Here we are again being played the fool by the North Koreans. The Obama administration hasn’t learned the lessons of the past, and we will once again give them tons of food for a promise that they will not keep. What’s worse, their new leader purposefully made a visit to the South Korean border to shake his pudgy, little fist at his neighbor:SEOUL, South Korea -- The North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, visited the heavily armed border with South Korea on Sunday and ordered his troops on higher alert, escalating his militaristic rhetoric in spite of American calls to improve ties with the South just a week after his country agreed to a nuclear freeze in return for badly needed food aid.
Kim has been hailed as the North's leader since the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in December, and has frequently visited frontline military units. But his trip to Panmunjon, a compound straddling the border where the armistice ending the Korean War was signed in 1953, was the first time he had put himself in full view -- and within the range -- of South Korean border guards.
"If there is a fight erupting, our military and people will have the enemy kneeling before us to sign not a truce this time but a document of surrender," Kim was quoted by the North's news agency.
The agreement that North Korea struck last week with the United States calls for it to suspend its nuclear weapons tests and uranium enrichment and allow international inspectors to monitor activities at its main nuclear complex, in exchange for 240,000 tons of food aid from Washington.
I guess we will never learn from our mistakes. This isn’t the first time the United States propped up one her enemies by giving aid to their people. When the Bolsheviks took over Tsarist Russia, their brutal policies – coupled with a civil war – caused millions to die of starvation; some resorted to cannibalism. Children were locked up for fear of being eaten. In October of 1921, it was estimated that 16 million people would perish, if aid didn’t come to Russia.
Kim has been hailed as the North's leader since the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in December, and has frequently visited frontline military units. But his trip to Panmunjon, a compound straddling the border where the armistice ending the Korean War was signed in 1953, was the first time he had put himself in full view -- and within the range -- of South Korean border guards.
"If there is a fight erupting, our military and people will have the enemy kneeling before us to sign not a truce this time but a document of surrender," Kim was quoted by the North's news agency.
The agreement that North Korea struck last week with the United States calls for it to suspend its nuclear weapons tests and uranium enrichment and allow international inspectors to monitor activities at its main nuclear complex, in exchange for 240,000 tons of food aid from Washington.
I guess we will never learn from our mistakes. This isn’t the first time the United States propped up one her enemies by giving aid to their people. When the Bolsheviks took over Tsarist Russia, their brutal policies – coupled with a civil war – caused millions to die of starvation; some resorted to cannibalism. Children were locked up for fear of being eaten. In October of 1921, it was estimated that 16 million people would perish, if aid didn’t come to Russia.
The Great Famine caught the eye of one of America’s great humanitarians: Herbert Hoover. Hoover was Secretary of Commerce during the Harding administration. He was also director of the American Relief Administration. It was under his insistence that Congress approve shipments of aid. Here is an excerpt from American Experience:
The ARA campaign in Russia would be the largest relief operation to date. And the first to provide relief to an adversary. The challenge was to get the food almost halfway around the world where up to 100,000 Russians were dying every week.America's surplus corn and wheat seed began to move quickly from the heartland to the holds of ocean-going freighters. The first relief ships left New York in mid-January 1922 carrying 300,000 tons of grain.
The task before the ARA workers in Russia was Herculean. During the child feeding, the ARA had divided Russia into ten districts. Each had an American supervisor and a small staff of Americans. Once again, these relief workers set off into the far corners of their districts estimating the new needs, arranging for more warehouses to store 20 million bushels of corn and thousands of tons of seed, and directing the village committees to identify starving adults for the expanded relief. They traveled over the flat expanses of the Russian steppes for silent days in crude sleighs, by train if they could find a private car. Their greatest physical threat was typhus, spread by lice.
The ARA’s efforts in Russia was strictly humanitarian and had unintended consequences. Lenin and the Bolsheviks consolidated power, while the Americans fed their people. The Soviet regime would last for decades. These communist dogs brutalized and murdered millions, until their fall in the late 1980’s. So, here we are again, feeding another communist regime’s people, while they consolidate power under another brutal dictator.
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