Head held high?<\/b>
\nAmericans might find this surprising, since so much of our media swooned over Kim Yo Jong and North Korea\u2019s cheerleading squad during these Olympics. Now that the respective US and North Korean government delegations have left Pyeongchang, CBS reports that South Koreans took a much more nuanced approach to Pyongyang\u2019s charm offensive. In fact, even among younger South Koreans, it would take more than an attractive chief propagandist and some cheerleaders to warm them up to a neighbor that constantly threatens them with nuclear annihilation:
Some are calling the Winter Olympics the \u201cPeace Games\u201d for presenting an image of warmer ties between North and South Korea, as athletes from both countries marched under a unified flag in the opening ceremony. The sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un also became the first member of her family to visit the South since the Korean War in the early 1950s. But many South Koreans are protesting what they call an \u201cillusion of peace\u201d to appease the North.\u2026
Recent polls show around half of young South Koreans don\u2019t support reunification. Many of them say after 70 years of division, the North is now a foreign country.
\u201cWhen they wanted to talk, they shot missiles first,\u201d Ha Kyoung Sohn said.
The two teams might have marched under a unification flag, but that\u2019s not a prospect that warms many South Korean hearts either:
One group said reunification might be nice one day but feared it would mean bankrolling the poverty-stricken North and higher taxes for them.
\u201cIt\u2019s gonna cost us tons and tons of money to rebuild the country,\u201d Jihee Won said.
The example of Germany may loom large in South Korean minds, and it should. When Germany reunified after 45 years of partition, the eastern part of the country was impoverished, environmentally damaged, and benighted from decades of Soviet domination. Economic issues and differences between west and east still remain, although they have been improving steadily over the last 28 years or so since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Not only has North Korea been run by a Stalinist state for a generation longer \u2014 over 70 years \u2014 it\u2019s even more oppressive than East Germany. The population is starving, imprisoned, sick, and uneducated outside of the approved circles. Modern communications and utilities outside the cities are nearly non-existent. It would take decades of infrastructure investment just to fix those problems before the North could begin to pull its weight in productivity.
And none of that will be possible at all as long as the Kim regime remains in place. One would barely know it from all of the gushing coverage of Yo Jong this past week, but she and her family are directly responsible for all of this brutal oppression, and Yo Jong serves her brother Jong-un in perpetuating the family\u2019s grip on power. South Koreans know that better than most. While some may want more cooperation between the two governments (as well as an end to the nuclear threat), very few of them would choose reunification under the Kim family\u2019s terms, no matter how attractive the international media finds Yo Jong and her cheerleading squad.
With that reality in mind, here\u2019s the Reuters headline on Yo Jong\u2019s departure last night: \u201cHead held high, Kim\u2019s sister returns to North Korea.\u201d Head held high? Here\u2019s the explanation from the article itself:
A prim, young woman with a high forehead and hair half swept back quietly gazes at the throngs of people pushing for a glimpse of her, a faint smile on her lips and eyelids low as four bodyguards jostle around her.
In her first appearance on the global stage, Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, had her every move closely scrutinised.
Crowds applauded as she stood for the South Korean anthem during the opening ceremony for the start of the Winter Olympic Games, while her big smiles and relaxed manner left a largely positive impression on the South Korean public.
But her sometimes aloof expression and high-tilted chin also spoke of someone who sees herself \u201cof royalty\u201d and \u201cabove anyone else\u201d, leadership experts and some critics said.
It took \u201cleadership experts\u201d and \u201c some critics\u201d to reach that conclusion, eh? The fact that she\u2019s a dynast running a prison-camp state didn\u2019t provide the first clue as to her arrogance, apparently. Reuters needed a body-language expert to deduce that the Kims may just think themselves superior to everyone else. Reuters does get around to talking about the Kim regime\u2019s atrocities, but only in the 19th paragraph \u2014 after extolling Yo Jong\u2019s poise and deployment of \u201csoft power.\u201d I\u2019d bet North Koreans don\u2019t think of it as soft at all. Too bad we can\u2019t ask them.<\/p>\n

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