STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
North Korean Sanctions Distract the West From Vanishing Freedom at Home
By Daily Bell Staff - March 02, 2016

UN Votes Wednesday on Tough New North Korea Sanctions … The U.N. Security Council votes Wednesday on a resolution that would impose the toughest sanctions on North Korea in two decades. –AP

North Korea is the target of yet more negotiated sanctions and the mainstream media won’t provide many articles that question them.

The propaganda is thick here. North Korea fights no wars with its adversaries (though it is still technically at war with South Korea) and doesn’t target enemies with the sanctions it regularly undergoes.

Nonetheless, it is convenient to point fingers at North Korea, and in doing so distract the gaze of Western populations from the increasingly authoritarian positions of their own nation-states.

These latest sanctions are actually the result of North Korea’s determination to continue developing nuclear weapons, but given the world’s hostility, who can blame them?

In some sense the sanctions are a kind of carefully modulated dance. For instance, while these new sanctions are apparently broad and deep, AP informs us that, “China, Pyongyang’s neighbor, was reluctant to impose measures that could threaten the stability of North Korea and cause its economy to collapse.”

This is in part the reason North Korea exists at all. China ensures the viability of the regime so that 20 million Koreans don’t begin to destabilize its Western flank. If China didn’t want North Korea, there probably would no North Korea.

How well will these sanctions work? Probably no better than previous sanctions, which have been circumvented as a matter of course.

The country is already subject “to four rounds of U.N. sanctions imposed since the country’s first nuclear test in 2006.” Now North Korea will not be able to import or export “expensive watches, snowmobiles, recreational water vehicles and lead crystal.”

What’s the catch? “As with previous resolutions, the test will be whether U.N. member states enforce the sanctions.”

And no doubt they won’t. Why should they? North Korea’s nuclear weapons, if they actually exist, aren’t aimed at them in particular. They are seemingly defensive from a strategic standpoint.

What is certain is that the dance continues.

Refreshingly, the Guardian yesterday carried a report from writer Monisha Rajesh who states, “I wanted to witness first-hand what North Korea was like and finally went last year.”

She concludes:

We never felt unsafe. Not once … We abided by the rules which are few and simple: don’t deface photos of the Kims; don’t fold a magazine in half if Kim Jong-un’s face is on the front; include the whole body when photographing the Kims; wear a tie to the mausoleum; don’t take photos of the public without asking; and don’t leave Bibles behind in the country.

Her conclusion: “If North Korea is to ever break down its barriers and become accepted by the rest of the world, then subjecting its people to further isolation isn’t beneficial.”

Ironically, at the same time as the North Korean sanctions are front page news, the British government has just announced that it intends to provide “sweeping new powers to hack phones and spy on web history.”

From the UK Mirror:

Police are to be handed sweeping powers to hack into people’s phones and computers and spy on their web-browsing histories under draconian new laws published today.

Home Secretary Theresa May has announced a massive extension of the spying powers originally drawn up to help the security services fight terrorists.

Under the draft version of the Investigatory Powers Bill published last year – dubbed the ‘Snooper’s Charter’ – the most intrusive spying powers would only have been available to spy agencies MI5 , MI6 and GCHQ. But under a rewritten version unveiled today Mrs May said police should also be allowed to spy on people’s internet use as part of their everyday work.

Whatever crumbling freedoms are left in both the UK and the US – in the West generally – are under continued attack.

France for instance remains under a “state of emergency” that allows police to enter and search any home or business they choose – and to arrest and detain people at will.

There is no formal state of emergency in the US but civilian police break into houses with regularity looking for “drugs.” Too often the break-ins occur in the wrong places and people are shot as a result.

The West, in fact, is under sustained attack from its own elites, the same elites that regularly “sanction” North Korea.

Having created terrorist forces, the US and NATO now combat them at a terrible human cost.

The wars have driven millions of refugees out of the Middle East and into Europe where they have begun to destabilize whole countries.

The idea seems to be to undermine countries and cultures so that the European Union can expand its authority. For the same reason, central banks have destabilized large swaths of Western economies with aggressive currency debasement.

The infliction of military and economic chaos is necessary from the point of view of the West’s self-appointed elites because further globalist policies and facilities still need to be implemented.

The goal is one world and millions, billions, will suffer continually until it is reached.

North Korea will suffer too in order to distract Westerners from what is happening at home. Perhaps the dance will end when North Korea finally acquires a Western-style central bank. When Afghanistan was invaded by the US, one of the very first actions was to create a Western central bank that continues today.

Conclusion: North Korea is the West’s favorite bogeyman, but the constant propaganda shouldn’t distract us. It may be a terrible place to live (and die), but many of its authoritarian elements are expanding in the West at a dismayingly rapid rate.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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