The intrepid Max Fisher of WaPo reports that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show satire of North Korea’s menacing statements went viral in China, garnering 2.3 million hits!
This news seems to me wonderful in every way. That Chinese youth know where to get real news is most excellent. That China’s new President Xi Jinping allowed the satire to become so popular is a good sign; humor and authoritarianism don’t usually mix, as Egypt’s President Muhammad Morsi is demonstrating in bothering Egypt’s version of Jon Stewart, Bassem Youssef. China has a poor record on freedom of speech, but one always hopes for positive change from a new generation. And that Kim Jong Un is widely treated with contempt and mirth rather than the respect and fear he covets is all to the good.
This is the Daily Show episode that went mega viral:
Maybe the problem isn’t so much Kim sung Un, buty the failure of US Diplomacy since George Bush with little correction from President Obama whose interests in foreign policy is nil.
Writing in the introduction to, A Moment of Crisis, by Marion Creekmore Jr, Jimmy Carter states:
[Kim Il sung] wanted to deal, … and he and I negotiated an agreement that froze the North Korean plutonium-based nuclear program, placed it under international inspection, and promised summit talks between the leaders of North and South Korea. This laid the basis for the official Agreed Framework of October 1994 between the United States and North Korea.
For the next eight years, North Korea did not produce any plutonium. It did not make any nuclear bombs. Its nuclear facilities that existed in 1994 were locked down, and outside experts monitored them twenty four hours a day seven days a week. There were later directed talks between the leaders of the two Koreas, for which President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea received the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Unfortunately, … the Agreed Framework collapsed in December 2002 [under George Bush]. The international inspectors were expelled, and the North Koreans regained unrestricted access to spent fuel rods from which plutonium could be manufactured. Since then, North Korea has had the capacity, which it has probably employed, to reprocess enough plutonium to make half a dozen nuclear weapons.
Excellent point William James Martin, indeed Jimmy Carter’s departure also coincided with with departure of the notion of “diplomacy/negotiation” in US foreign policy. There is a proverb, “if you can’t beat them, join them”, and that is what we have been doing for the past 3.5 decades, we have joined the crazies and the terrorists. Our mantra has become “we go to war to maintain peace”!!!!
Anyhow the following is an amazing piece of news that in my opinion should also go viral in China, if not in the United States. The depth of hypocrisy is unimaginable.
link to dcbureau.org
Incidentally USA has dropped couple of Atomic Bombs on the Japanese, we hold the number of ranking as an only nation who ever abused her nuclear capability.
‘now Zimbabwe’ I meant.
• I might add that Obama has never lifted his finger to resolve a single foreign policy issue, though he has been willing to tweak events here and there in a responsive rather than in a pro-active way. He ahs been willing to exercise some limited influence in events which are already underway.
I remind the reader of the following foreign policy initiatives by President Carter:
1) The effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, culminating in the Camp David Accords of 1978.
2) The Completion of the normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China, including the exchange of Ambassadors, which had been left dangling after Richard Nixon’s trip to China in which Nixon had left behind a lower ranking diplomat.
3) The resolution of the Panama Canal dispute, culminating the Panama Canal treaty, an unpopular treaty which however passed the congress with a 2/3 of the vote.
4) Carter was directly involved in the negotiations for the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement with the Soviet Union which, though it was withdrawn from consideration by the US Senate, did stabilize both the arms race and relations with the Soviet Union until it s fall in 1993.
5) The effort, which was successful, to move both the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to majority rule.
Don’t make me so happy,please.You guys are so funny.
First of all,John has a lot of fans in China,that is true,but,please take care of your sense of prejudice.We are not unable to present our speech.We know that what is happening in North Korea,what is fucking wrong with America.We can achieve many information from The Internet.Jhon’s daily show is a good program and we get lots of happiness from it,It is just a talk show!A interesting program.
American,put down your prejudice and ignorance to know more about the truth of China from other ways instead of receiving this “junk food” from this junk western media