The Korean games

Hey, hey, hey, look at little sister

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation To call upon a neighbor and to say: – “We invaded you last night, we are quite prepared to fight, Unless you pay us cash to go away.” And that is called asking for Dane-geld, And the people who ask it explain That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

—“Dane-geld,” Rudyard Kipling

It’s almost always good advice to take Winston Churchill’s advice. At least from the older Right Honorable Sir Winston Churchill. (Like the luckiest of us, he made his biggest mistakes in his youth.) Once, at a meeting in the White House sometime in the 1950s, he was supposed to have said: Jaw-jaw is better than war-war. At that time, the Nazis were defeated and nobody wanted a nuclear World War III. Listen to the man. Or as the Brits say, hear, hear.

There are games being played in Korea these days, and not just at the Winter Olympics. Lil’

Kim, the pudgy dictator of the North, sent his younger sister Kim Yo Jong to the games to make a public relations splash. Give him a bronze. Give her a silver.

But give South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, the gold. He didn’t fall for the Kims’ bag full of pyrite.

You’d never know it by reading many of the press accounts, but the lovely lady sent to the games from Pyongyang still represents one of the ugliest places on the planet. While she impresses the easily impressed media, let’s keep some things in mind:

The great masses of North Koreans are perpetually starved. Sometimes even without a government mandate. While the regime in Pyongyang maintains its Songun policy of military first, and sometimes last, its mere people shrink. Literally. Not all that long ago, some North Korean sailors were picked up from a boat in distress and brought to a South Korean hospital for treatment before going home. The men from the abandoned ship looked around at the nurses, and one of them said he could never move south of the 38th Parallel. The women were too big. South Korean women. Too big. The malnourishment is so bad in the North that some of its people can’t even join the military. Their bodies and brains, wracked from years of poor nutrition, cannot pass basic skills tests. All so the regime can use what little resources it has to pursue nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

The country runs a gulag system. It’s not an excess of a brutal government. It’s a feature. For prisoners, rats are a major source of protein. Anti-aircraft guns are used in some of the more public executions. Some of these gulags are as big as Los Angeles.

Punishment for some crimes is meted out to the third generation. Not only do North Koreans have to pay for the sins of their fathers, but for their grandfathers.

Oh, yes, and there’s the little bit about threatening to blow up the world. Or at least several million people in Seoul, Tokyo, San Francisco and maybe precincts beyond, if the missile technology can be developed.

Miss Kim Yo Jong is said to be the head of the party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. No need to ask what party; there’s only one in North Korea. And, yes, the name of the PR wing of the regime really is the Propaganda and Agitation Department. Must lose something in translation.

DISPATCHES say that the North’s emissary and PR expert relayed a message from her gentle brother, inviting the president of South Korea to a summit in Pyongyang soon enough. President Moon, not wanting to distance himself from the Americans, and also not wanting to bite an outreached hand, said, in so many words, we’ll see. The papers say he wants to “create the environment” for such a summit, and told Miss Kim as much. Which is a way to jaw-jaw without sparking a warwar.

What President Moon seems to understand is that the results of talking to North Korea always seem to be that pressure is eased on that regime. Whether it’s the Americans talking, or some combination of Americans, South Koreans, Chinese and Japanese. The North demands rice, fuel, wood, metal—all in exchange for not much. When the regime’s coffers, and big wigs, are full again, the cycle continues. Pyongyang issues threatening press releases, tests a nuke, demands more —and continues to commit crimes against its own people.

Kipling put it best:

And that is called

paying the Dane-geld;

But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him

the Dane-geld

You never get rid of the Dane.

The nations allied against North Korea and allied for a long-term peace should send Little Miss Propaganda and Agitation Department back home. With all due courtesy and politeness. With a message of our own: The Dane-geld will no longer be paid until the Korean peninsula is nuclear-free. With these Korean games, there is more at stake than the color of a medal.