Trump Baits His Hook . . . Have 21st-Century Dictators Become Different When Prosperity Is The Lure?
By DEXTER DUGGAN
You mean that if President Franklin Roosevelt had suggested building flashy resort hotels to improve the economies for Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the bloody dictators would have renounced being political gangsters and become good guys?
Highly doubtful, because those World War II bad guys were wedded to murderous statist ideologies that took precedence for them over burnishing their images by acquiring hotel swimming pools and fancy cuisine for tourists.
Still, sanguinary Stalin’s aggressive Communist, atheist ideology didn’t prevent Roosevelt from embracing him as a U.S. ally against the equally reprehensible totalitarian exterminator Hitler.
And capitalism perhaps hadn’t grown so visibly alluring yet, at that point in history, that it might tempt a totalitarian to trade his ways, even if for the enhanced welfare of his own nation.
In 1942, capitalism obviously had built Wall Street and provided the foundation for the continent-wide industrialized U.S. to have developed from mostly a wilderness only two centuries earlier.
But sparkling high-rise cities with their resort hotels around the world were yet to be grasped, much less realized. Moscow itself was a forbidding citadel of a prison-camp nation, not a transformed, soaring metropolis of the twenty-first century that includes American-themed California and barbecue restaurants. And including McDonald’s.
Today, the Kim dictatorship family of totalitarian North Korea seems literally to have a taste for McDonald’s.
It wouldn’t be the first time that once the invading McDonald’s Secret Sauce starts leaking under the door and seeping across the floor, totalitarians’ toes start slipping from their standing. Just ask Moscow.
Unusual developments have become standard for Donald Trump’s administration. But perhaps the most unusual of all was the apparent decision by North Korean dictator Kim Jong un to accept Trump’s invitation to renounce his land’s sordid ways of being an isolated threatener of nuclear disaster and become a budding consumerist society full of promise.
Trump even showed Kim what has been called a “movie trailer” of what could be the material blessings for a new North Korea. What a change Trump wrought in Pyongyang from only a few months earlier, when leftist media quivered that sternly talking Trump would thrust the world into a nuclear war with Kim.
After his June 12 get-together with Kim, Trump told a lengthy news conference in Singapore, “Chairman Kim has before him an opportunity like no other….Today is the beginning of an arduous process. Our eyes are wide open….Anyone can make war, but only the most courageous can make peace.”
With long experience as both a business executive and entertainment figure, Trump spoke easily and matter-of-factly to a horde of reporters, like a chairman of the board reporting to his top-level managers.
It didn’t hurt that the summit took place in bustling Asian Singapore, demonstrating firsthand to Kim what marvels lay beyond his isolated Hermit Kingdom. He wasn’t just watching a video back in Pyongyang but stepping out personally for souvenirs, onto streets where the price of a breakfast reportedly equated to a month’s wages for his subjugated workers.
It will take more than one jump to transition from a tragically deprived nation where worms are more common inside deprived people’s bodies than in their apples, to becoming some sort of middle-class society where families put their daughters into dance classes instead of seeing them disappear into indoctrination camps.
And maybe this won’t come to pass.
But even the Communist dictators of starving China had made the decision to invite capitalist concepts into their Marxist fortress because Marxism meant only economic deprivation and tragedy, starving people eating the bark off trees. What kind of proud reputation do you get on the world stage if your people are only pitiful, malnourished beggars?
This, by the way, should be a useful reminder to Latino nations’ rulers who, by this measure, are even worse than the Communists, because they don’t have the sense or ambition to reform their lands in any meaningful, hopeful way. Hey, if Beijing can do it, so can Latino corruptocrats.
Beijing’s balancing act since then has been to see how much economic liberty it can get away with, without allowing the nation to get away from Communist control.
Did Beijing counsel Kim that it wouldn’t hurt him to have a stronger nation for, in different ways, both his people’s and his own benefit — not a backward land notable for its blackness at night when viewed from space, almost entirely deprived even of electric lighting in the midnight hours?
Most people in the modern world with all of its neon have lost the historic understanding of there being a real difference between daylight and night, the latter with all its impalpable terrors and deep shadows. But North Korea still knows.
And, this being a broken world always in need of redemption, even brightly lit, consumerist nations have their own darkness that needs touching. Wealth needn’t mean all-prevailing wisdom.
No longer the very poor nation it once was, the Republic of Ireland in May legally invited the hissing serpents of permissive abortion in to poison its people.
And hardly had Trump’s remarkable summit occurred than his administration once again was being bashed in the realms of U.S. Catholic bishops, convened for their spring meeting in lush Ft. Lauderdale, because these bishops’ crusty old political liberalism clashes with commonsense border protection.
Indeed, some prelates took time to entertain the thought of canonical penalties against Catholic law enforcers that were absent from their minds when they indulged the grievously sinful public ways of radically pro-abortion Democrat politicians, or of Latino corruptocrats who refuse to reform their failing lands but chase away their own citizens. And prelates wonder why the faithful may not take them seriously?
Someone probably increasingly being taken seriously these days, though, is Trump. Imagine if he had been a contestant rather than the host on his old reality television shows, telling of just a few days of his ambitious achievements.
Well, you see, after I told off some globalist financial snobs meeting in Canada, I immediately flew halfway around the world, stayed up all night, and brokered peace and prosperity with a nuclear dictator, then I hurried right back to the U.S. to influence some elections successfully for my political supporters in the June 12 primaries.
Sounds like this apprentice should hear, “You’re hired!”
It’s good to have him on your side.
Another California?
Moderate Democratic strategist Doug Schoen wrote at Fox News after those elections: “Tuesday’s primaries in Virginia, North Dakota, Nevada, South Carolina, and Maine indicated that in many congressional races, vehemently attacking President Trump will not be a winning strategy for either Democrats or Republicans in the November 6 general election.”
Meanwhile, considering Trump’s proclaimed pro-life position, it’ll be interesting to see how strong for permissive abortion various Democrat candidates are going into the general election.
In Nevada, for instance, two members of Las Vegas’s Clark County Commission vied for the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nomination. Strongly pro-abortion Chris Giunchigliani got the endorsement of the radical pro-abortion Emily’s List, while commission chairman Steve Sisolak, who claims to be Catholic, tried to transform himself into being even more pro-abortion than she.
When pro-life Republican gubernatorial candidate Adam Laxalt dared to make an appearance at a Las Vegas pro-life pregnancy center in February, Sisolak quickly denounced First Choice Pregnancy Services as a “shameful group.”
Now, after the Silver State’s June 12 primary, Laxalt will face Sisolak in November for the governorship.
Victor Joecks, an opinion writer for Nevada’s largest daily paper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, told The Wanderer on June 13 that voters face a choice in the general election between a Democrat who wants to turn their state into another California and a Republican who doesn’t.
Said Joecks: “Steve Sisolak spent over $6 million convincing Democrat voters that he was as much of a leftist as Chris Giunchigliani. He succeeded in winning the nomination but drained his campaign coffers and hurt his standing with moderate voters in the process.
“With Democrats all but guaranteed to control the legislature in 2019, the choice facing Nevada voters is if they want to select Sisolak to turn us into California,” Joecks said.
