_Brandon Bartlett is a freshman political science major at MU. He is an opinions columnist who writes about politics for The Maneater._
The 2018 Winter Olympics recently kicked off in PyeongChang, South Korea, and they couldn’t go on without controversy. The last Olympic Games in South Korea, held in Seoul in 1988, were boycotted by North Korea, but the regime’s current dictator, Kim Jong Un, decided the country would be sending athletes this year. The leftist mainstream media decided to take this opportunity to praise and glorify the dictator’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, who attended the games.
A headline by Joe Sterling, Sheena McKenzie and Brian Todd from CNN reads “Kim Jong Un’s sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.” The article states “If ‘diplomatic dance’ were an event at the Winter Olympics, Kim Jong Un’s younger sister would be favored to win gold.”
Another headline by Anna Fifield from The Washington Post, says “The ‘Ivanka Trump of North Korea’ captivates people in the South at the Olympics.” This propaganda parading as journalism begins: “They marveled at her barely-there makeup and her lack of bling. They commented on her plain black outfits and simple purse. They noted the flower-shaped clip that kept her hair back in a no-nonsense style.” This is how the media describes models on the runway, not how the media should describe Kim Yo Jong. North Korea has had more than 1,000 public executions per year because of Kim Yo Jong and the rest of the Kim Family.
Kim Yo Jong is also a high-ranking member of Kim Jong Un’s cabinet and is the head of his Propaganda and Agitation Department. The Kim family is very careful about what it lets its citizens see and hear. The internet is prohibited to everyone except a select few of the country’s elite, determined by the state, as well as the few foreigners living in the country’s capital. TV and radio are also heavily regulated. Radios are preset to the nation’s propaganda outlets which praise the Kim family’s communist rule.
These radios must be checked and registered with the police. The television in North Korea is also basically state-ran and also only shows false information, meant to brainwash North Koreans, of how great the Kim family is. However, this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the crimes being committed by the dictatorial regime.
According to BBC, 41 percent, or 10.5 million of the country’s 25 million are undernourished. BBC also reports that “two-thirds of North Koreans still depend on food being distributed by the state,” and at one point, items like cereal and potatoes were rationed to just 300 grams per person per day in comparison to the government’s target of 573 grams per person per day.
The North Korean regime also runs inhumane prison camps which are filled with people who commit minor crimes or question the government.
Jeong Kwang-il was accused of being a spy for the Chinese, so he was taken to a prison camp where he was tortured for eight months until he couldn’t handle the pain anymore and confessed to crimes he did not commit. He was subjected to “pigeon torture” which consists of being suspended by the wrists that are shackled together behind the back so one could not stand or sit.
Ahn Myong Chol worked as a guard in a prison camp and was trained to believe the inmates were less than human. The most disturbing thing he saw in his time at the prison was when three dogs got away from their handler and attacked five children in the camp. Three children were killed almost instantly, but two were still breathing when the guards buried them alive. The guards then gave the dogs better food to eat as a reward.
While Lim Hye-jin was in a prison camp she saw guards rape any woman who caught their eye. If they were impregnated by the guard, the woman was forced to have an abortion. Many abortions in these prison camps are performed by either hitting the mother in the stomach repeatedly or by injecting motor oil into the mother’s womb. The dead fetuses are then often fed to the guard dogs.
This is a very short list of the numerous atrocities that are committed in the name of and under the command of Kim Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong and the rest of the Kim family. Thomas Buergenthal, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, states “I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps.” So why is the media fawning over a high-ranking official of the regime that could be classified as equivalent to Nazi Germany?
Well, because she threw some side-eye at Vice President Mike Pence, of course. The leftist media outlets quoted above seem to being following the notion that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” which isn’t really a good philosophy to follow when the enemy of your enemy is the sister of modern-day Hitler. On ABC’s “The View,” the hosts even criticized Pence for not standing when the North and South Koreans entered the stadium under a unified Korean flag. USA Today claimed that “by not standing for Korea at the 2018 Winter Olympics, VP Mike Pence embarrassed America.”
They claim that he is a hypocrite for criticizing those who kneel for the national anthem, but then refusing to stand in respect for the North and South Koreans. Regardless of how one feels about athletes protesting by not standing for the national anthem, the atrocities that happen in North Korea should be protested by everyone, and its leaders should not be glorified.
