Oh, those were the days!

American Digest:

If anybody still has any doubts about the degenerative effect a long, strong dose of Communism can have on the human brain, let him read the following “news dispatch” from Cuba:

Cuba Implements Program to Fight Effects of Climate Change | Cuba News Headlines. Cuban Daily News (CDN is of course a state news agency and has to be wery, wery careful about what it says and how it says it. As a result it has become an outlet skilled in saying nothing.)

Cuba began to implement a comprehensive program to face the consequences of climate change, mainly regarding the mitigation and adaptation to its negative effects caused by the developed world’s consumerism.

Well, all one can say, Fidelistas anonymous, is it’s about time! It’s nice to see your “planning” kick in just when the rest of the world is chucking the scam and moving on. But in case we’re missing some hidden point, tell us again what’s going on down Havana way…

Cuba began to implement a comprehensive program to face the consequences of climate change, mainly regarding the mitigation and adaptation to its negative effects caused by the developed world’s consumerism.

Okay, you just had to say it twice because you meant it, or because you were so bored by it that you couldn’t stand to proofread it? Or because you came in at noon and it’s now half-past and you need to break for lunch?

But now that we know you have “a plan,” please tell us what’s happening with it:

“One of the main current actions is the implementation and supervision of the plan,” Gisela Alonso Dominguez, president of the Environment Agency at the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment, told ACN.

I see. So the main action is to implement and supervise the plan. Good plan! That Gisela at the Agency of the Ministry is one real slave driver when it comes to goals, goals, GOALS! What’s more, she’s all about the “hard work:”

She added that work is being done to update and improve the current environmental legislation adapted to the Revolution’s policy that aims at preserving the environment.

Whew! I’m plumb tuckered out at the very thought of all this effort. What could be more productive than updating and improving existing legislation? Nothing? Not sugar cane harvesting. Not cigar rolling. Not the broadening of the nation-wide prostitution industry. After all, we’re talking about “preserving the environment.” You’d think that just letting the nation rot for around 50 years would naturally preserve the environment since there’s no new development in housing, business, and industry to tax the environment, but a Communist system never leaves natural ruin to chance when it can come up with policies that speed it along. Of course before there can be any updating or revision of policies and legislation, you need to have the one thing you can never have enough of — STUDIES!

Nearly 50 years after a botched US-directed invasion of Cuba, the communist nation said Saturday it is holding a military exercise next week to boost preparedness against any future US attack.“It is a necessity of the first order given the political-military situation that now defines relations between Cuba and the empire,” Major General Leonardo Andollo warned, referring to the United States.

He told the official Granma newspaper that the “Bastion-2009″ exercises will “raise the deterrent capacity to prevent a military confrontation, under the principle that there is no better way to win a war than by avoiding it.”

Well, they do have a lot of classic cars down there. Except I think they consider them heaps.

So said current Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus, when asked about who still believed in communism in the mid-’80s.

This is part one of a five part interview.

People forget how things were. How a government built a wall to keep its citizens from fleeing it evil awfulness, then shot them in the back if they tried to escape.

When Reagan called the Soviet Union evil, the intellectual elites gasped at his supposed lack of sophistication. Why, we had to get along with that regime…it was just so, so undiplomatic.

Yeah.

Bush got the elites in a tizzy when he called North Korea part of an axis of evil.

What else do you call a regime that let 600,000 to 2.5 million of its own people starve while its leaders got fat? Misguided?

The Nov. 2  New Yorker has a dispassionate account of how it all happened. Here, from their abstract of the article:

When the writer first met Mrs. Song, in 2004, she (Mrs. Song) had been living in Seoul, South Korea, for two years. Mrs. Song said she left North Korea only for her daughter and remained a true believer until the day she left. Even after three members of her family died of starvation, Mrs. Song believed that North Korea was the greatest nation on earth. Mrs. Song used to go twice a week to a food-distribution center near her apartment, in the coastal city of Chongjin.

Mrs. Song would hand over her ration book, a small sum of money, tickets from the garment factory, and the clerk would calculate her entitlements: seven hundred grams each per day for her and her husband, three hundred grams for her mother-in-law, and four hundred for each school-aged child living at home. For all its rhetoric about self-sufficiency, North Korea was dependent on the generosity of its neighbors.

By the early nineteen-nineties, the Russians, impatient with North Korea’s failure to repay loans, raised their prices for food, fuel, and raw materials. Enduring hunger became part of one’s patriotic duty. When the public-distribution system was cut off, people tapped their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. Mrs. Song was nearly fifty when the food supply ran out. Describes the businesses Mrs. Song tried to start over the years, including, tofu making, pig farming, rice trading, and cookie baking. In 1995, during a trip back from the coast with four large backpacks stuffed with rice, Mrs. Song survived a train derailment that may have killed hundreds of people. Tells about the death from starvation of Mrs. Song’s husband, Chang-bo. By 1998, it is estimated, between six hundred thousand and two million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine, as much as ten per cent of the population. Mrs. Song adapted quickly to South Korea. She was by no means an apologist for the North Korean regime, but she did profess a certain nostalgia for the idealism that used to propel her out of bed early to dust the portrait of Kim Il-sung.

Her husband had been a 200 pound robust man with a paunch, something rare in North Korea.

Malnourished, his skin began to flake off. His last words, with his mind gone, were, “Let’s go out to a restaurant and have a fine meal.”

To this day, when she eats at a restaurant, she tears up at the memory.

Obama found time to fly to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics, but he’s voting “not present” for the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Abe Greenwald explains in Commentary

…don’t hold your breath waiting for Barack Obama to change his mind and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama sees it as his job to move us (as in the people of planet Earth) past the “the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.” That’s how he put it in his UN address a few weeks ago.

The Cold War is not merely ancient history to our president; its memory constitutes an obstacle to a “reset” with Russia and to his vision of a mutually collaborative future for all nations. Let’s not dwell on the past — too many skeletons in the imperial closet. A communist world versus a free one, you say? Don’t be so dramatic. Washington and Moscow were the Hatfields and McCoys, fighting so long they forgot what they were fighting about. No need to rub the Kremlin’s face in defeat. Putin might get sore and stop telling us what to do next.

As for Germany and Merkel, Obama covered that at the UN too: “alignments of nations” rooted in that same ancient Cold War “make no sense.” Why give a friendly European democracy the false impression that we’re on its side? What would all the unfriendly autocratic regimes think?

For Obama, the 40th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall presents a spectacular opportunity: to place himself, and America as he sees it, outside the constraints of history, where the important work of Utopianism can be properly undertaken. He wouldn’t miss missing it for the world.

What an inspiring fellow, that Chairman Mao — he killed nearly 70 million of his own people, but by golly, he stood up to the man!

Two weeks ago, we watched Katyn, the Polish film about Soviet atrocities — murdering 22,000 Poles and burying them in a mass grave in the Katyn forest — which they denied until 1990.

The film opens with a great scene: two masses of Poles converge on a bridge. One tells the other to run because the Germans are coming. The other tells them to run because the Soviets are coming.

Poland was caught in the middle and abandoned by France and England.

For us, this is distant history. But to Poles, it’s still raw. That Obama chose that day to announce plans to leave them in the lurch vis-a-vis missile defense attests to either his administration’s historical ignorance or callousness.

Arthur Chrenkoff:

September 17 is one of these orphan anniversaries that no one wants to claim. It is too shameful to celebrate for some and too uncomfortable to commemorate for others. Many would rather not have to confront this date, yet confront it they must.

Seventy years ago, in the morning hours of September 17, 1939, the Red Army troops crossed the Polish border and over the following weeks, in accordance with the secret protocols of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, occupied and annexed large swathes of what was then eastern Poland and is now western Ukraine and Belarus and southern Lithuania. The outgunned and outmaneuvered Polish army was already by that stage collapsing under the onslaught of the first German blitzkrieg, so from a military point of view the Soviet invasion did not materially affect the outcome of the struggle. It did, however, provide a dastardly coup de grace for the first chapter of the Second World War.

But don’t expect much news and commentary about September 17; not in the West, and certainly not in Russia.

The anniversary is an uncomfortable reminder that for around one third of the duration of the war, the Soviet Union was one of the aggressors — first against Poland, then against Finland, and finally against the Baltic states and Romania — and that during that time it provided invaluable material aid to further the Nazi aggression against the West, while at the same time committing mass war crimes within the newly occupied territories, of which the so called “Katyn massacre” of some twenty thousand Polish army officers taken prisoner of war is only the most widely known.

Very few others have been investigated, none have been prosecuted (if one excludes the farcical attempt by the Soviets to pin the blame for Katyn on the Germans during the Nuremberg trials), and not one person responsible has ever been held to account. To add insult to injury, the very memory of the Soviet atrocities committed east of the Ribbentrop-Molotov line had been banished and criminalized after the war, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. For years, September 1, not the 17th, was the only date to remember, and for many it remains the only date that matters and the only date they know.

Michael Meyer:

Twenty years ago, on Sept. 11, 1989, the plug was pulled on the bathtub of Soviet empire.

At the stroke of midnight, tiny communist Hungary threw open the gates to freedom and the West. Tens of thousands of people surged across the suddenly unguarded border. Scenes of jubilation, of families reunited after decades of captivity in Eastern Europe, flashed around the world. Newsweek’s cover dubbed it the “Great Escape.” From one day to the next, Americans awoke to a startling new reality. Suddenly, it was possible to imagine the unimaginable: the fall of the Iron Curtain and an end to the Cold War.

The coming months will see a crescendo of 20th anniversary commemorations of communism’s final days, culminating on Nov. 9, the night the Berlin Wall came down. For many, Americans especially, the fall of the wall was a glorious moment, emblematic of the West’s victory in the Cold War. “We won!”

Yet if you watched the East Bloc’s disintegration from the ground, as I did over that fateful year, you saw it as more ambiguous. The founding fiction of our Cold War “triumph” — that it validated decades of containment and militarist confrontation — gives way to a more nuanced appreciation of the other forces that were at work. Among them: the actions of others, often unnoticed by the rest of the world. The Great Escape made history. But the real story, largely untold, is how it came to pass.

Every great event has its hidden turning points. Victory in World War II, some say, hinged on Operation Fortitude, Britain’s legendary gambit to fool Hitler into thinking the Allied invasion of 1944 would come near Calais rather than the beaches of Normandy. Similarly, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War had their roots, in part, in a bold gamble that unfolded, all but invisibly, one fine summer day in 1989 on the Austrian-Hungarian frontier.

The date was Aug. 19. The place: Sopron, a sleepy provincial town in western Hungary. Even in such a backwater, the winds of change were blowing. In Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev was at work, shaking up the old Soviet sphere. In Poland, the famous trade union known as Solidarity faced off against its communist masters.

Closer to home, in Hungary itself, a new generation of reform-minded communists had taken charge. Almost overnight, they wrote a U.S.-style constitution and began speaking openly of a free press, free markets and free elections. Emboldened, a small group of local Sopron activists decided to celebrate the new spirit. Their modest aim: put up some tents, hire a brass band and let the beer and good vibes flow. One of the organizers came up with an especially inspired idea — to briefly open a gate through the barbed-wire frontier to Austria, allowing people to casually stroll back and forth across the border for the first time in four decades. They called it the Pan-European Picnic.

President Reagan, dimissed by the left as an “amiable dunce,” understood that the 1980’s Soviet empire was weak and unsustainable.

He used this knowledge to expertly bring an end to the evil empire (which killed many more than Hitler.)

Senator Ted Kennedy who, like most on the left failed to understand the realities, thought Reagan was outfoxing Gorbachev and took it upon himself to give the Soviets some pointers. (Another example of Ted’s vaunted bipartisanship?)

The National Post of Canada wrote about this in a review of John O’Sullivan’s book The President, The Pope and The Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.

After the first Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva in 1985, Senator Edward Kennedy met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in February, 1986. The essence of the meeting, Mr. O’Sullivan reports, was that Senator Kennedy was concerned about Reagan’s popularity in the United States and that the president might use that strength to the detriment of the Soviets. After meeting with Mr. Gorbachev, the senator briefed Soviet officials on how to outmaneouvre Reagan in future negotiations.

“You should put more pressure, and firmer pressure, on Reagan,” said Kennedy, according to notes of his meeting with Vadim Zagladin, a Soviet foreign official who organized his meeting with Gorbachev. “And, of course, I shall think over what can be done on my side, the Senate’s side. At the Congress session, I shall report on my meeting with Mr. Gorbachev. I will speak in the country as many times as ?necessary.”

It’s one thing to disagree with Mr. Reagan’s policy; it’s quite another, with the Cold War still on, to undermine his policies by advising and making common cause with the Soviet communists. (O’Sullivan reveals that Kennedy had made previous overtures to Yuri Andropov, but was rebuffed.)

The news about Senator Kennedy, some of it previously reported and some of it original to Mr. O’Sullivan, should be devastating to a still-sitting senator. Imagine a senator trotting off to apartheid-era South Africa to advise the regime on how to avoid diplomatic pressure. Perhaps the senator’s long history of scandal (Chappaquiddick, the debauchery of Good Friday 1991, which resulted in rape charges against his nephew, etc.) immunizes him from reports that have him merely cavorting with the Soviets. Whatever the reason, the revelations have not created a stir.

To say the least. Undermining your president seems like borderline treason.

The release of the two US television journalists from North Korea may be regarded as a triumph but the reality is that the US may have paid a high price to bring the women home.

When Mr Clinton touched down in North Korea, the former president was seen as the man who could force the hand of Kim Jong Il and orchestrate the release of the journalists.

But it later emerged that it was Kim Jong Il himself who had invited Mr Clinton to Pyongyang and had guaranteed freedom for the reporters as long as the visit would not be linked to the issue of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

North Korea’s propaganda factory – working overtime – claimed Kim Jong Il had received a personal apology from the former US President.

“Clinton expressed words of sincere apology for the hostile acts committed by the two journalists,” state media declared.

Mr Clinton’s team later denied any apology had been offered but the damage had already been done.

On the other hand, the NK psycho regime will always be a psycho regime. At least the women got home safely.

Remember how aghast Democrats were when Bush declared North Korea evil? Jonah Goldberg:

Perhaps it would be better if we simply vowed to never again say “never again” when it comes to the sort of slaughter and institutionalized cruelty we associate with the Holocaust. Then again, taking the sting out of hypocrisy wouldn’t do much for the people of North Korea.

For decades now, we’ve known that what’s going on in North Korea is too terrible to contemplate. Even so, what once haunted us as an ill-defined and foreboding suspicion has clarified into the secure knowledge of broad and systemic evil.

A new report by the Korean Bar Assn. offers a horrifying portrait of the Hermit Kingdom’s mountaintop dungeons, which, notes the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, have lasted about 10 times as long as the Nazi concentration camps and about as long as the Soviet gulag. The North Korean abattoir even survived the largely man-made famine of the 1990s, in which hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have starved to death. In the camps, prison guards are instructed that it is better to err on the side of rape and murder than on the side of mercy or kindness.

Because North Korea’s founding dictator, Kim Il Sung, declared, “Enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations,” even the grandchildren of “traitors” — a term of infinite flexibility and application — can be sentenced to a life of hard labor as slaves and slow death from exhaustion and malnutrition.

Samantha Power, an Obama administration National Security Council official, wrote a moving book about America’s inability or unwillingness to stop genocidal slaughter. In “A Problem From Hell,” Power surveyed the cumulative horrors of the 1990s — in Bosnia and Rwanda — and was forced to ask, “Did ‘never again’ simply mean ‘never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945?’ ”

If the answer to Power’s sardonic question is yes, then America and the West have every reason to be proud of their record. If we mean that when faced in our own time with the reality of such organized evil we will heed the “never again” lesson, than we have a lot to be ashamed of. (more…)

“No people in history have preserved their freedom who thought that by not being strong enough to protect themselves they might prove inoffensive to their enemies.” — Harry Truman

Liz Cheney takes President Obama to task for his pathetic historial revisionism.

There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian version in Moscow last week.

Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: “The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.”

The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind. The basis of the Cold War was not “competition in astrophysics and athletics.” It was a global battle between tyranny and freedom. The Soviet “sphere of influence” was delineated by walls and barbed wire and tanks and secret police to prevent people from escaping. America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the Cold War. The Soviets were not. The Cold War ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat Communism.

It is irresponsible for an American president to go to Moscow and tell a room full of young Russians less than the truth about how the Cold War ended. One wonders whether this was just an attempt to push “reset” — or maybe to curry favor. Perhaps, most concerning of all, Mr. Obama believes what he said. (more…)

Evil is as evil does. LA Times:

…It is all part of a great leap backward taking place in the secretive autocracy. North Koreans interviewed in China in recent weeks say that the regime of Kim Jong Il has made a concerted effort to roll back reforms that had over the last decade liberalized the most strictly controlled economy in the world.

“They’re telling us that we don’t need markets and that socialism provides everything we need,” said an unemployed factory worker in her 50s, who gave her name as Lee Myong Hee. (North Koreans outside their country often give fake names because speaking to foreigners can be considered treason under North Korean law.)

Lee sneaked across the border last month into China, hoping she could make some money for her family. Thin and nervous, her body sculpted by a diet of two bowls of porridge each day, she said the party’s unbending ideology has squeezed the life out of the city’s economy.

“If they don’t give us food and clothing and we’re not allowed to buy things, how can we survive?” Lee said, tears rolling down hollowed cheeks.

The Korean Workers’ Party has banned the sale and swapping of apartments, practices that were widespread for more than a decade. The open-air markets where people do most of their buying and selling are now open only from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. The only people permitted to sell at the markets are women older than 50; everybody else is required to spend their days at their official jobs at government-run businesses.

So many Chinese goods are now taboo that markets stock only about 35% of the merchandise previously available, some say.

“They want to promote our own products made in North Korea, but since everything is ‘made in China,’ there is nothing to buy,” said Kim Young Chul, a civilian working for the North Korean military who had come to China to sell wild ginseng on behalf of his employer.

The economic restrictions reflect the rising power of the hard-liners within the staunchly communist regime and go hand in hand with the belligerent mood that led to North Korea’s May 25 nuclear test. Those jostling for power in the scramble created by the failing health of 68-year-old North Korean leader Kim Jong Il are raising the banner of juche, the term coined by his father, Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder, for an ideology emphasizing self-sufficiency.

North Korea has in effect scuttled dialogue with the United States, South Korea and Japan, shut down South Korean business interests within its borders and evicted many humanitarian aid operations.

“The North Koreans want to close off their country so they will not be hurt by sanctions. They think everybody is out to ruin their country and they are getting rid of anything that could be a threat,” said Cho Myong-chol, a former economics professor at Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung University who defected to South Korea in 1994.

Jay Nordlinger

Several readers have sent me a letter from the CEO of Orbitz, the travel company. The CEO is campaigning for unrestricted travel to Cuba, saying, “At Orbitz we believe passionately in the power of travel to transform lives. And we believe that people should have the freedom to travel wherever they choose.” I wonder whether he believes that that applies to Cubans too. When they try to travel, they are shot, right there in the water. It has happened many times.

The CEO further says, “Americans today have the right to travel to any country in the world except Cuba.” And he is petitioning the government “to end the 50-year Cuba travel ban and give all Americans the freedom to travel to Cuba.”

Fine, fine. But do Americans know about “tourism apartheid” in Cuba? There are separate hotels, restaurants, stores, beaches, medical facilities, etc., for foreigners. Ordinary Cubans aren’t allowed in those places — only specially vetted ones, which is to say, politically safe ones. Foreigners are pretty well segregated. They sip mojitos on beaches, perhaps indulge in underage prostitution (a reason that many, many foreigners go there).

I have a Cuban-American friend who visited the island a few years ago; his cousin was not allowed into the lobby of my friend’s hotel — because he, the cousin, was Cuban.

What I am saying is that there are considerations — considerations beyond a pat “right to travel.” Consider another consideration (and I apologize for sounding like Dr. Seuss or something): Do tourist dollars go into the regime’s pocket, or into the pockets of ordinary Cubans? And if tourism aids the regime, giving it oxygen, to continue its persecution — is tourism quite moral? Or are questions of morality laughable here?

The Left had no trouble understanding the morality of boycotting South Africa under apartheid, but they nuture a soft, romantic spot in their hearts for that murdering psycho Fidel. Also for the murderous Che, whom Fidel had killed.

Maybe not so old. But those prickly ChiComs used plainclothes cops armed with umbrellas to stop photographers.

Mei Fong in The Wall Street Journal

XIN’AN VILLAGE, HANZHONG, China — With no eligible women in his village, Zhou Pin, 27 years old, thought he was lucky to find a pretty bride whom he met and married within a week, following the custom in rural China.

Ten days later, Cai Niucuo vanished, leaving behind her clothes and identity papers. She did not, however, leave behind her bride price: 38,000 yuan, or about $5,500, which Mr. Zhou and his family had scrimped and borrowed to put together.

When Mr. Zhou reported his missing spouse to authorities, he found his situation wasn’t unique. In the first two months of this year, Hanzhong town saw a record number of scams designed to extract high bride prices in a region with an oversupply of bachelors.

Zhou Pin with his now-missing bride

The fleeing Mrs. Zhou was one of 11 runaway brides — hardly the isolated case or two that the town had seen in years past. The local phenomenon has fueled broader speculation among officials that the fast-footed wives may be part of a larger criminal ring.

“She called me soon after she left,” says Mr. Zhou, a slight man with a tentative smile. He says she asked how he was doing, and apologized for the hardship she had caused. “I told her, ‘I will see you again one day.’ ”

Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female ratios in the world. Using data from the 2005 China census — the most recent — a study published in last month’s British Journal of Medicine estimates there was a surplus of 32 million males under the age of 20 at the time the census was taken. That’s roughly the size of Canada’s population.

“A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals,” President Obama said on April 16, “and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.”

Ideals, indeed.

For a man who was willing to abandon Iraq to near-certain genocide (pre-surge), why should scaring the mastermind of 9/11 into thinking he’s drowning in order to save American lives be so troubling?

Obama has demonstrated a willingness to give the likes of Syria’s Assad the benefit of the doubt in the name of mature diplomacy. Assad’s goons, of course, car-bombed multiple Lebanese leaders who dared speak up against the tyrant.

For decades, US practiced “realpolitik” which meant taking the side of tyrants if said tyrants were friendly to us. President George W. Bush, a president of change, said this:

And in the last 60 years, many in the West have added to this distrust by excusing tyranny in the region, hoping to purchase stability at the price of liberty. But it did not serve the people of the Middle East to betray their hope of freedom. And it has not made Western nations more secure to ignore the cycle of dictatorship and extremism. Instead we have seen the malice grow deeper, and the violence spread, until both have appeared on the streets of our own cities. Some types of hatred will never be appeased; they must be opposed and discredited and defeated by a hopeful alternative – and that alternative is freedom.

Alas, Obama appears to a realpoliticker, not the idealist he purports to be.

Now consider our European allies, who Obama felt deserved an apology for Bush’s presidency. What moral compass guides, say, Germany?

In 2001, Bush declared North Korea an evil regime. This raised eyebrows among the chattering elites, why how intemperate!

But consider the testimony of a Norbert Vollertsen, German doctor doing aid work there.

I know North Korea. I have lived there, and have witnessed its hell and madness.

I was a doctor with a German medical group, “Cap Anamur,” and entered North Korea in July 1999. I remained until my expulsion on Dec. 30, 2000, after I denounced the regime for its abuse of human rights, and its failure to distribute food aid to the people who needed it most. North Korea’s starvation is not the result of natural disasters. The calamity is man-made. Only the regime’s overthrow will end it.

Human rights are nonexistent. Peasants, slaves to the regime, lead lives of utter destitution. It is as if a basic right to exist–to be–is denied. Ordinary people starve and die. They are detained at the caprice of the regime. Forced labor is the basic way in which “order” is maintained.

Vollertsen returned to Germany and tried to get the German media to report his story of cruelty and evil in North Korea. But Vollertsen was accused of being a “war monger” and largely ignored. Only the US media gave the story its due.

Even South Korea, which you’d expect to be receptive, mistreated him, fearing that he’d upset delicate negotiations with the North. That was seven years ago. All negotiations with North Korea have gone nowhere because you cannot negotiate with evil.

The Moron Caucus traipses off the commie Cuba, police state:

Lee and others heaped praise on Castro, calling him warm and receptive during their discussion. But the lawmakers disputed Castro’s later statement that members of the congressional delegation said American society is still racist.

“It was quite a moment to behold,” Lee said, recalling her moments with Castro.

“It was almost like listening to an old friend,” said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Il.), adding that he found Castro’s home to be modest and Castro’s wife to be particularly hospitable.

“In my household I told Castro he is known as the ultimate survivor,” Rush said.

Thus spake the former Black Panther.

Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Ca.) said Castro was receptive to President Obama’s message of turning the page in American foreign policy.

“He listened. He said the exact same thing” about turning the page “as President Obama said,” said Richardson.

If these twits had half a brain, they’d look around and realize that residents of American “ghettos” are living larger than middle-class Cubans. And, unlike Cubans, these Americans can advance if they so choose.

North Korea claims it fired a satellite into orbit where it played “revolutionary songs.”

US experts say it fell flaccid into the ocean, but if not, one wonders who’d listen — normal people only endure such Commie crap at gunpoint. Perhaps the concert was meant to dissuade attacks from outer space.

Although Dear Leader would be better off trying to lift stalks of wheat or corn from the ground to feed his starving masses, there’s more method at work than madness.

The UN Security Council’s inability to take harsh action against North Korea in an emergency session Sunday – the first such gathering of the Obama presidency – leaves the challenge posed by Pyongyang’s launch of a long-range missile in Washington’s lap.

That is just where North Korea’s attention-starved leader, Kim Jong Il, wants it.

“North Korea was way down on the list of priorities for Obama, but with this one test firing, they have put themselves at the top of his list of things to do,” says Chaibong Hahm, a Northeast Asia expert at RAND Corp., in Santa Monica, Calif.

The UN unable to take harsh action? Heaven forbid!

The LA Times ran this inspiring story about Yuriy Shishkov

Within the confines of his Corona work space, guitar designer Yuriy Shishkov had transformed a plank of blond ash wood into the body of a new Fender Telecaster. Seated at his bench, where he spends hours every day creating one-of-a-kind hand-crafted instruments, he studied the nascent creation. Holes had been cut for where tone-control knobs, a five-positioning pickup selector switch, the bridge and the pickups will be mounted, and the instrument’s neck, sawed and shaped from a complementary piece of bird’s-eye maple, rested in a rack to his left, finely sanded but still unfinished.

Shishkov — one of a handful of “senior master guitar builders” working at the Fender Custom Shop, the high-end division of Fender Musical Instruments — reached into a box of 700 square pieces of mirrored glass, selecting pieces to adorn the guitar that soon will be presented to its new owner, Australian country- music superstar Keith Urban.

He’s come a long way.

“If somebody would tell me when I lived in Soviet Union, ‘You’re going to end up at Custom Shop building guitars for famous people,’ ” the gentle-voiced guitar maker said, “I guarantee I would believe more if somebody tell me, ‘You will fly to space.’ ”

Guitar dreams

Space flight, in fact, was a more tangible part of life in the Soviet Union when Shishkov was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s than anything to do with the chief instrument of that most decadent of Western cultural forms, rock music.

He loved the music of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and other rock bands he heard over shortwave radio, soaking up rock’s core message of freedom and individual expression, even when he couldn’t understand the words. He started playing music at age 12, using a guitar owned by the school he attended. “After finishing school, I end up having no decent guitar. . . . One day I decided, ‘You know what? I can’t afford on the black market, really expensive instrument. So I have to make it myself.’ And I did.”

Necessity, as it so often has throughout human history, sparked innovation. From a magazine acquired on the black market, he took a slide photo of a guitar — it was Fender’s iconic Stratocaster — projected the image on a wall so he could trace the outline and went to work.

The only electricity in his workshop powered a single overhead light bulb. There was no heat, and the cellar, about two stories underground, kept a constant temperature around 55 degrees. In the spring, he set down bricks to walk on to keep his feet from getting soaked in the frigid water that would collect on the floor.

He bartered for primitive hand tools and created others, making a chisel out of a screwdriver, a gouge from the curved handle of a stainless steel spoon. He used magnets from the door of a refrigerator for pickups, which convert the strings’ vibrations into sound. To play it, he hard-wired it to a radio’s speaker.

“For a bottle of vodka or wine,” he said, “I could get scrap materials from furniture factory. . . . What I learned then taught my mind to work around complex issues and to think outside of the box. There was nowhere I could go and get this part or that part. If I needed something, I know I just have to come up with something.”

When the guitar was finished several months later, “A friend of mine saw it and said, ‘Wow! Can you make one for me?’ “

The Times overreaches with this bit of nonsense:

These outcasts who chafed under the state’s rigid political structure eventually helped force down the Iron Curtain.

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards once said that “Levi Wranglers and rock ‘n’ roll . . . probably did more of the job than all those rockets.”

USC Annenberg School of Communications professor Jon Taplin, who has consulted with the U.S. State Department on cultural issues, said, “It wasn’t called ‘the Velvet Revolution’ for nothing. It didn’t end with a gunfight. It ended with people saying, ‘Enough, we want to live in a world of freedom, and by the way, that world of freedom to us is equivalent to rock music.”

No doubt rock music helped undermine Soviet anti-west propaganda, but knowing there’s a better world outside your police state doesn’t end the police state. Just ask the millions of Iranians chafing under the mullahs.

The Cold War didn’t end with a gunfight because Reagan backed the Soviet leadership into a corner and they knew they were doomed. The voices of the people counted for nothing.

The Bulletin:

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”

Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”’

Ms. Moncrief made her first overture to Ms. Heidelbaugh after The New York Times allegedly spiked the story — on Oct. 21, 2008. Last fall, she testified under oath about what she had learned about ACORN from her years in its Washington, D.C. office. Although she was present at the congressional hearing, she did not testify.

U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., the ranking Republican on the committee, said the interactions between the Obama campaign and ACORN, as described by Ms. Moncrief, and attested to before the committee by Ms. Heidelbaugh, could possibly violate federal election law, and “ACORN has a pattern of getting in trouble for violating federal election laws.”

He also voiced criticism of The New York Times.

“If true, The New York Times is showing once again that it is a not an impartial observer of the political scene,” he said. “If they want to be a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, they should put Barack Obama approves of this in their newspaper.”

The NYT, projected to go bankrupt in 2009 by some, demonstrated why many will be cheering when it gave op-ed space to Bill Ayers, but denied the same courtesy to one man most qualifed to debunk Ayers.

The full story on that here. The op-ed they refused to publish is below.

By Larry Grathwohl

My name is Larry Grathwohl and I infiltrated the Weather Underground for the FBI. I had no idea when my journey began in August 1969 that I would see and experience the degree of violence and hatred of our democracy that existed in the Weather Underground. Bernardine Dorhn, Bill Ayers, and the other people I would meet had as their sole purpose the destruction of the United States. The fact that I ultimately became the only source of information regarding the activities of the Weather Underground and the fact that Bill Ayers now claims their goal was only to bring about the end of the war in Vietnam requires me to respond.

At least Bill admits the Weather Underground “crossed” the line of legality but mitigates this admission by stating that the effectiveness of the “symbolic acts of extreme vandalism” is still being debated. He further states that the selected targets were “property, never people” and that their only purpose was to end the war in Vietnam. Bill is simply not being truthful and is rewriting history to reflect a completely different role for himself and the Weather Underground from what actually took place. “Bring the war home, kill your parents” was the mantra being chanted when the group decided to go underground in December 1969 and there certainly isn’t anything anti-war in that statement. I’m also curious as to who is debating their status. When I think about the Weather Underground my immediate thought is “terrorism and death.”

Billy goes on about how the Weather Underground came into existence because “peaceful protests had failed” and “after an accidental explosion killed three comrades.” The explosion of the townhouse in Greenwich Village was the result of a bomb factory which was preparing bombs containing roofing nails for use at a Fort Dix enlisted club. The inclusion of roofing nails can have but one purpose and that’s to injure or kill people. Prior to this event Bill’s wife, Bernardine Dorhn, placed a bomb of the same design at the Park Police Station in San Francisco and killed Officer McDonnell. Additionally, I was still inside the Weather Underground when the townhouse blew up and the commitment to sabotage and terrorism had already been established and the purpose was the overthrow of the United States government.

Bill implies that the questioning of his activities is dishonest and that at worst he may have made some mistakes in judgment but his motivations were just. Personally, I can think of nothing that would justify the activities of the Weather Underground and am astonished by Bill Ayers’ attempts to corrupt the historical facts by making himself a misunderstood leader of the anti-war movement. Robert Kennedy, possibly the most notable anti-Vietnam war leader of the late 60s, was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968. The Weather Underground published Prairie Fire in 1974 and dedicated it to Sirhan Sirhan. Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dorhn, and others signed this dedication but now they would ask us to accept their explanation that all they wanted to accomplish was an end to the war in Vietnam.

I could go on with many other contradictions in the new history Billy is attempting to impose on us. Today we are supposed to believe that Bill is merely an educator with no interests in the political aspects of our society. If this is true then why the picture of him standing on our flag? Why the statement that his only regret is that they (the Weather Underground) hadn’t done enough? What is the meaning of “I now consider myself an anarchist”? I can only conclude that Billy is a confluence of contradictions and revised history meant to confuse us as to what he is really about. Consider “guilty as hell, free as a bird, America is a great country.” Do you think he really means that?

I must conclude by acknowledging that in one respect Bill is probably being absolutely truthful. When he says that “I never killed or injured anyone,” he is most likely being totally honest. Bill, like Charles Manson, never exposed himself to any kind of danger. He always gave orders and then left it to his then-girlfriend, Diane Oughton, and others to implement his plan. If you listen closely you can even hear the similarities in the arguments Manson and Billy use today to justify what they did: the 60s made me do it.

John Glionna in the LA Times about one man trying to get messages into the Hermit Kingdom.

Remember how huffy the Dems got when Bush called the regime evil?

Lee is equal parts meteorologist, tinkering inventor and political dissident, a man obsessed by a singular goal: to spirit messages to those left behind in his native North Korea — 23 million countrymen living under the ironfisted rule of Kim Jong Il.

To reach the isolated society devoid of outside newspapers, radio and television, the 52-year-old defector uses a simple yet elegant method to fly under the radar of North Korean intelligence watchdogs: He sends millions of leaflets northward by way of his towering helium balloons.

In this high-tech age, the balloons have struck a nerve with Pyongyang and landed Lee and other launchers center-stage in the Korean peninsula’s high-wire political standoff.

Last week, North Korea cited Seoul’s inability to control the launches — by defectors and a handful of civic groups — as a major reason to again close its border, banning tourists and reducing trade.

Tensions between the two Koreas have risen in the last year, especially after the February election of conservative Lee Myung-bak as South Korean president. The administration of Lee, who is a hard-liner on Pyongyang, says it is helpless to stop the launches.

Analysts say the leaflets are written in simple language by former North Koreans who intimately know the North’s culture and which political buttons to press.

The vinyl leaflets from Lee, founder of the North Korean Christian Defectors Assn., are often religious. But they also strike at a ruler referred to as his nation’s paternal “Dear Leader.”

“Dear North Koreans,” one begins, taking aim at Kim. “So he’s a General who eats rice gruel together with the people? But how could he get love handles and a double chin if he eats rice gruel? People are starving to death, but why does the country spend so much for Kim’s [extravagances]?”

South Korean officials are seeking ways to ban the launches, which they say jeopardize the fragile truce between the Koreas.

Many academics agree.

Academics = those who know everything but accomplish nothing.

“Shouldn’t they stop sending fliers, to prevent inter-Korea relations from being destroyed?” asks Paik Hak-soon, director of the Center for North Korean studies at Sejong Institute in South Korea.

This week, several civic groups said they would hold off on the launches for now, but Lee focuses on the long view.

“People in North Korea are dying every day, with their eyes and ears covered by Kim’s regime,” he says. “Do we just sit here and watch them die? No matter what they say, we have to do this.”

It’s the Gasbag versus the Bomb Thrower! Say you’re Bill Ayers with an obnoxious TV twit pulling a Mike Wallace on you, who you gonna call?

Chicago Boyz:

The Chinese government have shown themselves to be bunch of peasants with dung on their boots when it comes to international propaganda. The term in Chinese is “tu bao tz” (土包子) – pork buns (bao tz) made out of dirt.

Forget Yang Pei Yi (楊沛宜) and Lin Miao Ke (林妙可) – well, mostly. Forget the CGI fireworks. Forget that the enormous number of people used in the opening ceremony were from PLA song and dance troupes.

The big scandal is that China is showing us just exactly why investment there is still risky; why the “golden opportunity” everyone seems to be thinking lurks in China’s market is as frail as a butterfly. The Chinese government still has its fingers in every aspect of society, and that makes the shift from stable to unstable business environment just a power struggle away.

The CCP wanted these games to showcase the “new” China. Instead, they’ve provided two wonderful examples of why the new China is the old China painted up like a Shanghai warlord’s aging mistress.

Take, for example, the fact that the decision maker for the Lin Miao Ke switcheroo was a member of the Politburo:

“The national interest requires that the girl should have good looks and a good grasp of the song and look good on screen,” Chen said. “Lin Miaoke was the best in this. And Yang Peiyi’s voice was the most outstanding.”

During a live rehearsal soon before the ceremony, the Politburo member said Miaoke’s voice “must change,” Chen said in the radio interview. He didn’t name the official.

Yah, I’ll bet he declined to name names. But Mr. Chen also let it be known that the decision was not his, keeping an eye on future political developments in case these Olympics are judged to be politically ineffective in a post-hoc analysis. That way of thinking is very, very Communist. I don’t see much evidence of a new China there, do you?

Imagine the press reaction if a government official had issued such an order in the West. Not to mention that the National OC would have told him to kiss off. Even in the more authoritarian democracies such as Japan or Korea, that kind of political meddling would not have flown. That is not to say that some art director would not have made the switch long before it came to rehearsal, it’s that the decision would not have been political. And sponsors in the West would have been keenly sensitive to criticism if a contest winner had been substituted at the last minute for a “cuter” version.

Excerpt from John McCain and Mark Salter’s Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions: 

The writing began in fits and starts. Another round of cancer treatment interrupted him. And he had doubts that, lacking any access to official records, his own experiences — what he “was able to take away from the archipelago on the skin of my back and with my eyes and ears” — provided sufficient material on which to base such an immense undertaking. He set it aside. But after the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn began to receive hundreds of letters from Gulag survivors, and the letters and accounts obtained in conversations and memoirs from a total of 227 witnesses gave him the material necessary to complete the work.

In 1964, he began to work diligently on The Gulag Archipelago, writing sixteen hours a day in two eight-hour shifts. He completed the second draft in two and a half months, from late 1966 to early 1967. In the spring of 1968 he wrote feverishly to finish and microfilm the work in anticipation of sending it abroad for publication. On June 2,1968, it was done. One week later a friend carried the microfilm rolled in a capsule to Paris. Five years were to pass before it was published.

Solzhenitsyn had to make three decisions before The Gulag Archipelago and its truths, which were to wreak enormous damage on the Soviet system of oppression and hasten the demise of the entire postwar balance of power, would be available to the world. The first, of course, was the decision to write it. Even had the period of cultural liberalization in the Soviet Union lasted indefinitely, Solzhenitsyn’s truths would still have greatly offended Stalin’s successors. Among them were the accusation that Lenin shared culpability for the Gulag; and the recognition that the Soviet people themselves, not only Stalin and other Soviet leaders, must accept part of the responsibility for these crimes. His second decision was to send the manuscript abroad for publication, knowing that he would never receive permission to publish it in the Soviet Union. The third decision was to order its publication.

Solzhenitsyn’s death comes at a time when Russia is busy restoring the reputation of Josef Stalin, indirectly, by tarnishing the reputation of Nikita Khrushchev, the first Soviet leader to publicly denounce Stalin.

Some members of the Khrushchev family and others say the persistent rumor is part of a quiet battle of political symbols, in which the champions of a strengthened state have tried to weaken democratic institutions.

The aim, they say, is to burnish the reputation of strong leaders, such as former President Vladimir Putin and Stalin, by tarnishing that of Khrushchev — who denounced Stalin’s mass arrests, executions and deportations in a secret 1956 speech to the Communist Party leadership that later became public.

…Still, the celebration of state power has been a major theme in Russian arts and education in recent years. The country’s film industry, largely state-subsidized, has produced thrillers showing Russia under siege from the West, protected only by decisive czars, steely Communist Party first secretaries and vigorous modern presidents — essentially, Putin.

New textbooks praise Putin’s concentration of power and laud Stalin as a successful if brutal leader. Last year, Putin told history teachers that no one could make Russians feel guilty about Stalin’s crimes because “in other countries even worse things happened.”

Amazing.

Psychopath Stalin killed more than 20 million Soviet citizens via slave labor, execution, or forced starvation. But don’t let that besmirch his name — others did worse. Is that your point, Putin?

Then there’s this from John Derbyshire at The Corner:

Back in the 1970s, Solzhenitsyn inspired me to dig out all the Soviet truth-tellers I could find. The truly dismaying thing was how many of them there were: Anatoli Granovsky, Viktor Kravchenko, Victor Serge … This stuff goes back to the 1920s. It subtracts nothing from Solzhenitsyn’s suffering, work and achievements to note that the West had to be ready for him.

The truth about Leninism was there from the beginning. Reading Lenin’s pre-1917 works, in fact, you could say it was there from before the beginning. Perceptive observers didn’t need telling. Bertrand Russell went to Lenin’s Russia in 1920, saw through the whole thing, wrote a book about it (The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism, 1920), and lost half his friends. The young Vladimir Nabokov, whose family fled for their lives from the Leninists, was at Cambridge University 1919-20, baffled by his fellow-students’ inability to grasp what he was telling them about the new regime. They just listened politely and smiled indulgently. They knew better!

T.S. Eliot’s “humankind cannot bear very much reality” doesn’t tell the half of it. Humankind in general loathes reality, and will escape from it through any hatch that can be kicked open.