Trump and Nuclear Weapons

While Americans debate Trump’s domestic policies on health and tax cuts, the rest of the world worries that a leader with Trump’s volatile temperament has his finger on the nuclear button.

Today, nuclear weapons occupy the headlines in a way not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the positive side, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, an advocacy group that promoted the historic treaty to prohibit these weapons that was reached at the United Nations in July 2017. Although the treaty has been dismissed by the world’s nine nuclear-armed powers, its proponents believe that it will help to build a groundswell of support for the destruction of all nuclear weapons as the only way to guarantee that they will never be used again. This article first appeared on Open Democracy Transformation.    Continue reading

Kim Il-sung’s Pathological Regime

As with Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung’s pathological personality was reflected in the regime he created – a psychopathic regime of one-man-rule built on lies, paranoia, extreme isolation, and brainwashing of the North Korean population.   Continue reading

Kim Il-sung Consolidates Power

We are all born mad.

Some remain so.

                            Samuel Beckett

Kim Il-sung had led his country into the bloody disaster of the Korean War that had left a quarter of his country’s population dead. When the war ended, his response was twofold. First, he sought scapegoats to blame for his failure; second he distorted reality and proclaimed that North Korea had won a great victory by repelling the U.S. and South Korean aggressors who, he falsely claimed, had started the war.      Continue reading

North Korea – History of the Kim Dynasty Dictatorship

According to Human Rights Watch, North Korea is one of the most harshly repressive countries in the world. A 2014 U.N. Commission of Inquiry found that abuses in North Korea were without parallel in today’s world. This series of articles explains the historic background to today’s Korean crisis by tracing the rise to power of the Kim family dynasty, beginning with the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Kim Il-sung.      Continue reading

North Korea – A Look Inside The Psychopathic State

In 2014 a United Nations Commission reported its findings on the human rights situation in North Korea. The Commission concluded that the gravity, scale and nature of human rights violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world. In a world where vicious tyrants are still, tragically, not uncommon, North Korea stands out as the world’s vilest regime.      Continue reading

Our Disordered World

A brief journey around the world shows just how much damage people with dangerous personality disorders continue to inflict upon us, and highlights the extent to which the cultures of violence and greed imposed by this dangerous minority are accepted by the rest of us as ‘normal’.

Russia

Stalin and the brutal legacy of the Soviet Communists have left Russia today suffering from a deep crisis of hope. Continue reading

North Korea

Last month’s transition of power to the new collective leadership of the Politburo Standing Committee shows how China may hold the key to taming the madness of the North Korean regime. In the past few weeks, North Korea has declared that it is in a state of war with South Korea, and has threatened to wage nuclear war against the United States. Continue reading