There has been a bewilderingly large number of articles and Tweets during this Olympic season in praise of North Korea and its current public face, Kim Yo Jong, the sister of that poor country’s evil dictator. The phenomenon is strongly reminiscent of the crush the media had on Raisa Gorbachev in the late 80s and, of course, of the famous Vogue article on the stylishness and grace of Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syria’s evil dictator.
All the media personalities fawning over these wives and sisters of tyrants are, of course, solidly of the Left. They would not countenance the least trace of these tyranny in the United States. In fact, even shadows and phantasies of such an outcome give them the vapors and fill them with dreams of Hitler. Moreover, there is, last I checked, no mass emigration by media types to Russia, Syria, and North Korea, so one must assume that something deeper is going on than mere love of those countries and detestation for their own.
The Social Justice Warrior, in all his (whoops, zhis) manifestations, has been taught that all of society – indeed, all of life – is all and only about power relations. This theory is an odd congeries of Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Fanon, and too many others to list, which has resulted, with stops at deconstructionism and postmodernism, in something called ‘intersectionality’. I won’t go into too much detail, other than to note that the Social Justice Warriors aren’t very good set theorists: What they mean by ’intersection’ is more commonly known as ‘union’. That is, each victim (and everyone’s a victim, except white, heterosexual, cisgendered males) is the union of all the categories of oppression zhe can be included in. People have no other existence and no other meaning than this catalogue of oppression.
This has two results. First, it demolishes the very ideas of society and justice, for SJWs mete out rewards and punishment solely on the basis of group membership – far indeed from the usual conception of justice – and reimagine society as an endless war of group against group – which somehow doesn’t seem very sociable. Second, it makes it impossible for SJWs to engage with people as people. They can see only labels and slogans. If one behaves in a way inconsistent with the labels they apply to one or says anything inconsistent with the slogans they parrot, then one clearly must be removed from human society. They are thus unable to deal with the quirks and quiddities of real humans: an outcome foreseen by, of all people, the cartoonist Charles Schulz:
In order to achieve their goals, the SJWs need power; in the Kims of North Korea, they see power at its most naked and ruthless. Naturally, they want it. They go to bed at night dreaming of all the good they could do if only they had the power they deserve. And people who love power love people who have power. So this is the first explanation of Olympic Kimolatry.
But most of us know something – if less than we should – about the horrors daily visited upon North Koreans by their rulers, and so wish, however futilely, that something might happen to relieve them of their suffering. Most of us have at least some fledgling sense of empathy, after all. And one would think that anyone concerned with Social Justice would have even more empathy for these starving and tortured people, so I am fascinated by the phenomenon of SJWs fawning over fascists. One must remember, though, that SJWs spend all their empathy on slogans and labels. They have none left for living, breathing humans.
This combination of lust for power and absence of compassion would be sufficient to explain their love for North Korea – but add to it a deep, all-consuming hatred of Trump on the part of both SJWs and the Kims, and there really was no possibility for them other than to idolize the powerful, compassionless, Trump-hating dictator.
