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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Condor who wrote (54765)	10/25/2002 11:30:51 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hanson on North Korea. Excerpt: Apparently a privileged class of men and women in the West, the beneficiaries of higher education and of ample means, share a tendency to believe that the world works according to their own Enlightenment logic — or at least that its reasoned judgment can appeal even to the uninitiated like Kim Il-Sung. And the ego of these new missionaries of wisdom is mighty. ... The problems of such utopianism are twofold: Its fuzzy rhetoric of peace and love is as unassailable as the reality of its endangering innocents is irrefutable; and its purveyors are always lauded for their noble efforts, but rarely blamed for the carnage that comes after. So too it will be in the present catastrophe. Mr. Carter returns to Plains with his Noble prize; Mr. Clinton will continue to bite his lip as he makes millions lecturing about his peacemaking and garnering sundry awards and medals. Meanwhile, less flashy diplomats will deal with their mess. The latter are already being blamed for telling the truth that North Korea really is evil — even as they're granted little leverage over a rogue nation with the ability to vaporize a Seoul, Tokyo, or soon a Los Angeles. Moral equivalence peeps out beneath the present Korean fiasco. In the new morality, institutions and values are seen as relative concepts and not subject to absolute or unchanging criteria of evaluation. Instead, those with supposed power oppress and make the rules, while those without suffer the consequences. Thus a powerful democracy and its elected leaders are seen as not necessarily more worthy of consideration — or "privilege" — than the non-West, by any objective standard of politics or culture. In this view Israel has nuclear weapons, so why not Iraq? America stockpiles weapons of mass destruction, so what is the big deal with North Korea? Was not the United States "uncooperative" and "inflexible" in its prior stance toward North Korea, and thus simply unable to appreciate the nuances of its alternative politics? ... Set against those postmodern and post-heroic theories remain tragic truths that will never disappear. Unfree and totalitarian regimes like North Korea lie and always will lie, for two simple reasons. One: Without a free press and a political opposition, they can. And two: They must, because their system does not work and would collapse were their people free and able to speak freely. Second, appeasement — in the past, now, and for all time — only encourages thugs and killers, and proves far more dangerous and costly in the long run than either preemption or early resolute opposition (in the manner in which Israel took out the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, or we pondered the same in 1994 in North Korea). Third, culture affects the way a people fights, creates government, eats, and sleeps, but it does not trump human nature itself. Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Il-Sung may have had culturally specific preferences in their terror and mass murder, but as human tyrants of the ages they were predictable in their behavior and thus could only be opposed, never appeased. In short, Thucydides or Hobbes would know more about the North Korean leader than would the present leadership in either nearby Tokyo or Seoul. nationalreview.com

To: Condor who wrote (54765)	10/27/2002 9:55:35 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

In the US in 1998, guns accounted for over 38,000 deaths. (talk about weapons of mass destruction) Yeah.. and 43,501 people died because they crashed their vehicles.... infoplease.com Should we abolish cars too?? Hawk@liesdamnliesandstatistics.com