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A scene from "Squid Game" on Netflix
Reprinted with permission from Responsible Statecraft
The Treasury Department's nine-page "2021 Sanctions Review" released on Monday makes vague recommendations for "calibrating sanctions to mitigate unintended economic, political, and humanitarian impact." Unfortunately, it offers few tangible policy suggestions on how to end the high humanitariancost of sanctions on vulnerable populations in places like North Korea, where 40 percent of the population is undernourished and one-in-three households lack clean water.
That lack of concern about the well-being of populations in countries sanctioned by the United States should come as no real surprise. North Koreans are consistently dehumanized, caricatured, and parodied in U.S. popular media, a phenomenon that enables inflation of the national security risk posed by North Korea and serves to justify a brutal sanctions strategy against Pyongyang.
At a time of rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, the Biden administration and Hollywood would do well to take a close look at how South Korea portrays its neighbor to the north of the 38th parallel, particularly in the South Korean produced-Netflix runaway hit, Squid Game. That's right, the show that casually murders nearly (no spoilers here!) every major character in depraved children's games as part of a bloody allegory about late-stage capitalism, economic inequality in Seoul, and the boredom experienced by global elites.
If that sounds disturbing, that's sort of the whole point. But the show is also noteworthy for its humanizing treatment of most of the major characters, including a North Korean, in a manner that Americans almost never witness.
Most American news coverage of North Korea revolves around its nuclear weapons program. Recent reports that Pyongyang tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile will likely consume American media's attention, with scant attention placed on the people who live there and what the current situation means for them. Images of missiles and soldiers marching will dominate news about this latest development, while human-centered stories about the North Korean people will neither be seen nor heard. The result is an American public that does not see North Korea as a country made up of people and interests but as a threat.
Squid Game chooses to focus on a more human side of North Korea with its character Kang Sae-byeok, played by Jung Ho-yeon. A North Korean defector to the South, she enters the game to earn money to support her younger brother (currently in a South Korean orphanage) and to pay exploitative brokers to smuggle her surviving family members out of North Korea. Her elder brother and grandparents died from a plague in North Korea when she was a child.
Korean-speaking Squid Game fans note that Sae-byeok conceals her North Korean accent when speaking to her South Korean competitors, only allowing her North Korean accent to come across when speaking to her little brother, presumably a defense mechanism to avoid discrimination that is common among North Koreans living in the South. Indeed, North Korean defectors in South Korea often face discrimination and live in poverty.
Kang's character is sympathetically portrayed as a struggling person trying to improve her life and that of her family, much like most of the Squid Game participants. And that's an enormous departure from how North Koreans are typically portrayed in the United States.
The examples are numerous but also, sadly, consistent. James Franco and Seth Rogen's 2014 film, "The Interview," focused on a parody caricature of Kim Jong Un who suffers a mental and physical breakdown after hearing "Firework" by Katy Perry. In "Team America," Trey Parker and Matt Stone's black-comedy-action critique of U.S. foreign policy, Kim Jong Il is secretly an alien cockroach.
And who could forget then-President Donald Trump's taunt at the 2017 U.N. General Assembly, where he said of Kim Jong Un: "Rocket Man is on a suicide mission"?
Of course, criticizing the Kim government does not necessarily reflect a disregard for the conditions of the North Korean people. The problem with these caricatures is that North Koreans, outside Kim Jong Un and other top political and military leaders, are often rendered invisible both by their own government as well as by the international community, including the United States. And the more North Korea is essentialized as Kim Jong Un, the less likely the outside world will view the country beyond Kim.
In recent years, humanitarian groups working with North Koreans on the ground have had modest success in shining light on the plight of vulnerable North Koreans, such as patients of highly infectious diseases such as multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. As Dr. KJ Seung of Partners In Health noted regarding the 2018 documentary, Out of Breath, "North Koreans are not robots like they are normally portrayed on TV or in print." Legislation, such as the Enhancing North Korea Humanitarian Assistance Act (H.R.1504/S.690), led by Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA) and Congressman Andy Levin (D-MI), that would help expedite the delivery of lifesaving aid to North Koreans, have stalled in both the House and the Senate, and are unlikely to become law absent more support from relevant committee chairs.
Last Wednesday, Foreign Policy reported on a State Department cable making surface-level observations that Squid Game was a commentary on tensions in South Korean society and economic conditions. Perhaps if the State Department and Treasury Department looked a little deeper they might take another message. South Korean popular media — which, thanks to K-pop, K-dramas, films like Parasite and Snowpiercer, and other streaming megahits like Crash Landing On You — is producing humanizing and relatable portrayals of North Koreans.
Much of the U.S. sanctions strategy against North Korea is predicated on the theory that total capitulation to U.S. demands is the only acceptable outcome — even if ordinary citizens are harmed along the way. Perhaps if Washington and popular media treated North Korea as a country of people, rather than solely a security challenge, it would lead to a more humane policy and greater self-reflection on the impact of its policy on ordinary people.
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Mt.Rushmore
Reprinted with permission from Creators
In New York City, a statue of Thomas Jefferson has graced the City Council chamber for 100 years. This week, the Public Design Commission voted unanimously to remove it. "Jefferson embodies some of the most shameful parts of our country's history," explained Adrienne Adams, a councilwoman from Queens. Assemblyman Charles Barron went even further. Responding to a question about where the statue should go next, he was contemptuous: "I don't think it should go anywhere. I don't think it should exist."When iconoclasts topple Jefferson, they seem to validate the argument advanced by defenders of Confederate monuments that there is no escape from the slippery slope. "First, they come for Nathan Bedford Forrest and then for Robert E. Lee. Where does it end? Is Jefferson next? Is George Washington?"
No historical figure is without blemish, they protest. And it's unfair to condemn our ancestors using today's standards. If owning slaves is the discrediting fact about Lee, how then can we excuse George Washington? As if on cue, "TFG" chimed in with a statement chiding the city for "evicting" the "late, great Thomas Jefferson, one of our most important founding fathers." Not so important, apparently, that former President Donald Trump felt the need to learn about him though, because the next phrase was "a principal writer of the Constitution of the United States." Sigh. No, Jefferson was in Paris during the Constitutional Convention. He authored another founding document Trump hasn't read. But never mind.
There is an answer — a reason why it's right to remove Robert E. Lee from his pedestal in Richmond, Virginia, yet wrong to exile Thomas Jefferson from a place of honor in American life. It requires grappling with the full complexity of human beings and the mixed legacy of history. We must, as William Shakespeare said, "Take them for all in all," that is, judge them for their entire lives, not just a part.
People who defend monuments to Lee on the grounds that he played an important role in our history are confusing significance with honor. Lee surely played a huge role in our history, but as the leader of an army whose aim was to destroy the union. That made him a textbook traitor. As Ulysses Grant put it in his memoir, recalling his feelings upon accepting Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, Lee had fought "valiantly" but for a cause that was "one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."
Is it fair to judge Lee by our modern standards? Perhaps not, but even by the standards of his own day, he is wanting. Much has been made of Lee's supposedly agonizing decision to resign his U.S. Army commission because he could not "raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children." But others, including Gen. Winfield Scott, who offered Lee command of the Union army in 1861, also hailed from Virginia, yet remained loyal, as did Virginian Gen. George Henry Thomas, the "Rock of Chickamauga," and an estimated 100,000 white Southerners who fought for the Union.
Lee's image has been sanitized and even beatified by purveyors of the "Lost Cause" narrative about the Confederacy. They've depicted Lee as an upright, chivalrous defender of tradition, a moral man and a Christian. But, as Adam Serwer reminds us, Lee was a cruel slave master. In the words of Wesley Norris, one of his slaves who attempted to escape and was whipped, "Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done." As the leader of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee enslaved all of the Black Union soldiers he captured as well as free Black Pennsylvanians his army encountered.
As the author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson enshrined the ideals that made this nation. Jefferson's words formed our national identity as free people and marked a departure in human affairs. A 19th-century Hungarian nationalist, Lajos Kossuth, called the American Declaration of Independence "the noblest, happiest page in mankind's history."
Was Jefferson a hypocrite? Oh, yes. One of history's most flamboyant. He owned slaves and almost certainly fathered children with his dead wife's half sister, Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman. But he never defended the institution (as Lee did), quite the contrary. He wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
Do we overlook Jefferson's shameful private behavior? No, but we take him in full. His contribution to human liberty, despite his personal behavior, entitles him to a place of honor. There will always be an asterisk, but to say that statues honoring him "shouldn't exist," as the New York City assemblyman did, is to dismiss the Declaration, the American anthem.
As for George Washington, there would have been no nation to criticize or lionize without him. If Jefferson was the poet laureate of liberty, Washington was the living exemplar of republican virtue. Having led the revolution, he could have proclaimed himself king or dictator. Some urged him to do so. When King George III was told by the American artist Benjamin West that Washington intended to resign and return to private life after winning his country's freedom, the king said, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."
He was. Many a revolutionary leader came after him. Most became despots in turn. None has achieved his greatness.
Yes, Washington held human beings in bondage, and that was terrible. Owning slaves is a blight on his record, but the rest shines bright. No nation that has judgment — and gratitude — can fail to honor him forever.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her most recent book is Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense."To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
Photo credit: mercuryatlasnine at Pixabay
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