Click On The Links. You Know You Want To
October 10, 2006
Stop Signs And The Mother Teresa In The Mirror
October 10, 2006
The Anchoress has a great post, Sorry So Quiet that is a must read. There are lots of links, of course, but in the ‘money shot,’ she quotes a column by Rod Dreher (link from Anchoress) that discusses the recent tragic events in the Pennsylvania Amish community:
“…the Amish community, which buried five of its little girls this week, is collecting money to help the widow and children of Charles Carl Roberts IV, the man who executed their own children before taking his own life. A serene Amish midwife told NBC News on Tuesday that this is normal for them. It’s what Jesus would have them do.
“This is imitation of Christ at its most naked,” journalist Tom Shachtman, who has chronicled Amish life, told The New York Times . “If anybody is going to turn the other cheek in our society, it’s going to be the Amish. I don’t want to denigrate anybody else who says they’re imitating Christ, but the Amish walk the walk as much as they talk the talk.”
I don’t know about you, but that kind of faith is beyond comprehension. I’m the kind of guy who will curse under my breath at the jerk who cuts me off in traffic on the way home from church. And look at those humble farmers, putting Christians like me to shame. ”
And me.
The Anchoress posts a necessary stop sign on the highway of life, one that points to a real truth: Mother Teresa’s come in all flavors and varieties.
Look! There’s another one, in the mirror.
Letters From The Left
October 10, 2006
Letter from the looney lefty du jour, to Kim Jung Il.
To His Excellency Marshal Kim Jong Il,
Please allow me to send you my most sincere of greetings on the upcoming February 16th 2006 occasion of your birth.
I am Ziad Shaker elJishi, Chairman of the North American Committee Against Zionism and Imperialism (NACAZAI), and an Arab Palestinian refugee currently residing in the United States of America.
For the last several years, I have been active in supporting the DPRK, because of my firm convictions in support of socialism and against imperialism and Zionism. The Korean revolution, through my numerous conversations and recent August visit, has demonstrated to me that it is not only genuine in its efforts, but further-more, the most advanced outpost for anti-imperialism in the world today.
My people instinctively and unconsciously recognize the correctness of your Songun politics which places priority in military affairs in all circumstances. My Arab people, too see the way of the army in our era of fierce anti-imperialist class struggle, with a history of blood and martyrdom which runs through Algeria to Lebanon, from Iraqi resistance to Syrian preparations for defense, through their ongoing work for great national unity and finally to my own beloved Palestine.
While you long for Korean unity, I long for Arab unity. Like the Korean people under your care, my Arab people long for unification and independence. The lessons you have propagated against flunkeyism, by calling for preserving the Juche and national character of the revolution and synthesizing the people’s cultural and historical identity simultaneously with the anti-imperialist class struggle under the banner of ‘nationalist in form and socialist in content’, is nothing short of genuineness creatively putting its pulse on the needs and desires of the great masses of periphery.
Dear Marshal Kim Jong Il, I believe that the Great Leader Kim Il Sung won a decisive victory for the entire masses resisting imperialism and Zionism, and struggling to build socialism and independence, when he denounced flunkeyism and following the firm principles of Juche demanded the rights of each people of this earth to make the revolution organically, according to their own history, culture, national identity, and concrete conditions rather than being dictated to by foreign powers.
I have read historic interviews from the Great Leader comparing the historic lessons of the Korean People’s anti-Japanese Guerrillas to the military struggle of my own Arab Palestinian masses against the Zionist entity’s settler-colonialist usurpers. These words warmed my heart.
From visiting your country in August of last year, I believe, that like the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, you too are a brilliant and gifted man, a beacon of light for the oppressed and a military and political theoretician unmatched by any of today’s other regimes, most of which rule their own masses at the point of the gun rather than rallying the masses to point their guns onto America and all other enemies of the people [emp- SC&A].
The signs of military preparedness of the Korean People’s Army are everywhere. Never have I seen such a fierce unwillingness to reject concessions of national sovereignty, and principled recognition of the role of the gun. This lesson of army-based Songun Politics and the Juche idea which really brings the role of your masses into full play, are lessons I have begun to study intensely and propagate widely.
I have been lending part of my time and efforts to the Songun Politics Study Group (USA) and the US Solidarity Committee to Support the AINDF and the South Korean People’s Struggle, including making available various documents I received in Pyongyang in my native Arabic tongue as well as documenting the popular foundations of the DPRK Tanean work system.
You have truly done a magnificent job leading the north Korean people and acting as a beacon of light for the oppressed every where.
I wish you a splendid 64th birthday and many victories, in health and in happiness, ahead on the road of Songun Politics of Juche revolution.
— Ziad Shaker elJishi, Chairman of the North American Committee Against Zionism and Imperialism (NACAZAI)
Vice Chairman of the Songun Politics Study Group (USA)
Vice Chairman of the US Solidarity Committee to Support the AINDF and the South Korean People’s Struggle
PyongBang
October 10, 2006
Memories, all alone in the moonlight…
JIMMY CARTER: … what the North Koreans were waiting for was some treatment of their exalted leader with respect and a direct communication….I think he was quite ready. I didn’t have to argue with him. When I outlined the specific points that I had been informed in Washington was the administration’s position, I presented them to him. And with very little equivocation, he agreed…. I think it’s all roses now…. I’ve known that there were people in Washington who were skeptical about any direct dealing with the North Koreans. They were already condemned as outlaws. Kim Il-sung was already condemned as a criminal…. And it was kind of like a miracle and almost an incredible statement that Kim Il-sung gave me in response to my proposals, and it was hard to believe….
JUDY WOODRUFF: …. Are you absolutely persuaded that the North Koreans are going to honor this agreement, that while the talks are going on that it’s not just a matter of buying time on the part of the North Koreans, that they will not secretly pursue the program they were pursuing earlier, nuclear program?
JIMMY CARTER: Judy, I’m convinced. But I said this when I got back from North Korea, and people said that I was naive or gullible and so forth. I don’t think I was. In my opinion, this was one of those perfect agreements where both sides won and got what they wanted and there were no-nobody blinked, nobody had to yield…. I think the most important lesson is that we should not ever avoid direct talks, direct conversations, direct discussions and negotiations with the main person in a despised or misunderstood or condemned society who could actually resolve the issue. And we went through this for ten years when nobody in our government would meet or talk to Yasir Arafat. The Norwegians did, and they were the ones that brought the peace agreement last summer….
Jimmy Carter, interview with CNN (upon his return from North Korea), June 22, 1994
We noted in Time To Say Goodbye that
Diplomats do not solve problems, they effect useful compromise. That is nice when we are dealing with Canada, France or Luxembourg. Diplomats are ineffective when comes to dealing with evil, because evil must be defeated, not compromised with. Evil must be addressed, head on and relentlessly. If you are unsure about what is and isn’t real evil, you are indeed an idiot.
North Korea is a perpetual terrorist regime. As we extinguish one crisis, we understand that we are on the way to the next. It is also important to understand that each crisis posed by terrorists and terrorist states, escalates. By their very nature, those acts of terror have to escalate, if they are to continue to terrorize civilized governments and populations.
Remarkably, your mother was right about a few things. Here’s the way the real world works: You really are known by the company you keep.
North Korea’s ‘friend’s’ include virtually every dysfunctional and immoral regime in the world. North Kores’s closest ‘friend’ is China, a nation where the ’seven cent solution’ (the cost of a single bullet) to the back of the head keeps prison spending in check and executions so that organs for transplant may sold on black market, are an ongoing problem.
In fact, as those who insist we establish a ‘dialogue’ with North Korea, that very regime has been at the fore of arms proliferation, selling nuclear and missile expertise to the highest bidder. No amount of ‘dialogue’ will cause the North Koreans to ’see the light.’ They know very well the difference between right and wrong. They have deliberately chosen to starve their nation so that they might field the world’s 4th largest military and they have deliberately rebuffed the civilized world with threats of catastrophe.
It should come as no surprise that North Korea has for decades, counted among it’s allies terrorists and rogue nations and regimes that openly call for the destruction of other nations and entire peoples.
Jimmy Carter, like Neville Chamberlain before him, believed he had negotiated his way out of a crisis. Both those leaders did not see that the regimes they were ‘negotiating’ with never had any intention of pursuing any agenda other than the evil they had already publicly embraced (we are hard pressed to find any example of real evil being abandoned as a result of dialogue).
We have noted in The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, that
We are presuming that the accepted notions of ‘conflict resolution’ can be applied with successful results if only we tried hard enough. That notion is absurd. We can settle disputes, even wars, with opponents- societies and cultures that share the same values, notwithstanding the underlying conflict.
An enemy is someone with whom we, as individuals and as a community, we have very fundamental differences. An enemy has values and beliefs, that are very different than out own. An enemy wants to deprive us of our beliefs and values, because that enemy finds our beliefs repulsive or threatening to their own.
There are people who believe that enemies are opponents- that is, they can reasoned with and rationalized with and common ground can be had. Believing that an enemy can be an opponent is what led much of Europe to appease Hitler, in the beginning. Hitler, it was believed, was after all a European. Surely he could be reasoned with. Surely he would respond to the rational idea that war was catastrophic.
As much of civilized Europe was to learn, they were seriously in error.
The North Koreans are enemies- not just of the United States, but of the entire civilized world. There is a reason Pyongyang does not count any European or free nations as allies. That said, and as we have noted, there is a reason they do count repressive, oppressive and similarly dysfunctional regimes as ‘friends.’
If we want to avoid a real ‘Pyongbang,’ the North Korean regime must be dealt with.
Part Two, in which we discuss how to deal with North Korea, can be found here.
