If as the new comprehensive UN report claims, North Korea's regime is a criminal one, regularly committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and based partly on the Nazi model, complete with death camps, mass starvation, sadistic torture, and other sinister brutalities, what are we to do in The West? Going by past actions, nothing, sadly. There has long been a law for Europe, and a law for the Asian world - a double-standard, where the West either inflicts cruelties and crimes in that theatre of war it would not elsewhere, or tolerates them there when it would not elsewhere. No atomic bomb was dropped on Germany; no Napalm used on enemies of European descent. A subtle racism continues - people of Asia, Africa and the Middle East are treated as sub-human, or, more bluntly, sub-American. If France, Italy, or Greece were doing what North Korea was doing, it would be defeated militarily, as to stand by would be seen as an impossible moral failing; however, the assumption is North Korea has a nuclear potential and the madness to use it. That seems true, but we must hold themselves and ourselves to the highest historical, non-hypocritical standards. If NK is the new Nazi Germany, in terms of organised mass evil towards millions of its own people, then it must be defeated. How? Well, China should withdraw all support, for a start. The next steps are not so pleasant to contemplate. But, though I am not a warmonger, and am a Catholic opposed to unjust wars, this may just be a just one. But as said above, this is all hypothetical. NK will continue, likely for a decade or more, killing and torturing millions upon millions of trapped souls.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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