At this point the Pyeongchang Olympics really should be re-christened the Pyongyang Olympics. What should have been a celebration of South Korea’s titanic cultural, economic, and political achievements is degenerating into an event that will instead normalize the barbarous North Korean regime that wants to destroy the South.
It began with the news that the two Koreas would field a joint women’s ice hockey team. That wasn’t an altogether crazy idea, given the thousands of years of history the Koreas share—though it was a fundamentally unfair one, as it will necessitate benching many South Korean players in order to make room for their new teammates from the North. (Which is why the decision was widely unpopular in the South.)
Then came the announcement that a North Korean propaganda band would play concerts around the Olympics, and that Pyongyang would also send a 200-strong cheerleading squad. The band’s alighting to South Korea was particularly disturbing, as it will play songs feting a regime whose aim is to destroy the country in which it will be performing.
Then we learned that Kim Yong-nam, the 90-year-old who is technically the head of state of North Korea will travel to Pyeongchang for the opening ceremony. This was disturbing, if not unprecedented: Kim, while the nominal leader of the world’s worst human rights abusing regime, attended the opening ceremonies in Sochi in 2014, too.
But here it gets really bad: On Wednesday, it was announced that brutal dictator Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jung, and Choe Hwi, another apparatchik of Kim’s regime, will also attend the Olympics. This isn’t a diplomatic breakthrough. It’s an abomination.
Both Kim Yo-jung and Choe Hwi are sanctioned by the United States for human rights abuses. Kim because she is “part of the agency in North Korea who’s responsible for propaganda, for censorship, controlling information so that the people of the country do not know about the rest of the world,” says the Treasury Department. Choe is subject to United Nations sanctions, as well, which actually bar him from leaving his country.
Choe is “First Vice Director of the Workers’ Party of Korea Propaganda and Agitation Department, which controls all Democratic People’s Republic of Korea media and is used by the government to control the public,” the United Nations says. The South Korean government is reportedly trying to get an exemption to the travel ban for the Olympics from the UN Security Council.
The visits are being hailed as a way to “reduce tensions” in Korea, though that’s unlikely given that the Kim regime has made it abundantly clear that it will never abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. The more likely upshot is the normalization of a regime that is not only fundamentally abnormal, but evil.
