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I got an e-mail from someone this morning asking me why I haven’t said anything about this interview over at NKzone. So, I checked it out, and now I almost wish I hadn’t. I was left speechless. Dumbfounded. Mortified. I really don’t know what to say, or even if I should waste time saying anything. I will write, however, and with no exaggeration, that I find the KCNA a better read than what I found over there. After all, the Korean-language edition of North Korea’s preeminent online publication is at least fun to browse through, and when they rant, at least I can assume that they know what they’re ranting about. But Mr. Oostindie? Perhaps it’s best that I just say nothing. I’d rather spend my time fisking the Nodong Shinmun.
Perhaps the best way to refute that garbage is to link to the graph to the right — the accompanying piece on South Korea’s troubling obesity rates can be found here, courtesy the Korean-language edition of the Chosun Ilbo. Maybe Oostindie can chalk that up alongside the long workweek (tell me about it — I spent 11 hours in the office yesterday) and the suicide rate (something I might understand if I have to translate and/or correct another goddamned business article) as another form of social oppression forced upon the suffering South Korean masses as a result of capitalism/American imperialism. And a problem from which the North Korean proletariat is blissfully free:
South Korean anthropologists who measured North Korean refugees here in Yanji, a city 15 miles from the North Korean border, found that most of the teenage boys stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. In contrast, the average 17-year-old South Korean boy is 5-foot-8, slightly shorter than an American boy of the same age.
The height disparities are stunning because Koreans were more or less the same size ? if anything, people in the North were slightly taller ? until the abrupt partitioning of the country after World War II. South Koreans, feasting on an increasingly Western-influenced diet, have been growing taller as their estranged countrymen have been shrinking through successive famines.
That quote is via the LA Times, BTW.
PS: Be sure to check out the comments on that NKzone post, and especially the trackbacks (including this one over at Infidel’s blog).
11 Comments
For a good, clear discussion of the way communists communicate, look up “You Can Trust The Communists (To Be Communists)” by Schwartz. It is in several places across the web in both .PDF and HTML formats.
Simply put, a lie that advances their cause is the Truth. Everything else is a Lie.
Remember that Orwell wrote 1984 about the USSR. The communists turned it around and got people believing it was about the West…
*sigh*
If you repeat something often enough, people tend to believe it…
that irwin guy is a twit and i made a couple comments in the nkzone. its quite obvious he is a chomskyite. chomsky likes to take facts, take parts of facts out of context, and smear america. pretty much everything he had to say is straight out of the chomsky handbook.
I was disgusted when I read that garbage. Makes me wonder if he’s spent some time with Cumings.
Plunge, I’m not sure even Cumings could write something like that.
That Canadian guy is just so vague you don’t know what he is, except for dictatorship apologist.
But here is what real communists say:
http://www.kominf.pp.fi/Oextra.html
Red alert! You have been warned.
(It is a communism site kept by a Finnish guy [doesn't that make me feel proud] who once
explained that the footages of starving North Korean children must have been computer tricks
by the Western propaganda machinery.)
For the non-South Koreans, have no fear - at least about guys like this.
The good thing about people like this guy is that they are in the small minority.
But, it wasn’t long ago, say the 1970s and before and in academia well into the 1980s, that these guys had many an ear in schools, the entertainment industry, and even the public at large.
Now, they are kind of like dinasaur bones — and odd curiosity to be gawked at.
The problem for South Korea is they are one the rise and pressing into full blown majority status.
For us, we have other things to worry about. Like I wrote in a comment the other day, we have to get thinking minds, like those who strove with the Stalinist-apologists, back engaged with the world trying to point out (again) why democracy is a good thing that needs advocating and things like fascism and radical Islam need to be taken head on with more than just bullets…
Annti, that was hilarious, thanks!
I put the following ineptly-worded comment on the nkzone site:
There’s too much that’s just wrong here.
Does he really believe what he wrote? Is he one of Kim Jong Il’s “useful idiots”? Is he a communist? Did he fall for a pretty Norkette?
The communist line has always been that anything used to advance the Revolution is Truth and anything else is a lie…
That aside, there are a couple things to address:
1. “Further, it is hypocritical for North Americans to attack North Koreans while the US has millions in prisons??р쓑argely poor men of colour??р쓆nd a lower literacy rate than that of the DPRK.”
a. We’re not “attacking” DPRK. A refugee brought out papers alleging that and it was the BBC, that well-known puppet of US propaganda, that reported the news.
b. 20% of inmates in US prisons are illegal aliens who came here and committed other, ie non immigration, crimes.
c. The argument is fallacious on it’s face.
d. Western countries don’t use poison on anyone without a long trial and 10-20 years of appeals–and then only certain murderers.
e. all of the above.
2 “Last year, US troops in the south were acquitted for killing Korean schoolgirls, and prior to that many were let off for killing and raping prostitutes servicing the US military.”
a. the two were tried and acquitted for a traffic accident. the use of the perjorative language loses you credibility. no young men driving tanks aim for children.
b. There have been no US servicemen “let off” for killing or raping anyone. In fact, there have been several caught, convicted in Korean Courts, and sent to Korean prisons. Just last month a sergeant in Osan was recently convicted and sent to prison. Your understanding of SOFA is apparently inaccurate… willfully?
c. Apparently you think only prostitutes “service” the US Military. This would ignore the NUMEROUS “glass houses” and “room salons” scattered around South Korea. Don’t be a chump!! Sex is a big business in every country.
d. It is funny you criticize the values of the West and then try to use Victorian Morality codes to make your point…
3. “Young Koreans often choose to forego English language training in order to hang onto their Korean cultural identity.”
a. Bald-faced lie. There are more westerners teaching English in Korea than ever before.
There’s just too much that’s wrong here!!! You need to get your antiBush hat off and look at Kim Jong Il for the evil guy he really is!!
There is no way the US is attacking DPRK, with or without nukes, there are too many conventional cannon barrels pointed at Seoul. Too many innocent Koreans would be killed.
Kim Il Sung attacked South Korea in 1950 because he wanted it all. He was not a Liberator. People were fleeing before he even started the war. Communists lie about everything!!
If you don’t believe me, ask my in-laws… most of the older ones escaped during the confusion of the war… moved to the East Coast of the US… They know the truth…
Your protection of that villain in Pyongyang does a disservice to all of the people suffering up there. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for publishing this tripe!!
I’m not going to post about it. I’m not going to link to it.
Folks like that just love the attention more than “truth.”
No matter what facts you give or which of his errors you point out, nothing will sink in. You might as well have a conversation with a brick wall. He will only gleefully could you as another person he has “reached out and touched.”
Yangban is right. This guy is now part of my definition of feel good-ism. The only way someone with a brain can defend North Korea the way he has using the material he does and still fight the intellectual battles of the Cold War against the capitalist pigs — is because he wants to feel better about himself. Period. The fact that all the comments show that he is in the minority and people react strongly to the arguments he makes, especially when he throws in criticism of the West and “his people” just makes him feel even prouder of himself and how open and understanding he is in this world….
There is no way the US is attacking DPRK, with or without nukes, there are too many conventional cannon barrels pointed at Seoul. Too many innocent Koreans would be killed.
Well Clinton “almost” (depending on your defintion of the term) attacked North Korea and he didn’t believe in a policy of pre-emption.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asi.....668163.stm
Given the perception that Bush is a unilateralist on foreign policy and the fact that the North Koreans are bankrupt (and arguably not capable of launching an invasion of S. Korea - petroleum and spare parts for their antiquated tanks and planes takes hard currency the N. Koreans don’t have), the South Koreans view that the U.S. is a greater threat to their security than the North Koreans is not that unreasonable. The view may be wrong but there is a reasonable basis for holding the point of view.
Personally, I think that if the price of keeping North Korean produced WMDs out of the hands of Al Queda is that Seoul is turned into a “Sea of Fire” then well all nations act in their own best interest. If it’s a choice between a nuclear device going off in NYC or Seoul getting hit with artillery … then we choose NYC as I’m sure the S. Koreans would choose Seoul if given a choice. Hopefully it doesn’t come to this but …
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