By Chip Tsao | published Dec 02, 2010
I was attending a cocktail function in Kowloon on the day I was told by a few people I bumped into that North Korea had fired artillery at an island in South Korea, pushing the peninsula to the brink of a major war.
“The stock market is going to crash,” I was alerted by everybody. I found myself a bit unpopular when I innocently asked, “did anyone get killed?” only to be met with a few poker faces. I soon realized it was the wrong question. I should have checked my iPhone to find HSBC shares had dropped a little and told people the Hang Seng Index had reacted to the killings rationally, so we had not lost much money.
The Dear Leader’s aggressive acts, be it sinking a South Korean naval corvette to commemorate his late father’s birthday or the firing of a few bombshells to announce the succession of a crown prince, have been described as irrational and unpredictable by western governments and media. But there is nothing mind-boggling in his saber-rattling games as long as one understands the interdependent sadistic-masochistic psychic relationship between our Dear Leader and his foes.
Four South Korean cabinet ministers were killed in Rangoon during a state visit led by former president Chun Doo-hwan in 1984, who narrowly escaped death. This would ordinarily have amounted to a declaration of war, but was instead met with a round of routine “condemnation”—there was no other response.
Then came the bombing of a Korean airliner in 1987, when North Korea recruited a young and pretty female agent, Kim Hyon-hui, to plant a bomb on the ill-fated KA858 flight. Kim was arrested but her movie-star-like beauty melted the hearts of the South Koreans. She was pardoned by then-president Roh Tae-woo, who described the 25-year-old mass murderer as a “child” who is “as much a victim of an evil empire as the passengers aboard.”
This was soon followed by the “Sunshine Policy,” when the “evil empire” described by South Korea was awarded with rice, buffalos and cash, a policy endorsed by the United States.
It was the first time feminism played a decisive role in human judiciary. Kim was made a VIP as she toured around the country, making confessions in tears, blaming her communist motherland for her brainwashing. Had she been old, wrinkled and ugly, she would undoubtedly have been executed. Is Kim’s case a triumph of feminism or some kind of positive discrimination against women? I leave that mystery to the liberal academics to argue in their air-conditioned university lecture halls.
Male criminals will remain prejudiced against Timothy McVeigh, a terrorist of the American militia movement who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 civilians, was young and handsome with charismatic qualities resembling a combination of Steve McQueen and Tom Cruise. The 27-year-old indoctrinated terrorist was also a “kid” and a victim of some evil ideology, yet he was given a lethal injection.
So well done, our Dear Leader Kim.
Labels: Politically Incorrect, 陶傑