Comments on: You Must Be Joking, Mr. Unification Minister

By: knickerbocker

knickerbocker — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:44:07 +0000

MigukNamja makes an excellent point re. the hostages. I suspect these years of turning a blind eye to North Korean atrocities has made it ridiculously easy to do the same to the Taliban. Make no mistake though, that the entire world took note and was appalled. The administration in Seoul has got to go.

By: R. Elgin

R. Elgin — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 10:53:59 +0000

I can understand the honest desire of Koreans to remedy the tragic history of the past but to do so at the expense of a qualitative code of ethics and, at the expense of human dignity, is loathsome. There seems to be no shortage of these kind of people leading the Ministry of Unification and that worries me more since it is this very sort of moral blindness to leads to worse deeds.
A unified Korea under this sort of mentality (moral relativism) would be a spiritual disaster, regardless of the fiscal cost.

By: SomeguyinKorea

SomeguyinKorea — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 09:46:18 +0000

#4,

I thought that’s what China likes to say about human rights there.

By: snow

snow — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 08:12:32 +0000

“saying human rights issues should be interpreted according to the unique circumstances of a particular society. He added that there was no concrete evidence of human rights violations in the North.”

Wasn’t this similar to something Bruce Cumings wrote about North Korea? Moral relativism and blindness to clear evidence are hallmarks of Korean leftists.

By: SomeguyinKorea

SomeguyinKorea — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 07:25:17 +0000

“It even makes us suspect that his religious position was just a front to cover up his real identity as a professional revolutionary.”

When you read between the lines, you start to wonder how badly we’ve been duped for the last 5 years.

By: SomeguyinKorea

SomeguyinKorea — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 07:20:51 +0000

I’m speechless.

By: MigukNamja

MigukNamja — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 06:54:37 +0000

The office of the South Korean Unification Minister is little more than a PR office for the DPRK.

It’s very sad, literally, to see more and more South Koreans fall prey to Stockholme Syndrome as 22M Koreans are held hostage, allowed to die, or outright killed by the DPRK. Yet, we can see the mentality of the Korean Left through the recent Afghanistan hostage debacle : mortgage the future to get short-term results.

Yesterday, I was on a DMZ tour that got delayed by 20 minutes total while a seemingly endless convey of trucks laden with goods to be sold on the black market for cash flowed North, with nothing but empty trucks, empty hands, and empty promises returning. The heavy left-leaning propaganda movie and threatrical and darkly comical Dorasan Station did nothing to lift the mood of the trip.

Indeed, I cynically believe many Koreans secretly wish for the DPRK regime to continue, so that the ROK does not have deal with issue of the economic impact of reunification and their kin to the North starving and dying under a brutal dictator.