Posted on 05/29/2005 3:23:22 PM PDT by CHARLITE
It pays to take a look at the books George W. Bush hands out to his staffers. Last year Bush's book was Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, which argues that countries that do not protect individual rights cannot be reliable partners for peace. You could hear Sharansky's arguments in Bush's extraordinary second inaugural speech in which he promised to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East and around the world. Bush's critics like to mock him as the sort of person who never read books. But he does, and his reading has consequences.
This year Bush has been handing out copies of The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan. This is the harrowing story of a man who returned with his Communist family to North Korea to help build a Communist state and who was instead imprisoned. In the past Bush has denounced the North Korean regime as tyrannical and has been chided by some foreign policy experts for what they consider his allegedly impolitic bluntness. But his championing of The Aquariums of Pyongyang suggests that he is more determined than ever to undermine a regime that is probably the world's worst violator of human rights.
It also suggests that no one should expect this administration to endorse anything resembling the Agreed Framework that Bill Clinton endorsed in 1994. Under that agreement, the United States provided aid to North Korea and refrained from undermining the regime in return for North Korea's promises not to develop nuclear arms. The North Koreans broke their word, but some foreign policy experts argue that a similar agreement is the best we can get from the six-party North Korea talks and should be accepted as at least a way of buying time. Bush has never seemed inclined to support an Agreed Framework II. He has spurned North Korea's demand for direct talks with the United States and has insisted instead on talks that include China, the country best positioned to put pressure on North Korea, and its other neighbors, South Korea, Russia, and Japan.
Now he seems poised to go one step farther and to insist on including the issue of human rights in any negotiations. That is required as well by the North Korean Human Rights Act, passed last fall by overwhelming margins in the Senate and House, despite lukewarm support from the administration and some opposition from South Korea's appeasement-minded government. This act also provided for appointment of a special envoy on human rights to North Korea. To that position Bush is reportedly poised to appoint Jay Lefkowitz, a former deputy domestic adviser in the White House and general counsel at the Office of Management and the Budget in the first Bush term. Lefkowitz has no track record on North Korea. But he started off his political career in the 1980s championing the rights of Soviet Jewry. Friends expect him to be a forceful critic of North Korea's human rights record.
Does any of this matter? No one knows. Kim Jong Il's regime seemingly has a tight hold on power and has been willing to imprison even minor critics. But dictatorial regimes have fallen, suddenly, when ordinary people refuse to follow orders. Washington lawyer Michael Horowitz, who helped construct the alliance of evangelical Christian and Jewish organizations that lobbied for the North Korea Liberation Act, has predicted that the North Korean government will fall before the end of this year. Many others regard this prediction as unduly optimistic. The truth is that when tyrannical regimes fall peacefully, they do so with great suddenness and against the predictions of almost all area experts and foreign policy elites. George W. Bush has accelerated that outcome in the Middle East: It's impossible to imagine the peaceful uprising in Lebanon and the swift departure of Syrian forces from the country they had ruled for decades without the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime and the holding of free elections in Iraq last January 30. Now it seems that Bush is pursuing a policy designed less to accommodate the North Korean regime than to create the conditions in which it may fall.
If that analysis is correct, the administration also needs to give serious thought to what will happen afterward. The South Korean government is wary of reunification for very good reasons: North Korea's primitive economic condition and the fact that its people have been utterly isolated from outside media and information about the rest of the world mean that reunification will be very much more costly and difficult than the reunification of Germany—and that has had negative economic consequences that persist today after 15 years. If George W. Bush seriously envisions the peaceful end of the Pyongyang regime, as his championing of Aquariums of Pyongyang suggests, his administration needs to think seriously about what comes next.
Char
The European Union will offer North Korea a deal to prolong the regime beyond 2005.
This must be a typo. Everyone's heard about the AI report that says the U.S. is the "world's worst violator of human rights." North Korea must be second.
LOL, by the way things are going, the EU won't exist beyond 2005.
I'd call it nationalistic blindness in the form of so-called "common Koreity".
No.
I think you've pointed out one of reasons a lot of us will be delighted when the N. Korean government falls -- it will let us reduce our military presence in S. Korea, and give us less exposure to their ingratitude.
I assume it will rejoin south korea after the fall, and bankrupt the government.
They are following the cycle of "Anacyclosis" from slavery to freedom and back to slavery which the historian Polybius described over 2,000 years ago.
Maybe the two Koreas can be united and progress will be made. It will be a long, hard road but the Korean Peninsula should not be divided.
South Korea will have plenty of extra parking to its north.
Islam will break out.
Millions of North Koreans will eat again.
From their lips to God's ear.
ol hoghead
Aquariums is a powerful book, and should be read by all. The descriptions of the work camps are harrowing -- families having to raise rats secretly in order to survive, the hateful treatment of the children by the indifferent teachers and guards. The author describes his return to South Korea, and his confrontation w/ Marxist South Korean college students, and these useful idiots refuse to believe what is going on north of the border. They fantasize and valorize Kim Jong Il and his regime, and simply will not accept any direct evidence that contradicts their marxist utopia.
The reason why so many South Koreans are ungrateful is because ungratefullness is natural. Few people want to be indebted to anyone else, especially when it comes to morality. If someone feels indebted to someone, the debt is very personal--like someone saying "I'm indebted to my father" or "to my wife". This is in a way reflexive back on the speaker because of the connection--sure, my father/wife is more honorable than me for raising me/loving me, but because I am that person's son/spouse, therefore I partake in that honor in some way. But when it is by nature impersonal--feeling indebted to people of a different nationality and language, to tax payers and soldier families thousands of miles away, shame sinks in. There is no personal connection to it, no personal honor to be salvaged at all.
So cognitive dissonance sets in, and these Germans/French/South Koreans/US Leftists refuse to believe that any stranger could be higher on the moral or spiritual food chain than themselves, so they must rationalize reasons for why the top dog isn't all that and should be taken down a couple of notches. Up is down, black is white, and George Bush is the real Hitler and Castro/Saddam/Kim are the real saints. It passes off the guilt for being indebted to others who sacrificed their lives and livelihoods to protect their nation, and it makes them feel superior to those benefactors as well by inverting the values. Human nature sucks.
I think you have it. The problems Germany had in assimilating the GDR will look like child's play compared to what South Korea will have to deal with.
I'd be interested in your thoughts...
The same reason US students protest, ANSWER, etc. They all have the same roots and Foundations supporting them. There truly IS a vast leftwing conspiracy. They're part of 'The Justice Prevention Team'.
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