From: matus (matus@snet.net)
Date: Sat Apr 05 2003 - 10:35:04 MST
MaxPlumm Said:
>> All of these accusations are to some degrees true. However, I do not see
any perspective given to >> any of these judgments you have passed. For
instance, the United States "propped up" the regime of >> Syngman Rhee in
South Korea in 1950. Rhee was certainly an authoritarian and a thug.
To which Damien sullivan responded:
> And in 1950 we couldn't know how bad North Korea would turn out to be. So
we accepted mass murder
> by our ally
You miss the point entirely. 1st off, at no point in history do we know
exactly how the future would turn out, however, everyone was pretty
confident that communism sucked and democratic capitalism did not. Whether
history would prove them to be true was yet unknown, but it did in fact
prove them so. Considering more than 30 million chinese died in the
cultural revolutions there, the fewer cultural revolutions the better. 2nd,
as Max is trying to emphasize, it was not a choice between mass murder of
2,000 people and NO mass murder, it was a choice between mass murder of
2,000 people and mass murder of 2 MILLION people. To criticize the US for
supporting a thug but not appluaud it at preventing the enslavement and
murder of millions of people is rediculous.
I invite you to read Christopher Hitchens description of North Korea.
Liberal Author Christopher Hitchens calls North Korea 'The Worst of the
Worst', it is the worst possible combination of absolute despotism,
totalitarianism, and state failure. It is a living example of the nightmare
portrayed in Orwells 1984 and predicted result of runaway nationalization in
Rand's Atlas Shrugged, he says of North Korea -
"All films, all books, all newspapers and all radio and television
broadcasts are about either the Father or the Son[Kim Jong Il]. Everybody is
a soldier. Everybody is an informer. Everybody is a unit. Everything is
propaganda...Children are drilled to think of Japanese and Americans, in
particular, as monstrous...The old justification for the Stalinist
forced-march system was that at least it led to development. But even in
Pyongyang, the capital city which is reserved for approved citizens, one can
see that this excuse doesn't work. Neither does anything else; the place is
stalled and hungry and subject to constant blackouts. There are no cars on
the streets; there is no construction except of tawdry shrines to the Holy
Family. A very small window of dollar bribery has opened up in recent years,
but there's nothing to buy and no black market. Corruption at the leadership
level is exorbitant, with palaces and limos and (a special obsession of Kim
Jong Il's) megalomaniacal movie projects...I saw people scavenging
individual grains from the fields and washing themselves in open sewers. On
the almost deserted roads, animals do a good deal of the hauling. Domestic
pets are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps most have been eaten, for the fact is
that North Korea is a famine stat...Nobody knows the death toll-the best
guess is between 1.5 and 2 million-but in addition a generation of
physically and mentally stunted children has been "fathered" by the "Dear
Leader." Well-attested rumors of cannibalism have filtered across the border
to China, where a Korean-speaking minority has lately been augmented by
refugees so desperate that they will risk shooting in order to brave the
river. A system where you can't live but you can't leave is the definition
of hell...deserted towns, empty factories, wandering and neglected children
and untilled fields...the country's once productive coal mines have been
allowed to flood, and that there are no pumps that can be brought to bear"
(from -http://www.chosunjournal.com/worst.html)
The latest estimates are that the state has killed 2 million people in the
recent famine. This would make it the worst state killing since Cambodia in
the 1970s. It would push the total killing by the communist regime since its
origin to about 4 million people, making communist North Korea the 6th
greatest killer since 1900.
Now compare North Korea with South Korea, which started with similiar
populations nearly identical climates, land area, people, and culture. Yet
South Korea, which embraced capitalism and democracy at the end of the
Korean War is now the 11th largest economy in the world, a bustling hub of
progress and growth which recently hosted the Olympics. North Korea, on the
other hand, embraced massive statism, it is the only full fledged communist
state intact, its people are desperately poor and millions have starved to
death, while factories and fields remain unused and empty it receives
billions in international aide while maintaining a standing army of 1
million with artillary constantly aimed at South Korea's capital. A truly
sad state of affiars.
If the United States had not supported a 'totalarian thug' which murdered
2000 of his own people, All the people of South Korea, which numbers 48
million today, would be living under the same horrific hellish conditions,
where every year is 1984, that the people of North Korea live under.
Michael Dickey
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