multiple nations.
‘Comfort’ women dispute agreement
January 23, 2016Article outlining the seriously flawed agreement between the governments of Japan and South Korea regarding the so-called “comfort women,” actually women kidnapped into sexual slavery to serve Japanese Soldiers during World War II. The article includes the list of demands of the surviving women who were left out of the agreement’s negotiations.
World in View: North Korea executions
September 6, 2015North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, has eliminated another member of the ruling party elite, vice-premier Choe Yong-gon. It is likely that Choe was eliminated for his connection to the North’s joint business ventures with South Korea.
Handicap This! January-February 2015
January 30, 2015Missouri school district forced to return student’s cane; memorial for people with disabilities systematically murdered by Nazis; people with disabilities enslaved in South Korea’s salt fields.
South Korea on strike, North Korea on ‘ice’
February 15, 2014• Over 100,000 South Koreans, mainly workers, demonstrated in Seoul on Dec. 28. They expressed their anger over a number of issues at the government of President Park Geun-hye.
One source of anger is the move to privatize some service by KORAIL (Korean Railroad Corp.). This had already led to the largest-ever walkout by members of the railroad workers’ union. Union officials say moves to privatize will mean fare hikes, service reductions, and safety problems.
On Dec. 22 riot police were sent to attack the Seoul headquarters of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. Without search warrants, they broke down doors and caused serious property damage, including to the adjoining offices of the Kyunghang newspaper, which has been critical of Park’s policies.
Other citizens, outraged by revelations of manipulation by the National Intelligence Service of the 2012 elections when Park was elected, joined protesting workers. Police had confirmed illegal attempts to manipulate the election beforehand, but were ordered to remain silent.
With all these problems and more, South Korean youth have been inspired by the “Why We Aren’t Fine!” campaign. This was launched when a student at Korea University, Ju Hyun-woo, made a poster for his school bulletin board that was picked up and broadcast over social media. He wrote: “I just want to ask, ‘Are you okay?’ Are you fine with ignoring all these issues because they aren’t your problems?…And if you are not ‘fine’ after seeing all these problems, then voice your opinions—whatever they may be.”
Many of these young people joined in the Dec. 28 demonstrations, and also held flash mobs in cities across the country.
The Child Catchers
September 25, 2013Review of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce, which explores the religious Right’s renewed enthusiasm for domestic and international adoption.
Capitalism’s violence, masses’ revolt show need for total view
May 1, 2013The world today is riven between the creativity of masses in revolt and the violent degeneracy of counter-revolution, whose destructiveness even extends to the revived specter of nuclear war two decades after the collapse of the USSR. Such is the degeneracy of the globalized capitalist system, laden with destructive forces and sunk into structural crisis. The deep crisis is seen in the U.S. and abroad, economically, in unemployment and poverty, homelessness and hunger. It is seen politically, in new laws attacking workers and women, and new outbursts of racism. It is seen environmentally, with the advance of climate disruption and fake capitalistic solutions. It is seen in thought, as the lack of philosophy, of a total view, hampers the development of struggles from the U.S. to the revolutions of the Arab Spring facing counter-revolutions.
‘Comfort women’ speak
September 24, 2012Bok-dong Kim. Photo by Won Choi wonchoi.weebly.com/comfort-women.html
Los Angeles—Bok-dong Kim, an 87-year-old Korean “comfort woman,” came here as part of her U.S. speaking tour on the fifth anniversary of House Resolution 121, which acknowledged Japan’s war crimes against the comfort women. She met with Congressional representatives in Washington, D.C., spoke to 300 students at [=>]
Queer Notes, January-February 2012
February 27, 2012by Suzanne Rose
After six days of 24-hour-a-day activism, LGBT occupiers, activists, and human rights groups in Seoul, South Korea, won the Seoul Student Rights Ordinance, with all clauses in the original draft included. The draft that calls for non-discrimination against LGBT students as well as their active protection passed the council with a vote [=>]
Stop Colombian FTA
August 10, 2011Chicago–On June 10, several dozen activists from FSPA Justice & Peace Coordinating Committee, 8th Day Center for Justice, News and Letters Committees and others marched to Obama’s campaign headquarters here to forcefully remind the President of the promise he made as a candidate in 2008 to “oppose the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA)” while trade [=>]
Remember Ssangyong
May 22, 2011It has been two years since the management of Ssangyong Motor Company in Pyongtaek, South Korea, announced layoffs of 1,000 workers. Shortly thereafter, those workers occupied their plant and held it for 77 days, from May to August 2009, when they finally succumbed to a massive police and army assault.
In the aftermath, many militants were [=>]
Back to the nuclear brink
February 10, 2011From the Jan.-Feb. 2011 issue of News & Letters:
Editorial:
Back to the nuclear brink
The continuing threat of war on the Korean Peninsula, the nature of debate over the just-ratified New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, and the “wisdom” Homeland Security has shared with us on surviving a nuclear attack, all underscore the urgency of the [=>]
War threat over Korea
December 9, 2010The continuing threat of war on the Korean Peninsula underscores the urgency of the Marxist-Humanist perspective that the opposite of war is not peace but revolution. North Korea seized the focus of war, peace and nuclear annihilation on Nov. 23 by raining deadly artillery shells down on South Korean-controlled Yeonpyeong Island. The artillery attack appeared [=>]