Hey DJ, What’s That Big Pink Animal With the Prehensile Trunk? (Updated)

Admittedly, I don’t have high expectations of NPR, but I would expect that even they would at least mention the circumstances surrounding the summit that bought Kim Dae Jung his Nobel Peace Prize.  Instead, NPR lets his grandiose claims go unchallenged:

“The Sunshine Policy has been and still is supported by the majority of South Koreans and the whole world,” Kim says, sitting in his living room. “It’s the reason I won the Nobel Peace Prize. People are telling President Lee Myung-bak to return to the Sunshine Policy, but it isn’t clear whether he will or not.”  [NPR]

Since the point of the interview is to let DJ sell the plausibility of creating a kindler, gentler North Korea by paying extortion money — despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary — honest journalism would seem to demand raising the single most obvious question about DJ’s single most prominent claim of accomplishment.

Update:   DJ calls President Lee a “dictator,” and Kim Young Sam calls DJ a “communist.”   Both charges are baseless and needlessly inflammatory.  President Lee has done some authoritarian things, to be sure, though the one that has the left up in arms is the firing of the managers of government-run media who broadcast the infamous “mad cow” reports that were inflammatory, false, and done with reckless disregard for the truth.  Most on the left who were exploiting the effect of those reports hardly cared if they were false, or whether news media might possibly exist for a higher purpose than the dissemination of anti-American agitprop.

Quite rightly, Lee has been intolerant of the violent demonstrations that Roh not only allowed to run wild and subvert the democratic process, but fueled with government funding.  The sum total of Lee’s departures from the principles of free expression, though deserving of more sincere condemnation than they’re received, still don’t add up to as much authoritarianism as Roh demonstrated against opposition media or North Korean defectors.  So let’s call the Korean left’s hypocrisy about dictatorship for what it is.

Equally, I think Kim Dae Jung’s policies toward North Korea were disastrous for the people of both Koreas, but I doubt that Kim Young Sam, if pressed, could cite any evidence that DJ believes in placing the means of production under the control of a state managed by a vanguard elite and a Supreme Leader.  Maybe DJ and Kim Young Sam are too partisan to see it, but rhetoric like this doesn’t protect democracy, it brings mobs of thugs into the streets to destroy it.