Re: Sad

FYI, Kim Jong-Il did indeed turn away World Food Program workers, opting instead to let the politically expendable classes of North Korean society (btw, what is it with these communist putative “classless societies” always sprouting up classes?). Kim Jong-Il’s cost-benefit analysis concluded (rationally, I’m afraid) that infiltration of outside information and influence was a bigger threat to his regime than letting the North Korean lower-class starve to death.

The legitimacy of Kim Jong Il’s North Korea hinges on maintaining a hermetic seal with the outside world in order to uphold the Big Lie™ that North Korea is a) under threat from evil foreign imperialists who want to kill all the North Korans and b) still better off than the rest of the world. Letting a bunch of foreigners in with bushels of food to spare and a clear desire to help North Koreans undercuts both of those pillars on which Kim Jong Il’s regime rests.

Another fun fact: North Korea is the only industrialized nation in history to have suffered mass famine.

Meanwhile, China continues to destroy any remains of the soft power it had so deftly accumulated up until the Tibet debacle by refusing to use its considerable influence over the Burmese junta to get them to accept food aid–instead insisting on the primacy of the military junta’s “sovereignty.”

I wonder if, a century ago, people ever thought we would reach a world of such stunning moral extremes of high and low that we would be in situations in which Western countries were begging other countries to let us give them food.