North Korea and Bill Clinton’s Mission

 

August 5, 2009

 

 

 

 

Bill Clinton did good for the young journalists who were held in Pyongyang (since March) for their allegedly being in North Korea. Frankly, I don’t believe entirely that they were really in the country; the North Korean government is quite possibly just making it up. How would they have pulled this off? At a border crossing? Did they beat someone up? Did they climb a mountain and come over the ridge?

 

 

And even though Clinton deserves high marks for going all the way over there and enduring the bad breath of Kim Jong Il, it still remains a propaganda coup for his totalitarian regime. (I noticed the T.V. media refers to the regime as a “rogue nation,” which is fine, but it’s obviously their euphemism for “totalitarian.”) We can’t call them totalitarian since that would constitute impoliteness, you know.

 

 

This whole affair afforded Kim Jong Il the opportunity of posing as a non-totalitarian leader: first, he gets a visit from a former American president. The leader of the free world comes to pay you a visit?! And he travels to you,
not you to him?! That’s huge, sports fans. This fictitiously legitimates the North Korean government as a supposedly normal government of a supposedly normal country. This is bad for us. We don’t want to legitimate the likes of that regime. In this case, unfortunately, we had no choice, we had to get fellow Americans out, and I’m grateful to Clinton for pulling it off, but at what a price for the freedom loving nations of the world! We had to let ourselves be used for the horrible propaganda purposes of a sick old man whose cruelty and lies know no limits.

 

 

Second, the North Korean totalitarian lying joke of a government can play the part of being benevolent, by “granting” clemency to the journalists. Kim Jong Il can pose as the moderate father of his country, doling out wisdom and justice like crazy all day long. But of course we know that totalitarian governments pose as non-totalitarian, and we know that they set-up Potemkin villages to fool the credulous Westerners who visit, and we know, furthermore, that these same totalitarian “governments” use those credulous Westerners as useful idiots to spread the message for them. So what am I worried about if we know all this?!

 

 

But do we know all this? Do we know, for example, that Michael Moore is a useful idiot for buying into the Potemkin village he was presented with in Cuba for his doc “Sicko?” Do we know that Marxism is a Potemkin village itself, as it endlessly poses as both irrefutable and infallible? Furthermore, do we know that Sean Penn is a useful idiot, for traveling to Iraq and to Venezuela and then coming back full of praise for them and criticism of us? Do we really know what just happened in North Korea? Do we really know that on the big chessboard of the global political scene Kim Jong Il indeed won, and freedom certainly lost? (Well, we better know it.)