President Donald Trump may or may not intend to literally eradicate North Korea’s 25 million men, women and children as per his recent U.N. speech, but it is of distinctly morbid interest that he did not differentiate in his verbal missive between North Korea’s government and North Korea’s ordinary citizenry. The president simply said that North Korea would be “totally destroyed.”
It is always a very somber thing to hear a statesman advocate exterminatory war against a foreign power. Far worse is to hear this same statesman threaten tens of millions of ordinary citizens with physical eradication. There cannot be anything positive in a political message that advocates the extermination of millions of civilians.
Trump must clearly differentiate in his political message between a tyrannical government, on one hand, and millions of humble and ill-used people on the other. It is a major mistake for him to threaten all Korean people who happen to live above the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
