Admiring North Korea’s Cheerleaders
The American press is obsessed with all things North Korean during the current Olympic Games in Pyeongchang. They apparently find anything “anti-Trump” as admirable as any other, so at the moment it is convenient to remark on Kim Jong-un’s charming peace-through-sports initiative, his beautifully aloof sister, and of course his official retinue of perfectly perky, synchronized cheerleaders.
In other words, the American news media — explicitly named in the U.S. Constitution as an essential canary in the coalmine on the republic’s level of freedom — have taken to praising a merciless tyrant’s attempt to propagandize his neighbors into weakness, legitimizing his use of his sister as a prop to “humanize” his brutal and bloodthirsty regime (in which that pretty sister happens to serve as official chief commissar of propaganda), and, most interesting of all, entertaining their audience with the delightfully cute “otherness” of the most terrified, tortured slaves any of us are ever likely to see up close in our lifetimes.
The little red cherubs, dozens of them, all chanting, swaying, and smiling together in perfect unison — always maniacally smiling the most cheerfully cheerful smiles — are not random North Koreans who traveled together to the Games to support their countrymen. They are a state-trained, state-indoctrinated, and state-tethered instrument of Little Sister Kim’s official state propaganda machine.
They are not chanting because they love North Korean athletes, but because they and their families back home will be punished if they do not chant loudly. They do not sway, bounce, and clap together out of enthusiasm at having great seats for the Olympic Games, but because they will be imprisoned, denied food, and suffer broken limbs if they fall a little out of unison. They do not smile those maniacally cheerful smiles because they want to spread joy, but because they are scared for their lives at every moment.
American and other Western media entities have been admiring, focusing on, and amusing themselves with these poor, debased monstrosities, and even claiming, in perfect North Korean-style unison, that those squirming red worms in their desperate dance for survival are “stealing the show” in Pyeongchang.
Are these “reporters” and “news people” honestly that monumentally stupid? Or are they honestly that diabolically evil? In all seriousness, I see no third option. And in the end, true ignorance and true evil are either one and the same or twin sisters, so it makes little difference.
One more point: It’s always easy to sit back and accuse the media and/or entertainment industries of being ignorant, biased, or immoral. But what about us, sitting at home watching this coverage? If we are amused by those North Korean cheerleaders, look forward to seeing them again, or find their unison “impressive” and “cute,” then we are effectively participating in their torture.
And we cannot absolve ourselves of our complicity by thinking, “Well, they will be tortured and mistreated regardless of how we react to them, so what harm does it do to watch?” If you saw a pimp and his henchmen beating his prostitutes to death, and he invited you to grab a stick and take a whack at them yourself, would you rationalize doing it on the grounds that your action will make no difference to their ultimate fate anyway? Or if he just asked you to watch the beating, and admire the way the prostitutes avoid screaming through the bone-crushing blows, would you watch and admire the display?
No, you cannot stop the suffering of those hopeless girls at the hands of the blood-soaked and glamorous Kim Yo-jong and her criminally insane brother. But you can do what any decent human must do when confronted with such exploitations of another human’s suffering: lower your head in shame and disgust, refuse to dignify the indignities with your passive participation, and reject the monsters among us, the supposed “free press,” who willingly join in the fun of North Korean torture and slavery, merely to score political points against Donald Trump — or, worse yet, but just as likely, because they actually cannot see why slavery is wrong when it is undertaken in the name of communism.
After all, the West’s big media are, almost to a man and woman, what used to be called “fellow travelers,” and the communism alongside which they mindlessly travel is, always has been, and has been endlessly exposed as, nothing but slavery on a universal scale.
Save your soul, rise above the “entertainment value” of a tortured slave’s living hell — look away.
