Christine Ahn: Korea Is Reunifying!

No, not really. It’s just the latest from socialist wingnut and former Dennis Kucinich groupie Christine Ahn. Remember her? The International Herald Tribune’s bio failed to note Ms. Ahn’s associations with the anti-American, pro-Pyongyang Korea Solidarity Committee.

SAN FRANCISCO The Bush administration is drawing up plans to further tighten the noose around North Korea by barring financial firms investing in Pyongyang from conducting business in the United States. Washington is moving fast to capitalize on Pyongyang’s alleged counterfeit dealings, but so fast that it is omitting a major factor: Korea is reunifying.

Do tell.

At Incheon International Airport in South Korea, flat-screen televisions beam a
Samsung cellphone commercial of a concert with South Korea’s pop icon, Lee Hyo
Ri, and the North Korean dancer Jo Myung Ae. Korea’s most popular female stars,
they sing a song about parted lovers with the lyrics, “Someday we will meet
again, although no one knows where we’re going, someday we will meet again, in
this very image of us separated.”

As they hold hands, the blue “One Korea” flag rolls down behind them, and as they turn to watch the flag, Lee Hyo Ri says, “That day I was so nervous because the story wasn’t just about the two of us.” Here was Samsung, one of Korea’s most powerful corporations, popularizing reunification. And the South Korean government was also sending a clear message to all foreigners landing on Korean soil: Reunification is happening, slowly, but surely.

Where to begin. . . . First, who else took note of the decisive proof that for at least one far-lefty opponent of globalism (whatever that is), the opposition is about something other than corporations using the media to sell its intent to exploit slave labor. Here is a case of it biting Ms. Ahn right on her fleshy regions, and she’s positively agog about it.

Second, the times have moved beyond Ms. Ahn. This is sooooo 2001 . . . a trip back in time to World Cup Fever and the post-summit afterglow when semi-serious thinkers could give semi-serious consideration to the idea that North Korea’s regime would reform, smidgen by smidgen, until presto! We are one! Nearly six years after the summit, however, North Korea has reversed its few halting economic reforms, is no less bleak from the human rights perspective, is still starving its people, and is even less open and transparent than in 2000, to the point of throwing out the World Food Program at the obvious risk of another famine (Ahn, as you recall, blames the United States for the famine because of its “embargo” against North Korea). Not even the official North Korean tour guides know what goes on inside Kaesong

This brings us to the real point of why the Land of Sunshine is a fool’s paradise, and my third point: none of the rays are shining into North Korea. The only glow is from the glint of fool’s gold.