"I have often depended on the blindness of strangers." - Adrienne E. Gusoff
***
Coming from the same person who says that "Singaporeans sometimes get upset" because "foreigners... make friends with our girls":
Possibilities for S'pore businesses strong if Korean relations are better
"Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo has said that possibilities for Singapore businesses would be stronger if relations between North and South Korea are better.
Mr Yeo was speaking in the North Korean capital Pyongyang where he is on an official visit.
Mr Yeo noted that if North-South Korean relations are better, the potential for the development of Kaesong Industrial Park will be enormous.
That's because North Koreans are smart, hardworking, highly-disciplined and competitive in international wages.
He said that based on what he had seen, North Korea has witnessed progress, though it is encountering some difficulties."
I love how they make North Korea sound like a normal country you can just walk into to invest in. Singapore may be Disneyland with the Death Penalty, but North Korea is Disneyland with the Mandatory Death Penalty
Considering that North and South Korea are still technically at war (55 year old truce notwithstanding), and that the former was still kidnapping citizens of the latter just 8 years ago (and probably more recently too), 'better relations' is a great euphemism.
Compared to us ungrateful and spoilt Singaporeans, North Koreans sound like model workers:
- Smart (because, not allowed to have long hair, their men experience positive effects to their "human intelligence development")
- Hardworking (because otherwise they're sent back to the fields to eat tree bark and mud)
- Highly-disciplined (it's all the parades) and
- Competitive in international wages (because anything is better than eating worms, and US$1.83 gets you an executive suite at a North Korean hotel)
It's not hard for North Korea to have witnessed progress, and the park to have enormous potential considering how screwed up North Korea's economy is (thanks to "some difficulties" all imposed by its wonderful regime).
Perhaps the most disgusting bit is that this is a regime that starves and murders its own people, and all we can think of is "possibilities for Singapore businesses"?!
No wonder people don't like us.
Then again, we've already done business with drug money (while hanging the small fries), so what's new?
"It was Marx who claimed that capitalists even go to the hell in their pursuit of profit" (I can't find a citation - if anyone has one I'd be very happy to have it)
[Addendum: It is suspected that North Korea was responsible for the disappearance of five young Singaporean women in August 1978, which makes this all the more shocking.]