North Korean Genocidal Maniacs Garner NYT Plaudits

The NYT doesn't mention today the two million deaths by starvation in the nineties due to Dear Leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jung Il's guns-with-no-butter-or-rice-or-comestibles policies to strengthen the N. Korean armed forces and build a nuclear device.

Indeed, the NYT more or less likes the sort of coercive social engineering that Communist autocrats like Castro, Saddam, Arafat, Kim Jung Il, Chairman Mao and earlier during the NYT's Walter Duranty days, old Uncle Joe and his Purge Trials, where millions died because to cook an omelet, you had to break eggs. But it was for a cause many NYT readers on the Upper West Side have a soft spot for, so as for the journey by the NY Philharmonic to the capital of mass-murderer Kim Jung-Il, Loren Maazel's little foray into Mordor is covered by NYT ink-stained wretches with its customary moral indifference.

Just by chance today, while the power outage raged, I was sitting in the sun at my backyard pool reading the stemwinder [from a moral outrage position]Our Culture, What's Left of It by Theodore Dalrymple. On p. 114 of the paperback version, TD recounts his visit to Pyongyang in 1989 when he was approached surreptitiously by a young Korean who said:

"I am a student at the Foreign Language Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life."

Dalrymple writes that the kid melted back into the crowd and called it "the most searing communication I have ever reeived in my life."

This in Dalrymple's chapter on Huxley and Orwell called "The Dystopian Imagination."

North Korea remains hell on earth and the NYT functions towards Kim Jung Il more as an enabler than a therapeutic intervention agent.