generalspeaking

With All Due Respect ... Rational Judgement of an Irrational Tyrant?

"He [Kim Jong-un] tells me that he didn't know about it [charge, incarceration and torture of Otto Warmbier, U.S. citizen], and I will take him at his word."
"I really believe something horrible happened to him [21-year-old U.S. tourist Otto Warmbier], and I really don't think the top leadership knew about it."
"I don't believe he would have allowed that to happen. It just wasn't to his advantage to allow that to happen."
U.S. President Donald J. Trump

"We have been respectful during this summit process. Now we must speak out."
"Kim and his evil regime are responsible for the death of our son Otto. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity."
"No excuse or lavish praise can change that."
Fred and Cindy Warmbier, parents

ITAR-TASS News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo

An American college student of 21, Otto Warmbier had been a tourist on an organized trip to North Korea. He was seen to have taken a poster, a North Korean propaganda piece that he meant to take back with him to the U.S. as a memento of his trip. Instead of boarding his flight back home, he was arrested in Pyongyang, accused of taking illegal possession of a poster. That possession earned the young man 17 excruciating months in a North Korean prison. His curiosity about North Korea was truly expunged, and he fervently wished nothing but to return home.

He was prepared to do anything and everything the regime demanded of him, from appearing on television to express guilt over his dreadful crime, to pleading with the authorities to allow him to leave. His humiliation, however, did not serve to satisfy the wretched ill feelings of North Korea nor its cretinous leader who determined that the young man hadn't quite suffered sufficiently to assuage indignation over his sense of entitlement that spurred him to make off with a poster.

When he eventually was permitted to leave North Korea to fly back to the United States, not even his anxious parents awaiting his return with the knowledge that their son was in very ill health resulting from his incarceration, interrogation and torture would or could begin to imagine how perilously on the edge of death he was. Immediately hospitalized, there was nothing that modern medical care could offer to prolong his life.


The Warmbier family succeeded in winning a $500-million judgement in federal court against North Korea. In December, a judge ruled the Kim regime to be responsible for the torture and extrajudicial killing of Otto Warmbier. The money would mean nothing to them. They will never see any of it. It can be said to be recognized as a moral, but hollow victory. Nothing can restore their son to them, and the judgement means little other than what they know happened has consequences under the law, but there is no normal law in North Korea.

President Trump went to Singapore to meet with the nasty little dictator on an unrelated topic, one of huge interest and importance to the rest of the world, excluding champions of Kim, like Iran, Syria, Turkey, Russia and China. North Korea is a nation like few others. Small, impoverished, threatening and paranoiac, with a passion to perfect intercontinental ballistic missile systems and nuclear devices to go with them. Its population has undergone starvation and privation but for the elite who support their leader.  Kim's devotion to seeing the world quail in despair over his threats feeds his ego.

Doug Mills, The New York Times

The U.S. President obviously feels he has the inside track with this nasty little dictator, and it's best not to dwell on speculations respecting their perceived commonalities in temperament and perhaps even character. What is clear, is that Mr. Trump appears to harbour some odd speculative affection for Kim, puzzling to any observer, perhaps explicable in his own mind. Even so, no harmony of like minds prevailed in Mr. Trump's insistence that Kim's nuclear ambitions be laid to rest in exchange for sanctions lifting.

And perhaps some measure of comfort can be taken in the fact that the U.S. President determined that no agreement could be reached in the face of that intransigence, though it's hard to see how he could have expected a different outcome, despite his stated confidence that he would return with a signed agreement, ostensibly because he sees himself as a master manipulator, a genius of 'the deal'.

However, that he could gull himself into believing that what happened to Otto Warmglier was not the full responsibility of and directed by Kim is astonishing.

North Korea is determined to prove its military might to the world. Picture: Liu Xingzhe/VCG/Getty Images

Labels: Conciliation, Conflict, North Korea, Nuclear Threats, Otto Warmbier, Terrorist States, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, March 02, 2019