A head of strings is outed as a North Korea fan
mainA British Sunday newspaper – one of the lower forms of life on earth – has reported that the head of strings at a minor public school is a member of a revolutionary communist party. The teacher in question has visited North Korea and claims to admire its regime.
Er, so what?
The school is a private, fee-paying institution. Even if the teacher was a rabid missionary, there would be few opportunities while adjusting fingering and bow position to convert £30,000 a year silver-spoon children to a subversive ideology.
We fail to see any public interest in this story. Can you?
“We fail to see any public interest in this story.”
Agreed — and I therefore wonder why it merited a mention here,
It would seem peculiar, even hypocritical, for a Communist to be working in the private education sector, but, bweyond that, none whatsoever.
Considering some of the hijinks all too many music teachers have been reported trying to get away with (rigging competitions, sexual imposition), this seems pretty tame. I’ve known teachers, musical and not, with some mighty odd political associations.
Coverage in European newspapers costs plenty – nothing appears there by accident. The clandestine world of story-seeding, nurturing, and rearing involves big money – passed in plain brown envelopes between “PR” agencies, government ministries, public and private ‘policy organisations’ and ‘think tanks’, ideological ‘foundations’ and journalists is murky and opaque.
The run-up to an attempted ‘colour revolution’ and ‘regime change’ will be foreshadowed by a bad-mouthing campaign that can run for several years – to turn the public’s mind against the country or leader in question. More secretive still are the vast sums which ‘consultants’ receive for achieving their clients’ wishes in such matters.
The actual purport – or even accuracy – of the story printed is of almost no importance. It’s all part of a drip-drip campaign of malignant disinformation that has a cumulative effect. When the coup d’état comes, when the alleged ‘people’s choice’ candidate emerges from his CIA-funded shadows, the public’s subliminal memory is prompted with all of these tales of piffle and prurience, to call upon ‘world support’ for the overthrow of the now-hated ‘regime’ which has done all these ‘terrible’ things. “Useful idiots” are even cheaper – their brand of fanatic regime-hatred comes free-of-charge… although their travel costs, online presence, and postings in social networks (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and even SD) are all handsomely recompensed.
Still more ruthlessly effective is the ability to ‘spike’ stories which might be of gain to the targetted regime, or which expose foibles, follies or foul-ups ‘on the home front’.
I think many of us remember Tony Blair placing military squadrons around Heathrow and Gatwick… ‘to deter Saddam’. Their actual function there was never disclosed – but my, what a field day it was the for the Daily Wail! And indeed for the Torygraph, the Murdoch Press, and all the rest of them.
The Guardian – a once left-of-centre rag which has now done an elegant volte-face that retains its right-on readers but reprograms them with establishment thinking – has recently opened a special ‘section’ (“North Korea Network”) devoted entirely to… N Korea? Why this tiny and remote land needs such a section hasn’t been discussed. But there is a special logo for the ‘hermit kingdom’ showing a military officer peering through binoculars. For the past month, Grauniadistas have been treated to a daily Five Minute Hate directed against Pyongyang… and the alleged ‘disappearance’ of Kim. Sadly for Rusbridger & Co, Kim turned up in public just last week, after a month of medical ailments. This was just the latest of a series of potty twaddle, which has even suggested that Kim’s former girlfriend had been “machine-gunned, along with the music group she sang with’ – by way of highlighting the pseudo-psychotic tendencies of the N Korean premier. (Of course, they all turned up alive and well later). Kim’s wife was also reported ‘missing’ for some time, with similar imputations concerning a probable ‘murder’.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/09/kim-jong-un-speculation-north-korea-leader-intensifies
The Guardian’s “New East Network” doesn’t even shrink from naming its sponsorship by the USA-based Carnegie Foundation (and a stream of other organisations who are in fact funded by the Carnegie Foundation).
Decoding the ‘story behind a newspaper story’ is often your best guide to what’s really happening in the world. You can be certain that what you’ve just read has been bought and paid for by a group of determined extremists, usually in a foreign country, anxious to sleight their alleged ‘enemies’.
In my already over-long post, I neglected to mention that just a year ago, The Guardian was forced to sell some of its assets to head-off imminent bankruptcy. Yet within weeks of the Snowden/Greenwald leaks, the Grauniad took a rightward turn. Zoe Williams reported that the Iraq War had been ‘the right thing to do”, and that Blair was a hero. New correspondents such as ‘Rafael Behr” emerged as leading columnists, without even completing their stint as cub reporters.
The pigs quickly moved into the farmhouse. And not a word more has been heard about the paper’s financial problems. Ker-ching!
My dear Mister McGowan,
Please read this:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/02/a_nation_of_racist_dwarfs.html
North Korea is one of the vilest (if not the vilest) regimes on the face of the earth.
Nothing can excuse the policies of its ‘leaders’ – and nothing can excuse anybody finding excuses for them or even admiring their actions.
The byline of the vile warmonger, water-boarder and neocon thug Christopher Hitchens at the head of the trash you’ve linked to invalidates ever word of the garbage that appears below it.
I won’t read a word of his paid-to-post Nazi tosh. And I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope he screamed in agony as he was dying. He deserved every moment of pain he received.
Wow. Now I know why Mr Lebrecht used to redact comments.
N. Korea is indeed a vile régime that mistreats its own people, but I can think of a good many Western countries that could be similarly described, if not inasmuch as domestic policy were concerned (although when you consider that the UK ‘bedroom tax’ comes in for criticism from the UN, one cannot help coming to the conclusion that some in the political establishment are determined to subjugate the populace), then certainly when one accounted for foreign policy, both economic and military.