Every time I  read a news article about how hellish life in North Korea is, I think about the TV show MASH.

Today MSNBC reported that the North Korean government is sending people to labor camps to punish them for not weeping over the death of dictator Kim Jong Il. This news won’t surprise anyone who understands Communism, under which the government has absolute power over the people. According to the Black Book of Communism, which was published back  in 1999, the North Korean government had by that time killed around one-and-a-half million citizens in concentration camps, and another hundred thousand or so in purges of the Party itself. Another estimated half million citizens had starved to death by ’99, bringing the domestic body count up to something like two million people, in a nation of only twenty-three million.

South Korea is a very different story, thanks to the United States.

During the 1950 to 1953 war UN forces, most of them provided by the United States, saved South Korea from a North Korean invasion. Today South Korea is free, democratic, peaceful, and wealthy. According to Wikipedia,  South Korea is “a presidential republic consisting of sixteen administrative divisions and is a developed country with a very high standard of living.”

If American leftists had had their way in the 1950’s, all of Korea would be under Communist rule, and Heaven only knows how many more innocent people would be dead. 

The recurring theme of the MASH program was that America was doing something evil and stupid by fighting against the Communists in Korea. The war effort was “madness;” and “peace” was the noble goal that some right winger was always obstructing. The show, like so many things that come out of Hollywood, was morally upside-down. When liberals preach about “peace,” they usually mean American capitulation in the face of Communist aggression, and that was certainly the kind of peace advocated by the writers, directors, and actors in the series.

I can’t think of a better example of the leftist bias in Hollywood than MASH. It had clever scripts, charming characters, fully lines, and a perverse political message.

The other thing I think of when I hear about the latest North Korean atrocities is Joseph McCarthy. His anti-Communist crusade took place during the same period as the Korean War, and many Communist agents lost their jobs in the US Government after being exposed by McCarthy. If McCarthy and other anti-Communists had not been pushing back against the enemy agents in our government, the leftists might have gotten their way. The entire Korean peninsula might be Communist today.