John Feffer could be more accurately described as a hack apologist for its regime than an authority on North Korea. Feffer recently won himself a Bruce Cumings Prize for the year’s most spectacularly ill-timed defense of the indefensible. What the Soviet archives did for Cumings’s academic reputation, the Havel-Wiesel-Bondevik report ought to have done for Feffer’s denial of Kim Jong Il’s culpability for the great famine that sacrificed millions of lives for nukes and missiles, had anyone actually read what Feffer wrote. Here are two men whose tongues have never known a lamppost that was too cold for affectionate contact. So in a sense, you could say that drawing a comparison between George W. Bush and Kim Jong Il is a move toward moderation for Feffer. Heresy, even.
The answer, or a stab at one, comes in a piece called “Bush and Kim: Brothers under the skin?” by John Feffer, the director of global affairs at the U.S. think tank International Relations Center (IRC). It was published in Foreign Policy in Focus, whose co-director Feffer is.
First of all, Feffer says, both “grew up in privileged families, though they have both taken pains to present themselves as men of the people. Not surprisingly, then, they have tried to obscure their origins.” Kim Jong-il claims his birthplace in the symbolic Mt. Baekdu rather than the Soviet Russia where he really saw the light of this world, while George W. Bush pretends to be from Texas but is actually a Connecticut-born WASP.
Right! And one keeps 250,000 men, women, and children in concentration camps, while the other is fattening up 395 terrorists in Gitmo. Which makes them exactly the same! Other than one being a tall, skinny white guy who’s won two elections over the opposition of a hostile news media … and the other being a dumpy Korean mass murderer who inherited a despotic regime of shriveling subjects from his father, there are absolutely no differences except for, you know, their entire psyches.
Feffer may also have some qualifications as a mental health professional, but they were not apparent in this Chosun Ilbo piece.
Venturing into psychology, Feffer speculates that this “oedipal insecurity” led to the Iraq War and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Here’s my venture into psychology: projection. We have here a person who works for something with “International Relations” in its name, and who expects to be taken seriously as a scholar, and who seriously suggests that at the, erm, root of two the world’s great crises is … a sexual deviancy. I’d love to know the basis of Feffer’s major premise for this novel theory, but it makes more sense that Feffer is talking about something he really knows, or possibly through an aperature of similar latitude. Anyone who would hire this man as a scholar would hire Ted Kennedy as a lifeguard.
Natural Missile Reduction!
Maybe the Chosun Ilbo wasn’t taking Feffer too seriously, either, and I detected a hint of sarcasm in its report. That may presume too much sophistication for Chosun readers, however. If the Chosun Ilbo insists on publishing rants that have this little news value or logical merit, it might as well educate its readers about just where Feffer is coming from ideologically. The endorsement from Noam Chomsky would be a start.
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