Opinion

SYMPHONY FOR THE DEVIL

Sadly, the New York Philharmonic has chosen to perform in North Korea next year.

Even if this comes with the blessing – or encouragement – of those cock-eyed optimists in the State Department, this is no worthy cultural breakthrough.

Nor a cause for celebration.

It is, in fact, a public-relations triumph for a regime with an appalling human-rights record.

As arts critic Terry Teachout noted in the Wall Street Journal recently, this bears no resemblance to the Philharmonic’s visit to Moscow in 1958: “In the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev, classical music was generally accessible and composers like Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich managed to write major works in spite of the rigid censorship to which they were subjected.

“North Korea, by contrast, does not have anything remotely resembling a serious musical culture – and what it does have is not available to ordinary citizens,” wrote Teachout.

Indeed, Pyongyang crushes all culture – save for propaganda that glorifies dictator “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il.

But the evil regime is best seen by how it treats its own people:

* Failure to obey strict, often arbitrary, laws is punishable by sentencing to one of seven political hard-labor camps.

* Human-rights groups estimate that as many as a million political prisoners have perished in these camps since they were constructed in 1972.

* Political prisoners have been used as guinea pigs for medical experiments.

* A third of the country’s gross domestic product is spent on a million-man army, missiles and – until a recently announced suspension – an expensive nuclear-weapons program, even as hospitals remain dangerously undersupplied.

* A natural famine that struck the country in 1995 was deepened by obsolete agricultural and economic policies – resulting in death by starvation and disease of more than 10 percent of a population of 22 million over the last decade.

* The famine causes many children to grow up orphaned with mental and physical handicaps – including stunted growth – from severe malnutrition.

* International food aid is redirected toward the regime’s loyalists.

* All the while, Kim Jong Il lives in the lap of luxury, feasting on international foods that his personal chefs travel abroad to obtain for him, imbibing rare cognacs and being entertained by female “happiness teams.”

This is the government that the New York Philharmonic wishes to reward with our highest musical culture?

Sad that they would entertain the idea to perform for this regime of cutthroats.

Horrific that the State Department would put them up to it.