Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Trotting out the true believers

When former South Korean president Roh Moohyun was considering sending ROK troops to Iraq to help out with the war effort, there were major protests. Peaceniks came out of the wood veneer to protest the movie, calling Roh a tool of Bush and a warmonger, etc. Understandable, since that was a hugely unpopular war and the reasons for getting involved in the first place were highly questionable. 

But there are other things where siding with Washington is the natural thing for Seoul to do, and joining Proliferation Security Initiation (PSI), the US-led effort to stop the proliferation of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in the wake of North Korea's probably missile test, is one of those things. After all, this is not an attack, it's not going to war; it's simply forcing North Korea to comply with its own agreements since it's clear they're just thumbing their nose at international opinion. Moreover, it's a well-reasoned response to North Korea's provocation that had been threatened even before Pyongyang's 

Yet here they are: the perennial protesters who get themselves in a snit over anything related to Washington. 

I'm just glad AP and the Washington Post are calling it like it is: pro-North Korean protesters. The truth is that in South Korea, the press would be loath to call them pro-Pyongyang, because such labels used to get people in very serious trouble. And there still is that pesky National Security Law that can be used to hammer down those nails that stick out. 

Nevertheless, pro-North they are. Or at least, some in their leadership are. It's a theme I've repeated often, but the chinbo progressives have more than a few members who get their ideas and possibly their marching orders from North Korean propaganda or from North Korean operatives themselves. 

These groups are anti-American and certainly anti-USFK, anti-Tokyo, anti-Seoul (as in the government), anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, and basically anti- everything except Pyongyang. I talked about it here, but I'l repeat it again: They try whatever message they can to see which one resonates with the public. In last year's Mad Cow protests, they got a good sizable segment of the public to come out on a near daily basis to demand the ouster of the sitting elected president (and yes, the demonstrations were much more about anti-Lee sentiment than any anti-Americanism)

2 comments:

  1. Too bad the South Korean government can’t make repatriation of these morons to the North a part of any future food deal with the little guy up there to save all those who are constantly starving in the workers' paradise. These brainwashed fools would quickly find out that life isn’t a bed of roses in the poorly named “Democratic People's Republic of Korea,” and, unless they are true lackeys, they would quickly find out about a Russian appropriation, the gulag.

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  2. True that. But Pyongyang doesn't want them: They're value to the regime is in how much on-camera damage they can manage.

    In South Korea, they're useful idiots. Up in the DPRK, they'd just be idiots.

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