Andrew Dickens Afternoons

Am I the  only one who hasn’t swallowed the kool aid on Korea?The world was agog on Friday when the leaders of North and South Korea met on the 38th parallel and went for a walk.  No-one would deny the images and the symbolism was powerful but was it really the dawning of a new age?After all the leaders of the 2 Koreas have met twice before, in Pyongyang, in 2000 and 2007, and the meetings then were heaped with the same hopeful praise and rhetoric and yet nothing happened.  Perhaps in our dumbed down age we’ve developed long-term memory loss.My question to you is what on earth has the last 70 years of the Korean War been about.  A war that saw 1.2 million people die including 33 New Zealanders. To my eyes, the West waged war to stop the spread of communism from the North driven by Russia with the tacit support of China.  It was a war that sought to reunite the 2 Koreas under a prosperous democracy. It was a war that was necessary to maintain the West’s influence in Asia.So the weekend’s developments is a sign