I certainly never imagined he’d wind up dead – which I why I didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the Otto Warmbier story when he was first arrested. After stories like this, this and this, I should have know better. I’ll never underestimate that evil, little, Asian demon again.
But what made Warmbier’s ordeal and subsequent death a double tragedy was something else I wasn’t aware of at the time; the way the Left mocked him as almost deserving of his plight due to white male privilege. Michelle Malkin detailed their venomous ridicule in a recent article ~ When the far Left exhibits the same ugly totalitarian impulses as Kim Jong Un ~
More than a year before succumbing to the unknown illness or injury that left him in a coma thousands of miles away from home, Otto Warmbier’s own countrymen murdered his reputation. His character. His humanity.
Click-hungry media ghouls knew nothing about Warmbier’s small-town upbringing, his family life, politics, personality, disappointments or dreams. But they gleefully savaged a young man who made a mistake on a doomed trip to a totalitarian hell.
Warmbier’s thoughtless taunters instantly transformed him into a bigger, badder villain than the barbaric DPRK goons who beat, starve, rape and kill enemies of the state for such offenses as listening to foreign radio broadcasts, possessing Bibles and disrespecting Dear Leader — in Warmbier’s case, by attempting to steal a propaganda sign that read “Let’s arm ourselves strongly with Kim Jong-il’s patriotism!” as a souvenir.
The Huffington Post published an acid rant by “Blogging While Black” writer La Sha titled “North Korea Proves Your White Male Privilege Is Not Universal.” She rejoiced at Warmbier’s sentence because, she gloated, it taught him that “the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.”
Instead of faulting a repressive socialist regime, La Sha blamed Warmbier for “being socialized first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country.” The HuffPo’s megalomaniac millennial had the gall to compare her daily plight of living and breathing freely in America to Warmbier’s captivity…(More)
Malkin provides several other hideous examples of progressive tolerance and inclusion, character assassinations from Black Lives Matter icons to popular comedians to Salon Rag Mag. None of them could be bothered to learn (or care) what Otto was really like ~
By all accounts, Warmbier was a charismatic and caring human being whom one high-school classmate called “Everyone’s friend.” He was a lover of cultures and intellectually open-minded — “a warm, engaging, brilliant young man whose curiosity and enthusiasm for life knew no bounds,” according to his family.
Kim Jong Un on the other hand is a sociopath who sicced wild dogs on his own uncle and had his paternal half-brother murdered. A real boy scout.
None of that mattered to unhinged progressives though ~
Utterly consumed by malignant identity politics, the left-wing intelligentsia have become the intolerantsia. They are bent on dehumanizing individuals, fomenting racial, ethnic and class division in the name of “progressivism,” and never taking responsibility for the damage done.
The left hasn’t yet remade America into their own ugly image; angry, callous and selfish. But their innate inability to discern good from evil, and their total lack of compassion for others, is rapidly eroding our civil society.
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Related:
Otto Warmbier funeral: Around 2,000 gather to celebrate life of student who died after North Korea detainment
Family of David Sneddon, missing US student, says North Korea kidnapped him ~ Another tragic story I never heard about. Let’s pray that this one has a happier ending ~
The parents of an American college student who disappeared in China in 2004 said they are convinced their son was kidnapped by the North Korean regime to teach English and is alive inside the Hermit Kingdom — citing a plethora of circumstantial evidence collected over the years indicating an abduction.
