Mood:
d'ohTopic: "Graffiti Government" (2)
Should someone ask, Frodo has been considering how he would resolve the mess that has been made of Middle Earth. It started, he believes, with the single most memorable phrase in any of the collected speeches mouthed by George W. Armstrong Custer Bush. The "Axis of Evil" was, in all honesty, not really that outrageous a concept when defined as the most visible threats to peace and stability. The allegation that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were somehow linked as part of a global network of anything other than stupidity was a dumb idea then, and it is a dumb idea now. What is even more bizarre is the approach taken to deal with each of the points of conflagration.
Much has been written and broadcast of late about the differences between the "Iraqi Nation" and Iran. So let Frodo voice his ideas using North Korea, wrapped in its' own enigma, to serve as his point of demonstration.
North Korea is an entity that thrives on its' isolation. Very few know anything at all about the people there, much less what they think, or how they live. The government, which truly is a less than benevolent oligarchical dictatorship, maintains its' power because it insulates the citizenry from the outside world. The only information they get is that whatever lies outside their borders is a large and festering threat to the immediate health and safety of those protected by the great leader. All North Koreans fear the outside world because they believe that the outside world wants to steal their cache of rotting cabbage.
The current philosophical approach taken in order to deal with North Korea is, ta da, that's right, isolation. Every time North Korea does something to piss somebody off, the first, and only, suggestion, is to embargo, blockade, or otherwise punish the government. Would it not, argues Frodo, make more sense to merely pack up all the excess grain, corn, and other agricultural products which are maintained by the world's largest food producer and deliver them to the Chinese-North Korean border? At that point set up a sound system, and begin broadcasting into North Korea that people can come and get all the free food they want. Eventually, even the North Korean Army would find itself bereft of troops willing to prevent starving people, including themselves, from this largesse by the "demons" from the outside. In time, and at very little cost to the outside world, the North Korean government would have to change its' proverbial tune, or the people would change it for them.
North Korea would be confronted, in this suggestion, as a single entity, and not as part of some cabal of faceless sub-human creatures. It is evidently quite difficult for the authors of the "Axis of Evil" to recognize that these are human beings, and not Orcs.
That, dear reader, is Frodo's suggestion. In order to deal with the human problems that confront all of Middle Earth, we must first set our own minds to deal with other people and to recognize that their needs are not really that different from our own. Lamentable it is that the present course was set in motion by those who were similarly isolated within their own borders.
