Liberal Federal MP Michael Johnson seems to have let all his air travel go to his head:
He told the Sky News Agenda programme yesterday that North Korea really was misunderstood as he was waxing lyrically about Pyongyang, declaring that he thought he could have been in Paris with its beautiful wide (and no doubt empty) streets….
Bizarrely, he decrees that North Korea’s six official haircut society “is very sophisticated, um people know what they’re doing, they know their place.”
He sounds awfully like he’s defending one of the world’s ugliest autocracies: “It’s very rigid, very mechanical, very clinical but I think in that society, in that regime, that’s a plus for them in controlling the people.”
A revealing article from the WSJ outlines North Korean images, of among other things, the graves of 2 million people who died from starvation in the 1990s. The words ‘plus’ and ’sophisticated’ don’t exactly come to mind when describing North Korea. A clumsy choice of words. The regime clearly did a good job deluding Johnson during his trip.
UPDATE I
It is clear Johnson is not exactly up to speed on current North Korean events, so I post the following transcript of an interview between US radio host Hugh Hewitt and Christopher Hitchens:
HH: North Korea is rattling many sabers today, announcing that they abrogating the 1953 Armistice, and that they are going to, they’re going to go to war, in essence, if anyone bothers their ships coming in and out of port. What do you think about that?
CH: Well, an abrogation of an armistice is in effect a declaration of war. And in some ways, as the armistice were, the armistice itself implied, there’s never been a serious peace treaty. What they’re doing, as they’ve done so many times before, is trying to blackmail us into doing what they cannot do, which is to feed their people. There’s another round of famine due for the long-suffering people of North Korea who are already six inches shorter than the average South Korean. Just let that sink in for a moment, and picture it for the children, the stunted, malnourished, enslaved generation. They expect that we will, because of this blackmail, give us the food that will keep their regime going. I don’t see how much long we can allow this relationship to go on.