Yeah, I can't believe it, either:
North Korea Saturday threatened to respond with nuclear weapons to a major US-South Korean naval exercise starting this weekend, saying it was ready for a "retaliatory sacred war."
I believe the North Koreans are taking a page out of the Islamofascist playbook and invoking some sort of holy war to receive American funds, Japanese food aid and South Korean molly-coddling.
Please see here:
The communist government of North Korea, currently bouncing through the headlines once more, still the despair of the American State Department, was supposed to have gone out of business at least a generation ago....
This phenomenon among nations, living by secrecy and punishing anyone who even speaks to a foreigner, remains largely unknown to the world. Barbara Demick, while spending five years in Seoul as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, discovered during six trips to the north that the government thugs escorting her wouldn’t let her exchange even one word with a private citizen. So, back in South Korea, she began to study refugees from the north.
The result, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, recently won the Johnson Prize for the best non-fiction book published in Britain. It turns out to be a marvellous journalistic performance, the first account I’ve read that delivers an intimate sense of North Korean life. Demick braids the stories of six Koreans and their families into the history of a state dedicated to isolating and oppressing its citizens.
She leads us carefully and thoughtfully through desperate lives. A kindergarten teacher reports that the hardest part of her job was watching her pupils die of starvation. A pediatrician says much the same about her patients.
Yet most of these survivors acknowledge that for a long time they believed what the regime told them. They were persuaded, for instance, that South Korea was suffering terrible deprivation — one reason children sang a song beginning, “We have nothing to envy in the world.”
It's hard to imagine the complete paralysis of thought but it exists. We allow it to exist in some indirect ways. We tolerate China's octopus-like grip over the economy by fooling ourselves into thinking this will radically change the tyrants whose grip on this filthy Asian country has changed very little since Mao. Some even visit North Korea and see it as some kind of obscene novelty. As for the politicians, maintaining the status quo is better than shaking things up. Why rile China's lap dog? It will do that whenever it wants something and China- like a doting mother to an enfant terrible- will spoil it.
I was messing about when I found this:
Remember the end of "Samaritan Snare" where the rather unintelligent Pakled shouted, "We will destroy them!"? That's what I thought of when I read this:
In Pyongyang, "hundreds of thousands" of North Koreans marked the anniversary of the 1950 start of the Korean War by "denouncing the U.S. imperialists, the sworn enemy of the Korean people," according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency.
The protesters "reiterated the firm stand of the army and people of (the North) that should the U.S. imperialists ignite another war of aggression on this land, they will mobilize all the political and ideological might and military potentials built up generation after generation ... and mercilessly wipe out the enemies and victoriously conclude their standoff with the U.S.," KCNA reported.
So what are Kimmy & Ko. up to? There is the danger that they might give nuclear bomb technology to terrorists, but we'd turn Pyongyang into rubble if we could trace it back to them. No, I don't think Kimmy really wants to start a war he knows he couldn't win, but he can bluff. Making noise has created quite the Pavlovian reaction in the West, because every time he threatens, Western politicians want to placate him with more food and money. But our continued aid shipments are more "Oh just take this and shut up!" than "Please don't start anything." Think Riker sending Geordi to fix the Pakleds' engines not because they're an actual threat, or out of compassion, but so they'll stop saying that annoying "We look for things...it is broken."
Yep.
The North Koreans are mirror images of the Pakleds, a painfully slow yet touchingly pathetic species of the Alpha Quadrant.
Pretty sad, really.
No comments:
Post a Comment