Look, y'all know me...and you know that I'm one who argues that you should be able to do whatever the hell you want to do with your own life. But...but damn...
You know your situation is pretty damn desperate when you're trying to flee into communist China.
But that's precisely how this story, from the Sunday Times, begins. And there's more:
According to exiles, North Korean agents in Beijing and Ulan Bator are frantically selling assets to raise cash — an important sign, says one activist, because “the secret police can always smell the crisis coming before anybody else”.
I find this heartening as well. I mean, Ulan Bator? Come on, man! Genghis Khan's day was some time ago. Maybe I've missed something, but it's been a while since Mongolia was a regional power, or any other kind of power, am I not right? Not that I resent their climb out of communist-induced economic doldrums, for indeed I do not. It just brings a smile to my face to think of the Pyongyang regime as that desperate.
And that would be a big, big smile. We're speaking of a regime which has kidnapped Japanese people in order to have them teach their own secret agents the Japanese language and culture, which has or is working toward missiles pointed at American targets, and which has reduced its own populace to eating tree bark -- when they can get it. Yeah, you could say I'm glad to see it on the ropes.
For I most emphatically do not believe -- to any degree -- that there is any value in international stability. Not in today's climate, for would I not prefer to witness an end to the mullahs' regime in Iran, to the vicious dictatorship in Myanmar, to the so-unjustly-feted Castro?
That Christmas season of 1989 was quite memorable, wasn't it? Angry Romanians put their vile Stalinist oppressor Ceasescu (and his wife) against a wall, on television, and shot them both dead. I had no problem with that: the violence depicted in Saving Private Ryan and in Black Hawk Down tweaked me more.
Let's not forget Beavis and Butt-Head. The violence depicted therein bothers me unfathomably more than what was shown to have happened to the Ceasescus.
So I hope Kim gets it, and soon. And painfully, and in public. On television and on the internet, if possible. Sure, there are others -- I've mentioned, in this post alone, those running the concentration camp shows in Myanmar, in Cuba, in Iran, in China itself, to which desperate North Koreans are desperately fleeing -- deserving the same fate. But I think it would be a touching February 16, for lovers of liberty, if Kim Jong-il ingested some slow-moving lead on his birthday.
(Hat tip to Paul Hsieh at NoodleFood, who, legitimate practicing physician that he is, is not responsible for anything which could be read as bloodlust in this oh-so-dispassionate post.)
Posted by Craig Ceely at January 30, 2005 10:06 PM