Operation Tokdo Freedom© . . . in the Hearts of Children

(If you’re a new reader and don’t know what all this Tokdo fuss is about, here’s some background.)

When the motives for the adults’ cynical manipulations have passed, the poison still metastasizes in the minds of their kids. The teachers who orchestrated this state-sanctioned display of hate should be ashamed. Ditto the parents. Much more here (and don’t miss the rest of Gord’s superb photoblog). The art for this show comes courtesy of South Korean schoolchildren. The venue is the subway, which you could call the metropolitan equivalent of the family fridge.

If your kid drew pictures like these, would you put them on your fridge?

The characters on the little cartoon bomb (below, right) mean “nuke.” Sweet, no? Ummm, no. If little Jimmy in Wisconsin turned in a drawing like this labelled “Mecca” or “Ramadi,” he’d get sent directly to the school guidance counselor, and Child Protective Services would call to ask his mommy what kind of video games he was playing. And as so many have forgotten so quickly, our nation is fighting for its life, not a guano concession.

Or, for that matter, reunification with most of its land and a forgotten third of its people.

Now, I’ve beaten the whole Tokdo thing to death on this blog, so why, might you ask, do I still whack at this dessicated piñata? To illustrate that something other than a love of peace motivates South Korea’s simultaneous refusal to confront the effects of North Korean policy toward its own people, starting with its policy of not feeding all of them. Even if you don’t wonder, “Why all the excitement about Tokdo?”, you can still wonder why there’s so little excitement about 2 million dead North Koreans whose government chose to build a nuclear arsenal instead of feeding its starving kids.

Apparently, I am not the only one who wonders:

U.S. President George W. Bush, meeting with North Korean defector and Chosun Ilbo journalist Kang Chol-hwan on Tuesday, drew attention to North Korea’s human rights abuses and asked: “Why are South Koreans not enraged about human rights abuses in the North?”

It may well be that Japan-hatred, like its cousin, America-hatred, is a cheap intoxicant that no one believes likely to result in a real war. Such thinking goes no deeper than the recognition of Japanese and American benevolence, a reassuring safety net obscured by clever lighting but without which the political circus act would assuredly never be performed. By obscuring the net, the circusmasters have obscured the hole in it. The deeper truth is that South Korea is isolating itself from the allies–and if South Korea wants to be whole and free, Japan is its ally–on which its peace and security have depended for fifty years.

For guano.

HT: Dan at tdaxp, who is far too intelligent to spend so much time reading Thomas Barnett (though I fully expect to see Barnett prominently displayed when he responds to my tagging).