By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, August 20, 2026
By refusing to take part in waging war on the people of Iran, the South Korean government obtained something else favored by many of the people of South Korea: at long last a reduction in U.S. war rehearsals and hostility toward North Korea. U.S. media outlets panicked. How could Trump abandon his duty to keep the Korean peninsula divided and the risk of nuclear apocalypse respectably high? U.S. comedians were thrilled: Trump and his fellow dictator in North Korea must be in love! The same people who will never let Trump end the war on Iran, preferring to mock the negative results (as if a war could have some other kind of results, and as if negative results for Trump are all negative results for the world), want to keep the Korean War going whether they are even aware that it never ended or not.
Imagine if a U.S. president or other official who had not been wrong about everything else thus far, who spoke intelligently, who didn’t admire dictators, who respected the rule of law, and who generally advocated kindness over sadism were to announce that the United States had had no business dividing Korea or destroying it or keeping half of it armed to the teeth, that the wise course was deescalation, and that the Korean people should be free to work out their own future, and to do so in a world without military threats from abroad, which was why he or she would be working with the rest of the world to begin compliance with the nonproliferation treaty and the scaling back of imperial bases across the planet. Would you panic? Or would you let out breath you’d been holding in for decades and sigh a thank you to all the gods ever invented?
I know, I know. You hate Trump for all his millions of murderous and destructive policies. But refusing to let the fascistic fool get something right, at great risk to the people of Korea, Asia, and the world, isn’t exactly non-murderous or non-destructive, is it?
I know, I know. He’s not a courageous peacemaker standing up to the militarists and the weapons dealers to bring peace to the world. He really is just a demented jackass who loves dictators. But that makes his taking the right position on something (for his own ludicrous reasons) all the more fragile, all the more precious, all the more important not to sabotage. He’ll reverse himself for a single sarcastic compliment from the right sycophant, so why flood him with opposition to the one thing he gets right? It’s not as if we’ve all exhausted our ability to oppose the trillion things he’s doing wrong.
Of course, if a U.S. politician of the other flavor were pursuing this policy, we would be hearing ear-splitting screeching about the evil communist dictatorship of North Korea which must be nuked and should have been nuked by Douglas McArthur who should have been the noble rightwing dictator of the Good Christian Empire of the United By-God States of Love-It-Or-Leave-It America, but not before sending every Democratic Socialist to live there and learn first-hand why letting people have preschool or healthcare leads straight to starvation and stupidity.
I wonder what percentage of people in the United States knows that the grandfather of the current leader of North Korea, the guy who ruled over North Korea from 1945 to 1994, was more of a Presbyterian than a Communist? If the means of avoiding evil dictators like Kim Il Sung is to educate everyone in good American Christian schools, what does one do with the fact that Kim Il Sung was raised in a Christian community created by U.S. missionaries, that he was a Sunday School teacher and church organist and leader of a Christian youth group prior to being the evil dictator of North Korea? While the people of Korea, like every other people, have a thousand influences and their own initiative to credit and blame for their history, the people of the United States should know that U.S. missionaries’ grandest success ever anywhere was the mass-conversion of Koreans, especially in the North, where Pyongyang acquired the appellation “the Jerusalem of the East”; that the U.S. government meanwhile busied itself training the Japanese government in imperialism and blessing its takeover and occupation of Korea; that many Koreans, like much of the rest of the world, fell for Woodrow Wilson’s lies about self-determination, resented his betrayal, and associated Christianity with it; that the United States and the Soviet Union liberated Korea from Japan by accident without the slightest interest in the place and then divided it in half and sought to each dominate a half while each imposing a brutal ruler on half — one a U.S.-educated Christian and the other (Kim Il Sung) a former Christian professing Communism to the Soviets but appealing to Christians for support before suppressing their practices and exiling, imprisoning, and murdering them; and that U.S. military commanders in the Korean War said they were fighting for God against the godless but bombed and destroyed the thousands of Christian churches in the North that had been built up over a half a century — not because they particularly wanted to bomb churches but because they leveled every building of any kind.
Kim Il Sung did not turn against Christianity so much as choose to himself play the role of Jesus in the story. He changed his name to take the name of a mythical messiah figure (Kim Il Sung), beating out Sun Myung Moon who had the same idea. Kim Il Sung encouraged beliefs in his supernatural powers. He was said to have performed miracles, to have known more as a child than the scholars, to heal with the touch of his hands, and to be especially fond of fishermen. He set aside a Sabbath-like day for worshipping him and learning his words as gospel. One could not take his name in vain or mistreat any image of him. Christian-like hymns praised his glory. Instead of 10 commandments, there were now 10 principles which included effectively that one would have no other gods besides Kim Il Sung. His mother became a Marylike figure. And, like at least one Trump staffer, some of Kim Il Sung’s family was said to have the power to teleport.
Kim Il Sung did not just name everything for himself in Trump fashion, but rebuilt the capital city that the United States had demolished as a giant monument to himself and turned into quasi-sacred shrines every little place he went or thing he touched as if “George Washington slept here” signs had become objects of worship or Donald Trump’s empty McDonald’s bags were displayed under glass. Kim Il Sung was associated with the sun and with a holy mountain, while Trump seems to despise the sun for producing non-profitable energy and to have never seen a mountain he wouldn’t gladly level to make a buck. But Kim Il Sung’s grandiose ideological teachings and scholarship were — like Trump’s social media posts — generally at an elementary school level.
It’s hard to draw simple lessons from incredibly complex history. But one might be this: believe bullshit at your own peril. Myths can be used for good or bad, but not for any good you can’t accomplish without them. There are Trump-worshippers in the United States by the millions. If Trump loves working people on Tuesday and wants to give all their money to billionaires on Wednesday, the Lord works in mysterious ways. If he wants peace on Thursday and nuclear war on Friday, well that’s simply the way one achieves peace — “eternal peace” perhaps. Believing bullshit is risky and can lead to even worse places than Trump has thus far taken us.
Another is this. While Kim Il Sungism is openly a religion, there isn’t any nationalism that doesn’t to some extent resemble it. And political parties would clone it if they could. So, exercise nationalism and partisanship with great care. When you find yourself condemning the leader of the bad party for not continuing long-established insanities that risk life on Earth, it may be time to risk going off your party’s script.
##
