Women Cross DMZ Co-Directors Christine Ahn and Cathi Choi sit down with Ktown Social Club’s Michael Kim and Michael Won to discuss ending the US travel ban on North Korea and building a movement for peace in Korea and ending the Korean War.

The post WATCH: End the Travel Ban to North Korea! Ktown Social Club, Episode 43 appeared first on Korea Peace Now!.

For our second gathering of Korea Peace Now!’s Intergenerational Healing and Learning Series, Jungwon Kim and Yoon Ra debrief “Unbind Your Heart: Korean Han / Grief Transmutation Ceremony,” a KPNGN action held on July 27, 2023, the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, in Washington, DC. where participants transmuted collective, generational grief and rage, 한 / Han, into a wellspring of righteous anger and strength to call for an end to the Korean War. Both speakers will discuss the process of blending grassroots community organizing with ritual, performance, and song in order to transform and counter state violence and war-making. They also share about their work more broadly and why we must prioritize community, ritual, and spiritual resistance in organizing and narrative building practices.

Jungwon Kim is a multi-disciplinary communications strategist and advocate who has chronicled frontline environmental and human rights movements for the past two decades. She served for nine years as head of the creative & editorial team at the Rainforest Alliance and for eight years as the editor of Amnesty International, a quarterly human rights print magazine (circ. 300,000). She has also worked as a journalist for newspapers, magazines, and nationally syndicated public radio programs Jungwon is the board chair of Peace Is Loud and a board member of the Fund for Public Health NYC. She is a writer, mother, and co-founder of two BIPOC-centered sanghas.

Yoon Ra is a trans, non-binary grassroots documentary filmmaker and cultural organizer creating counter-narrative media with sex worker mutual aid groups: Red Canary Song (New York, Turtle Island) and Scarlet Cha Cha (Paju, Korea). Red Canary Song centers base-building with migrant massage workers and Asian sex workers through a labor rights, migrant justice, and PIC abolitionist framework. Red Canary Song believes that the full decriminalization of sex work is necessary for the safety and survival of massage workers and trafficking survivors. Scarlet Cha Cha has been organizing direct actions to protect the livelihoods and workplaces in Yongjugol, a red light district village first created to service an American military base in Paju, South Korea.

The post WATCH: Reflections on Unbind Your Heart: Korean Han / Grief Transmutation Ceremony, One Year Later appeared first on Korea Peace Now!.

In our first gathering of Korea Peace Now!’s Intergenerational Learning and Healing Series 2024, we hear from author Joseph Han and psychologist and shaman Helena Choi Soholm on intergenerational trauma, healing, and the Korean War. Both will share their approaches to healing intergenerational trauma and grappling with their families’ histories, the legacies of U.S. imperialism, and the ongoing war in Korea.

Helena Soholm, PhD is a transpersonal psychologist and a Korean shaman. She has been a clinician for the last 18 years, and in her practice, she integrates indigenous healing systems with Western theories of psychology to support the healing and growth process of people navigating the complexities of technologically advanced societies. As a healer and teacher, Helena facilitates soul and ancestral initiations through ceremony and ritual. Clearing and honoring ancestral energy is achieved through the recovery of the indigenous mind, which can deepen a person’s connection to self, others, and land. She collaborates with healers and artists around the world, offering shamanic ceremonies in the United States, Asia, and Europe. The goal of these ceremonies is to ignite collective healing from humanity’s colonial past while simultaneously creating pathways for people to gain awareness of their greater purpose on the planet.

Joseph Han is the author of Nuclear Family, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best book of the year by NPR and Time Magazine. He is a 2022 National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree and a Kundiman fellow in fiction. His novel won the 2023 Asian/Pacific American Literature Award Adult Fiction Honor, the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. At Korea Peace Action: National Mobilization to End the Korean War (July 2023), Joseph co-led a grief transmutation ceremony and community healing event focused on addressing collective and generational grief. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

The post WATCH: Intergenerational Trauma and the Korean War: Healing Across Generations appeared first on Korea Peace Now!.

Award-winning journalist Kihye Jeon Hong, President of South Korean online news site Pressian, spoke at KPNGN’s April 2024 National Meeting and provided a brief analysis on the results of South Korea’s recent parliamentary election and its implications for peace on the Korean Peninsula.

The post WATCH: KPNGN April 2024 National Meeting appeared first on Korea Peace Now!.

The post WATCH: [The Gendered Impact of the Korean War: Past, Present, and Future] appeared first on Korea Peace Now!.

Galvanized by mass opposition to the genocide in Gaza, today’s anti-war movement is growing rapidly and raising mass consciousness about the violences of U.S. imperialism. In this critical moment, what lessons can we learn from anti-imperialist movements of the past? In this discussion, Mark Tseng-Putterman will discuss his research on Asian American anti-imperialism during the Cold War period, focusing on how Asian American activists worked across ethnic, class, and generational lines. Join us as we discuss how prior generations of Asian American anti-imperialist activism can inform our work today to end the war in Korea and end U.S. militarism globally.

Mark Tseng-Putterman is a writer and historian whose work engages the history of Asian American internationalism, anti-imperialism, and community politics. His dissertation, “Beyond Belonging: Asian American Internationalism and Cold War Empire” explores how Asian American diasporic identifications navigated the Cold War crossroads of racial inclusion and US imperialism. He will earn his doctorate in American Studies from Brown University in 2024. His writing on Asian American racial politics has appeared in outlets including The Atlantic, ROAR Magazine, and Monthly Review. Join us as we discuss how prior generations of Asian American anti-imperialist activism can inform our work today to end the war in Korea and end U.S. militarism globally.

The post WATCH: From Chinatown to Vietnam: Locating Histories of Asian American Anti-Imperialism appeared first on Korea Peace Now!.

The post WATCH: [North Korea Is Not Our Enemy with Women Cross DMZ’s Echo] appeared first on Korea Peace Now!.

Christine Ahn explains why Hawaiʻi is especially vulnerable to a potential war with China and North Korea, and why we must double down on our calls for a diplomatic solution.

The post WATCH: Funder Hui Learning Call: The Cost of U.S. Militarization in Hawaiʻi: Climate, Housing, and Community Impacts appeared first on Korea Peace Now!.

The post WATCH: Korea Peace Now! Grassroots Network Highlights of 2023 appeared first on Korea Peace Now!.

The U.S. government imposes broad sanctions on dozens of nations, punishing populations in violation of the Geneva Conventions, supposedly in order to influence or overthrow their governments although that is never the result. The result is horrible suffering and death.

Featured in this video:

Luis Delgado Arria (Venezuela)

Luis Delgado Arria is a university professor, researcher, poet and essayist. He has a degree in Literature from the Central University of Venezuela and a Magister Scientiarum in Arts from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of various books and articles on decolonial philosophy, communication, political advocacy, cognitive warfare and analysis of media and political discourse. Founder and host of several opinion programs on ANTV. He currently serves as vice director of research and intellectual creation at the International Communications University. He directs a collective investigation for the construction of political counterhegemony in Venezuela.

Foad Izadi (Iran)

Foad Izadi is a Member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. He is based in Iran. Izadi’s research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary and focus on United States-Iran relations and U.S. public diplomacy. His book, United States Public Diplomacy Towards Iran, discusses the United States communication efforts in Iran during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Izadi has published numerous studies in national and international academic journals and major handbooks, including: Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy and Edward Elgar Handbook of Cultural Security. Dr. Foad Izadi is an associate professor at the Department of American Studies, Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran, where he teaches M.A. and Ph.D. courses in American studies.

Cathi Choi (from the U.S., speaking on North Korea)

Cathi Choi (she/her) is the Director of Policy and Organizing for Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of activists mobilizing to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure feminist leadership in peacebuilding. She co-coordinates the Korea Peace Now! Grassroots Network, launched in 2019 to organize communities in calling for demilitarization and lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Policy History and the Asian Pacific American Law Journal. She is based in Los Angeles and is the Program Committee Co-Chair for GYOPO, a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals generating progressive, critical, intersectional, and intergenerational discourses, community alliances, and free educational programs.

Fouad Baker (Palestine)

Fouad Baker is a member of the International Criminal Court Bar Association and the head of the legal department at the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He is a Palestinian refugee based in Lebanon. He has studied electromechanical engineering and international law.

Ramón Labañino (Cuba)

Ramón Labañino is Vice President of the National Association of Economists and Accountants of Cuba (ANEC). His one of the Cuban Five, who spent 16 years in prison in the United States.

MODERATOR: Liz Remmerswaal (New Zealand)

Liz Remmerswaal is Vice President of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War, and national coordinator for WBW Aotearoa/New Zealand. She is a former Vice President of the NZ Womens’ International League for Peace and Freedom and win 2017 won the Sonja Davies Peace Award, enabling her to study peace literacy with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in California. She is a member of the NZ Peace Foundation’s International Affairs and Disarmament committee and co-convenor of the Pacific Peace Network. Liz runs a radio show called Peace Witness.

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