RES: a trip to North Korea

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Apr 22 22:52:58 PDT 2000


At 6:38 PM -0700 4/22/00, Dennis R Redmond wrote:
>On Sat, 22 Apr 2000, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > No, I'd criticize North Korea more freely, *if* I were a North
> > Korean, but I'm *not*.
>
>I'll believe that the precise moment you can find me a North
>Korean who openly criticized their own government and lived
>to tell about it.
>
>As a general principle, First World radicals shouldn't nail their
>flags to the masts of Third World one-party states of whatever political
>provenance. That's not our job.

A non-response if there is one. I suppose you don't find it unseemly for an American or a Japanese to ridicule the relative poverty of North Korea while laughing at the idea of reparations as a "fantasy." We sure do live in incommensurate moral universes, it appears to me. How postmodern.

You, Doug, Brad, Elizabeth, etc. are free to prattle on whatever comes to your mind about North Korea (or anything else for that matter), while it has your precious attention momentarily, that is; you have nothing much to say about it anyway, though, except that it is a "poor Stalinist" country with a "cult of personality" (wow, thanks for Big News -- even the CIA & the State Department are more informative than you are, I must say. Hey, there's nothing easier than criticizing America's Official Enemy in America -- why not be more creative and come up with a real howler?). But it won't make anything better for any North Korean; it will only reinforce the long-standing reactionary U.S. government policy toward North Korea and other poor nations (especially Cuba, Iraq, Yugoslavia, etc. that are under its sanctions). I suppose that's the foremost political duty of American "leftists." What America does to the rest of the world, if they ever disobey, is to napalm them first and laugh at their scarred faces later. In the case of North Korea, this happened literally, not just figuratively. I'm afraid that the collective memory of American "leftists" got also napalmed away during the Korean War.

All in all, one of the dumbest threads on LBO. When this thread goes kaput, North Korea, I'm sure, will once again fade out of your attention (until next time you feel like announcing Big News or North Korea goes post-Socialist, whichever is earlier).

Yoshie



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