Open Sources, May 28, 2012

NO ONE SHOULD EVER SAY “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY,” but everyone ought to be able to enjoy this day without feeling that it’s wrong or ungrateful to do so. This country exists to elevate the individual over the state, to be a safe place for the pursuit of individual happiness. Our obligation is simply this — to reflect on the fact that our happiness was secured by a few, who were willing to give everything away for our sake.

YES, SOME OF THE EDITORS OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL may be craven, sniveling corporate weasels, but they still have a first-rate reporter and blogger in Evan Ramstad, who has reduced to writing the playbook of Korean leftists when asked about human rights in North Korea. It’s one of the funniest, most insightful, thought-provoking things I’ve read all year. Go read it now.

Back already? OK, I move to supplement the record. First, you may remember how George Orwell phrased Step 1 on Ramstad’s list in Animal Farm: “Surely you do not want Jones to come back.” Step 2 — I’ve been to North Korea [___] times so I know better than you — is the tactic I tend to associate with Selig Harrison, from whom we’ve heard very little this year (or haven’t you missed him as much as I have?). There is an American version of Step 3, in which you simply search-and-replace “unification” for “talks,” “diplomacy,” or “the reduction of tensions,” however temporary (just don’t say “disarmament;” no one has been talking about that since 2009.)

Ramstad forgot two of the important methods, however — their favorite is to change the subject to a discussion of something done by the United States that’s grossly incomparable in terms of numbers, treatment, legal process, or any number of countervailing ethical considerations: Gitmo, for example, or incarceration rates of [insert presumptively aggrieved group] in the United States. Finally, North Korea’s apologists conceal themselves behind North Korea’s secrecy: you can’t prove [the existence of the camps / the diversion of food aid / uranium enrichment] because you don’t have eyewitnesses.

In the end, what all of these techniques have in common is that their common purpose is to avoid doing what no North Korea apologist can do — defend North Korea’s human rights record on its own merits.

WHAT THE HANKY IS REALLY TELLING US, then, is that many (most?) South Korean businesses can’t turn a profit in North Korea without massive subsidies from their own government. If that’s the case, how is this whole experiment supposed to attract third-country investment?

THE LATEST GOOD FRIENDS DISPATCH has much interesting gossip about the relationship between North Korea and China.

KOREA IN 1931, from an old newsreel.