In view of the fact that the U.S. military has quite unexpectedly announced North Korea has the capability of launching a nuclear weapon atop a missile, and in view of the fact that the young, untested, unstable, paranoid, and maybe even trigger-happy, North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un is as labile as he is, wouldn’t it be advisable for the craven American media to at least try to mention that the U.S. is, in fact, taunting North Korea by engaging in its ridiculously inflammatory military exercises?
There is almost no mention of the military exercises we are engaged in right across the border from North Korea using thousands of troops massing near its border while deploying huge artillery ensembles, stealth bombers, and dozens of naval support vessels.
How is the paranoid regime in the North to know we are simply engaged in harmless “exercises” instead of using that term as a ruse to initiate an aggressive first strike?
An intelligent, rational, and balanced American president would realize—even if he had only an introductory course in abnormal psychology—that the level of danger is so high for a nuclear miscalculation that it is time to stop our military maneuvers, now, immediately, and without equivocation.
And it is no less important to expose the complicity of the U.S. media in its obsessive preoccupation with North Korea’s paranoia and militarism, while dismissively failing to mention that we are, in fact, provoking this delusional leader into acting out.
It could happen tomorrow.
If we had a rational, intelligent, and insightful American president, he would cease and desist from rattling the cage of the extant mental case which is North Korea.
Not to do so rather convincingly demonstrates that the mental case is here not there.
Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor Emeritus from the graduate division of psychology at Santa Clara University. He may be contacted at his website, collectivepsych.com
