Paying For Your Korean Feud
The year is Juch 99, which means that we must be in North Korea. And there’s a bar tab to settle.
The snappily titled “Committee for Investigation into Damage Done by the U.S. to the Northern Half of Korea” has taken out its pencil and beermat, thought for a while and “summed up all human and material damage brought by the U.S. imperialists to the northern half of Korea for the past six decades since they landed in south Korea on Sept. 8, 1945.“
They are claiming that the cost of US involvement since the peninsula was divided in 1945 is about $US64,959,854 million and change – a demand coming purely by chance on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the start of the 1950-1953 Korean War.
KCNA said the $US65 trillion figure includes $US26.1 trillion arising from “atrocities” by the “U.S. imperialist ogres” which left more than 5 million North Koreans dead, wounded, kidnapped or missing – and caused the death of precisely “369,101 cattle and 764,604 pigs” and loss of “40,755,640 volumes of ancient and old books“.
It doesn’t look as though the North Koreans are hanging around in the hope of a cheque…they are still trying to “build a great prosperous and powerful socialist nation on this land without fail“. Which is, by all accounts, coming along as successfully as the shithole that is Cuba. Maybe they should wait for their money though. The way Barack Hussein Obama is spending money and cuddling up to the enemies of the USA he might just be tempted to write them a massive cheque.
“Which is, by all accounts, coming along as successfully as the shithole that is Cuba.”
I suspect the Cuban people are somewhat happier than their North Korean counterparts. Although Western health policies may be making their lot a good deal worse, as Julia M has noted:
http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/2010/06/guardian-writer-in-lets-all-take-up.html
I’m sure you’re right, although I’d love to see YouGov trying to do the survey 🙂 .
Neither have much choice in the matter, though. You don’t see people strapping floats to their cars and heading *towards* Cuba or hiding under the axles of a truck heading for North Korea. And neither are on my holiday list.
It’s fair to say that I’ve never seen a Kim Jong Il t-shirt on a BBC journalist though, so Cuba has slightly more street cred.
Telegraph reports Sat. that for the first time China now concedes that North Korea started that war.
To expand on your comment, how many people got shot trying to escape the Berlin Wall fleeing eastwards?
Brinkmanship over that torpedoed S Korean ship may still get us a shootin’ war with the North, and that will test the US/UK appetite for foreign intervention after Iraq and Afghanistan. That’ll get the asylum and refugee applications flowing.