Something's afoot in the land of Dear Leader.
From the desk of Jane Galt:
I went to school with a fellow who had been in Naval Intelligence, stationed in North Korea, before matriculating. He didn't tell me anything classified or anything, but he did offer horrifying reports of what was going on in the provinces, including cannibalism, as the regime not only produced a horrifying famine, but used the distribution of food to crack down on provinces it considered troublesome.
That's why I've always been rather surprised at liberals and basically isolationist libertarians who concede World War II, but offer Korea as an example of a morally questionable war. Dear Leader is doing his best to turn the entire country into a concentration camp; how is it morally questionable to have kept tens of millions in South Korea from having suffered that fate?
Oh, one could argue that US intervention prolonged the regime, or made it worse. But one can look at the first few decades of communist regimes in nearby countries to see that even if the regime hadn't lasted so long, the time it did last would have been plenty horrible enough that it should at least induce a few qualms about abandoning the South Koreans to such a fate.
Yet it doesn't seem to. I was an enormous fan of M*A*S*H when it was first on the air, though I was far too young to grasp the political implications (I think I was nine when the series ended.) Now, of course, I realise that it was a thinly veiled metaphor for the Vietnam war: American boys and innocent asians being killed by a bunch of power-mad brass waging war for the fun of it.
I often wonder if Alan Alda--or any of the other producers, directors, writers or actors of either the movie or the television series--ever looks at the news coming out of North Korea and thinks "Yeah, I guess maybe we were wrong about that." I doubt it, though. |
