The Head of the World Health Organization Bears May Day Greetings from Pyongyang! (Update: No Signs of Obesity There!)
It could have been worse, I suppose, had I awakened this morning to the clatter of panzerkampfwagens rolling through the D.C. suburbs blaring the Horst Wessel Lied from loudspeakers. But if the prospect of the U.N. as Government of Earth horrifies you any less, get a load of what Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization, holds up as the very model of a peachy health care system:
UN health agency chief Margaret Chan said on Friday after a visit to North Korea that the country’s health system would be the envy for most developing countries although it faced “challenges”. “Based on what I have seen, I can tell you they have something that most other developing countries would envy,” she told journalists, despite reports of renewed famine in parts of the country.
“To give you a couple of examples, DPRK has no lack of doctors and nurses, as we see in other developing countries, most of their doctors and nurse have migrated,” the director general of the World Health Organisation said. She also highlighted its “very elaborate health infrastructure” extending to a district network of household doctors, she added. [AFP]
The factual ignorance and the prevailing moral retardation of the United Nations even manage to put the Catholic Church’s recent troubles into perspective. Hey, at least they’ve only enabled the rape of a few thousand children! Speaking of a regime that willfully allowed up to 2.5 million of its people to starve to death, while the survivors merely watched their loved ones starve to death, Chan concedes that all is not perfect in North Korea:
“I can see perhaps that malnutrition is an area where the government has to pay attention, especially in pregnant women and young children,” Chan said in a telephone news conference about her visit.
Then, citing official North Korean statistics without apparent irony or suspicion …
[S]he praised the extent of child vaccination in the country, citing coverage of about 90 percent, as well as the way it tackled tuberculosis, malaria and other infectious diseases.
But there were some qualifications. An OFK reader — one of (so far) two journalists for major news services who e-mailed me from the verge of apoplexy about this story, I will note — described this one as “perhaps the understatement of the decade:”
Chan later accepted that what she saw in Pyongyang “might not be representative of the rest of the country.
To say the least. Chan clearly wasn’t led to the hospital in Chongjin where the doctors, denied any medicines or modern equipment, spent large parts of their days gathering, drying, and grinding herbs to make “traditional” medicines, but who could seldom do more for their starving patients than watch them die. She wasn’t guided to the black markets where people buy the medicine — often, it’s crystal meth — that their government refuses to provide while it spends its money on luxuries for its Inner Party. Or to any of the schools that had to close during the most recent of North Korea’s frequent epidemics of H1N1, tuberculosis (regular and drug-resistant), typhoid, paratyphoid, typhus, or scarlet fever, despite the regime’s vaunted excellence at vaccinating children. Or any of the places Norbert Vollertsen described in this Wall Street Journal op-ed:
Though I was assigned to a children’s hospital in Pyongsong, 10 miles north of Pyongyang, I visited many hospitals in other provinces. In each one, I found unbelievable deprivation. Crude rubber drips were hooked to patients from old beer bottles. There were no bandages, scalpels, antibiotics or operation facilities, only broken beds on which children lay waiting to die. The children were emaciated, stunted, mute, emotionally depleted. [….]
Once, I had an opportunity to visit my driver, a member of the military, who was in the hospital because of injury. The authorities were vexed that I wanted to see him, but I was able to overcome objections. As was my custom on hospital visits, I took bandages and antibiotics–basics. On this occasion, I was embarrassed to see that, unlike any other hospital I visited, this one looked as modern as any in Germany. It was equipped with the latest medical apparatus, such as magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, electrocardiograms and X-ray machines. There are two worlds in North Korea, one for the senior military and the elite; and a living hell for the rest.
Ms. Chan’s belief in the illusion through which she was paraded is, quite simply, beyond belief. It is in jarring contrast to North Korea’s refusal to so much as let the U.N.’s Human Rights Special Rapporteur, Vivit Muntarbhorn through his borders.
He also highlighted reports that the regime had tightened its grip on food distribution by prohibiting smallholders and markets. “The situation concerning food shortages in 2009 — with impact on 2010 — remains severe,” especially in the northeast, he added. Muntarbhorn stressed that “the problem is not simply food shortage but distorted food distribution, from which the elite benefits.” [AFP]
“Logically, it would seem that if the authorities are not able to satisfy the basic needs of the people, the people should be able to participate in activities which can help generate income so as to enable them to produce or buy their own food as well as sustain their livelihood,” he told the council. [Reuters]
This, children, is why the very term “United Nations” has become an oxymoron.
Update: Oh my God. Please tell me she was misquoted:
Chan spent most of her brief visit in Pyongyang, and she said that from what she had seen there most people had the same height and weight as Asians in other countries, while there were no signs of the obesity emerging in some parts of Asia.
I can’t speak to Sonagi’s criticisms of Dr Chan without some links to what she is saying about Chan, but I did get a somewhat different feel from the Reuters article on Dr Chan’s visit, which was in my Daily Kor yesterday:
The same article notes that her predecessor said earlier this past decade that North Korea’s medical system was about to implode:
So is the problem the UN and the WHO, or is it Dr Chan, or is it the game?
I’m going to write more on this from a public health perspective, but Dr Chan — or anyone in her seat — is in the unenviable position of having to shake hands with dictators and their minions with one hand while trying to hand out meds, needles, and other supplies, with her left. The WHO is interested in getting as much data, as factual as it can be gotten, and try to get their people on the ground so they can work on reducing or eradicating tuberculosis, malaria, etc. It is not her job to tell everyone to take down the regime, but to get the regime to work with her to get medical care into the country.
And so she did so by saying, essentially, in my brief technical and professional visit to the capital, I did not see signs of malnutrition or obesity, and the hospitals were well staffed, but I did not visit the countryside and the conditions may be different there.
Is that so different from just about any other observation we’ve seen from visitors to Pyongyang Disneyland? What else would she say? What else could she say?
I’m not trying to defend Dr Chan, but I am seeing this from a public health perspective, as it goes right to the heart of the major dilemma of public health policy I mentioned above. Do we want North Koreans to get some types of health care that their government cannot or will not provide? If so, unfortunately, this is sausage-making in front of an open window. But maybe I see things a bit differently in this regard because this is the very thing I myself may face in the future, depending on where my own situation heads. It’s also why I see Lisa Ling — or anyone — using a public health NGO as a cover for undercover journalism sends up red flags for me.
I can now see why Matt Groening portrayed the United Nations as DOOP in Futurama.
What else could she say? Wrong question. First, she shouldn’t have gone in the first place. Second, she could have *not* said most of the stupid things she did say. Third, she should have done some research on actual conditions in North Korea rather than making herself a propaganda tool, though I’m sure any Chinese government official is must be practiced at making such compromises. If any good were to come of such a visit, it could only be because Chan knew what the hell she was talking about and had the courage to say it. There is much good she could have done for North Koreans. She has done the opposite.
Joshua wrote:
Joshua, I don’t think this was a visit to determine that status of Pyongyang’s fine hospitals, regardless of what was said in the interview. The WHO’s mission is to get into places, easy or difficult, regardless of political relations, and get whatever medical care they can on the ground to those who need it. Unfortunately, that necessitates making nice with people like those in Pyongyang.
I think that’s what her agency is trying to set themselves up to be able to do. Would Dr Vollertsen himself have ever been able to determine all he did about North Korea’s state of medical care had he himself not made nice with them in the first place?
Some day it will be necessary for NGOs, US groups, ROK agencies, and UN groups to go in and give people what it is they need. Any collapse of even the pitiful governance North Korea now exercises could be a humanitarian disaster, and it would be better to have some data and experience on the ground — even if gathered through murky conditions — than none at all. I’m not saying that Dr Chan’s visit is that, nor should it be considered so, but it may be a necessary step for getting North Korea to open up enough so that — possibly, eventually, maybe — they can get people on the ground for things like tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, etc.
Kushibo, if this was about getting aid to those who needed it, instead of a propaganda tour by Chan, the WHO should have sent a working-level delegation to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the needs of the North Korean people. Had it done this first, Chan wouldn’t have made an imbecile of herself on a global stage.
I suspect, though I can’t prove, that Chan was doing North Korea this favor at the request of the ChiCom government.
Chan holds her directorship of the WHO only because she has the full backing of the CCP. I agree that it is most likely that she did not want to offend her oh-so-benevolent superiors.
In any case, the North Korean regime will never meet the transparency, monitoring, and accountability standards of the WHO or the Global Fund.
Your gratuitous cheap shot at the Catholic Church is not welcomed by all your readers.
@KCJ
your gratuitous cheap shot at OFK is not welcomed either. you act as if the rape and cover up of thousands of boys ought to be defended.
also, it might do you some good to recall that Joshua posted some nuanced posts with regard to religion (Christian churches in South Korea helping defectors and South Korean Christian missionaries in China), even though he prefers “his religion to be less organized.”
OFK reminds me a lot of kristof’s recent columns. though i doubt OFK would enjoy the comparison.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opinion/02kristof.html?ref=opinion
Eww. Kristof.
joseph wrote:
KCJ’s comment was in no way gratuitous, as it went directly to something that fairly dominated Joshua’s second paragraph.
I mean no disrespect to Joshua, but I also felt the comment about the Church’s abuse scandal was gratuitous. I only chose not to say anything because I knew that with my earlier comments I would have to pick my battles. And for me to really get into any kind of defense (i.e., defense of the position that the Catholic remark was a gratuitous potshot, not a defense of the ham-handed way the Catholic Church handled abuse cases and ruined many lives in the process) would take this comments thread in a very off-topic direction, precisely because the remark was gratuitous.
Again, I mean no disrespect to Joshua. I wish to point out that this is one of only very quibbles I ever have with what he writes.
Aigo! One of only very few quibbles I ever have with what he writes.
Thanks for the cover, Kushibo. I deeply respect that. I don’t defend the abuses – I heartily condemn them from top to bottom, just thought that wasn’t a very fair way to get the point across.
Peace,
kcj
I would trust margaret chan a good bit more than any of you. Have any of you even been to North Korea?
If she says they have a good health care system believe her. North Korea isnt filled with unhealthy fast food and ready made meals pushed by Capitalist for profit companies. They cook their own healthy meals and look after their own health. If we in the US regulated fast food like some progressives have proposed (eg a Soda Tax, laws against building fast food shops in poor neighborhoods) we could reduce our obesity rate to the that of North Korea. Good health need not be expensive we just need some common sense regulations.
By the way North Korea offers universal health care. It might not be perfect but its a damn site better than what many Americans recieve under our vaunted “free market” healthcare. Even Obamas moderste efforts at reform were frustrated by people who idolize our current system, yet Republicans claim it is the best in the world. Are we all that different than North Korea?
oh wow.
anyone wanna take a crack at that last post?
Oops, I meant does anyone wanna respond to that last COMMENT, not POST.
I’ll just note that good health from a lack of fast-food, while good for overall public health, has little to do with claims of a good health care system.
Bruce,
follow this link to Amnesty International’s factual indictment of North Korean health care. Amnesty International went to North Korea — and reported on a failed system, where homemade methamphetamine is the primary panacea for all symptoms, where intravenous fluids are given from used beer bottles that must be supplied by the patients, and where anaesthesia is the exception.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/north-koreas-crumbling-health-system-dire-need-aid-2010-07-14.
It really is a game-changing report when one considers the source.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102×4467561
‘Garwood said Thursday’s report by Amnesty was mainly anecdotal, with stories dating back to 2001, and not up to the U.N. agency’s scientific approach to evaluating health care. “All the facts are from people who aren’t in the country,” Garwood told reporters in Geneva. “There’s no science in the research.”‘
That says it all about Amnesty’s so called unbiased report. I’d also remind you that in the US we have serious drug problem not to mention all the people in Prison as a resault of our “war” on drugs.
Also I would say North Korea’s relatively healthy diet low in unhealthy foods is part of the health consideration. You need to take a holistic approach to health and not just look at the medical establishment but also the rest of public policy.
Bruce, the link to DU is broken.
I entirely agree we have problems in the US with drugs — not least with Ice, or meth — which is highly addictive, causes erratic and aggressive behavior, and creates very serious tooth decay among other calcium-deprivation problems. But at least our government, unlike that of the DPRK, tries to prevent the wholesale and unregulated use of meth in the interests of the general health of the population.
As for anecdotal evidence, it is another phrase for “limited personal experience” –and is quite acceptable so long as one has reason to believe it is representative. Everything we know about the evidence from the DPRK confirms that the anecdotal evidence from Amnesty is representative.
Amnesty describes DPRK public policy in substantial, and entirely fair, detail — and then contrasts the policy with the reality, explaining at some length why it believes its information is representative, and its own efforts to assess the reliability of the information received. I really do suggest you read the report, rather than rely upon a third party’s interpretation of it.
Bruce wrote:
State-induced malnutrition is a well-known chronic problem in North Korea, which you are twisting around as some sort of anti-obesity lifestyle choice. That would be almost like marketing Nazi-era concentration centers as “fat camps.”
Bruce your last name wouldn’t happen to be Cumings by any chance. I would love to know what makes people like you tick. I believe leftists suffer from some form of mental illness. How can any person defend the evil that is the government of North Korea. You need to read stories about the lives of defectors from the North, and it doesn’t matter if the story came from 2001 or 2008 or 1968 the evil of the Kim’s is unchanging. General Eisenhower forced the local germans to walk though the concentration camps at the end of the World War II so they could not deny their evilness, I believe the leftists that defended the Kim’s should be forced to visit the gulags of the North and talk to their victims and your fate should be determined by the North Korean survivors. Pack your bags because I believe that time is drawing near.
Ha! That would be funny if Bruce were the Bruce. It would be fun to have a polite discussion about the merits of some of Bruce’s works. When I saw him at a conference one time, he ducked my questions.
No, I am not Bruce Cummings. My last name is Carson if you must know.
I hadn’t actually heard of him before but he seems like a very reasonable person. From my point of view, his writings are just as valid as your opinions. What are your negative perceptions of North Korea based on? A bunch of defectors. We discovered after the invasion of Iraq just how reliable defectors are when it comes to getting information about a member of the “axis of evil.” A number of Iraqi defectors assured us that we would be greeted as liberators… so much for that.
The only scientifically based agency to report on North Korea, the WHO, says things are not so bad. They have a lot of trained doctors and they might lack equipment because of sanctions but its not the worst healthcare system ever.
Hmm. Looks like my comments aren’t going through. So much for an open debate.
If you are Bruce Cumings, I have read your books on North Korea and the Korean War with pleasure. I agree with your views about MacArthur the blowhard, the unreliable US Army and the murderous Curtis LeMay — but, as with your comments above, realizing the extent of our own serious misconduct does not justify a policy of excusing and even championing the even bloodier, more murderous, implacably ruthless behavior of the Northern invader.
If you are that academic, then your failure to read the text of the Amnesty report is inexcusable. The foundation of the academic privilege, to write inflammatory statements that cause ordinary people to reconsider their prejudices, is actual knowledge by the academic commentator — but if you are simply spouting the predigested views of someone else under a pretence of original research, you are not even as well informed as a person who expounds upon a Readers Digest Condensed Book as if he had read the original.
I’ll try again…
I don’t know Bruce Cummings. If you must know, my last name is Carson.
But he seems like a reasonable guy and I respect his opinions just as much as yours. What do you guys have but a bunch of anecdotal reports FROM DEFECTORS. The only scientifically based reports, from the WHO, point to a situation which is not that bad.
By the way if North Korea does fall I think we’ll find that things are not that bad. Defectors from Iraq before the war there said we would be greeted as liberators. We discovered how reliable defectors are.
Bruce — I found a real ink to the DU posting. Did you intend to omit the comment about Margaret Chan visiting Potemkin hospitals?
I also attach an except from the WHO briefing, reported on July 16 at the UNO Geneva website:
“Paul Garwood of the World Health Organization said that to him there was no apparent contradiction between Ms. Chan’s remarks and Amnesty International’s remarks. Challenges had been identified by both sides. Ms. Chan’s recent visit to the country post-dated the many accounts that had been used in Amnesty International’s report, some of which dated back almost a decade.”
It certainly appears that Margaret Chan was caught flatfooted, and her spokesman was trying to backpedal fast, with flat feet.
Obviously I dont know if the hospitals were ptomkin villages or not but I see no evidence they were.
I just want to point out that what defectrs tell us is usually not very reliable. For example before the irack invasion defectrs told us we would be greeted as liberators… so much for that.
“By the way if North Korea does fall I think we’ll find that things are not that bad”
Then why defect in the first place?
Why defect?
Because the south korean governemnt pays a stipend to defectors. Not to mention the better economic opportunities… South Korea is better off economically theres no denying that.
Bruce go to google and look up Nobert Volllertsen a leftist german doctor and how his eyes were opened about the true nature of north korea. Try “How north korea starves its people ” by Catherine Edwards. But you may not want to waste your time because a leftist can see a million people tortured and starved to death with his own eyes and let it wash over him like water off a ducks back, the dear leader loves his people and the checks in the mail.
Bruce, what do you mean “defect”?
In the free world, it’s called emigration or immigration. It can be legal or illegal, permanent or temporary, economic or principled, religious or secular. It can even be voluntary or involuntary exile. In the entire civilized world, an emigrant is not a defector. Emigration is not a crime punishable by a death sentence imposed by the “potentially bereaved” government — except in the DPRK and a few recent rebarbative societies. And in those societies, the Nazi practice of sippenhaft or joint family responsibity condemned the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins to imprisonment. Now, with the end of Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, East Germany and the satellites, essentially, only the DPRK practices such barbarities. Even Cuba appears to have abandoned sippenhaft.
And, of course, in the camps and prisons of the DPRK, medical services are even less available than on the outside — unless it is abortion by the boot in the belly — which is again only anecdotal, but reasonably reliable, information.
Bruce wrote:
Nah. He’s full of crap, and I’m just a little.
Don’t bring me down, Bruce.
You want to talk about who is restrictive and does not treat migrants as human beings? How about the US with the way it does not allow Mexicans to immigrate or racially profiles them as in Arizona?
In other words I am saying… don’t throw stones when you live in a glass house. We’ve got our own right wingers in this country that want to model things on North Korea.
Also a lot of the people defecting from the North Korea are from the army. If you defect from the US army you’ll get court marshalled as well.
Wrong again, Bruce. We allow Mexicans to emigrate — legally, by quotas that are regularly modified to increase the number of South and Central Americans over Europeans. (Racial profiling is purposefully built into our immigration laws, and has been there since the era of the Know-Nothings.)
And as for our treatment of “illegals” — well, no matter how bad you perceive it to be, it is certainly far better than the DPRK’s. (The racial profiling argument in Arizona is, only, that brown-skinned US citizens could be wrongly racially profiled as illegals and required to prove residency: racial profiling is not a defence against an otherwise valid deportation.)
You should be explaining or seeking to defend the DPRK’s brutal treatment of its subjects who are returned forcibly and against their will by the Chinese as “defectors” — but instead you choose to deplore our own lesser errors.
In that respect, you argue by allusion which, if you are the academic Bruce Cumings, you should know is a logical fallacy that concedes the truth of the opponent’s argument. It is always a losing ploy. There is no way, in humanity, law, ethics or morality, to condone the DPRK’s treatment of “defectors’ and their innocent families — nor any way to justify the almost total lack of medical facilities in the prisons and camps to which they are condemned.
Don’t you agree?
(For what it’s worth, I have encountered our federal Customs and Immigration authorities in action at the border, where I have been adversarial to the authorities, on hundreds of occasions and, with the exception of one occasion, those officers have invariably behaved with decency, humanity, fairness and consideration. )
Bruce, the transparency of your arguments is so obvious to not even be worth my scarce time, but I’ll try to hit the highlights.
For starters, your characterization of the body of information about North Korea as being merely the reports of disgruntled and greedy defectors is false. Since Dennis already mentioned Dr Vollersten, you can start there to see the individuals and agencies who have seen the North Korean system up close and have criticized it despite any personal gain from doing so.
Also, no matter how much you attack the US on its treatments of migrants, it won’t make North Korea’s health care system any better. Such tu quoque argumentation is further weakened by the misleading claims you use to make it. For example…
Where to begin? Well, I could point out that the US is not a country that “does not allow Mexicans to immigrate.” In fact, “Mexican immigrants account for about one-fifth of the legal immigrants living in the United States,” a number equalling about six million people. While there are millions more who are undocumented (and millions more Americans of Mexican heritage born in the US), one could easily argue that the US’s problems with illegal immigration continue precisely because even undocumented migrants have been given kid-glove treatment and rights in some key areas.
As for the Arizona situation, you leave out the loud and emphatic opposition to the Arizona policies, from the president to politicians in other states to the judicial system. Quite a misleading presentation there, Bruce.
And finally…
This is not part of your overall argument, but it struck me as I read this that the last two times I remember reading such denial in this “don’t know who he is but he sounds like someone I’d agree with” form, it turned out that the writer was in fact that person. One was
and the other involved someone who went into the real world and tried to get me fired from my job. Ah, good times.
I do hold out the possibility that our Bruce Carson is actually Bruce Cumings. My strongest bit of evidence: Both those surnames begin with C. Don’t you get it?! They both begin with C!
And I only point this out because the way Dr Bruce became a (paid? unpaid?) shill for North Korea was so obvious after the Soviet Union fell and the veil was lifted on much of Pyongyang’s antics, yet he continued to write as if what all he was saying about how good and misunderstood the DPRK was still plausible. Like Bruce’s arguments above, it became quite transparent. He, like Christine Ahn, almost seems to be a 송ë‘율-esque paid-under-the-table mouthpiece for the Pyongyang regime.
Bruce like all leftists your are playing fast and loose with the facts. Around 70% of the defectors are women and I would think around 1% or less are from the military. The US makes over a million people citizens every year the vast majority are from 3nd world countries. Your claim is the US does not have the right to secure it own borders, do you have the right to lock your front door at night, what if a homeless person wants to sleep on your couch. There are over 20 million illegal aliens in this country and they cost the taxpayers tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars a year, in a country that is going broke. The vast majority work in the cash economy and don’t pay taxes, and they ship tens to billions to their home countries. Did you look up Dr Vollertsen.
Bruce, you have to be a troll. I can not believe an even vaguely intelligent person can believe there is even on a rhetorical level a comparison between the US and NK, which is probably why people are trying to get into the US and people are trying to get out of NK. You realise David Woolley was talking about what happens to families of people trying to LEAVE NK and you respond with some vague attempt at a parallel with immigrants INTO the US? You are aware that being an illegal immigrant doesn’t bring a death sentence in the US, right?
Cummings doesn’t have a lot of credibility mainly because of his extraordinary bad timing. He worte a book claiming the South started the Korean War and it was just propaganda that the North started it. Two years later the USSR collapses archives open and there are letters in Kim Il Sung’s own handwriting asking for and planning for an attack on South Korea. He then write a book where he says that North Korea’s economy is not that bad and is self sufficient in 1997 just in time for North Korea to admit to the world that its people are starving. Finally he wites a book published in 2004 saying there is zero evidence that NK has a nuclear weapons programme…. Ironically Cummings is better at talking about South Korea than North Korea, probably because it is a far more open society.
As for trashing refugees, maybe back in the day you could do so but there are literally tens of thousands of North Koreans giving this evidence. Even DPRK said it needs external aid to feed its people, saying that starving to death millions of people is somehow an anti-obesity health drive is a truly innovative “reinterpretation” of history…
D’oh! The “at TMH” blockquote should have been a link to this.
This thread rocks. *spoken like a true Californian*
The real Bruce Cummings lost all credibility when he started making vacuous and utterly baseless claims like “North Koreans are free to be Korean.†Whatever that’s supposed to mean. If living as a slave in a Stalinist hellhole while being raped by the elite and living in a state where all Korean traditions and customs have been neutered and warped in subservience to a bankrupt 20th century ideology counts as “being Korean,†then I guess he has a point. But I’m quite certain nearly all Koreans, except the most inane and braindead of the lot, would disagree.
@Milton
So, it’s Sept. 20th? 🙂
Remember our bet?
Of course one should understand why she is so sympathetic….
After all mao also cured obsesity in China in the late 50s:
http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/pyared/papers/famines.pdf
First of all, according to Wikipedia there’s only 14,000 defectors in South Korea… HARDLY tens of thousands.
But whatever. You guys have totally made up your mind about North Korea without ever visiting it, just relying on people who left (and therefore have a good reason to dislike it). I don’t think the way our media reports on other countries is reliable either. If you read Noam Chomsky you’d realize our media and the right wing military industrial complex hype up North Korea to serve their own ends. You guys depict Kim Jong Il as insane, but we actually had an agreement, which Carter reached, and only fell apart because Bush spat in the North’s face by failing to hold up OUR END of the bargain.
By the way SOUTH KOREA is not self sufficient in food either… if it were sanctioned the same way the North is you can bet there’d be starvation.
Anyway…. I’m done arguing with you guys.
@Bruce
North Koreans aren’t starving because of sanctions, they were starving after the Soviet Union collapsed. Sanctions prevent Kim Jong Il from driving his luxury sedan to his Italian yacht to eat some more caviar. The famine in North Korea has a number of causes, the least likely of which is sanctions. I’m pretty sure that money spent developing ICBMs, nuclear warheads, and the Ryugyong Hotel could have been better spent on food. In fact, North Korea’s “songbun” ideology is probably a root cause for starvation.
If North Korea was so intent on fulfilling their end of the bargain, why did they have such a problem with independent investigators verifying their claims of peaceful nuclear energy? I mean, if you had a history of stealing from your company, and your company wanted to assign a supervisor to watch you, would you have a problem if you honestly never intended to steal again? North Korea never had any intention of honoring their end of the agreements Bruce, face it. Even if they did, evidence that North Korea has been dealing arms to Iran completely derail your argument of a “peaceful” North Korea.
I can’t believe you’d actually bring up an argument about Mexican immigration into the United States. Why don’t you take a look at what happens to South and Central Americans migrants who are en route to the United States?
Bruce, in your drive to paint us as anti-Chomskyite counter-revolutionaries, you’ve depicted me at least quite inaccurately.
I do not think, for example, that Kim Jong-il is insane. Quite the opposite. Nor is he irrational.
And let’s not kid ourselves that the US’s sanctions against North Korea are what’s keeping it down or its people starving (and weren’t you saying earlier this was a good, health-inducing thing, this lower caloric intake…?). The DPRK has had an adequate lifeline with the PRC, the Russian Federation, and a host of other countries; it’s mismanagement and the use of food and relative liberty as a political weapon and means of control that is at the heart of most North Koreans’ misery.
I’m beginning to believe more strongly that you really are the Bruce. And if you’re not, you’re clearly someone as delusional and possibly as much on the take.
And, without wanting to descend into pedantry, it only takes a rudimentary search on Google, which I concede I didn’t do, to find that there have been more than 20,000 defectors in South Korea for quite a while now~
To be honest, I have a feeling Bruce is actually a right-wing agent provocateur; it’s like a bad impersonation of conservative’s idea of what all “leftists” are like.
Bruce,
Where are you from?