Korea, Where Life Imitates Monty Python

This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who.

— Monty Python and the Holy Grail

[P]ointing out mistakes and bickering over what is right and wrong is not helpful, and in the end the injury rebounds on the abduction victim and the victim’s family….”

— Unidentified official, defending South Korea’s low-key reaction to a statement by South Korean abductee Kim Yong Nam, under the careful observation of North Korean minders, that he was “rescued” by a passing North Korean ship in 1978, when he was still a boy.

This, in spite of the admissions of one of the captured North Korean spies who abducted him from a beach. South Korea’s leftist government, which has provided billions in unconditional aid and investment to Kim Jong Il’s regime, has never publicly demanded the repatriation of its 468 kidnapped citizens, or the hundreds of South Korean POW’s still held since the Korean War, or conditioned the provision of aid on their release. Its “Unification Ministry” recently attempted to censor reporters when North Korea bristled at their reports describing other South Korean abductees as having been kidnapped.