즐거운  곳에선은  날오라  하여도

내쉴곳은  나에집  내집뿐이니

청천에  밝은빚과  그넓은 우주도

모도다  나에쟙에  비힐배 안일세

Many places of happiness beckon me,

But my resting place is my old home, the only home of my birth,

In the endless blue sky holding up the infinite Universe,

No place is like my old home, ever merry and warm.

A long time ago, I realized that my anti-Communist "crusade" in my youth was based more on my personal interests than on any lofty ideology. Communists took away my land, killed my brother and forced me to flee, leaving all my possessions, friends and childhood memories behind. They took away everything I had. I wanted to regain my land, books, home and friends; I wanted to wreak vengeance on those who had wronged us.  Some 50 years has passed and I have given up any hope of regaining my properties in North Korea and in fact, I do not want them back. I agree that land should belong to those work it, as Kim Il Sung said years ago. 

Kim Il Sung was wrong to let lawless peasants mobs to run wild and run the country. The mobs, who wave red flags and sing praises of Stalin and Kim Il Sung, are the very same people who used to wave the Rising Sun and bow to Hirohito every morning. In 1950, these same people lined the streets of Hamhung and Pyongyang and welcomed American troops waving the Stars and Stripes. Kim Il Sung should have known that these "patriots" were opportunists who cater to anyone in power.  They are driven more by self-preservation than any love for the nation or Kim Il Sung. They would served anyone who feed them.

In due course of time, Kim Il Sung found himself in a mess: his people were cold and hungry, his nation became one of the poorest countries of the world, his dilapidated factories closed down one after another, and North Korea was stuck in the 19th century and was not going anywhere. His cronies had purged those who could have and wanted to built a strong, rich nation. All he had left was shameless and useless sycophants like Hwang Jang Yup, who would and did leave the sinking ship at the first opportunity. A few months before his death, Kim Il Sung confided to Jimmie Carter that he had made many mistakes, but no regrets can undo the wrongs his Party hacks had done to the Korean people or bring back those killed by them.  

Life goes on. It is encouraging to see Kim Jong Il undoing some of the wrongs perpetrated by the Party gold-diggers who surrounded and suffocated his late father with incompetence. Kim Jung Il has restored some of the purged nationalists, restored some semblance of democracy and nationalism, and has the economy moving. He has replaced useless Party hacks with young technocrats. He even had the courage to execute high-ranking party cadres for corruption. I wish him good luck, and should he want or need my help, he will have it.

The South Korea I left in 1955 was a cesspool of rampant corruption under a ruthless, corrupt and incompetent tyrant, Rhee Syngman. He surrounded himself with pro-Japanese, pro-American merchants of death, bent on robbing the national treasury and perpetuating their grip on power at any cost.  The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The war-torn economy remained war-torn, voices for reforms were silenced with harsh police brutality. In 1960, the people of South Korea had had enough of Rhee Syngman and his cronies and rose up in arms. Rhee's own troops turned against him and Rhee was spirited out of Korea by the US CIA.  After a succession of military dictators, South Korea has, at last, elected a people's government led by Kim Dae Jung. Democracy and freedom are at last smiling on the people of South Korea.

America, too, has changed. The Korean War was a racist war much as the Indian Wars were in the 19th Century. The American military had no qualms about killing millions of Korean women and children, for, to them, Koreans were not humans and killing them was not against any law, was not un-Christian.  Americans killed Koreans like so many flies on one day and then attended church services, singing Christian hymns as if they had done nothing un-Godly.  In the 1950s, I saw American racism against the Jews, blacks and the Yellow race with my own eyes. Kid threw stones at me, yelling "You chinaman, go home!" and landlords refused to rent me a room, and parents forbade their daughters to go out with me.

It took decades of selfless crusades and sacrifice by people like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, countless progressive church, civic and political leaders and, most importantly, the common people of America,  to rid America of the likes of Ku Klux Klan, Dean Rusk and George Wallace, .Over the years, America has changed from a racist society to the most racially tolerant society in the world today.  

In the new millennium just started, the art of war has changed. The advent of nuclear weapons, of genetically engineered super bugs and cheap but deadly chemical weapons, intended to destroy enemy population centers, makes conventional war machines, such as tanks, flat tops, sleek fighter planes, smart goose-steeping soldiers, useless. The age of military conquest is out and the age of information and economic conquest is in.   Brain power has replaced muscle power as the chosen means of domination, and for the first time in human history, humans are starting to behave more like humans, the sole owner of advanced intelligence of all living things, and less like wild beasts.