Monday Post

Kim Jong-Il is tired of America's half-breed interference:

On my first visit to Pyongyang in 1979, handlers and interviewees repeatedly spoke of the North Koreans' constant need to be on guard against "impure elements." The unfamiliar term, puzzling at first, turned out to mean the country's enemies. The implication was that the North Koreans themselves were pure. Indeed, as B.R. Myers argues in his provocative and important new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves -- And Why it Matters, a childish fantasy of purity is at the core of the ideology that the North Korean regime has used so effectively to control its people. It is a doctrine that, according to Myers, owes relatively little to Marxism-Leninism, or to Confucianism. It is, rather, "an implacably xenophobic, race-based worldview derived largely from Fascist Japanese myth."

The same country that had once annexed Korea and is now figured in North Korean propaganda as an enemy state is the great influence for the Kim dynasty. Curious.


(Note: the term "half-breed interference" is a reference from the Star Trek episode, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?")


Eternal shame:

With Stephen Harper in Europe commemorating the 65th anniversary of V-E Day this week, a poll shows some Canadians have a distorted perception of what they’re celebrating. Five per cent think the day in question marks the anniversary of the October Crisis and 17 per cent believe it’s the 10th anniversary of the death of Pierre Trudeau.

An Ipsos Reid survey commissioned by the Historica-Dominion Institute, marking the anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, shows 50 per cent of Canadians know May 8th is V-E Day; the other half of Canadians, however, appear less knowledgeable.

In addition to being confused as to whether the May 8th anniversary has anything to do with Trudeau, who died in September of 2000, or a crisis that took place in October, 16 per cent of Canadians thought it was the 200th anniversary of Sir John A Macdonald’s birth (January, 1815) and 12 per cent figured it had to be the 20th anniversary of the death of the Meech Lake Accord (June, 1990).

Men risked their lives fighting tyranny and this is how the unschooled think of them. Nice.


If people want something so badly they can pay for it their damn selves!


An argument for the burka (tee!):

These considerations led me to formulate an inverse-burqa law that came to me as an inspiration when, returning briefly to France recently, I saw a report in Le Monde that Belgium has become the first country in Europe to ban the wearing of female attire that covers women up entirely like the plague doctors of the sixteenth century.

Now this is all to the good, but if adopted in Britain would not entirely solve the problem of the female dress code. For we in Britain face not only the problem of the niqab and the burqa, but the opposite problem of young women who uncover themselves far too much.

When I say “too much,” I am speaking from the strictly aesthetic, not the moral, point of view. In every British town and city, fat and lumpen British girls, as often as not tattooed, who represent a constant diet of fast food, soft drinks, and too much beer made pale flesh, come out into the streets on Friday and Saturday scantily clad, to scream and shout like the vulgar drunken slatterns they mostly are. Here, if anywhere, is the place for the niqab and the burqa.

These garments would have several advantages. First, of course, is that they would add (admittedly by subtracting from ugliness) to the aesthetics of our streets. They would also make it more difficult for the women inside them to drink too much, thus serving a public health function; and they would muffle the sound of their loud moronic expostulations, surely an end to be cherished by anyone who values intelligence and culture.

What I would suggest, therefore, is that each town and city set up a committee, along the lines of the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution, to determine which young women should be obliged to wear the niqab and the burqa to prevent offenses against public good taste. A first offense would mean the niqab for a determinate period of time; a second, such as exposing a tattoo to public view (two strikes and you’re out), would mean a life sentence of the burqa in public.

It seems so sensible at first glance...