Korean rapper Psy has become a global phenomenon with his YouTube sensation “Gangnam Style.” The YouTube video is now the world’s most-watched, clocking in at 923 million views; it will hit 1 billion for certain by early 2013. He’s been feted by everyone from Barack Obama to Ellen Degeneres to Sen. Alan Simpson, who awkwardly danced the Gangnam Style to try incongruously to tell young people to pay more attention to fiscal cliff negotiations.
But while Psy enjoys the American dollar, it turns out that he’s an ardent opponent of the American military. Back in 2004, he sang at an anti-US rally and concert in South Korea, where he spat out these charming lyrics:
Kill those f*****g Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those f*****g Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully
That wasn’t the only time Psy ripped on American troops. In 2002, he performed at another concert in which he threw a model of an American tank on the ground, then bashed it to shards with his microphone stand. Psy sees no contradiction in the fact that he has made the vast majority of his cash from the United States.
Here’s the awful irony: if it weren’t for the US military, Psy wouldn’t be performing. Actually, he’d be three inches shorter. From 1950-1953, America fought her truly forgotten war for the freedom of Korea. Because of the uncertain outcome, Kim Jung Un gets to enslave 24.4 million people in North Korea to this day, condemning them to poverty and starvation while he proclaims daily discoveries of wonders like a unicorn lair.
North Korea is a giant gulag. The average North Korean is three inches shorter than the average South Korean, despite the fact that Koreans are genetically homogenous. If it were not for the 37,000 American dead and 92,000 American wounded during the Korean War – and were it not for the continued presence of thousands of American troops manning the trigger-hair border with North Korea – South Korea would be part of that gulag.
There would be no Gangnam Style without American troops, because there would be no Gangnam– an upper class district of South Korea, a country with a booming economy thanks to the U.S. intervention over sixty years ago. Its current economy is over a trillion dollars, where it was about zero before America arrived. If not for the sacrifice of American troops, Psy would today be cowering in fear of receiving a shot to the head from North Korean authorities.
Poll countries around the world that America has liberated, and you’ll find that they’re largely ungrateful for American help. Barack Obama may be personally popular in France, but polls show that even before 9⁄11, only 62% of the French public had a positive perception of the United States. After the Iraq War empowered such thinking, 39% had a positive view of the United States by 2006, even though we were attempting to do for Iraq what we had done for France itself not once but twice during the 20th century.
What about Korea? The latest polls show high approval ratings for President Obama, but back in 1999-2000 – before the dreaded Bush years – the approval rating was just 58%.
America is not in the business of freeing countries to gain their gratitude. We’re happy just to have them as allies, even if they’re uncomfortable living in our shadow. But the international leftist artists that make themselves rich by capitalizing on American freedoms should not ignore the fact that their own freedom is only available because of that American “imperialism” they hate so much.
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