Jung Money: Americans are blinded by Olympic pageantry

Before I get started, I want to apologize for yet another Winter Olympics-related column this week. But as a Korean, I feel compelled to follow up on something I wrote earlier this semester.

When North Korea announced it would send 22 athletes to PyeongChang, South Korea, last month, I was cautiously optimistic. Even though tensions between the hermit nation and the rest of the world were at their highest in recent memory, I was hopeful — hopeful that a united Korea at the Opening Ceremony and the presence of a joint women’s hockey team would show the humanity of the North Korean citizens, many of whom suffer under the most brutal regime on the planet (though I’m sure some of the athletes are beneficiaries of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s corruption).

And despite the United States’ current relationship with North Korea, I was hopeful that Americans would watch the Olympics and see the Koreans’ dream of eventual unification — the identity of a singular nation, even though it has been muddled by generations of conflict.

“It would be easy to root against the athletes, considering North Korea’s threat to the United States,” I wrote in January. “But the competitors under the unified flag don’t reflect their governments.”

After the opening week of the Games, however, I now have the complete opposite concern: Politics and the novelty of the situation seem to have temporarily blinded many of us from reality.

American audiences were captivated when Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, attended the Opening Ceremony alongside South Korean president Moon Jae-in, the country’s most dovish president in more than a decade when it comes to relations with the North.

“Kim Jong-un’s Sister Turns on the Charm, Taking Pence’s Spotlight,” a New York Times headline read. The article detailed people’s objections to Vice President Mike Pence’s cold attitude toward the North Korean envoy sent to PyeongChang, while also describing the understated charisma of Kim Yo-jong.

The top comments on the article mortified me (why I dove into the cesspool of an internet comments section, I don’t know).

“With all due respect to [the] charm displayed by Jong-Un’s sister for maintaining some modicum of civility at the international event, it doesn’t take much effort to outshine the bigot Pence,” one comment read.

“Ms. Kim was polite, courteous and a positive representative of North Korea. VP Pence and wife Karen, on the other hand, were rude and disrespectful to all Olympians,” said another.

No matter how low an opinion you may have of our current administration here in the States, don’t be naive enough to let that dislike push you to suddenly sympathize with Kim Yo-jong or any other member of the North Korean leadership. Don’t give them credit for being courteous when they literally imprison their own citizens within their country while diverting every single valuable resource to the dictatorship.

It’s as simple as this: If those commenters on the New York Times website were North Koreans speaking about their own government, they would be hunted down and killed. American student Otto Warmbier died because he stole a poster. North Koreans have been executed en masse for being caught with Bibles.

All this amazing fanfare we’ve been seeing — the Opening Ceremony, the joint hockey team and the hundreds-strong cheering sections chanting, “We are one!” — it’s the manifestation of a carefully planned so-called “charm offensive” from North Korea.

Not to say that these gestures can’t be used as a unifying force, but if they work, the North’s plan would have backfired. It would be downright silly to assume that this third-generation totalitarian dictatorship, which has consistently spit in the face of basic human rights in its decades-long pursuit of nuclear weapons, has extended a genuine olive branch so abruptly, only for the likes of Pence to rebuff it.

The best-case scenario for these Games is a wholehearted South Korean embrace of the Northern people — not its regime.

I still dream of living in a unified Korea someday — the land my grandfather once lived in, before he was forced to leave his parents as a teenager and escape south to avoid being forcibly conscripted into the Communist forces. I hope these three weeks in PyeongChang bring us a step closer to that reality.

But when things inevitably return to more or less the status quo at the end of the month, it won’t be because of Pence, President Donald Trump or anyone else other than the human skidmark named Kim Jong-un and those who ally with him.

Ollie Jung is a senior majoring in print and digital journalism. His column, “Jung Money,” runs Fridays.