I've watched a ridiculously retarded documentary about North Korea. I cannot believe how dumb and malicious some people are - and they get air time. I'm embarrassed National Geographic sponsored the thing.
The documentary is by some intrepid female journalist who manages to stick a camera crew to a doctor going to help people with eye cataract removal in North Korea. They use spy cameras to film the streets and the monuments and the people, constantly narrating how terrible the place is and how evil the leader and how terrorized the people and how horrid conditions that their medical and school system is in.
Seriously, at this point I would shake Kim Jong-il's hand if I met him in a hallway.
"The worst human rights violation in human history..."
Yes. Because there has never been any wrong doing in American civil wars or at all on American civil soil *cough*slavery?!*cough*. There has never been a nasty civil unrest in any African country, which is for all intents and purposes a paradise on Earth? Nobody ever made Spain and Catalonia a bad place to be in at some point and there was never any such thing as an Gulags in Russia? OrMuslims? In Tehran?
People seem to be blissfully unaware, or simply never bothered to pay attention during primary school history classes, that one the other side of every communistic regime, there is always - FEUDAL era. For those impressed by iPads and Chunky Monkey ice-cream - feudal era means 95% of people are so poor that they at times need to eat their own children to survive, and are birth-to-death defined by their status, whereas 5% are drowning in wealth and get all the privileges, which they then abuse and maltreat in pathological greed for supremacy. Born in a feudal time, a woman would have been a grandmother by the age she now finishes college and the only happines she would ever be able to find would be if she was lucky in marriage with a good spouse and a small farm with a goat somewhere. There would be/was not ANY education, health system or legal clemency for those 95%.
Then along comes a wacky dictator. I have seen this happen with my own eyes in the case of former Moroccan king, for example, a typical communistic monarch, as ironic as that sounds. The same thing happened with Castro in Cuba, Mao in China and the Kims in Korea (not to mention the French a bit of a time ago.). It has also of course happened to my homeland with Tito. (Also a much beloved dictator who set remarkable foundation for a well established country that we now managed to fuck up in less than 2o years of independence.) They swept away the rich and the powerful with one brutal wave, and said: EVERYONE deserves a chance. Born the poorest of the poor, female, whatever, deserves schooling and medical care and legal system benefits. And a job and whom they chose to marry. If you try to sabotage this vision, sorry mate, no time for lazy, mean or greedy creeps now. Off with your head.
Of course the American documentary stresses one magnificently idiotic fact: that there is very little of everything - that hospitals are very poor and that the economy is yet to take off... Funny how Americans seem to think that a poor country is an evil country. Like, they've brought this onto themselves for banishing the internet! Has anyone ever seen Nepal? Their Royal Palace is more poorly built than an average American barn - but that does not make it an evil, or ugly or at all an unhappy place. Nepalese people are some of the happiest I've ever met! I loved the line: "It is not true health care in N. Korea is free: there simply isn't any!" That's an excellent line coming from an American. Jealous much? I seem to recall another documentary in which people who cannot afford health care in the US are left to lye in the street?
Without the dictator, without the fear, people cannot focus. They cannot go from being farmers and slaves to aristocracy and clergy into being normal, independent individuals. Of course when you look at one man now, he suffers, but when you look at a nation, perhaps in 50 or a hundred years, it can go from the dark ages to what Singapore and Hong Kong are now. It takes time, it isn't easy, but that's how it happens. The Kims had to do it all alone - they had very little support, nobody ever just gave them anything. But they said: schools, clinics, police protection, no more status shunning, no more gender shunning... They may not be shiny and posh, but they are trying. The state of mind that we, who have done this before or who never had to do it, because we just invaded some nice place and killed all the natives away, have now, is a product of cultural evolution. People so easily forget not the whole world was glorious Vienna 300 years ago. N. Korea is nowhere near a happy place to want to own an Mp3 player, but it is on the fast (their famous) 12-lane highway to being an actual 21.century country to be.
Shame on them for not having fast food restaurants and beauty pageants! Shame! Honestly!
