🔒 June 25,A War Not Yet Ended — 1950

🌧️ Four in the Morning

At four in the morning on June 25, 1950, seventy-five thousand North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel. Tanks led the way. Seoul fell in three days.

The 38th parallel was not a line drawn by Koreans. In August 1945, when Japan surrendered, two American officers looked at a National Geographic map and drew the line in thirty minutes. The north was where the Soviet Union would accept Japan's surrender; the south was where the United States would. Koreans were not part of the decision. It was meant to be temporary. It became permanent.

⚔️ Three Years

The United States entered the war through a UN Security Council resolution. The Soviet Union was boycotting the Council at the time and could not exercise its veto. Twenty-one countries joined the fight.

MacArthur's Inchon landing reversed the tide. When UN forces pushed all the way to the Yalu River, China intervened. The front lines fell back toward the 38th parallel. Two years of grinding attrition followed. Negotiations dragged on for two years over the single issue of prisoner repatriation.

On July 27, 1953, the armistice was signed. The UN Command and the North Korean and Chinese forces signed it. South Korea did not. Syngman Rhee refused to accept the failure of reunification by force.

The dead numbered at least two and a half million.

🔒 Armistice

The first sentence of the armistice reads: to ensure a complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea until a final peaceful settlement is achieved.

Seventy-two years have passed. A final peaceful settlement has not been achieved.

The armistice did not end the war. It stopped the fighting. Legally, the Korean War is still ongoing. The DMZ is not a peacetime border but a wartime buffer zone. The twenty-eight thousand US troops in South Korea are stationed not under a peace treaty but under wartime authority.

🕊️ The End-of-War Debate

On one side: declare the end of the war first, then draw North Korea into denuclearization. On the other: without denuclearization, an end-of-war declaration is a dangerous concession.

North Korea has been calling for a peace treaty since the 1970s. The goal was the withdrawal of US forces. The 1994 Geneva Agreed Framework, the 2005 Six-Party Talks joint statement, the 2018 Singapore joint declaration. Each time an agreement was reached, North Korea continued developing its nuclear program.

In 2018, Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un met at Panmunjom. They declared that there would be no more war on the Korean Peninsula. They agreed to declare the end of the war before the close of that year. In 2019, the Hanoi summit between North Korea and the United States ended without a deal. Everything stopped.

In 2024, Kim Jong Un named South Korea the principal enemy in the constitution. In 2025, the Workers' Party congress formally refused all dialogue and exchange with the South. In 2026, the South Korean government announced it would pursue an end-of-war declaration again.

🌑 Now

The agreements vanished from the paper they were written on.

The signatories to the 1953 armistice agreed to convene a peace conference within three months. The conference was held, and failed. Every agreement since has also failed. Seventy-two years have passed.

The DMZ is now the most heavily armed border in the world. Dean Rusk, one of the two officers who drew the 38th parallel in thirty minutes, later became Secretary of State. The line is still where they drew it.

⚔️ June 24, All Power Belongs to the People — 1932, Bangkok

🏛️ The Declaration

On the morning of June 24, 1932, an officer climbed onto a tank in Bangkok's Royal Plaza and read out a proclamation. The Khana Ratsadon — the People's Party — had ended seven hundred years of absolute monarchy. King Prajadhipok was playing golf at his seaside palace in Hua Hin.

Three days later, a constitution was promulgated. It had been drafted in advance by People's Party leader Pridi Phanomyong. Its first sentence read: The supreme power in this country belongs to all the people.

When the king returned to Bangkok and received the People's Party delegation, he stood up. In Siamese culture, the king always remained seated when subjects paid their respects. "I rise to honor the Khana Ratsadon," he said. Seven hundred years of absolute monarchy ended like that.

⚔️ The First Coup

Less than a year after the revolution succeeded, the same army drove out the elected prime minister. That was 1933. The precedent of revolution became the precedent of the coup.

In 1938, Plaek Phibunsongkhram eliminated his rivals, aligned with fascism, and brought Siam into the Second World War on Japan's side. In 1947, the military toppled an elected government again. In 1951, Phibun staged a coup against his own government to restore the 1932 constitution. In 1957, Sarit Thanarat ousted his own superior. In 1958, Sarit staged a second coup and completed a dictatorship.

The military governed from 1947 to 1973 — twenty-six years.

🩸 1973 and 1976

In October 1973, students took to the streets. Hundreds of thousands demanded democracy. The military opened fire. When the crowds still would not go back, the military finally relinquished power. Thailand's first genuinely democratic government took office.

It lasted three years.

On October 6, 1976, the military massacred student protesters. The official death toll was forty-six. A coup followed, and democracy was erased again.

🔄 Repetition

1977, 1991, 2006, 2014. The coups continued. The pattern was nearly always the same. When an elected politician came into conflict with Bangkok's entrenched elite, the military intervened. In 2006, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was in New York for the UN General Assembly when the coup happened. In 2014, his sister Yingluck was removed the same way.

Not one coup leader was ever punished. Those who succeeded became prime ministers; those who failed went into exile or received pardons. Throughout the Cold War, the United States supported Thailand's military governments in the name of stopping communism.

📜 The Constitution

Since 1932, Thailand has rewritten its constitution twenty times. Each time a coup succeeded, the constitution was scrapped and a new one drafted. The constitution did not limit power. Power wrote the constitution.

🪙 The Missing Plaque

In the Royal Plaza where the 1932 revolution was proclaimed, a commemorative plaque had been set into the ground — engraved with the words of that day's declaration. One day the plaque was gone. No one has been held accountable for its disappearance.

🗳️ Now

In May 2023, a relatively free election was held. As of 2025, a territorial dispute with Cambodia has revived fears of another coup.

The first sentence of the constitution promulgated on June 24, 1932 is still there. The supreme power in this country belongs to all the people.

📖 June 23, The Deserter — 1959, Paris

 🫀 A Ticking Heart

He knew his heart was a ticking bomb. Despite doctors warning him he would not live past thirty, he breathed harder and more fiercely than ever. "Every note I play takes a day off my life." He said this, and blew his trumpet through the night.

📖 Banned Books and a Masterpiece

When the world pointed its finger at him as a third-rate pornographer hiding behind an American pen name, he used I Shall Spit on Your Graves to expose the hypocrisy of white mainstream society and its brutal racism. It was banned. He was prosecuted.

Behind that cynicism, his true soul lived inside Froth on the Daydream. It was the story of a man who gave everything he had — his fortune, his life — for a lover slowly suffocating as a water lily grew inside her lung, and still could not stop her from dying. A masterpiece, critics would later say: surrealist language unlike anything before it, shaped by the rhythms of jazz.

🎺 The Deserter

In 1954, France was at war. The state was pushing young men into the mud of Indochina and Algeria. He broke his pen into a letter aimed at the president's office.

"If blood must be shed, let it be yours."

It was a declaration that he would not give his life to the wars of those in power. The title said it plainly: Le Déserteur. The price was banning, repression, and threats hurled at him from the stage — but he did not take a single step back.

🎬 June 23, 1959, Ten in the Morning

He attended the premiere of a film adapted from his own novel. He had already fought with the producers and demanded his name be removed from the credits. A few minutes into the screening, he cried out suddenly.

"Those people are supposed to be American? That's absurd!"

Then he collapsed. He died on the way to the hospital. He was thirty-nine.

"No one will come to my grave," he had once said. It became a lonely prophecy.

🌹 Resurrection After Death

But Boris Vian's true resistance was resurrected after his death. Nine years after he was gone, in May 1968, on the barricades of Paris. The young people who poured into the streets against the boots and arrogance of the old order carried his worn books in their hands, and Le Déserteur rang from their lips.

Only in death did he become the hottest heart of the '68 revolution — an eternal blue flame of resistance.