I’m so upset that that I really can’t come up with an articulate OP. Guess it’s a good thing that the pit has somewhat lower standards for eloquence.
Fuck you North Korea. You are truly the asshole of the world. You make the Middle East look like a Utopian society of philosophers by comparison. You are the shittiest, vilest, and most pathetic excuse for a country. You are more a cult than a state.
Glad I got that off my chest. You know I’m perfectly content just letting shitty societies just do their own thing, but when then take our own citizens under some pretense of a fair trail or any kind of rationality it just pisses me right the hell off.
Now i know that the odds are they are planning the eventually release our citizens in hope of getting good PR about how generous they are. This is still unacceptable to me. Do any other liberals feel like hawks at times like these?
Ah yes, the pariah of the world, North Korea. You would think that with all the posturing that the Chinese do to look tough vis-a-vis the US Navy, playing chicken with airplanes and spyships, that the Chinese would be a bit concerned with their wacky barbarian neighbors. But they are not. I say leave this problem to the Chinese. They want to be respected, well then, deal with a neighbor that is utterly dependent on China and disrespecting China on a weekly basis. It makes China look weak to ignore such a problem.
The word I am getting is that they were interviewing North Koreans who had fled to China and were captured by the North Koreans who claimed that they had illegally crossed the border. I haven’t done a great deal of research so I’m not positive what the truth is, and for that matter I’m not sure anyone does beyond those involved. I’ll be damned though if i trust the North Korean government on anything that I can’t verify for myself, they seem content on playing a massive geopolitical game where they get off on acquiring tiny bits of political capital in a world where absolutely nobody agrees or identifies with them.
Even in the very unlikely event that the journalists had illegally crosses a border, no civilized person in the 21st century believes that the punishment fits the crime. But once again, I’m going to take anything the North Korean government says with a mountain of salt.
On the (albeit a very, very dim one) bright side, there’s no way North Korea is going to send two foreign journalists to an actual labor camp if they have any intention of releasing them. If they’d planned on sending them to a real labor camp, then the sentence would’ve been life. There’s no issue of them “going to be bargaining chips” as the very second they were apprehended, that’s exactly what they became.
And most of the press I’ve seen from news organizations around the world indicate the journalists were actually on the wrong side of the border. Since they were on a frozen river at the time, it’s not really that far-fetched that they were farther south than they intended.
Well there is no doubt that the journalists are bargaining chips, and this just happens to be timed just when the US was reported to be considering re-adding North Korea to the state sponsors of terror list. Fancy that. Still it is something of a relief to know that the sentence indicates a return of our citizens sooner than later.
It is possible that they were on the wrong side of the border and were seized by overzealous border agents in search of just such an advantage. Still, this play is as transparent as possible. Everyone knows that the lack of any kind of public airing of the proceedings (as it is with everything in NK) indicates that the North Korean government is playing a funny little game with us, they’ve moved their chess pieces and we are expected to respond in a way that is favorable to them so that they can continue their charade that fools nobody on this planet.
At least in the case other countries who’s values are different that our own (such as middle eastern nations), they are still global players who are susceptible to global political influence…thus real diplomacy is an attractive possibility. North Korea on the other hand is like the one kid in the playground who actually wants to be hated. He doesn’t want to form factions with any of the other varied players, he just wants to piss on your jungle gym and then run off to the sideline and wait until everyones back is turned long enough for him to do it again.
The problem is I draw the line when they play this game by threatening the lives of our own citizens. I seem the remember a tale about how the ancient Romans could travel anywhere in the world in safety just by proclaiming that they were a Roman citizen. It may not have literally been true, but I’d like to think that it at least metaphorically applies in today’s modern world with the most powerful state on the globe. Call me a dreamer.
Gee, and to think the journalists involved could have avoided ANY repercussions by simply staying the fuck away from N. Korea! :rolleyes:
I guess I’m not civilized by your measure, but IMO if you are stupid enough to travel to a foreign country and engage in activities you ought to reasonably expect that country to disapprove of, you pretty much deserve what you get.
Yeah, well, back then, the Roman empire had forcefully subjugated and demanded taxes from most of the “western” civilized world. It does not bother me one jot that Americans ought not view sovereign states as their playpen. I consider your “dream” closer to a nightmare.
This is extremely troubling. These prisoners of conscience committed no crime and I hope for their immediate return home.
However, I sadly can’t help but feel that the U.S. does not have a fraction of the leverage in this situation that it might once have had, given our ownrecenthistory of holding foreign citizens in detainment camps.
I feel sorry for these journalists, but I do think the U.S. should have a crystal-clear policy that unequivocally states “If you get captured or arrested in North Korea, we cannot help you.” Maybe we already do, I don’t know.
But, yes, it’s obvious these women were intended to be, and will be, used as bargaining chips in North Korea’s endless rounds of crazy brinkmanship and “aid aquisition by threat.” I see no reasonable course for the U.S. other than disengagement and a refusal to negotiate. I agree with the “leave North Korea to China” POV.
When the fires were raging in my home state (Montana) and people were told to evacuate and several wouldn’t, the U.S. Forest Service, BLM, and local Fire and Rescue issued a joint statement to the effect: “If you stay, we are NOT coming to get you.” That needs to be the U.S.'s position regarding those who voluntarily go to North Korea, or even flirt with the border.
I agree with all this. Of course, anyone with more than three functioning brain cells knows (or should know) what they’re getting into if they fuck with North Korea, especially if they’re American citizens.
Also, while NK is clearly run by a fucking madman, and is a godawful dictatorship that the world would be much better off without, the fact is that, if all the news reports are correct, these journalists were on the wrong side of the border without permission.
If there’s one thing i hate almost as much as draconian prison sentences meted out by undemocratic countries, it’s the way that some people in countries like the United States get all fucking whiny and indignant when their own citizens break the law in other countries and are made to suffer the consequences.
Australia is no better; whenever some stupid Aussie gets caught smuggling drugs in some southeast Asian country with draconian drug sentencing, there’s always a whole bunch of people calling on the Australian government to Do Something About It. I’m just trying to imagine the reaction among those same Australians if Australian Customs busted an Indonesian or Thai tourist smuggling dope into Melbourne, and the Indonesian or Thai government demanded leniency.
I hope for their return, too. But to say they committed no crime is completely contradicted by all the available evidence. The fact that you and i don’t like North Korea doesn’t change that.
If these people actually were caught in NK, I would agree that they are on their own. I don’t know the location of where they were grabbed, but I do know the the North has a long history of cross-border incursions and kidnappings. If it can be established that the two were actually taken in the south, then NK should get a serious smackdown.
You mean like those 2 idiot females in Afghanistan about what, 8 or 10 years ago sentenced to death for preaching? When they were WARNED ahead of time that to preach was both illegal and terminal? Then they whinged about it because they were arrested and sentenced for preaching?
Yup, should have let those to idiots burn, Then they could be martyrs and go to heaven
I’m fine with that. The State Department regularly issues travel advisories, warning against certain destinations. IMO these advisories should be accompanied by a clear statement to the effect that: “If you choose to visit these places and the government does something unpleasant to you, you’re on your own!”
I just checked the State Department site and was surprised to see there is not a travel warning or alert for NK. The country-specific info does state that you can be detained there for activities that are not illegal elsewhere.
We should deal with North Korea like you dealt with barbarians of old. You don’t negotiate with barbarians, barbarians aren’t capable of meaningful negotiation.
The long mismanagement of North Korea has essentially reduced the country to a state of true barbarism. You don’t treat with them and you also don’t wring your hands if your citizens end up captured because they were out playing in the barbarian lands. Traveling in such a region is like swimming in shark infested waters–I don’t wish ill on anyone but I also do not think that it can be the obligation of the United States government to rescue citizens who have put themselves in harm’s way.
I recognize that North Korea has nuclear weapons, this does not concern me. North Korea has no real desire to use these weapons on another country, to do so would essentially guarantee that whoever is ruling North Korea at the time loses power and most likely loses their life, there can be no doubt of this. There’s even a good chance the Red Army would be in Pyongyang before the U.S. was even fully mobilized to take North Korea.
North Korea is developing nuclear weapons because they realize they are a barbarian state and that the rest of the world views them as such. They know that eventually first world countries tire of outright barbarism and will consider regime change. So they have nuclear weapons to protect themselves, it’s a tool to make sure the United States won’t invade. North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons program because it realizes that to do so would make it vulnerable to true invasion from the United States. They will also never use their nuclear weapons aggressively because if they did that the United States would have no reason anymore to not destroy North Korea (for the record I don’t believe them firing a nuke at us would result in us irradiating the Korean peninsula, but we’d definitely invade, and I think it even possible China would invade.)
I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about “law” in this context. We have no indication that there is any law in North Korea, separate from the exercise of political will. So, these journalists may have been reckless and foolhardy with their own safety, but when someone is attacked by a grizzly bear, we don’t typically describe them as having broken the “law” of the bear’s cave.