Posted on 03/03/2005 8:55:51 AM PST by TastyManatees
N. Korea, Without the Rancor
By Barbara Demick, Times Staff Writer
He arrived at the entrance to a North Korean government-owned restaurant and karaoke club here in the Chinese capital with a handshake and a request.
...
"There's never been a positive article about North Korea, not one," he said. "We're portrayed as monsters, inhuman, Dracula … with horns on our heads."
...
"For basic life, we can live without America, but we can live better with" it, he said.
Yet he voiced strong enthusiasm for his country's recent announcement that it had developed nuclear weapons. The declaration, which jarred U.S. officials, was not intended as a threat, he said, but merely a way to advance negotiations.
"Now that we are members of the nuclear club, we can start talking on an equal footing... "
A colleague, a 55-year-old man also visiting from North Korea [and obvious North Korean agent to everyone but this "reporter"], nodded.
"This was the right thing to do, to declare ourselves a nuclear power. The U.S. had been talking not only about economic sanctions, but regime change," the businessman said. "We can't just sit there waiting for them to do something. We have the right to protect ourselves."
...
He believes that Americans have the wrongheaded notion that North Koreas are unhappy with the system of government under Kim Jong Il. "We Asians are traditional people," he said. "We prefer to have a benevolent father leader."
...
The most important point the North Korean said he wanted to convey in the conversation was that his nation was a place just like any other.
"There is love. There is hate. There is fighting. There is charity…. People marry. They divorce. They make children," he said.
"People are just trying to live a normal life."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
"We prefer to have a benevolent father leader."
I'm sure they would prefer one who didn't starve them.
Of course they do.
North Korean Communists and reporters from the LA Times - birds of a feather.....
Seriously. The North Koreans are not "like", they are UNLIKE any other regime.
http://www.hrnk.org/TheHiddenGulag-press.pdf
I still see young women lying by a wall with the tops of their skulls blown off. It is sort of a tough image to erase. Were these young Korean women mass murderers or thieves, or did they just have an attitude problem?
Yet another love letter to the enemy.
What excrement.
She's a halfwit for quoting a kooky North Korean at length? What's wrong with hearing a new, albeit skewed, perspective?
... While Westerners tend to stress the rights of the individual, he said, "we have chosen collective human rights as a nation…. We should have food, shelter, security rather than chaos and vandalism. ..."
The North Korean "businessman" sounds like he would make a good Democrat.
Wasn't it Hillary Clinton who said in 1993, “We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society”?
She later wrote a book on the same theme. I think the title was "It Takes a Village Idiot". Obviously, the LA Times reporter was the sort that Hillary had in mind.
The article was almost inevitable. With things in the Middle East starting to go Bush's way, they had to find the next " fatal Bush Blunder" nation, and who else could that be but North Korea.
Not only that, but Bush reversed the Clinton/Carter strategy, and the MSM will be trying to point out the "dire consequences" of that reversal until your stomach turns.
Complete B.S. but I'm impressed how the NK propaganda man understands the memes that would trigger knee-jerk concurrence in lefty minds.
The reporter is no Duranty. Duranty was an operator, this reporter just a useful idiot.
Hugh Hewitt has spent his entire show talking about this. I am surprised there has not been more response to this post. It is completely irresponsible on the part of the L.A. Times.
"Now that we are members of the nuclear club, we can start talking on an equal footing... "
Blaahahaha!
Let's see you try to set it off... unless you are full of $#!T
Holtz
JeffersonRepublic.com
Hugh Hewitt: An Outrage from the Front Page of the Los Angeles Times
wasn't Susasn Estrich just complaining about the lack of female writers on the LA Slimes?
"He said he did not want to be quoted by name because his perspective was personal, not official."
B.S.
He inherited his iron-fisted power from his daddy and now has declared the dictatorship will be kept in the family and passed on to his son.
There is absolutely no difference in the way Kim is ruling than from the Chinese emporers of the China Dynasty - all with an iron fist. (And all came tumbling down.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.