Court Sentences Nutty Professor to Two Years, Suspended

Let’s just be clear that Professor Kang Jeong-Koo is a lying Stalinist media whore and failed petty tyrant:

In a lecture in Incheon last year, Kang said, “Had the United States not
intervened, the Korean War would have ended in a month with the death toll in
both South and North less than 10,000. But 3.99 million more people died
additionally because of the American intervention. The U.S. is the main culprit
in the war and Douglas MacArthur its advance guard.” Kang’s regret that a North
Korea-led communist unification failed is evident in every line of his remarks.
At the time, he was already being tried for groveling in the visitor’s book at
Kim Il-sung’s birthplace of Mansudae, “Let’s achieve unification by succeeding
to the spirit” of the great leader’s hometown.

First, let’s begin with the dramatic overstatement of Korean War casualties, which are much closer to 2.5. million. The millions who would have been starved/frozen/tortured/shot to death under the reign of the Kim dynasty — anywhere from 700,000 to 3.5 million, not including victims of the engineered famine of the 90’s, are conveniently excluded from the numerator, even as those massacred by the North’s forces — around 130,000 — are left in the denominator. Kang’s prescription would have plunged Korea into a dark age that would have made Pol Pot’s Year Zero Kampuchea look like a tropical resort. Instead, South Korea has gigantic digital TV screens mounted on skyscrapers that overlook traffic jams, and Prof. Kang has tenure.

See how easy that was? The logical flaws are obvious enough. Now how about making the argument instead of answering idiocy with idiocy. Given that far too many South Koreans seem to think that Nogun Ri was the only massacre of the whole Korean War, with Kwangju and Cheju being the only others of recent historical significance, it’s an argument South Korea needs to have, but won’t:

The Seoul Central District Court on Friday handed down a suspended two-year
jail term to Prof. Kang Jeong-koo of Dongguk University, who famously asserted
the Korean War was North Korea’s “war of unification. Kang was found guilty of
violating the national security law with remarks that, the court said, are
capable of substantively harming the existence and safety of the Republic of
Korea and its liberal democracy.

When a war of ideas becomes one of state vs. dissident, the dissident always emerges as a martyr with a gathering of followers. In other words, the “dissident” wins, regardless of how wrong he may be. Kang, intoxicated with undeserved fame, will assuredly spout more of this blather, and his sentence will be swiftly unsuspended, meaning he will become even more famous. If the world were just, he would be an unknown, frustrated transmission mechanic in a forgotten district near Tongdaemun.

Phrased more colloquially, two stupids don’t make smart. Kang’s university ought to impose some rational academic standards and protect its reputation by getting rid of him, but since when do free societies prosecute the insane for mere words?