Dear me.

Dear, dear me.

You know that progressives are scraping the bottom of the barrel of their rather shallow politics when articles such as the one written by Kevin McKenna, entitled Say what you will about North Korea… and published in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper see the light of day.

McKenna first begins by admitting his “fondness” for North Korea, and we would expect nothing less from a self-confessed lefty.

But allow me to share some of the gold nuggets from his article.

If the poor North Koreans managed to get onto the internet and see the Western news (I know, I know, the plausibility factor, but please humour McKenna for a moment) they would learn:

“for centuries the UK has been governed by a tiny elite drawn from some of the most privileged families in the UK and that we, the idiot punters, all think we’re in a democracy.”

And this:

“…despite possessing riches beyond the imagination of North Korea, we have one of the most unequal societies in the world. To their horror, they would also discover that hundreds of thousands of UK children live in grinding poverty.”

And:

“They would wonder why we’ve never risen up against a regime that spends billions on nuclear weapons and has been in a state of perpetual war for more than 300 years.”

And this sparkling diamond:

“They would draw their children close when it was revealed that we allow the United States, the most reactionary country in the world and one that gives its police officers carte blanche to execute black people, to dictate our foreign policy and to torture horribly some of our own citizens on trumped-up charges of terrorism. And they would immediately dismiss it as a spoof. For how could any people in the so-called civilised west allow their government to treat them in such a fashion?”

It must be a fascinating imaginary world in which people like Kevin McKenna live, where one’s suspension of disbelief extends to believing that North Korea and Western nations exist on the same spectrum for comparison. I know, it’s not reason or logic, but their sense of guilt and self-loathing which allows them to live in a world of such cognitive dissonance. The kind of cognitive dissonance of one who worships the ground Barack Obama walks on but despises the United States.

Whilst I am tempted to go off into another tirade about the twilight of so called ‘progressive’ politics and that fact that it has (or perhaps always) has been intellectually untenable, I won’t. I will say something else.

People like Kevin McKenna at best trivialise, but mostly just ignore the suffering, the grinding suffering and death that takes place under regimes such as North Korea and formerly took place under its socialist ancestors. To compare the poverty of those in the West to those in North Korea mocks the suffering, poverty and atrocities that have taken place in North Korea, including the starvation of between 24,000 and 3.5 million North Koreas in the 1990s.

Now, I’m not going to try and convince you that the democratic West offers a political system and society vastly superior to those in the rest of the world. I don’t need to convince you, but perhaps the scores who have tried to cross over from North Korea to the South, and the millions who have dared to escape the Communist Utopia of Cuba in the perilous sea journey in leaky boats to the bad old United States will have a go.

Not to mention the hundreds of thousands, even millions who are currently fleeing Africa and the Middle East to try and get a foothold into Europe and Australia.

I won’t try and convince you, but they probably will.

It’s the XYZ.