It’s no secret that intelligence is not precisely correlated with moral wisdom. But it’s still alarming that three Nobel laureates have apparently decided to pay a visit to North Korea.
The three laureates – winners in medicine, economics, and chemistry, respectively – will spend some seven days in the totalitarian country, reports Yonhap News. They’ll spend their trip hobnobbing with the country’s elite; they’ll deliver lectures at Kim Il-Sung University, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, and Kim Chaek University of Technology. These schools serve the sons and daughters of the Workers’ Party elite (distinguished alumni of Kim Il-Sung University include Kim Jong-il) – they’re essentially finishing schools for the slave-masters of North Korea. (For insight into the slave/master relationship between the Pyongyang elite and the rest of North Korea, see Robert Collins’ excellent new report, Pyongyang Republic.) And Kim Chaek University is particularly sinister; its graduates are reputed to work on North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. The laureates will also reportedly hit the usual “highlights” of the North Korean tourism circuit, including Kim Il-sung’s birthplace.*
The timing of the trip could not be worse: It comes as North Korea is apparently preparing a fifth nuclear test, and as its bellicose rhetoric towards South Korea shows no signs of abating. (One can only speculate what South Korean scientists, who live day and night under the threat of nuclear annihilation, make of their brethren’s sojourn.) And it will provide North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un with a propaganda coup on the eve the Workers’ Party’s seventh Congress, scheduled for early May, which will ratify his tyrannical rule. The visit will prove politically useful to Kim as he struggles to maintain the loyalty of the elite class that is showing increasing sings of impatience with him.
Of course, for their efforts, and given the track record of the Nobel Organization, the laureates can probably expect a second Nobel Prize – this time, the peace prize – upon their return.
*Update: The International Peace Foundation, which is sponsoring the visit, has informed THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the laureates will not be visiting Kim Il-sung’s birthplace. This sentence was based on an erroneous report by Yonhap News.
