Most people dismiss the crisis in North Korea — including recent threats to attack the United States, once able, with nuclear weapons — as irrelevant to their daily lives.
In a narrow and short-term sense, this may be true. But the words and threats of North Korea are very relevant, when you consider their source and full meaning.
First of all, North Korea is a Communist dictatorship. It’s based on the very same premises and principles as Obama’s philosophy. These principles include: Man is his brother’s keeper; the primary function of government is to enforce this principle; wealth comes from government, not from the private sector, and the private sector is, at best, a necessary evil whose existence and well-being is at the discretion of the government.
In principle, there’s no actual difference between the moral assumptions of a North Korean dictatorship and those of the socialist-collectivist Barack Obama. The difference is that Obama allows for more freedom in the private sector than the all-out Communist dictatorship of North Korea ever would. That’s fortunate for America, but it’s only because the government (in Obama’s world view) permits it. America, under Obama, is in the process of being “transformed” into a collectivist-socialist state. North Korea is already there.
Obama, like his pragmatic but still Communist colleagues in China, recognizes that without any private sector or individual rights being allowed, the government would not be able to maintain the power that it does. North Korea hasn’t been quite so smart. Because they allow virtually no political or economic freedom, the country is quite literally perishing and starving, probably more than we know. That’s what economic and political dictatorship does: It starves people, both mentally and materially. Instead of blaming this on the government, North Korea’s mad leadership externalizes the blame, and takes it out on the freer South Korea, and the still freer United States.
None of this matters to most Americans, I realize, and none of it will matter unless or until a nuclear weapon ends up detonated somewhere on or near our shores or territories. That might or might not ever happen. But there should be little doubt that if it ever does, it will be due to the ideology and philosophy of the Communists in North Korea who share the same fundamental principles as Obama: as I said, socialism, collectivism, brother’s keeperism.
In the current crisis, this puts Obama in the precarious and slightly ridiculous position of trying to keep the peace. The whole thing that differentiates the United States from North Korea is the remaining prevalence of freedom, individual rights, and private property/semi-capitalism. Yet these are the very things that Obama has vowed to “transform” about America, and has been systematically striving to do since day one in office.
In other words, Obama has to fight the North Koreans (diplomatically, and potentially militarily) on the premise that our system is right, and theirs is evil and wrong. But he’s hamstrung by his own ideology that government ownership of the means of production is really the moral and proper way for things to work (case in point: Obamacare.)
You can’t reconcile two opposing things. And you can’t credibly hide behind the fact that in America, under Obama, the principle of collectivism is less consistently implemented (at least at present) than under the much more consistent North Korea.
It will be interesting to watch how Obama dances around this issue, assuming the crisis between North Korea and the United States continues to escalate.
If Obama does what prior administrations have done, he’ll simply give in with concessions to help the destitute North Korea stay that way by enabling their government to keep being the dictatorship it is. Most likely, this will take the form of some foreign aid package or concession that is bad for the United States, but serves the interest of the North Korean rulers. The bluster will stop and the intellectual establishment will call it a brilliant demonstration of peace making on the part of the flawless Obama. In truth, it’s simply destructive enabling and moral cowardice.
If Obama were truly courageous, he’d at least come out and admit that he agrees with the North Koreans in principle — and then ask why in the world are we even enemies, in the first place? After all, North Korea’s Communism is fundamentally at odds with the Constitution of the United States. But it’s not at odds with Obama’s proposed transformation of that Constitution.
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