Living with Crazy Neighbors

South Koreans were attacked by their fellow Koreans in the North so often and almost routinely that they seem to have become insensitive and immune to the continuing aggression from the North.

Maybe, we in the South are such a nice and tolerant people who love our cousins in the North so much that we forgive them generously, instead of reacting to their attacks with corresponding intensity, every time they perpetrate their fratricidal crime against us.

Or maybe we are really scared stiff of the North Koreans who are threatening to reduced us and our country to ashes with their nuclear bombs and other terrible weapons of mass destruction.

Although we don’t admit publicly but deep down, we all realize that our armed forces are no match to their counterparts in the North and therefore could not defend our country by ourselves alone. We are such a meek and gutless people, in other words, that we could not muster a measure of courage to stand up against the crazy and despicable tyrant and his loyal followers in Pyongyang and teach them an unforgettable lesson that we, unlike their own cowed and trembling people, would not put up with their cruel and inhuman behavior.

Whatever the reason, we have shown an amazing, almost infinite, degree of patience and stoic tolerance toward the North Koreans who have attacked our nation and killed hundreds of innocent people since the War ended in truce in 1953.

As the North Korean launched their attacks with impunity, even with contempt, South Koreans, for their part, have developed the pattern of their meek reaction, which seems to have become routine as well.

In the latest attack, the North Koreans shelled a South Korean island in the West Sea, just south of the Northern Limit Line, killing two marines and two civilians and injuring 18 on Nov. 23.

Pundits and scholars in South Korea, the United States and other Western countries tried, as usual, to figure out why Kim Jong-il and his lackeys were behaving the way they did. But there cannot be any clear and rational explanation because these are acts of irrational people.

It is easy to believe that the North Korean leaders are a bunch of crazed men and women; what I don’t understand is, there are equally crazy people amid us in the South, who are blindly following the cruel dictator in Pyongyang. These are leftist politicians, unionists, radical teachers and students who are sympathetic to and supportive of Kim Jong-il and his regime.

I wouldn’t go so far as to describe them as “enemies within,” but they represent, without doubt, a dangerous element in our society which could play a dangerous and extremely damaging role, if another all-out war breaks out in Korea.

After a North Korean submarine was found to have fired a torpedo and sank a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 sailors last March, Pyongyang denied the responsibility for the attack, despite the findings of an international investigation. That was not all. Resorting to its favoring game of turning the table on the victims, it outrageously claimed that the sinking was the work of the South Korean government.

These North Korean claims were parroted by the afore-mentioned people in the South who follow the Dear Leader blindly with what appears to be unswerving loyalty.

But who in their right mind with a modicum of intelligence would believe that the administration of their elected president is such a rotten, inhuman government that it could think of, let alone carry out, such a horrible crime against its own people?

In the wake of the latest attack, these people and others as well as China, North Korea’s only ally, are urging the rest of the world, as usual, to talk to the North Koreans to defuse the tension and negotiate a peaceful resolutions of “Korean problems.”

But haven’t we had enough talks in the past half a century? What had we gotten out of those talks? What have we achieved in our talks with those crazy people except to let them make a number of nuclear bombs and continue their attacks against the South?

Talking with insane people to work out a sensible solution is a senseless thing to do. It is an exercise in futility at best.

There is a saying in Korea that the best and only way to treat a mad dog is a good thrashing with a stick. Those insane people in the North need a good beating. For they, like mad dogs, fear and understand only the brutal and merciless force.

To be sure, we may have to pay a considerable price, including the loss of lives, in order to put an end to this senseless life-and-death game that North Korea is forcing us to play. But we must act, sooner rather than later, if we are to keep our hard-earned freedom and advancing economy.
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Something I Couldn't Erase From My Memory

My mother, who had been suffering from a serious heart disease for several years, tried to kill herself by cutting her own throat with a knife when I was 13.

A few days before the incident, my father had taken her to a Christian missionary hospital on the outskirts of Seoul, where she was diagnosed with a defective heart valve, but she was told to go home because the doctors there couldn’t do anything for her. It was too late to treat her, they said.

Realizing that it was pointless to keep suffering, she had apparently decided to end her own life. Father found her in the bedroom just in time to wrest the knife from her hand and call a doctor. Even though she was awfully weak and frail already and despite a heavy loss of blood, she somehow survived thanks to quick emergency treatment.

I was at school all morning that day without knowing what had happened; when I came home in the afternoon, she was sleeping under sedation. I saw a trace of blood that had seeped out and stained the white gauze that was wrapped around her neck.

Watching her pale, emaciated face, I was too stunned to feel—much less, think of—anything. I just sat on the floor where Mother lay on a thin mattress. Mother was so still I thought she was either asleep or dead.

After a while, I realized that though she was extremely weak, she was conscious of her surroundings. I even detected a trace of what looked like a faint smile on her face.

“What is it, Mother?” I asked her. “Is there anything you want?”
“I have messed thing up, haven’t I?” she said. “But don’t be frightened; you are a big boy now.”

Her voice was barely audible; I had to lean forward to listen to what she was saying. “After I die,” she went on, “you will have a new and healthy mother who will take a good care of you.”

“What are you saying,” I mumbled but I couldn’t go on and tell her to stop talking nonsense.

It was then that I realized I resented Mother for what she had done not only to herself, but, more importantly, to me.

The train of thought that ran through my young mind went something like this: there I was, her only son, whom she said she loved despite her long illness and suffering, and yet, she was ready to go away and “abandon” me. It was very selfish of her, I thought, to leave her loved one behind and “try to go away alone.”

The realization of that fact was pretty unsettling as I felt that her attempt to kill herself was a kind of betrayal. But it soon dawned on me that I was the selfish one for thinking only of myself while I’d cared very little about how much Mother must have suffered to have wanted to end it all with her own hand.

She died a week later. Father, who always insisted that I should never miss a day at school, told me to stay home that day. He must have had some kind of premonition.

I stayed at Mother’s bedside all morning but in the afternoon, a friend dropped in to find out why I had skipped school. While the friend and I were in another room, talking about a book we had both read recently, Mother was left alone and death must have come then.

It was Father who discovered her and called me and other members of the family into the room. By then, it was too late.

The funeral rite was held at a Buddhist temple on the western outskirts of Seoul. Mother was neither a Buddhist nor a Christian. But she had believed in the supernatural. In other words, she was superstitious.

I do not know who decided to hold her funeral at the Buddhist temple three days after her death. It must have been customary at that time for most Koreans to cremate the dead after holding the funeral at a temple. And we must have just followed the custom, although no member of our family was Buddhist.

The temple was about 500 meters up a hill behind the crematorium.
Before we left for the temple, they placed the wooden casket on a trolley in front of one of the four furnaces. A crematory worker told us we could stay there a while and watch the casket going into the furnace. I wanted to stay. I felt I had to see Mother for the last time before she would be reduced to ashes.

Even at that age, I could see that it would be one of the most painful moments in the funeral processes: while mourners stood around, the crematory worker would open the thick glassy door for us to see the fire roaring inside the cylindrical chamber into which mother in the casket would be pushed by the worker. If you are the “chief mourner” of the deceased you are supposed to watch the process, he said.

But as it was too painful, especially for such a young chief mourner, like myself, the worker explained we could leave the job for them. And my father said we had better go to the temple right away to attend the funeral rite.
The rite at the temple was a drawn-out affair.

A faded black-and-white photo of Mother, which must have been taken years before when she was relatively healthy, was placed on the altar. She looked like a stranger to me perhaps because I had not known such a healthy looking mother in all my life.

A monk recited a long, unintelligible scripture while we kneeled on the floor and bowed to a huge, gleaming bronze statue of Buddha, and stood up just to repeat the process again and again. At the end of the prayer service, the monk explained to me: “Now, the soul of your mother can leave this world because of the infinite mercy of Buddha.”

After the rite, we were led to a dinning hall where rows of dishes of steamed rice and vegetarian foods were laid out. My sisters, uncles and aunts and other members of our family ate hungrily. When I thought about it, we had not had a substantial meal for three straight days and they must have been starving. Watching them wolfing the food down, I, too, felt ravenous, and yet, my mouth was extremely dry, and I felt I could not swallow anything even if I tried.

I sneaked out of the dining room and crossed the front yard of the temple to the edge of the cliff from where I could watch the crematorium. A wisp of smoke was coming out of its chimney and disappeared into the air even though there was hardly any wind in the dull, early spring weather.

The chimney was extremely tall. Then, I remembered hearing that it wasn’t tall at first, but the crematorium was forced to raise its height after the people in nearby villages complained of the smell of burning flesh almost every day.

Vaguely, I wondered how many dead bodies were cremated there. Hundreds? Thousands?

Then suddenly I realized that I was trying to force myself to think of something that had nothing to do with my mother, who, at that very moment, was being reduced to a handful of ashes and smoke that was emitting from the chimney and disappearing into the thin air.

I wondered whether my mother felt the heat in there—the suffocating and insufferable heat—had she been able, perchance, to feel as we, the living, do. Of course, there was no way of knowing whether the soul of dead persons could feel anything. And yet I could not help wondering about it.

Until then, I have never thought of what might be “the best way to go” after death. Which would be better? Burned to ashes or buried deep in the cold, dark, damp ground? Actually, when they told me that Mother was going to be cremated, I thought it wasn’t such a bad idea. But then, when I thought of the heat, that awful heat she had to suffer, I felt a cold shiver running down my spine.

When we returned to the crematorium, they had already pulled the trolley out of the furnace and a heap of ashes with some fragmentary white bones scattered among them were ready for us to pick up. I was given a pair of big wooden sticks to pick the bones and deposit them into a ceramic urn along with some ashes.

I could still feel the heat that emanated from the remains. In addition, perhaps because of the awfully hot atmosphere of the hall, I felt beads of sweat running down my face.

“Let’s hurry up,” my father, standing behind me, said to no one in particular. “We have to catch the last bus from the station in the village and we haven’t got much time.”

After depositing most of the ashes into the urn, we left the crematorium for the village. As mother’s only son, I was asked to carry the urn in a cloth contraption that hung from my neck while I held it with both my hands. As we walked down a narrow, winding road in a single file, I was surprised to find how light the entire remains of my mother were. I also felt the warmth of Mother’s ashes through the ceramic urn that I was holding against my chest.

Then suddenly and for the first time since Mother had died, tears started welling up in my eyes, blurring my vision, in spite of myself. Right after Mother died, I had told myself not to show tears in front of others if I could help it.

To this day, I do not know why I made such a resolution. Anyway, all of a sudden, tears started flowing, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I handed the urn to my father, told everybody to go ahead and leave me alone for a while. I then sat down on the side of the road and, after making sure nobody was watching me, I wept with abandon.
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Blaming General MacArthur

In an opinion poll, conducted recently to mark the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, more than 30 percent of young people in South Korea said they believed that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the United Nations forces during the war, was responsible for blocking the Korean people’s effort to reunify their country.

From the point of view of most older South Koreans who experienced the war, the opinion of the young people, came as a complete shock, I am sure.

Admittedly, the young people were born long after 1950 and therefore had no experience of that awful war, launched by the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung to communize the South. They have also grown up in a free and affluent society, which their grandparents and parents worked hard to build up in the 1960s and 70s from the rubble of war. Moreover, they were educated by teachers, many of who are leftists, who have apparently tried their best to brainwash their students with their pro-Communist and pro-North Korean view of the war.

In any case, the young South Koreans apparently believe that MacArthur foiled the “attempt by Koreans to unify their country,” when he launched the tactical maneuver in which the U.S. and South Korean forces landed at Inchon from the West (Yellow) Sea on September 15, 1950 and attacked the occupying North Korean force, recapturing the capital city of Seoul within a few days.

The surprise attack also cut off the North Koreans’ supply line, completely isolating the Communist forces in the South. Within about ten days, the North Koreans had either surrendered or beat a hasty retreat, crossing the 38th parallel that had originally separated from the South from the North.

The U.N. forces then marched north, all the way to the Yalu River that separated the Korean Peninsula from China, nearly succeeding in unifying the country.

But then, the Red Chinese forces, hundreds of thousands of them, crossed the border and surged into North Korea to fight the U.N. forces alongside the North Koreans. They eventually pushed the United Nations forces near to the original dividing line of the 38th parallel before the two sides came to an armistice agreement in 1953.

So, if MacArthur’s Inchon landing frustrated reunification efforts, as those young South Koreans believe, the Chinese Red Amy that invaded Korea, should also be viewed as responsible for blocking the Korean people’s effort to unify their country.

I wonder why those young people so conveniently forget this fact and unfairly shift the blame for the division of their country only on General MacArthur.

It’s incredible as well as deeply saddening to realize that those young South Koreans are blaming the American commander and the United States for blocking the reunification of their country instead of expressing appreciation to MacArthur and being grateful to the United States for helping their country remain free and build up its democratic system and economy.

Would they rather live in a country that is one huge gulag for all practical intents and purposes, starving or living in utter inhuman conditions under the cruel and merciless dictatorship of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il? The answer, of course, is clear; no one who wasn’t forced to would want to live in constant fear and complete darkness like that.
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Beware of Liars on the Internet

Koreans on the whole are so emotional and gullible that they believe all kinds of dubious allegations, heresies and even downright lies concocted by netizens and spread through the Internet for fun or with malicious intent.

Without ascertaining their truth, Koreans tend to take action, turning the false allegations into social or political issues that sometimes shake the very foundation of the republic.

We all know that on a personal level, a lot of harm is being done to well-known public figures by the nasty twitterers and Internet bloggers and surfers. It has become easy for everyone to use such Internet sites as Google, YouTube and Facebook to attack others, often under the protection of anonymity.

The problem becomes more serious when unscrupulous political activists abuse the Internet to incite social unrest by planting misinformation or rumors. In most advanced societies, the people are not so easily duped into believing information they read on the Internet, until it is substantiated by facts. But the opposite is true in South Korea; for, it is a society where the people are, as I said, highly gullible and excitable.

The situation is exacerbated by the people’s political mindsets.

The country, which is barely as big as the state of Indiana, is politically divided by regions, which have hated each other like irreconcilable brothers for centuries. One group is ostracized and marginalized by the other whenever political power changes hands.

The group, currently in power, comes from the conservative region or the southeastern part of the country while the others—in the opposition now—are mostly left-leaning people from the southwest. Also, as in many other countries, the younger generation tends to be liberal whereas the elderly are conservative.

These, of course, are not fast and clear-cut rules but they are generally true.

Those from the southwestern region, plus a majority of young people, are generally leftists, sympathetic to—if not downright supporters of—the pseudo-Communist regime of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il while the conservatives are pro-American and anti-North Korean regime.

It is against this demographic and political background that the game of intrigue and propaganda has been played out through the use of the Internet.

Thus, a group of anti-American leftists alleged on the Internet a couple of years ago that the beef imported from the United States was tainted with mad-cow disease, fomenting fear and hysteria among the general populace.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators hit the streets of Seoul and other major cities almost daily to demonstrate against the government for months. However, the allegations were eventually proven false. And yet, not many of those who were known to have spread the groundless allegations were forced to take responsibility for their action.

Then, a South Korean navy vessel exploded and sank in the East (Yellow) Sea nearly three months ago. A painstaking and detailed investigation by South Korean authorities, aided by foreign experts, has established that it was a North Korean submarine that torpedoed and sank the ship.

As usual, the North Koreans denied the charge and the leftists in South Korea parroted Pyongyang, claiming that it must have been the South Koreans themselves who sank their own navy ship. There were even allegations, made on the Internet, that a U.S. submarine was somehow responsible for the sinking.

But who, in their right mind, would sink a navy ship of their own or that of a close ally, unless they were crazy like the leaders in Pyongyang?

Anyway, in the latest episode, Guus Hiddink, former head coach of the South Korean national football (soccer) team, who successfully piloted his team to the semifinals of the 2002 World Cup held in South Korea and Japan, was quoted as sharply criticizing the South Korean team currently competing in the World Cup in South Africa in the wake of its 1-4 defeat at the hands of the Argentine side.

Korean newspapers prominently played Hiddink’s criticism under big headlines. And readers were puzzled by the kind of remarks that would not have come from the smart and suave coach. Indeed, it turned out that the whole story was fabricated by a netizen and run on an Internet site as though Hiddink made the remarks in an interview with a Dutch publication.

Needless to say, what this netizen has done is inexcusable. He should be hunted down and made to pay the price for his stupid and pointless prank.

But what is more deplorable, shameful, really, is the irresponsible Korean newspapers that lifted the false story out of the Internet site and without checking its truthfulness, published it on their front pages.

True, we are all victims of the sensationalism and untrustworthy tidbits of information that are masquerading as legitimate news reports these days. We also know that the electronic media, whether we like them or not, are playing an increasingly important role in our society. That is precisely why we must be wary of its harmful effects as well.
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Loser In the Game of Chicken

When I was reading news reports on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s return to Pyongyang from his visit to China early last month, a faded image of a small Korean boy resurfaced in my memory out of half a century of oblivion.

The boy was one of my classmates at the elementary school in a remote village in South Korea nearly 70 years ago.

The North Korean dictator somehow reminded me of the obnoxious little kid who was disliked and avoided like a leech by everyone in our class. He was not unusually big or strong but managed to bully everyone because he had a big brother who was four years older than us.

His family, I remember, was extremely poor and yet he always was in possession of a pocketful of candies and marbles that he had “confiscated” from us. He even forced us to give up our lunch boxes so that he didn’t have to skip a meal. Luckily for us, his family moved out of our village a couple of years later, and the memory of that awful boy soon faded away.

As we all know, Kim Jong-il visited China shortly after a South Korean navy ship was attacked and sank in the West (Yellow) Sea. A month-long, meticulous investigation by South Koreans aided by a team of foreign experts established—based on undeniable and watertight evidence—that the North Koreans had perpetrated the crime.

Outraged and angry at the latest in North Korea’s unending series of terrorist acts against them, South Koreans vowed to retaliate. President Lee Myung-bak’s government declared it would force the impoverished but belligerent North to pay a price for the unprovoked attack.

South Korea and its ally, the United States, also announced that they would hold a joint naval exercise as part of demonstrations to show their determination to confront possible further provocation from the North. In addition, Seoul moved to have the United Nations condemn North Korea for the attack and tighten its existing economic sanctions against Pyongyang as punishment.

The North Koreans, as usual, resorted to their well-worn tactics, claiming that it was South Korea itself that had “staged” the incident and sank its own navy ship. It even threatened to launch an all-out war against the South if Seoul tries to retaliate against them.

Although Kim Jong-il and his running dogs in Pyongyang barked loudly, they must have been scared nonetheless over a possible military action by the South against them. For, Kim dragged his ailing body to Beijing apparently to seek Chinese reassurance that they would continue to stand by their North Korean puppets no matter what happens.

In the ensuing game of chicken between the North and South, it is Seoul, it seems, that has blinked and let Kim Jong-il get away with murders once again. South Korea and the United States postponed their announced naval exercise indefinitely while the United Nations has not taken any action against North Korea as of early June.
The Seoul government even issued a statement saying it would refrain from taking any step that could provoke North Korea.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did visit Beijing but was unable, obviously, to exert any effective influence over the Chinese leadership. Judging by the action—or rather, inaction—of Beijing, China’s role of big brother for the North seems to be unchanged, if not strengthened.

Thus, like the obnoxious kid that my classmates and I had to put up with in our elementary school days, that cruel and insufferable dictator Kim Jong-il, riding piggyback on his big brother, will keep terrorizing and murdering South Koreans with impunity as China continues to expand and wield its power and influence over its neighbors.

Kim Jong-il knows, no doubt, that right now, the United States can’t do anything much for South Korea not only because it has its hands full with two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—but also because it is suffering serious financial difficulties that include an enormous debt to China. It has been reported that Beijing has dragged its feet on the U.S. request for Chinese efforts to help maintain peace in the Korean Peninsula.

One only hopes that the overconfident Kim Jong-il will not take any more rash and miscalculated action against the South that could easily trigger another all-out war that would surely reduce the two Koreas to one huge heap of rubble.
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Living With Ants (II)

The other day, I played god with a couple of tiny ants, members a species that is smaller than a grain of rice. Hundreds of thousands of them have invaded our house and have been living with us for years. That is why I wasn’t very upset when I saw them crawling around the edges of the bathtub when I was taking my morning bath.

I decided to get rid of them but not immediately. I wanted to see how strong their instinct for survival was. I realized that I was being cruel. But my desire to observe their behavior in the face of imminent death was stronger.

First, I built a puddle of water around them with warm bath water scooped up with the palms of my hand in order to see them struggle to get out of their watery confine and escape. Apparently, though, they are not good swimmers.

Despite their desperate efforts, they could not wriggle through water. But they never gave up; they ran around tirelessly in search of a possible exit for more than five minutes.

I found out that in the world of ants, there are also individual differences. One ant was obviously stronger physically than the other. It continued to scurry around while the other one gradually slowed down, eventually stopped running altogether and lay there as still as though it was dead.

Then, I witnessed an amazing scene. The stronger one approached the weaker one and in what appeared to me to be a gesture of nudging, pushed its head against the body of the exhausted fellow ant. Of course, I had no way of knowing whether ants actually communicate with each other and, if they do, how.

Anyway, to my great surprise, the one that I thought was dead, started moving again. And pretty soon, it began running again, not with its companion, but separately.

Meanwhile, the bathwater was getting less and less warm as I forgot to replenish it with hot water as I usually do. I was too preoccupied with my observation of the ants’ behavior.

Then, a disaster befell on the physically stronger ant. While it was frantically trying to find a route for escape, it run over the slippery edge and fell into the tube. And for a few moments, I thought it had no chance of surviving in the larger body of water, however tepid the water had become.

But lo and behold! It not only survived the fall but was vigorously moving in the soapy bathwater. Impressed by the tenacity of such a small creature and taking pity on it, I fished it out in my palm and returned it to his former “watery prison.”

Some may say that I was being needlessly cruel, but I had become extremely impatient with all the ants that had been bothering us everywhere in our house day and night. And I have killed them mercilessly whenever I spotted them. The couple of ants I ran into in the bathroom could not be an exemption. I contemplated what could be the best way to send them to their death. The answer was hot water. I knew the water didn’t have to be scalding hot.

I turned on the hot water, cupped some of it in my hands and sprinkled it on the two ants, which were reduced to a couple of dark specks instantly.

Coming out of the bathroom, I did not feel sorry for them. But somehow, I didn’t feel any vengeful elation either. Nevertheless, as I was drying myself, I turned on my CD player, knowing that the music it would play would be Mozart’s Requiem.
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How Long Should We Wait?

I have said this before but I’ll repeat it here again because I’m upset with God, yes, God. He has not been keeping his promise to us. He said vengeance is His and He will repay. But He has not kept his promise with regard to Kim Jong-il, the North Korean dictator.

(Before I go any further, I must apologize to my friends for writing so much about North Korea which is, I’m sure, one of the most distressing and uninteresting topics to think about. In the absence of any other serious events, however, one is forced more or less to discuss whatever it is that is developing in that part of the world).

Not counting his dad’s crime of killing more than 2 million people half a century ago, Kim Jong-il has been killing hundreds of innocent South Koreans, not to mention millions of his own people in the North, for decades. And yet, God has not punished him. I wonder what is holding Him up. Don’t they say that justice delayed is justice denied?

Sure, God moves in mysterious ways as they say. So, He has his own way of working on vengeance. But today, the murderous North Korean leader is not only alive and kicking but also continuing to play god himself, killing people at will and getting away with the murders.

That’s not all. Due, no doubt, to years of debauchery and decadence, he is reportedly suffering from kidney disease and has had a stroke and yet, he has “miraculously” recovered from them. Instead of doing soul searching and repenting his crimes, he still seems to be enjoying torturing and killing people.

In the latest adventure, he is strongly suspected of ordering his navy to blow up and sink a South Korean patrol ship in South Korean territorial waters in the West (Yellow) Sea nearly two months ago. Some 46 South Korean sailors perished in the unprovoked attack.

Fearing retribution from the South, he is said to have visited China in order, as some press reports speculate, to discuss ways to counter possible action from the South with Chinese leaders, his big brothers and protectors.

It is true that everything that the North Korean dictator does should necessarily be veiled in secrecy. So, some said he visited China in order to beg for more food aid for his starving nation while others were still naïve enough to hope that he was trying to discuss with the Chinese the possibility of returning to the Six-Party Talks on the denuclearization of his country. (When will they learn to regard Kim Jong-il and his followers simply as a bunch of gangsters whom they should never trust?)

From my perspective, I would say that he visited China to beg for more financial and food assistance in exchange for the right to use the strategic port of Chungjin in northeastern North Korea. There have been reports that China was trying to extend its power and influence all over Asia including the East Sea (which is known in some quarters as the Sea of Japan).

Or, maybe Kim Jong-il wants to invite Chinese tourists to visit the scenic Kumgangsan (Diamond Mountains) resort, which his regime has recently seized from the South. South Korea’s industrial group, Hyundai, and some others had built the resort in the North at the cost of tens of billions of won, but Kim Jong-il and his henchmen recently arbitrarily seized control of its operation.

Whatever the reason for his visit to China, one thing is sure: he is up to no good for the majority of his countrymen and women, not to mention, the entire Korean people. Yet, no one, indeed, no country in the rest of the world, seems to be able to do anything about him. That precisely is why, I, for one, am impatient while waiting—interminably—for God to mete out his punishment to Kim Jong-il if only to prevent him from killing any more innocent people. After all, he is one of the greatest sinners in the later half of the 20th century and beyond and there should not be any more delay in bringing him to face divine judgment for his crimes.
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