Let’s Stop Pretending North Korea is a Normal Country

Lets+Stop+Pretending+North+Korea+is+a+Normal+Country

Michael Ragnow, Staff Writer

With President Trump and Kim Jong Un currently arranging a North Korea-South Korea-U.S. summit, the world’s eyes are fixed on the Korean peninsula and the DPRK is on its best behavior as it prepares to wager its position with the military titan that is the United States.

Korea has long been a hotspot for geopolitical debate and argument. Kim Jong Un has been working diligently to try and scare the South Koreans and the West into easing economic and political restrictions, by testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to demonstrate their military might. But Kim seems to be easing off the scare tactics and leading to a new method. Charm.

The Olympic Games are a perfect opportunity for diplomatic relations between usually tense countries. The PyeongChang Winter Olympics gave the “Democratic People’s Republic” of Korea the chance to try and trick the global community into thinking it’s a normal, diplomatic, friendly country.

It’s not. It is the most corrupt, evil regime on Earth.

The Kim family runs Gulags. North Korea’s people starve, and are shot on sight if they try to defect. North Korea has effectively a 100% incarceration rate. Kim Jong Un feeds his workers crystal meth to speed up production on his pet project skyscrapers.

But the DPRK’s “charm offensive” seems to have worked on a few Westerners, specifically those in the American media.

During the first weekend of the games, mainstream media outlets released a number of articles needlessly shilling for the North Korean dynasty.

Titles like “Kim Jong Un’s sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics” and “North Korea is winning the Olympics and it’s not because of sports” from CNN, paint the picture that the Atlanta based news organization is fine with willfully ignoring the atrocities of the Kim family and patting them on the back for an attempt at diplomacy.

The first article mentioned features Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong. In their headline, CNN conveniently doesn’t include Kim’s title, Deputy Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Worker’s Party.They also only mention it only once in the story. Once. It should be noted that it is mentioned explicitly, early in the article that her rank is one of the few things known about her.

The article goes on to compare Kim to the likes of Ivanka Trump. Balbina Hwang, a quoted professor in the CNN article says Kim’s presence proves the DPRK isn’t a “crazy, weird former Cold War state” and that it “has young women that are capable and are the future leadership” but that isn’t true. At all.

North Korea is, objectively, the last remnant of the Cold War. Diplomatic and economic relations were opened with China under president Nixon in the seventies, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the U.S.S.R fell apart in the nineties, and even Fidel Castro, dictator of Cuba, died in 2016.

The Korean Peninsula is the only part of the world that is still held back by the Communist/Capitalist struggle that emerged in the 1950s. It’s important to remember that the Korean War is technically still going on, the 1953 armistice being the closest thing ever to peace. North Korea remains the only part of the world besides Chernobyl, Ukraine trapped in a Cold War hellscape.

On the topic of women in the future leadership of North Korea, first of all, I’m personally hoping there is no future leadership in North Korea. Secondly, the only reason Kim Yo Jong has any leadership is because she’s the brother of the country’s dictator. A good example of the treatment of the average North Korean woman is the cheer squads at the Winter Games.

In the Reuters article covering the cheer squad, the women had bodyguards blocking people from getting close to them in the Olympic stands. According to the New York Post, the women are forced to sleep with high ranking members of North Korea’s ruling party. By all accounts the women of North Korea are starving, sex slaves, or dead.

President Trump is foolishly trying to negotiate with a man, Kim Jong Un, whose main goal is to essentially spread his evil regime to the other half of his peninsula, and he must tread carefully. Not exactly his strong suit.

As much as the President is at odds with CNN, their coverage of North Korea at the Olympic games is oddly working in his favor. As CNN continues to normalize North Korea and ignore the despicable actions of its ruling family, the more the nation as a whole, even Trump’s detractors who make up a sizeable chunk of CNN’s audience, will be comfortable with the federal government approaching North Korea like any other country, which it should not.

If both Trump’s hardcore supporters are fully behind his decision to meet with Kim in Trump’s usual, loud, rambunctious fashion, and CNN is simultaneously helping to sway Trump’s critics that North Korea isn’t as bad as it truly is, then the loudest voices on both sides are failing to acknowledge the real problems an average diplomatic meeting with the DPRK.

Trump is not graceful, careful, or intelligent enough in the realm of foreign policy to conduct this meeting. As much as he pats himself of the back for being the master of deal making, this is something he personally should not touch.