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Harry Harris – Insubordinate U.S. Ambo To South Korea – Soon To Be Fired
On Friday the U.S. embassy in Seoul hung up a large 'Black Lives Matter' banner and posted a tweet about it:
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U.S. Embassy Seoul – @USEmbassySeoul – 22:04 UTC · Jun 12, 2020
The U.S. Embassy stands in solidarity with fellow Americans grieving and peacefully protesting to demand positive change. Our #BlackLivesMatter banner shows our support for the fight against racial injustice and police brutality as we strive to be a more inclusive & just society.
When I first saw that tweet on Saturday I wondered how long the banner would stay up. It was clear that the White House would be miffed about it as the banner and the tweet were running against Trump's election tactic of raising tensions.
Today the banner was taken down:
A large “Black Lives Matter” banner draped on the front of the U.S. embassy in Seoul was removed on Monday after it was brought to the attention of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, according to people familiar with the matter.
Pompeo and Trump were both displeased about the banner, the people said. A large, multicolored “pride” banner recognizing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people was also removed on Monday. They were replaced with a banner commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of the Korean War.
To hang up such a banner can be understood as a public protest against Trump. The U.S. ambassador in South Korea is Harry Harris, a former 4-star general and head of the U.S. Pacific Command:
“USA is a free and diverse nation… from that diversity, we gain our strength” the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, Harry Harris said in a re-tweet of the official embassy message in which he also quoted former President John Kennedy.
The embassy had displayed the large rainbow flag in support of “LGBTQ Pride Month” last year, despite an order of the State Department not to hoist the banner.
Harris' full tweet:
Harry Harris @USAmbROK – 22:15 UTC · Jun 12, 2020
I believe in what President JFK said on June 10, 1963 at American University: "If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity." USA is a free & diverse nation…from that diversity we gain our strength.
Harris is Asian-American. His mother is Japanese. I am pretty sure he takes anti-racism seriously (even as his arrogant behavior towards Koreans lets one assume differently.)
Harris was originally supposed to become U.S. ambassador to Australia. That would have been a plush and easy job. But two years ago Trump and Pompeo ordered him to Seoul in preparation for Trump's talks with North Korea's chairman Kim Jong-un. Harris was known to be a North-Korea hawk:
On the subject of North Korea, Harris expressed caution in falling for the country's so-called "charm offensive," indicating Kim's regime as the most immediate threat to both the U.S. and South Korea during a House Armed Services Committee hearing in February dedicated to security issues in the Indo-Pacific region.
According to Harris, Kim's desire is to reunite the peninsula under a single communist system. "He's on a path to achieve what he feels is his natural place," he said. He championed the strengthening of the U.S. missile defense system as well as economic and diplomatic pressure to "bring Kim Jong Un to his senses, not his knees."
On several issues Harris pushed South Korea and its government around. There were public demonstrations against him and a group of young people even climbed over the embassy wall to protest against his arrogant behavior.
It seems Harris has had enough of his thankless job. There were rumors in April that he would not stay on during a second Trump presidency or that he might even resign earlier:
US Ambassador to South Korea Harry Harris has said privately that he does not plan to stay beyond the November US presidential election, regardless of whether President Donald Trump wins another term, five sources told Reuters news agency.
Harris, a 40-year veteran of the US Navy and Trump appointee who started in Seoul in 2018, has expressed increasing frustration with the tensions and drama of his tenure, the sources said, all speaking on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue.
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In December protesters destroyed portraits of Harris during a demonstration outside the US Embassy as they chanted, "Harris out! We are not a US colony! We are not an ATM machine!"
My best guess is that Harris ordered the LGBT and BLM banners up as intentionally insubordinate acts towards Trump and Pompeo. "Fire me. I dare you." As a former high ranking commander he is likely to support the opinions of other former generals, like Dempsey, Mullen and Mattis, who recently protested against Trump's threat to use active military against protesters.
The man wanted to make a point before he leaves his post.
That is now likely to happen rather sooner than later.
Very interesting article by Vladimir Odintsov:
Vestiges of the American Dream
It brings this very curious information that I wasn’t aware of:
On May 15, the US Department of the Treasury released Treasury International Capital (TIC) data for March 2020. It showed that total foreign ownership of Treasuries dropped by $256.6 billion to $6.81 trillion.
I already knew there was a race to the Renminbi since China recovered from the first wave of the pandemic (it is mentioned in at least two op-pieces in the Asia Times), but I didn’t know there was a correspondent race from the USD. Let’s remember: in 2008, there was a race to the USD; the USD became stronger than ever with that crisis, and America’s dominance in the financial sector strengthened, not weakened.
Now it may be different. The USD is getting weaker, not stronger. Faith in the USA is weaning.
Also there’s this nice little piece, very poetic, whose only value is in the fact that it was written by an American who loves his country and served in the Army:
America Without the Sugar Coating: Wishing Ill Will On Our World
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@ Posted by: juliania | Jun 15 2020 22:55 utc | 61
What will become of “Putin’s Russia” is a very interesting topic.
Pepe Escobar’s interview with Karaganov made it look like Russia’s plan is to serve as some kind of leader of the “non-aligned” countries in a future China-USA bipolar world order. I found it too vague, could mean anything.
However, there’s another, much more interesting, phenomenon: the rise of some right-wing intellectuals from Russia and the USA who are trying to revive what we call nowadays as “paleoconservatism”. They are the Martyanovs, Dugins, Korybkos the guys who write for Unz and The Saker, the Russia Insider team around there.
Those “new paleoconservatives” differentiate themselves in the sense that they really try very hard to be intellectuals — that is, they do not adopt the irrational methodology of the typical far-right/neofacism, they abhor the neocons/neoliberals, they abhor the so-called “woke left/cultural marxists/pluralists/SJWs” (which they frequently associate, if not equate, to the neoliberals), they believe in some kind of a concept of race or racially determined culture based on geography and climate, they certainly abhor scientific socialism (some of them even, under absurd and extremely dumbed down arguments, directly stating Marx’s theory was wrong) but they also abhor Nazism – albeit for reasons that are not, let’s say, “orthodox”. They are also against imperialism as the USA is practicing right now, but not against “self-defense” imperialism, that is, the line is blurry.
But the most important factor that unites this group is their blind faith in Christianism. They somehow believe that if you fuse capitalism (which, for many of them is not even a system, but human nature itself) with Christian values (it doesn’t need to be Christian religion per se, you don’t need to be a practicing Christian), you somehow get the perfect mix between man’s animal side (capitalism) and spiritual side (Christianism). It’s like your traditional post-war social-democracy, with the difference that they put Christianism in socialism’s place. As a result, you go back to the good ol’ times, more or less in the 1950s, where everything was, allegedly, “in their place”.
This obsession with Christianism makes me, jokingly, to call this coterie as the “Neobyzantines” – a bizarre postmodern chimera born from the degeneration of late stage capitalism.
But this is the boring part. The cool part about the Neobyzantines is the fact that they have a geopolitical policy. What’s this policy? You guessed it right: they want a Christian confederation composed of the entire Northern Atlantic (NATO countries)… plus Russia. This, the Neobyzantines say, will save Christianism (and the correspondent white race) from subjugation and hegemony of the socialist Yellows (some of them also have a racial-based theory about why socialism/communism naturally occurs in East Asia; for some of them, South Korea and Japan are even communist themselves already).
We know Putin was raised as a Neobyzantine. He’s an Ocidentalist that believed in the concept of an European civilization. That’s why, in my opinion, he plays such a good sport with the Orthodox Church, as it is a living fossil of the times of Peter the Great etc. etc. However, as time passed, he became increasingly disillusioned with the USA and the EU, and the ties were definitely broken with the invasion and partition of the Ukraine in 2014. His policies, therefore, clearly became more Eurasianist, but that certainly was the result of necessity, not free will.
Is Putin may be converting himself to “Neobyzantism”? Will Neobyzantism really become a thing, or will it just be thrown to the dustbin of History, as was many other ideologies of the past of which only a Historian knows nowadays?
Posted by: vk | Jun 15 2020 23:35 utc | 66
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