No, I’m not going to bore you with tales of the Plantagenets warring with the House of Valois in the 14th and 15th Centuries.  This offering is all about North Korea.  Many remember the partition of Korea after WWII, and the Korean War, but the problems go back much longer than that.  The point is that the current situation with North Korea’s threats to unleash nuclear weapons, which led to President Trump’s warning that North Korea had “best not make any threats against the United States,” or else “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” is nothing new.  It is just the latest salvo in a series of battles that go back more than 100 years.  In 1907, Korea became a protectorate of Japan.  The Japanese formally annexed Korea in 1910, brutally subjugating and enslaving the Korean people.  When Koreans protested for independence in 1919, 7,000 were killed.  Violent demonstrations continued in the 1920’s.  The 1930’s brought Japanese military rule.  The Japanese attempted to eradicate Korea as a nation by abolishing Korean culture.  The Japanese government made worship at Japanese Shinto shrines compulsory.  Perhaps adopting the policies of John Dewey, they radically modified school curricula to eliminate teaching in the Korean language and history.  The practice of Korean culture in any way became illegal.  The Left is working on that here.  At the end of WWII, after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and with the war won, Russia (there go those sneaky Russians again) declared war on Japan.  Russian tanks entered Korea on August 9.  That led to the partition of Korea at the 38th parallel, for the sole purpose of having Japanese troops north of that line surrender to the Russians and those south of the parallel surrender to U.S. forces.  As in Europe, the Soviet Union agreed to, then refused to follow, the UN mandate for democratic elections nation wide.  In 1948, the Soviets installed a communist dictatorship in the north, run by its puppet,  Kim Il-sung.  That Kim attacked the South on June 25, 1950, supplied by and supervised by the Soviets.  The NK’s had almost succeeded in driving the South Korean and U.S. forces into the sea at Pusan, before General MacArthur pulled off his landing at Inchon, after which U.S. forces drove the North Koreans all the way to the Chinese border on the Yalu river.  At that point, the Chinese attacked with 600,000 troops, and the fighting ended in a stalemate back near the 38th parallel.  I say the fighting ended because the Korean War never ended, officially. After the armistice, South Korea transformed itself into a prosperous, democratic industrialized nation.  The North, dedicated to a communist police state, starved.  Kim Il-sung died in 1994, and was succeeded his son, Kim Jong-il, who presided over a large-scale famine that left some 900,000 people dead, and a generation of children suffering from the long term effects of malnutrition.  The latest “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Un, has continued North Korea’s great expenditures on its military, while the people continue to sit in the dark and starve. (Let’s hear it for communism!).  Since 1953, North Korea has engaged in constant border incidents, trying to provoke a military clash with the South, which is why the U.S. has had to station thousands of troops on the border for over 60 years.  With more than half the North Korean population suffering from malnutrition, the constant threats and provocations from North Korea might seem irrational.  However, it is the privation of the North Korean people which makes the seemingly crazy threats of the North at least explainable.  The explanation goes like this – the North fear the South Koreans, and need to try to intimidate the South.  The North threatens the U.S. in order to appear strong to its starving population; in order to stay in control.  Sounds crazy, sure, but it has worked.  The North Koreans seized the U.S. ship Pueblo in the 1960’s, and held the crew and ship for 11 months, without being wiped out by the U.S.  They have shot down U.S. spy planes, and have killed Americans along the DMZ, without being destroyed.  So now, the North Korean nuclear threats are just the next step in the provocation game, the idea being that, if the U.S. tolerated the non-nuclear threats, the nuclear threats will make North Korea appear even more important on the world stage.  Playing with nuclear fire is a dangerous game, however.  Kim’s threat to fire missiles at Guam prompted the Trump warnings.  The latest news seems to indicate that the North Koreans have backed off their threat to fire on Guam.  Possibly, Kim has been counseled by the Chinese, who have reminded Kim that he’s not dealing with Obama anymore.  Possibly cooler heads in the North Korean military have decided that they aren’t ready to deal with a President who might actually strike back.