Ukraine and Korea, more of the same

In January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech discussing, among other things, where he thought US interests around the world sat. The United States had been supporting the South Korean government with training and arms to quell a communist uprising in their country, and had been so successful that it seemed they would be able to withdraw from the peninsula entirely later that year. Unfortunately for Mr. Acheson, his speech was likely one of several indicators that the Soviet Union used to ultimately decide that the US would not intervene in a Korean Conflict. Josef Stalin authorized Kim Il-Sung later that spring to begin his invasion, which kicked off in June of 1950.

The Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China and North Korea all counted on the United States not intervening in Korea. That turned into a miscalculation that ultimately cost over one million lives between the two sides and countless scars that are still visible in the landscape and culture today. It was a worthy sacrifice, as South Korea has remained a strong and independent country that demonstrates what a real democratic government can look like in Asia.

The Ukrainian invasion came as a surprise to nobody. Russia’s interest in Ukraine has been stated from the very beginning, and it has been calculating the time and place of an invasion for some time. Perhaps the most important reason it launched now, verses in the past, was the assurance that it could invade without interference from the US and NATO. Similar to Korea, the invasion is designed to be quick, precise and achieve victory in a matter of days. Whether it does or not remains to be seen.

Authoritarian governments bent on invasion will never back down from their intentions, but they also aren’t stupid. They all perform the cold calculations of cost when they consider actions, and those costs skyrocket if a country like the US, France, Japan, UK, or other nations intervene. The Russians and Chinese militaries aren’t without faults, and they know those faults well, and they do in fact fear legitimate military intervention by Western democracies. But as shown in Korea, when we telegraph weakness or even indifference, it pushes these calculations in a direction we don’t want.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Biden and Western weakness will hand Ukraine over to Russia

Bumper sticker that reads, in Ukranian, “Putin is a d*ckhead.”

By John Ruberry

“History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.” Ronald Reagan.

Contrary to the lessons that are almost certainly taught in American universities by leftist professors, large military budgets are not a precursor to war. In reality history teaches us something different.

As the Ottoman Empire declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Turks were faced with numerous rebellions and wars. They were on the losing side in nearly all of them, as ethnic groups and nations saw their opportunities, and for the most part, took them. One of those opportunistic states was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, itself in decline. Its annexation of Bosnia, nominally still part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1908 nearly caused a war in the Balkans. But a few years later there were two conflicts, the First Balkan War and the Second Balkan War, which, along with the assassination of the heir apparent of Austria-Hungary in Bosnia in 1914, and to be fair some other European disputes, set the table for World War I.

The First World War brought us World War II, arguably the same conflict with a two-decade intermission, which led to the Cold War, then the collapse of communism, with eventually, former KGB agent Vladimir Putin becoming the de facto president-for-life of Russia.

Do you see where weakness leads us?

Last year, with the inauguration of Joe Biden, an emphasis on wokeness and diversity was pushed by our military leaders, instead of more important things, such as defending America and confronting enemies. Far worse for the appearance of American military strength was the rapid fall of Afghanistan. As bad as the fall of Saigon was for the image of the USA, the South Vietnamese were able to hold off the communists for two years after the departure of American combat troops. Afghanistan fell before Joe Biden’s pullout date.

Which brings us back to Putin.

Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. As soon as this week, Russian troops, including some in Putin’s client-state of Belarus, could invade the rest of Ukraine. While I am not an advocate of sending troops to Ukraine, now that is, if Biden had sent a tripwire contingent of American and NATO ally troops to Ukraine last summer, that very well may have been enough to scare off Putin. We have troops in South Korea that aren’t sizable enough to defeat the North Koreans, but an invasion from the north would almost certainly lead to a national outrage and call for a swift response to avenge American casualties and to protect South Korea. There are NATO troops in the Baltic States, and yes, Estonia, Lativa, and Lithuania are members of NATO, which are serving a similar role.

For those calling for an economic boycott of Russia. Good luck with that. The best way to punish Russia in the pocketbook is to stop buying Russian oil and natural gas, the latter is a crucial energy source for western Europe. That will not happen.

Biden projected weakness early in his presidency by waiving sanctions against the Russian company building the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 originate in Vyborg, Russia. It’s important to remember that between the world wars, Vyborg was part of Finland, but the Soviet Union seized it in the Winter War of 1939-1940.

As for fossil fuels in America, Biden is instead hitching his shaky wagon to Green New Deal follies.

Humiliating defeats don’t necessarily lead to more debacles. The first major World War II battle between American forces and the Nazis was the Battle of Kasserine Pass in North Africa, it was a fiasco for the Allies.

What happened next?

The American commander, General Lloyd Fredendall, was sent stateside and was replaced by General George S. Patton.

After the Afghanistan rout, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, still has his job.

Was anyone fired after the fall of Kabul? I don’t believe so.

Worse, Putin likely sees Biden as not only weak, but as someone suffering from cognitive decline. At the very least, Biden and his top aides, were indecisive as Afghanistan collapsed, according to recently declassified documents.

Which brings us back to that Reagan quote.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Review: The Silent Sea on Netflix

By John Ruberry

On Christmas Eve, Netflix began streaming an eight-episode South Korean science fiction series, The Silent Sea, which is based on a short film from 2014, The Sea of Tranquility. Both projects were directed by Choi Hang-yong.

The show brings us to a dystopian world nearly all of Earth’s water is gone. What water remains is of course rationed.

Such environmental havoc hasn’t prevented the Republic of Korea’s Space and Aeronautics Administration from building an expansive base, Balhae, on the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.

Han Yoon-jae (Gong Yoo) is recruited to lead a mission to retrieve a valuable scientific sample from the Balhae base. Five years earlier 117 people were killed by a radiation leak and the base was abandoned. Han has an ill daughter whose proper treatment depends on receiving a higher water ration classification. Also recruited for the mission, for reasons no one can ascertain, is Dr. Song Ji-an (Bae Doona), a former astrobiologist, now an ethologist.

Here’s the plan: In a space shuttle-type craft, the SAA launches the 11-person crew, most of them armed with handguns, so they can land at the Balhae base, locate the sample, and quickly return home. Things don’t go well–the poorly briefed crew doesn’t know what to expect. Some crew members know more than others, the chief engineer, Ryu Tae-seok (Lee Joon), is among them.

Laying out plot twists will produce numerous spoilers, so I’ll leave them out of my review. Being the first Korean science fiction series set in outer space, The Silent Sea is understandably derivative. It owes much to John Carpenter’s brilliant 1984 sci-fi thriller, The Thing.

Although subtle, there is a Christian influence in The Silent Sea as well. Quite unlike the blatant image of a golden calf hurtling through space in another recent Netflix release, Don’t Look Up, which I only saw short segments of while I walked through our living room when Mrs. Marathon Pundit was watching.

Viewers of The Silent Sea will enjoy a suspenseful ride with compelling acting. On the flipside, the series is a bit long. It appears to be a six-episode series that has been stretched out to eight. And the ending was a bit of a letdown for me.

Amazingly, the desertification of Earth here is not blamed on human-caused climate change.

The Silent Sea is currently streaming on Netflix, it is available in Korean with subtitles with bits of English dialogue, and in dubbed English with subtitles. It is rated TV-MA for violence and foul language.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Hey Salon, Hollywood remaking South Korean movies is not racist

By John Ruberry

Every once in a while I come across an article on the internet that makes me want to scream in disbelief. Such as is the case with a piece on Salon by Carolyn Hinds with the headline, “Hollywood, please stop adapting K-dramas. It’s not just unnecessary, it’s racist.”

Wow, look who is woke.

While acknowledging adaptation of motion pictures from one culture to another is commonplace, Hinds, who begins one sentence with, “As a Black woman, cultural appropriation is behavior I’m all too familiar with,” unloads on the wave of Hollywood remaking South Korean movies. And she spews this awful offal, “Instead, I’m referring specifically to how Hollywood seems to be making a concerted effort to focus on South Korean – as well Japanese – content, for the sole purpose of remaking the stories to appeal to American audiences, i.e. white audience.”

But as Mark Levin so often responds on his radio show to a recording of some liberal, “Oh, shut up you idiot!”

Hinds calls the Asia-to-Hollywood artistic transfer “whitewashing.”

There are plans in Hollywood to remake the Korean thriller Parasite, a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed and one that I felt was deserving of its Best Picture Oscar. In her Salon piece Hinds brings up other movies from South Korea that were remade by Hollywood, including Oldboy, another fabulous film. The flat American version (or so I’ve heard, I haven’t seen it) was directed by Spike Lee. Il Mare was redone as The Lake House, which starred Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. Moving beyond South Korea, Hinds notes that Martin Scorsese’s The Departed was inspired by a Hong Kong flick, Internal Affairs.

No society exists in a vacuum, not even North Korea, which is it should be. Culture crosses borders, as does science as well as political notions. The modern version of democracy comes from the European Enlightenment. The greatest form of government is utilized not just in the United States, but also in South Korea and Japan.

Another South Korean film I enjoyed is The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which as you probably guessed is a remake of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And weird it is–instead of an American Civil War setting, this Western takes place in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1939. Hinds ignores this specific cultural transfer in her Salon piece. The soundtrack of The Good, The Bad, The Weird includes an instrumental rendition of the Animals’ 1965 hit “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” The original was recorded by Nina Simone, an African-American woman.

Moving on to television, do you know that there is a Korean version of the American television series, Designated Survivor?

What about Japan, which Hinds mentioned earlier. The stellar collective of writers here at Da Tech Guy is known as Da Magnificent Seven, a tip of the hat to the 1960 Western that starred Yul Brynner and many others. That film is an acknowledged remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. The first movie of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy,” A Fistful of Dollars, is an unacknowledged remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Kurosawa, who named John Ford as one of his major influences, filmed a Japanese warlord version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, a brilliant epic, Ran.

So now you know why I called Hinds an idiot.

Dan Bongino on his radio show often notes that the unhinged left run will run out of enemies, so it is doomed to devour itself.

Hey Hollywood: Remake more South Korean and Japanese movies.

Hey South Korea and Japan: Remake more Hollywood movies.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.