Do you really believe this garbage purporting to be
hard news?
Why don’t you ask yourselves exactly what North Korea
expected of a team that has had no previous
international experience, and probably can be
classified as no better than a participant team in the
first or second division of the English league.

Yes gerard, we certainly don’t want to insult the Dear Leader. I am impressed by your sensitivity. I wish you would show the same restraint towards Sarah Palin and George Bush.

DFC’s revelation about the photograph supports what I was trying to help Rico understand:

Defensiveness knows no bounds, especially when threatened by outsiders. I’m glad the soccer association seems to have recognized that.  Some young lives may have been saved.

Incidentally, I reread the entire article and noticed again how very insulting it is. And what does it accomplish except uneasiness, embarrassment encouraaging disdain by giving off twisted interpretations and unproven allegations.It uses every propaganda devise in the book to try to stir up trouble.  Disgusting.

DFC:

The more I look at it the scarier it gets!!! Someone should juxtapose the two and publish them side by side! Adams certainly deserved the Pulitzer too. Thanks again.

PS. I’m surprised, and glad, that someone of your tender age knows of that photo.

Thanks. The image came to mind immediately when I first saw the photo of the coach lecturing the player, such is the power of photography… and I was only 3 years old when it was taken on February 1, 1968.

The original caption (now that I’ve researched it a bit more) of the photograph by Eddie Adams is:  “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon”. In 1969 Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for that photograph.

DFC:

Yeah! You’re right. Good eye!

The photograph supplied with this story is eerily reminiscent of a certain iconic image from the Vietnam War:  “Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief” by Eddie Adams 1968.

Rico,  what do you believe to be a looney post.????

I can’t wait.

Excuse me?

Rico Suave:  What a crock!

gerard:

Don’t give up. Let’s talk about this some more. You asked me some questions. I tried to answer. Now you’re saying I’m wasting my time. Why did you ask them then? What are YOUR answers to those questions?

(Side note: A poster recently asked me why I bother spending so much time on a progressive website. I said it’s because I want to understand how progressives think. The trap I fell into over time was that I wrote too many smartass, smary responses to too many of the loonier posts and not enough thoughtful ones to serious people like you and ardee. I came across as a bully and unserious. I am trying to avoid those pitfalls. I find reading and, especially writing posts very challenging. If you are doing this just as a hobby and don’t like giving the posts a second thought after you hit “submit”, well, ok then.)

Rico, I am amazed that you do not have some high post in our diplomatic services.  They could use you in the U.S.Department of Wasted Energy ot, perhaps, in the Bureau of Unfinished and Forever Unfinishable Wars.  You could really stir things up there.

tobysgirl:

Come on! Weigh in. It’s getting good.

gerard, you have a strong stomach. And persistence on an Olympian scale.

gerard:

“Your “tell him to fuck off” sentence indicates considerable unwillingness to ask questions in order to understand cultural differences.”

Wait. I evidently didn’t make myself clear to you. Reread the post. The point I was trying to make was that a VERY significant difference between a free and a repressive society is that in a free society, citizen are “free” to tell their leaders to fuck off, whereas in a society such as the PRK, they would be, and are in fact, shot for expressing such a sentiment. Nowhere did I say or imply that, “Since I don’t understand your culture, fuck off.”

To answer, briefly, some of your questions:
1. Because they are not free, nor do they have the resources available, to improve their own lives, and/or they can’t escape.
2. They compromise their dignity and they go along with the party line.
3. Greed, lust for power, idealism, fear. Mostly fear.
4. Impressing on them that their defensiveness and belligerence is fruitless. Such conditions will be ameliorated if the leaders of the repressive regime learn to trust their own citizens.

Do you think the ongoing six-party, two-party, whatever group du jour-party talks with the North are just window dressing? The US and the world have been trying to engage the North forever. Why?

Rico Suave:  Things to consider in dealing with cultures differing from your own:
  Why do some people tolerate living under conditions and pressures you personally regard as unbearable?
  What kind of compromises do they find it necessary to make, what concessions do they feel forced to make, in order to endure?
  What historical influences went into the making of repressive regimes, and why do they continue?
  What methods are most likely to succeed in “opening up” cultures that are defensive and belligerent?  What helps to “defuse” defensiveness and belligerence?
  There are probably 100 more questions to be asked, researched, discussed, some of which might eventually be advocated by knowledgeable people who are seriously interested in finding agreements, commonalities, causes, effects, etc.
  During such a search,  it would perhaps also happen that knowledgeable people would consider their own opinions questionable.
  Your “tell him to fuck off”  sentence indicates considerable unwillingness to ask questions in order to understand cultural differences.  I will not trouble you further.

gerard:

No, I don’t want to talk perfectionism. Where did you get that idea? But I do want to talk about repercussions in “traditional authoritarian societies.” I personally don’t believe there is room, anywhere, for “but” when it comes to North Korea. Their entire system, morally, politically and economically, is categorically indefensible, the “imperfections” of the US notwithstanding.

If the South Korean team came home and was lectured by their President about losing, they could look him in the eye, tell him to go fuck off, jump in their Hyundai’s and drive to the coast for a vacation.

Whose team would you rather play for?

And, I disagree with your premise. Why would “outside interests” (presumably China and the UN) be interested in creating a separate (and there is nothing artifical about North Korea) country? Why didn’t the “outside interests” just subsume the geography into China and/or the South? Do you think the US and UN “chose” to let North Korea survive as a separate entity? To what purpose? And if China prevented the US and UN from preventing the survival of the North, then China is to blame for the current situation.

Rico Suave—Want to talk perfectionism and national pride as a tiny poverty-stricken nation created artificially and arbitrarily by “outside interests” and as the result of having “lost” a war?

Your right, North Korea, isn’t as belligerent
noR do they attack as many nations as the U.S.

gerard:

You can’t compare North Korea and the US in any category.

Rico Suave:  Want to talk suicide and self-sacrifice for the glory of ...?

Rico Suave—Want to talk repercussions in traditional authoritarian societies?  Want to talk blame, and revenge, and “discipline” and “national spirit” and paternalism and ...?

Waant to talk “pathetic”?

This is an article that promotes xenophobia. Bashing the N. Korean leader over
and over again can only drum up support in this country for one more ill-
conceived attack on yet another country. North Koreans don’t need additional
suffering.  As for us, we have “liberated” far too many countries. Let’s take a rest.

Maybe when Kim grows up he will become like our leaders who continue to be
empowered to sacrifice their own people in order to bring death and destruction
to foreign lands.

Gerard,  just ask him if is of Cuban descent.

gerard:

“But, but, but…”

“But” nothing! Pathetic gerard.

Caswell is lying,oh so subtly, but to some of blatantly.

Korea IS NOT SECRETIVE—KOREA BECAME SECRETIVE!

And why not when a monstrous fascistic land threatens its very existence and whicj with help fromother fascist split asunder their land.

Similarly US IS NOT THE MOST BLOODTHIRTSY EMPIRE—IT BECAME THE MOST MONSTROUS EMPIRE.

And it can—if people think like caswell—become even worse than ever!tnx

I hope that some day we will start to love and respect people in our own communities for who they are because then we can be in a position to judge other people in foreign countries, which is apparently what we are wanting to do because we are doing it already.

“Because North Korea is so highly secretive….”

Oh yeah,  nobodies government could match the secretivness
of the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

“North Korea Deserves A Hard Kick For Abusing Its
Soccer Team”

Then , if that is the case, I would believe that the
United States of America should deserve something more
than that for harboring and giving sanction to the man
that is accused of blowing up the airplane that killed
all of the elite Cuban sports team…....................

Is that any way to talk about one whose birth, according to some of his countrymen, “was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens”?

I thought that was George Worthless Bush.

North Korea has a sick government, how is this news? Wake up call, we support equally sick regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Colombia, Peru, Pakistan, Mexico, Honduras and on and on and on.

But, but but ... are you sure the team members and coach will not be even further punished by your association reprimand?

If I were you I’d go easy on this perhaps-not-well-thought-out cry for “justice.” 

Some people are crazier than others—and many dangerously so—and we are not so sane ourselves, you know.  “USA! USA! USA!” ad nauseum in China was just a little over-the-top there, according to some people who do not bow down and worship our great but stumbling country.