Moral Treason from Jimmy Carter

On Saturdays, neither the NY Sun nor the WSJ is published, so I buy the NY Times. It keeps me from being overly optimistic. Today, on page 4 of the Times, there's a story entitled "North Korean Standoff Poses ‘Greatest Threat,' Carter Says." Here's the lead paragraph:

"Tokyo, Sept. 5 - Former President Jimmy Carter, the man credited with defusing the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis, warned here today that the current standoff was the world's ‘greatest threat.'"

Here's how I would have written that lead:

"Tokyo, Sept. 5 - Former President Jimmy Carter, the man blamed for the failed 1994 attempt to bribe North Korea away from nuclear bomb development, admitted here today that the current standoff was the world's ‘greatest threat.'"

A little later, the story said Carter's 1994 trip "opened the way to the first nuclear agreement with North Korea." Yeah, and Neville Chamberlain's 1938 trip to Munich "opened the way to the first territorial agreement with Nazi Germany."

The following is not about slanting, but the story quotes Carter as describing North Korea as a country "with a superb military technology and the ability to destroy hundreds and thousand of lives and most of Seoul if a war should come."

So Carter is not only claiming that a primitive, brutal dictatorship has a "superb" military technology, but actually trying to scare the South Koreans (who are already acting, probably out of fear, as virtually a puppet of the North Korean regime).

Carter also advocated "the lifting of all economic and political sanctions against North Korea and the opportunity for that little country to become completely absorbed in world affairs on a normal basis."

Poor little country! Only its "superb military technology" and the threat of killing hundreds of thousands of South Koreans keeps it afloat. If only we'd let it trade all its nonmilitary bounty with the rest of the world, it would become so absorbed in "world affairs" that it would change its ways, drop its ideology (which, incidentally, holds that trade is imperialist exploitation), and become normal.

This disgraceful moral treason by Carter is, among other things, the Marxist notion that ideology and politics is determined by "the mode of production." But Carter implicitly recognizes the power of ideas and morality, because one of his charges against the US, one of the things he thinks as equivalent to North Korea's breaking the agreement he is "credited with," is Bush including North Korea in "the axis of evil."

Dr. Binswanger, a longtime associate of Ayn Rand, is a professor of philosophy at the Objectivist Academic Center of the Ayn Rand Institute.

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