Hitchins: North Korea is even weirder and more despicable than you thought
slate.com
slate.com
This self-promoting buffoon should be exposed for the what he is. He went to Lebanon last year to film his one-man crusade to impose Liberal Democracy on the "unwashed Arab masses", he made a fuss about being attacked by Nazis in Lebanon! In reality, him and his photographer went to certain Beirut neighborhoods and provoked the locals until he was slapped around by teenagers.
Let me say that again: Hitchens went to the Middle East to pick fist fights. Yeah, very intellectual.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hitchens+Lebanon+brawl
:-|
I value his take on North Korea as much as I value Octomom's opinion on Cuba.
... the rest of us are paragons of tolerance!
Also, can we stop with this red/blue state madness -- it's very hard to generalize the views of a given state, especially large populous states.
But I'd agree, considering America is a salad bowl of cultures, it's probably more tolerant than most homogenous countries out there. Of course being a salad bowl, you'll get more collisions too which is why it may seem like America is less tolerant of different cultures. More homogenous countries simply have less foreigners to be racist towards.
As you can see the blue states and the red states are fairly well represented, with CA having the most. The southern states which are typically red have a significant amount. But the western states that are red have less than the western blue, so as I said before I don't think you can draw any conclusions. Also the majority of the southern red states used to be blue, so that's something else to consider.
I think you're attributing the statement "red states" to Republican party. I think that's an unfair statement, but "red states" is a measurable geographic location, not a political ideology. And I'm pretty sure the map still would show that the density (if you take the total racists and divide by the total population of the red states) of hate groups is greater in the red states.
A map of the per-capita hate crimes committed would be more educational, but again it would not be a measure of racism. To have hate crimes you need 2 things, people who hate some group, and members of that group they can act against. In the areas that were most heavily racist they chased out all hated minorities 50+ years ago.
The town I grew up in had 5000 residents and no black families (actually, some have moved there, but only when I was in about 3rd grade did that start). I didn't see any racism at all in that town, but how could I? Driving 30 minutes away to the nearest sizeable black population center and you see tons of it. Look at the school zones and you see tons of it. Hate crimes were non-existent however, just because you can't hit someone who isn't around. Finally, if one did happen, how would it get reported? In areas where hate crimes are super rare I would assume they would also be under reported since the justice system would be unfamiliar with recording and prosecuting them.
Finally, saying one area (red states) is 'more racist' than another is the exact same in-group out-group dynamic that feeds racism in the first place. Due to the stuff I listed above, I would expect blue states to have far more racist acts, just because there are more cross-race interactions and boundaries (which are the only 'opportunity' people have to commit racist actions). There is no discrimination against minorities for jobs if there are no minority applicants, and there is no discriminatory school zones or public service allocation if there are no minority communities in a city. The unanswerable question is, "Would there be if there were minorities there", but that can't be captured in these sorts of statistics.
If your society systemically creates a vast underclass of impoverished, poorly educated people who are oppressed as such because of their race, people are going to have their racism confirmed by those very effects. Likewise, if your society is flooded by a vast number of impoverished, poorly educated immigrants, people are going to hate the immigrants. (Judging from America's experience, this seems to be a temporary problem in most cases.) In either situation, you create racism by having more people of a different race, so long as those people are poor, segregated, or different enough to piss people off.
American racism was not as much xenophobic, it was always based on the difficulties of integrating immigrants and on the ongoing, cyclical oppression of the black population. You had some xenophobia during wartime (http://img.moonbuggy.org/superman-says-you-can-slap-a-jap/) but we tend to forget how much we hate other people after the war's over.
I'm not sure about the North Korean case, but an author argued a few years back in the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" that most WWII-era Germans were happy and willing to go along with the despot's genocide and total war.
"1984" ends with Smith Winston seemingly coerced into the attitude "[I] loved Big Brother". I'm not so sure he had no choice ... I think people usually are complicit in that which they tolerate and support.
People can be evil. In the U.S. we are too, in ways we usually don't acknowledge.
And sure, I broke the rule "if you have to bring up Hitler in an argument, you've already lost". So be it.
If you want to call that evil... I guess you may. But I'd say all it shows is that in certain contexts we can all support evil things.
And 3 characters to spare!
...
Yeah, I dunno. It's Hitchens and he seems to be writing a sideglance apologia for Communism. (As in, "See these shrunken slaves: It's nationalism that made them this way, not Marxism.") Nothing new really. China is doing something very similar actually, and they have been replacing Communist rhetoric in schools with nationalistic rhetoric, and for them it seems to be not a problem.
They aren't worse than the Japanese, and Japanese aren't really extremely racist (they appear so to people who never had to experience "race consciousness" in their country of origin).
My experience with South Koreans is that they are generally proud of their accomplishments (rightfully so) and there is a subgroup that is abysmally ignorant. You could compare the second group to "rednecks" (and whatever the equivalent is wherever you are), except for the fact that it is much more difficult for a South Korean to travel than for a westerner.
Throwing the racist epithet around in this case seems overblown.
He is definitely not immune to bias, but I would bet the bias is hatred of the North Korean regime.
Afganistan and Iraq were (and still are) oppressive totalitarian regimes where the individual's mind was being invaded. He supports liberation. Iraqis largely see the coalition as occupiers, not liberators (apart from the Kurds who never saw themselves as part of Saddam's Iraq) regardless of their views of the previous regime. Accepting that Iraq was not in fact liberated is accepting that liberation is not possible. His solidarity is delusional. That's got to be a bitter pill for someone like Hitchens.
The thought of North Koreans rejecting liberation from their regime to Hitchens is like the thought of an American slave rejecting abolition to some lingering flag bearer of the Black Panthers, like Hatians begging for the return of the French.
North Korea claimed to be communist, but it is totalitarian. China claims to be a republic, but it is totalitarian.
Mostly-competent entrenched ruling class (with token democracy) vs. mostly-competent entrenched ruling class (without the token democracy). That's what we're looking at here, and quite honestly, I am not sure that the periodic input of a disinterested and politically naive bunch of voters is all it's cracked up to be.
Anyhow, since China is rich, it is considered sort of impolite to say "China, please stop committing genocide" or "Hey, China, working people to death in your laogai camps is sort of uncool." (This is sort of related to how it was tres gauche to mention that Soviet Russia was a brutal, genocidal dictatorship and how a huge portion of the American and European intelligensia supported that model and wanted it for their own countries. Which is itself related to it earlier being quite undiplomatic to talk about what the Austrian chap was doing in addition to his economic reforms.)
Be that as it may, reluctance to confront evil in China should not lead to reluctance to confront evil in North Korea.
It would have been a bad example for the above post, though, because people actually opposed Japan's conduct in Manchuria contemporaneously (whereas China's conduct in the status quo, the Soviet Union's conduct for its entire existence, and the first few years of German fascism were/are dealt with limp-wristedly when they were not actively applauded).
For example, the United States hit Japan with a steel/oil embargo after Japanese refused to withdraw from Manchuria, which was the proximate cause of Japan deciding to go to war with the United States. (Funny little historical note: the US didn't actually intend the embargo to be a total embargo. When it was conceived in Washington it was as a temporary cutback to force Japan to the negotiating table. A minor bureaucrat misfiled something, though, and the planned periodic review never happened, which turned it into a total embargo. "Whoops.")
As an aside, essentially none of Japan's present economic prosperity is owed to wealth stolen from China. Most of that got very comprehensively burned, along with the rest of the country. Japan was pretty desperately poor postwar prior to the US' Korean war buildup, which they largely sourced in Japan, re-laying the industrial base which ignited the Period of High Economic Growth (高度成長期) that brought Japan from "substantially poorer than Mexico" to "really freaking rich".
Apologies for the lecture.
It might be an interesting study to see if North Korea actually just slowed down the collapse via slave labor vs. actually contributing.
He does this by saying that, since one recent government document doesn't mention the word communism, the country's not really communist at all. No mention about whether actions count more than words, or how that worked in years past, when there was plenty of racism and plenty of mentions of communism.
A few notes: All dictatorships are militaristic in some important sense. That's because all dictatorships crush dissent, and sometimes you need a tank when all else fails.
As for racism: Stalin launched numerous pogroms against the Jews (and, in a nice Stalinist touch, put a jew in charge of the operations). The Soviet Union had only one non-Russian on the Central Committee, despite a large number of ethnic minorities in the USSR.
A guess on the Deeper Subtext behind this mess: "Yeah, I supported the war in Iraq, and I've lost readers like crazy. But I'm really a leftie. Here, watch me establish my bona fides."
Good then you agree that North Korea was never a proper communist state since it never really showed any of the classic characteristics of communism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joseph_Dresnok
CBS's report, with video:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/25/60minutes/main2398...
Some may also remember from the news a few years ago another Korean War defector, Charles Robert Jenkins, who was able to move to Japan with his wife in 2004 during a period of Japanese-North Korean rapprochement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Robert_Jenkins
His wife had been shanghai'd from the shores of Japan by North Korean agents to help train their spies.
I'm interested in knowing what's going on in North Korea, and he does have some facts in here, but on the whole I'd prefer something a little more informative.
1) North Korea runs concentration camps, in which inmates are worked to death in mines and factories to increase industrial production.
2) North Korea is a military dictatorship which has used democide via famine against its own people to make it impossible to resist its dictatorship. If you're on the winning side with the army, your family gets to eat better than grass. In the late 90s a famine killed about 3 million people. That's the regime's estimate, incidentally. (Communists tend to have rosy accounting about such things.) The population of North Korea is about 23 million.
3) North Koreans are some of the most desperately poor people on earth. They don't have much, and what they do have gets forcibly expropriated to maintain one of the largest standing armies in the world. Its number one enemy is its own people, though if you believe the propaganda it has crushed the imperialist Yankee under its boot and exacts tribute from him, which explains all the bags of rice bearing American flags without which the population would again starve.
4) The regime is supported by a personality cult of Kim Jong-Il and his father, Kim Il-sung, who has been essentially deified. That is not an exaggeration -- North Korean propaganda has attributed the creation of the world to him.
Any educated person should know the above four facts already. If you know them, "Wait, hold on a second, let's not rush to judgement or use overly emotional language when discussing this country" sounds like you're so open-minded your brain has fallen out.
Usually when someone reads a Hitchens article, they know what to expect. He definitely has a bias. He is a hawk, a bit of a neo-con, and an infamous hater of the Clintons. He is also known for his zealous atheism (heh) and enormous ego. I don't often agree with Hitchens, but I generally enjoy his work and appreciate his surly intellectualism and penchant for turning over rocks to reveal the dirt. His pieces are usually opinionated but factual.
A preference for informative is hardly trolling.