Themis etc.

What has North Korea got to do with Islamofascists? Great word though I love hearing Shrub try to pronouce it. Islam... Islamo... Fash.. Islamfa... Terrorists. :)

Thank you Leigh.

This article cuts to the heart of the current debated about education standards, too. FYI, Professor, its toe the line, not tow the line, elicit not illicit, and you cant't invade sovreignty.

You do have a point about NK now being safe from invasion - but only if it does not attack anyone itself. Perhaps this is a good thing. Pity about the poor people of North Korea, though.

The core question here is why should N.Korea be condemned, villified, sanctioned and possibly invaded for doing what many major Western nations are doing?

"What separates Western democracies from so called "Communist" regimes is the ability of Western democracies to a) openly criticise their governments and power structures,"

What good is criticism if it is completely ignored? Most people are against the Oil war currently going on in the Middle East.

"and b) elect their governments."

We have a two party system where both of the available choices open to us have essentially the same policies and are entrenched thanks to a preferential voting system. Some choice! I'm only a Liberal because I approve of their mature attitude to the development of nuclear technology here in Australia.

"I don't see such freedoms being available in North Korea. Yet the US is the tyrant?"

Don't believe everything you read. Having been falsely maligned in the press for over a week, starting with a front page story in the Sydney Morning Herald, I'm highly suspicious of what I read in the newspapers now. The story calling me a Cybersquatter and accusing me of cashing in on Steve Irwin's death was pure fiction. Despite my having emailed the Irwin's weeks earlier offering them http://www.bindiirwin.com for free I was villified. I was also called anti-jewish in some stories and anti-semitic in others. I am neither. Reporters are liars and newspaper owners have no integrity. I am still awaiting an apology. These disgusting rags couldn't even post a one paragraph retraction on page 20. They just swept the whole thing under the rug.

N.Korea's government controls the press but nobody controls the likes of Rupert Murdoch in this country and people like him are dictators in their own right. Dictators capable of making or breaking Governments.

Which is worse? A government controlled press or a press controlled Government? Both are equally despicable in my opinion.

Could agree that the NK leader is acting a bit like a nut case, but the very fact that China keeps NK going economically, helping to feed most of a million men under arms alone, proves that China has the answer to calming NK down. Also, Russia, whose leader, Putin being former OGPU no doubt still has thoughts of Soviet supremism, NK ideology now only an outpost or remnant of it.

The trouble is we still have serious problems with our own supremos, whose immediate forebears were much of the trouble that brought on Communistic socialism, which did start in our West and whom philosophers still tell us was simply only the opposite side of the same coin. That is why Marx said as well as Lenin, that the way to beat capitalism was not only to challenge it but to get better at it, and beat Western capitalism at its own game.

The biggest problem today, of course, is that both sides follow the Roman idea and also the Old Testament Promised Land teachings that if you cannot convert a people it is sufficient to murder and kill as long as good comes out of it.

As was the plan of the Romans when they destroyed Carthage as well as all its people. As with the Nazis who destroyed six million Jews, somewhat with the agreement of certain Christian leaders, not taking the lessons of the Sermont on the Mount but of the slaughter of the Moabites and others in the gifting of the Promised Land.

We see this so much with modern pattern bombing, not so much to destroy a structure, but the bombs containing smaller scatter grenades out to kill or wound all people who habitate the structures.

Not to be a bleeding heart or a left-wing loonie to think like this, but as Christians we should have learnt to know better. It is so distressing to find so many of our Christians far more cold-blooded at doing away with anti-Western Muslims, than certain agnostics who are inclined to agree more with Socratic reasoning than Christian faith.

Bushbred Part Two

Moreover, we find our own supremos in the endeavour to be probably moral or ethical in the long run, breaking written laws as with the attack on Iraq, breaking laws as with the interrogation of prisoners in both Iraq and Guantomono Bay, our John Howard fully in agreement.

In fact, our leaders have been breaking so many laws and telling so many lies, as former US defence official, Daniel Ellsberg has ben saying lately, we could wonder whether we are on the right side or not?

Having an oil company magnate like Richard Cheney as US vice President certainly makes it worse, and also the fact with such a hopeless looking military mess made in Iraq, with Cheney saying they’ll still be there beyond the next ten years, can only mean one thing, that they are only there in the long haul for the oil - as well as what’s in Iran.

One wonders whether we could have better supremos than the Cheneys and the GWBs, maybe even a Bismarck father of Realpolitik, and the theory of balance of power. Bismarck gained so much without ever fighting a big war, except when taking France in 1871, frightening hell out of the people of Paris, taking big guns right up to the gates, then retreating in glory back to Prussia, after telling the French to mend their ways.

Gathered all the Germanic states together without firing a shot, and it is said of Bismarck that if still alive in 1914 not only WW1 would never have begun, nor either WW2, because as Maynard Keynes so later mentioned, it was the nastiness by the victorious allies during the Versailles Treaty that induced Hitler with the help of an angry Vermacht that brought on WW2.

Maybe some of us might do well to read a few books in university libraries, watch out for the looney lefties, however.