Car buffs everywhere are in awe of the Korean mechanics who kept these cars in top-flight condition. running on 45 octane coal oil.

FIFY

The death of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il raises some interesting moral and religious questions as to how we—as individuals—and as a nation ought to respond. It is most unfortunate that this rogue seems to be the talk of the hour, while scant attention has been given to one of humanity’s truly great heroes of the 20th century, the Czechoslovakian President and champion of democracy, Vaclav Havel, whose Velvet Revolution stood off the might of the Soviet Communist machine; his legacy is the democracy he created for the two countries of Czech and Slovakia. Jewish tradition teaches that the death of the righteous is alike the destruction of the Temple (BT Rosh Hashanah 18b).
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As I was reading the media’s reaction to the death of Kim Jong-il, I decided to compare the media’s reaction with the kind of reactions seen when the world first discovered about the death of Adolf Hitler, on June 1st, 1945. If nothing else, it offers a remarkable contrast to how our society has changed over the last 67 years.
•Lt. William J. Cullerton of Chicago, a fighter pilot who was left for dead a few weeks after a German SS man fired a .35-slug through his stomach, said, “I thought I’d had it, now they say Hitler is dead. Maybe he is. If he is, I don’t believe he died heroically. Mussolini died at least like a dictator, but somehow I can’t figure Hitler dying in action . . .”
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The real issue that bothers me is the feeling of moral relativism that has become a part of our modern culture. Lines of demarcation differentiating between good and evil have become passé; in their place we are now seeing a new lexicon of political correctness that no longer refers to evil leaders as “evil,” but “opinionated,” or some other vacuous metaphors that trivialize evil in the world.
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Instead of speaking positively about this monster as others have done, they would be wise to simply be quiet and say, humanity has been greatly impoverished by the life of this one demented individual, who chose the values of necrophilia over the values of biophilia. That is our great struggle today, and we would be wise to recognize this elementary fact before it’s too late for all civilization.

Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel: Unorthodox Jewish reflections on the issues of our day

Rabbinic Reflections on Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il [tyops corrected]

Well said Loh!

If the rabbi intended to demonstrate the flaws of moral relativism, he failed to do so.

King David: “Do I not hate, LORD, those who hate you? Those who rise against you, do I not loathe? With fierce hatred I hate them, enemies I count as my own”

Jesus: [Y]ou shall love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Heavenly Father, for He makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Don’t the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Don’t the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your Heavenly Father is perfect.

With respect to Psalm 139:22, let’s be blunt: for many people, the verse certainly offends the liberal propensities and moral values of our times. Obviously, this is not a warm and fuzzy type of passage we might expect to encounter in the Psalms, but do not underestimate its contemporary message. Besides, there are numerous other passages in both Testaments that reflect the same animus toward “God’s enemies.”

Talaat Pasha, the “Turkish Hitler,” who killed at least 1.5 million Armenians during WWI; Béla Kun’s ethnic cleansing against Turkish and Crimean Tatars and other minorities in 1921-22; White and Red Terrors; Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge; Mao Zedong’s Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries; Pol Pot’s Killing Fields; massacres at the partition of India, or the Hama, Jallianwala Bagh; Tlatelolco massacres; and the mass killing of communists by Suharto’s New Order; and Rwandan Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, who killed between 500,000 and 1 million of the Tutsi people. Kim Jong-il is directly responsible for allowing 3.6 million of his own people to die.

Genocidal people will forever be remembered as the true enemies of God and civilization. We would be wise to remember not to sugarcoat their legacy of mayhem, which will only serve to perpetuate the existence of evil in our world today and in the future.

Religious minded people of the Christian and Jewish communities routinely avoid speaking about “evil,” as if it has any kind of ontological existence. Manifestations of evil, we are taught, are [Augustine's] “privations of natural good.”

For Locke, morality is the one area apart from mathematics wherein human reasoning can attain a level of rational certitude. For Locke, human reason may be weak with regards to our understanding of the natural world and the workings of the human mind, but it is exactly suited for the job of figuring out human moral duty.

The rules that govern human conduct are specifically tailored to human nature, and our duty to God involves realizing our natures to the fullest degree.

Kim the son walked along the long hall, and then threw himself in the arms of his father. Kim Il-Sung fought his tears, and then gave way to allow the newcomer to greet Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. Mao has not changed much. He still retains his sense of hubris and laziness. He is annoyed by the fact that the Chinese now preferred dollars over the readymade recipes of the Red Book. Mao is also annoyed that the current leaders resemble stock brokers, having turned the politburo into a board of directors. Stalin, meanwhile, is ever more solitary and lonely. He was heard threatening to hang the body of Mikhail Gorbachev on the Kremlin’s gates. He objected to the installation of surveillance cameras in the hotel’s hallways. He insists on keeping his room number a secret, for fear of a plot to assassinate him. This is while Pol Pot did not waste the opportunity…he advanced, shook hands and quickly withdrew to his suite.

Shortly before sunset, Saddam and Muammar went out for a walk. The first showered praise on the people of North Korea, and the second soon did the same. Our sacrifices were met with ingratitude, they said. They came with the foreign occupiers. They stomped on our portraits and uprooted our statues. Our names in the official media have become synonymous with tyrants. Even the executioners we would task to carry out the dirty work have washed their hands clean of us, and have now become fond of human rights. Kim the son was wiser. He confiscated their voices and turned them into a people fighting to find one or two meals. He produced generations of missiles and sold them, leaving his son a nuclear bomb to keep him warm and protect him. Our children are in the grave, in prison or in exile, and his son sits on his grandfather’s chair, with shining stars on his shoulders. Saddam and Muammar were in agreement that what is happening is incredible and unreal. The whole thing must have been invented by the tendentious media. The fabrications of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya cannot last for too long.
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On the next day, a tripartite meeting took place between Kim the son, Saddam and Muammar. The hotel manager handed them a proposal submitted anonymously, to reserve a room for a president who has just passed away, along with a resume of the applicant. The trio scanned Vaclav Havel’s resume. They were amused by the title of ‘leader of the velvet revolution’. They double-checked the text. This man did not invade a neighboring country. He did not wreak havoc in a city of his own. He did not blow up a commercial plane, chase stray dissident dogs or produce toxic gases and biological weapons. A part of his country wanted to secede so he bade it farewell in all politeness. Not even the life of one person is on his conscience. There were no dungeons, torture or nail removals. Moreover, the Prague Spring must no doubt be an imperialist conspiracy, being the legitimate forerunner of the Arab Spring. Then many a comment ensued. Do we welcome him because he was a heavy smoker before he quit? He also went to prison and left it without forgetting teeth or fingers there. Or should we welcome him because he was a playwright, so are we a writers association then? The request was denied unanimously. The leaders shall meet again later, to consider other applications.

I think his central message is:



The rabbi is observing that we must always tell the full truth about the monsters who have lived among us, and we must never ever forget. Failure in fulfilling that imperative is what he calls "moral relativism." Evil exists and must be confronted directly, not shunted aside as an illness or a normal human failing.

My objection is that I do not believe that is an accurate characterization of relativism. Further, I think the easiest way to fall into evil inadvertently is by insisting on an absolute frame of reference that simply does not exist. For every Hitler who is evil by virtually any rational frame of reference, there is a multitude of more ambiguous characters. Take Andrew Jackson. Given credit for much positive advancement in American democracy, he also supported slavery and escalated genocidal policies toward Native Americans. Take Hiroshima. From any absolute frame of reference, slaughtering tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians by dropping a nuclear bomb on their city is nothing less than an atrocity. Taken relative to the circumstances that motivated it, though, it is hard to say whether it was necessary or not, and not possible to say it was motivated by pure evil.

My objection is that I do not believe that is an accurate characterization of relativism. Further, I think the easiest way to fall into evil inadvertently is by insisting on an absolute frame of reference that simply does not exist. For every Hitler who is evil by virtually any rational frame of reference, there is a multitude of more ambiguous characters. Take Andrew Jackson. Given credit for much positive advancement in American democracy, he also supported slavery and escalated genocidal policies toward Native Americans. Take Hiroshima. From any absolute frame of reference, slaughtering tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians by dropping a nuclear bomb on their city is nothing less than an atrocity. Taken relative to the circumstances that motivated it, though, it is hard to say whether it was necessary or not, and not possible to say it was motivated by pure evil.

More specifically, would it be too farfetched to suggest that when Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” he was merely referring to the garden variety of people who behave more like a nuisance in our lives, or people who simply don’t like us, rather than individuals who pose a certain existential threat to whole societies or even civilization itself?

For an example of the former, take the former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright; in an interview with Larry King, where she admires certain qualities Ki Jong-il displayed in their meeting: [saying that "he is not a nut," that he would have loved to have been a Hollywood director; and that he loved American sports.]

Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, who said with enthusiastic glee, “I actually met Kim Jong-il.”

The Bomb bothers you? The Tokyo Firebombings killed more people and destroyed more property in one night than the nukes.

I think "The Bomb" presents a more convenient case study in morality (especially as regards science and morality),

How do the North Koreans explain the fact that Kim Jung Il has not risen from the dead?

How do the North Koreans explain the fact that Kim Jung Il has not risen from the dead?

The Americans at Kim Jong Il's funeral

Even in his death, the North Korean leader couldn't escape the reliance on US transport

Kim Jong Il hated the United States. But an American carried him to the grave.

The casket of Mr Kim, the late North Korean leader, sat atop the roof of a polished masterpiece of American automotive grandeur: A mid-1970s armoured black Lincoln Continental, which wended through the snowy streets of Pyongyang yesterday in a rigorously choreographed funeral. Mr Kim's gigantic, smiling portrait was balanced atop a second Lincoln limousine. A third, slightly smaller Lincoln brought up the rear, its roof bearing an immense wreath.

The cars that led the procession were probably from either 1975 or 1976, according to Mr Gregg D Merksamer, who observed on the forum that "the full, rear fender skirts and the five heavy vertical bars separating the grille into six sections" were marks of those years that disappeared from later models.

Should any ordinary North Korean ever have the opportunity to read this thread, what you are reading is universal disgust at the regime that has lied so blatantly to you and pity that you have not yet tried to see over the high fence that they have built. Our contempt is for those who have exploited you for so long.