Time to save the world from North Korea
About a year ago, one of our national papers had a nighttime photo of the Korean Peninsula taken from space on its front page. It was one of those photos that are definitely worth a thousand words, and then some.
South Korea, in the bottom half of the photo, was lit up like a Christmas tree. It looked … vibrant. You could easily imagine businesses and homes, malls and schools, restaurants and coffeeshops. You could tell, just by the lights from 200 miles up, that things were happening there.
But it wasn’t hard to tell where the border between South Korea and North Korea was. It started where the lights stopped. Everything north of the lights was in darkness.
It was one of those photos – the ones where you’re never quite the same after you see them. Like the Falling Man photo, a single frame capturing an unknown man’s final seconds as he fell to his death from a burning World Trade Centre tower. It’s a powerful photo. A close-up shot of the glass and steel tower served as the background. A man falling - head down, legs up, hands at his sides - was front and centre. Seconds later the man was dead. Minutes later the building was rubble. But after seven-and-a-half years and untold thousands of images of that day, you mention 9/11 and I see that photo in my head. No other image has ever conveyed the enormous sense of loss of that day so completely to me as that one.
I was moved much the same way when I saw that photo of North Korea surrounded by light and shrouded in darkness. That photo opened my eyes and for the first time, I realized the country’s hopelessness, its poverty of spirit and how it’s being held hostage by a wacko.
Kim Jong-Il, the country’s absolute dictator, is a paranoid madman worried the rest of the world is out to get him and desperate for nuclear weapons to protect himself.
Meanwhile, the population of 22 million is not only in the physical dark, but also in the dark intellectually about the world outside their borders. Information and news is tightly controlled, so much so a National Geographic documenatary stated North Koreans are so out of touch, few even know people have been to the moon.
Over the years, some have managed to defect, bringing accounts of concentration camps, rapes, murders, torture and other atrocities with them.
During the North Korean nuclear crisis of 1994, which almost brought the world to the verge of nuclear war, Kim Jong-Il vowed he would “destroy the world” rather than lose a war.
Well, here we are again, 15 years later, same madman, same situation.
Who knows? Maybe he’ll press the big red button this time and send us all to blazes.
But where are the great crusaders of the world now that there really are weapons of mass destruction being produced by a leader who spends half his day thinking he’s a god and the other half planning to send the world back to the Stone Age?
Oh, yeah, they’re enforcing the rule of law in a country where only a few days ago the government made it legal for a husband to rape his wife. Sure, the government changed its tune a few days later when the whole world went into an uproar over it, but for a few days, the Coalition of the Willing was protecting the right to rape.
Your tax dollars at work.
Why don’t the bigwigs invade North Korea, put Kim Jong-Il out and democracy in?
If there’s been a better reason for military action in the last 60 years, I haven’t heard of it.
Running around in the desert protecting the legal rights of rapists and turning big rocks into little ones while a madman sits in the dark plotting to set the world on fire is pretty crazy.
Looks like the lunatics are running the nuthouse.
Again.
South Korea, in the bottom half of the photo, was lit up like a Christmas tree. It looked … vibrant. You could easily imagine businesses and homes, malls and schools, restaurants and coffeeshops. You could tell, just by the lights from 200 miles up, that things were happening there.
But it wasn’t hard to tell where the border between South Korea and North Korea was. It started where the lights stopped. Everything north of the lights was in darkness.
It was one of those photos – the ones where you’re never quite the same after you see them. Like the Falling Man photo, a single frame capturing an unknown man’s final seconds as he fell to his death from a burning World Trade Centre tower. It’s a powerful photo. A close-up shot of the glass and steel tower served as the background. A man falling - head down, legs up, hands at his sides - was front and centre. Seconds later the man was dead. Minutes later the building was rubble. But after seven-and-a-half years and untold thousands of images of that day, you mention 9/11 and I see that photo in my head. No other image has ever conveyed the enormous sense of loss of that day so completely to me as that one.
I was moved much the same way when I saw that photo of North Korea surrounded by light and shrouded in darkness. That photo opened my eyes and for the first time, I realized the country’s hopelessness, its poverty of spirit and how it’s being held hostage by a wacko.
Kim Jong-Il, the country’s absolute dictator, is a paranoid madman worried the rest of the world is out to get him and desperate for nuclear weapons to protect himself.
Meanwhile, the population of 22 million is not only in the physical dark, but also in the dark intellectually about the world outside their borders. Information and news is tightly controlled, so much so a National Geographic documenatary stated North Koreans are so out of touch, few even know people have been to the moon.
Over the years, some have managed to defect, bringing accounts of concentration camps, rapes, murders, torture and other atrocities with them.
During the North Korean nuclear crisis of 1994, which almost brought the world to the verge of nuclear war, Kim Jong-Il vowed he would “destroy the world” rather than lose a war.
Well, here we are again, 15 years later, same madman, same situation.
Who knows? Maybe he’ll press the big red button this time and send us all to blazes.
But where are the great crusaders of the world now that there really are weapons of mass destruction being produced by a leader who spends half his day thinking he’s a god and the other half planning to send the world back to the Stone Age?
Oh, yeah, they’re enforcing the rule of law in a country where only a few days ago the government made it legal for a husband to rape his wife. Sure, the government changed its tune a few days later when the whole world went into an uproar over it, but for a few days, the Coalition of the Willing was protecting the right to rape.
Your tax dollars at work.
Why don’t the bigwigs invade North Korea, put Kim Jong-Il out and democracy in?
If there’s been a better reason for military action in the last 60 years, I haven’t heard of it.
Running around in the desert protecting the legal rights of rapists and turning big rocks into little ones while a madman sits in the dark plotting to set the world on fire is pretty crazy.
Looks like the lunatics are running the nuthouse.
Again.
posted by Street Wise Guy | 1:55 PM
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