Kathy Dettwyler (center, in dress) with students, 2016
During the past few days we’ve been studying the responses of several ethically challenged commentators to the arrest and imprisonment of American student Otto Warmbier – who died on July 19 – by the brutal regime of North Korea, which accused him of removing a propaganda poster from a hotel corridor. Instead of recognizing Warmbier as a victim deserving of sympathy, writers at Salon and Huffington Post, and so-called comedian Larry Wilmore, either criticized him for his supposed disrespect for his totalitarian hosts or made fun of him for having gotten himself into trouble in the Hermit Kingdom in the first place. But worst of all was Kathy Dettwyler, an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware, who on her Facebook page and in a reader comment posted at the website of National Review, actually tore into Warmbier after his death. To their credit, her bosses at the University of Delaware were quick to issue the following statement:
Otto Warmbier at his press conference in North Korea
The comments of Katherine Dettwyler do not reflect the values or position of the University of Delaware. We condemn any and all messages that endorse hatred and convey insensitivity toward a tragic event such as the one that Otto Warmbier and his family suffered.
The University of Delaware values respect and civility and we are committed to global education and study abroad; therefore we find these comments particularly distressing and inconsistent with our values. Our sympathies are with the Warmbier family.
This statement was soon followed by another one indicating that the university would not be rehiring Dettwyler after the present semester.
Kathy Dettwyler, breastfeeding expert
We were so disgusted by Dettwyler’s remarks about Warmbier that we decided to find out more about her. It turns out that Dettwyler is an “expert” on breastfeeding. She is sometimes described as a “breastfeeding advocate” – which means, basically, that she believes in breastfeeding babies until long after they have ceased to be babies. In one article she suggests that it is reasonable to keep breastfeeding a child until somewhere between the ages of three and eight. A brief career summary: after studying at UC Davis and Indiana University, she has bounced from one college faculty to another – the University of Southern Mississippi, Texas A&M, SUNY Plattsburgh, Millersville University.
University of Delaware
After her remarks about Warmbier made national news, TheReview, a newspaper published at the University of Delaware, ran a piece about her stating that she had “earned a reputation” at the college “for incorporating her political beliefs into her teaching.” The article quoted junior Nicolas Diclaudio, who had taken two anthropology courses taught by Dettwyler. According to Diclaudio, Dettwyler “would routinely go on political tangents, oftentimes making derogatory remarks about President Donald Trump and his supporters….Dettwyler’s classroom activity became seriously unacceptable when she began to include her political beliefs in academic assessments, asking questions with intentional ideological bias.”
A question about Donald Trump and his supporters from a test by Dettwyler, along with the “correct” answer: true.
“I would always pick the answer that I knew she wanted because I didn’t want it to affect my grade,” Diclaudio told The Review. “Me and some of my friends would stop going to class and just read the textbook because her lectures got out of hand.” The Review noted that Diclaudio was not surprised by Dettwyler’s remarks about Warmbier; on the contrary, the student referred to Dettwyler’s Facebook post on Warmbier as “The most Kathy thing I’ve ever seen.” Student comments about Dettwyler at the website Rate My Professors confirm Diclaudio’s report: “It’s her opinion or no opinion…will give you attitude if you ask certain questions.” “She is very opinionated and blunt.” “Easily the rudest professor I have had at UD.” “She’s extremely rude.” “Way too opinionated to the point where she becomes unprofessional.” “Very opinionated and can be perceived as rude.” “Very opinionated and rude.” “Extremely strict and rude. She thinks she created Anthropology and hates America….She’s horrible and obnoxious.” “Insufferable. I’ve never experienced a professor who’s as self-important…one of the rudest people I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting.” “Unbelievably rude when students disagree with her but she tells us to question authority.”
While various national media failed to get any comment out of Dettwyler, she did respond to an inquiry by The Review, stating that “A couple of students complained about my comments in class about Trump, when what I did was talk about statements he himself had made, and lead the students through and analysis of the underlying cultural beliefs they reflected….This is part of my job as an anthropology professor.”
The last couple of days, we’ve been dwelling over the terrible story of Otto Warmbier, the American student held prisoner by North Korea and returned home last month in a coma. Our focus has not been on Warmbier, who died on June 19 in Cincinnati, but on the creeps at Salon, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere who chose to respond to Warmier’s arrest not by recognizing it as the act of a reprehensible totalitarian dictatorship but by denouncing – or ridiculing – Warmbier himself.
Kathy Dettwyler
To be sure, all these criticisms of Warmbier took place while he was still alive (and in a North Korean prison). Even worse was Kathy Dettwyler, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware, who after Warmbier’s death, mind you, wrote a few breathtakingly callous things on her Facebook page and in a readers’ comments section at the website of National Review: “Is it wrong of me,” she asked, “to think that Otto Warmbier got exactly what he deserved?” She maintained that Warmbier was “typical of a mindset of a lot of the young, white, rich, clueless males who come into my classes” and who “cry about their grades because they didn’t think they’d really have to read and study the material to get a good grade. They simple deserve a good grade for being who they are. Or instead of crying, they bluster and threaten their female professors.” There was no indication that Dettwyler had any knowledge about Warmbier’s academic conduct or performance: apparently the fact that he was a white male college student was enough for her to come to certain conclusions about him
Warmbier’s funeral
“These are the same kids,” wrote Dettwyler, “who cry about their grades because they didn’t think they’d really have to read and study the material to get a good grade….His parents ultimately are to blame for his growing up thinking he could get away with whatever he wanted. Maybe in the US, where young, white, rich, clueless white males routinely get away with raping women. Not so much in North Korea. And of course, it’s Ottos’ [sic] parents who will pay the price for the rest of their lives.”
Again, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Warmbier thought he could get away with anything; and there’s certainly no excuse to equate him with a rapist. His alleged crime wasn’t rape – it was ripping a piece of paper off of a wall. And there’s no way of knowing whether Warmbier even did that. All we really know about what happened to him in North Korea is that he was arrested, imprisoned, and obviously abused so brutally that it ended up killing him. All these people’s criticisms should be directed against the totalitarian monsters of Pyongyang who tyrannize their own people in the same way they tyrannized Warmbier.
We’re talking, after all, about a country where a couple of hundred thousand political prisoners are being held under primitive conditions, are forced to perform back-breaking slave work under dangerous circumstances, and are in constant danger of either starving or freezing to death. But no: certain people on the Western left are so drenched in postmodern cliches about identity-group-based power and victimhood that when they see a story of this kind, their first instinct is to empathize with the non-whites, however monstrous, and to come down hard on the white male, however innocent.
No, Warmbier should never have set in North Korea. But did he deserve to die for his naivete?
Yesterday we looked at some of the more repulsive responses to the case of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who was arrested last year while on a tour of North Korea and, in June, was returned to the U.S. in a coma and died a few days later. As we’ve seen, a Huffington Post contributor named La Sha was one of several commentators who mocked Warmbier and blamed him for his own fate. Knowing only that Warmbier had been imprisoned for the alleged crime of taking down a propaganda poster, La Sha decided that he was a victim of his own white male privilege. She actually compared him Warmbier to the Aurora, Colorado, mass murderer:
La SHa
When you can watch a white man who entered a theatre and killed a dozen people come out unscathed, you start to believe you’re invincible. When you see a white man taken to Burger King in a bulletproof vest after he killed nine people in a church, you learn that the world will always protect you….What a mind-blowing moment it must be to realize after 21 years of being pedestaled by the world simply because your DNA coding produced the favorable phenotype that such favor is not absolute. What a bummer to realize that even the State Department with all its influence and power cannot assure your pardon. What a wake-up call it is to realize that your tears are met with indifference.
La Sha actually criticized Warmbier for his lack of “respect for the national autonomy” of North Korea. And she concluded her comments by comparing his plight in North Korea to her own situation as a black woman in the United States:
…living 15 years performing manual labor in North Korea is unimaginable, but so is going to a place I know I’m unwelcome and violating their laws. I’m a black woman though. The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense. He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help. I get it.
Larry Wilmore
Similarly, after Warmbier’s arrest, the terribly unfunny Larry Wilmore, who at the time had a program on Comedy Central, responded to Warmbier’s arrest and show trial by making fun of Warmbier’s name and addressing him, with a sneer, as “frat boy.” Salon agreed, running a piece in which it described Warmbier as “America’s biggest idiot frat boy.” Affinity Magazine, which markets “social justice” to a teenage readership, tweeted a piece of advice that, it argued, Warmbier should have heeded while in North Korea: “Respect their laws.”
But there was, believe it or not, even worse in store. Tune in tomorrow.
We wrote last year about Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who went on a tour of North Korea only to find himself sentenced to 15 years at hard labor for supposedly stealing a propaganda banner from a corridor in his Pyongyang hotel – and who, last month, in a horrific denouement, was returned to the U.S. in a coma only to die several days later. In our account of the Warmbier case last year, we took a look at the firm, Young Pioneer Tours (YPT), that arranged the group trip in which he took part – but that, in the aftermath of his tragic experience, has ceased organizing vacations to the Hermit Kingdom.
Warmbier in court
A quick recap on YPT: according to its own website, it was founded by Gareth Johnson, a Britisher who has a great “love for the people and culture” of North Korea. The site also quoted from a YPT official, Shane Horan: “I’m passionate about travel to so called ‘rogue nations’ and changing people’s often incorrect perceptions of them.” YPT’s promotional materials directly addressed potential vacationers’ concern about safety in North Korea: “How safe is it? Extremely safe! Despite what you may hear, North Korea is probably one of the safest places on Earth to visit. Tourism is very welcomed in North Korea, thus tourists are cherished and well taken care of.”
Warmbier and fellow tour members in Pyongyang, prior to his arrest
Far from being cherished and well taken of, however, Warmbier was arrested at the airport in Pyongyang when he was about to return home. He was put on trial and, on March 16 of last year, sent to prison. YPT issued a statement to the effect that it was “continuing to work closely with relevant authorities to ensure a speedy and satisfactory outcome for Mr Warmbier.” Well, that didn’t exactly work out.
La Sha
Far from showing any remorse, YPT kept whitewashing North Korea. And meanwhile Warmbier was undergoing – well, no one outside of Kim Jong-un’s empire knows exactly what he underwent. It now seems clear that he was savagely abused. Nobody remotely familiar with the reality of North Korea should have been surprised at the thought that the incarcerated American was undergoing brutal treatment. But that thought didn’t stop many appalling people in the U.S. from blaming Warmbier for his own fate – and, in effect, taking the side of the North Korean regime. At the Huffington Post, for example, a writer named La Sha took palpable pleasure at the news of Warmbier’s prison sentence, writing that “the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.” The “reckless gall” Warmbier had demonstrated in North Korea by supposedly snatching a propaganda poster, argued La Sha, was “an unfortunate side effect of being socialized first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country.”
As a “benefactor…of all privilege,” suggested La Sha (she later referred to his “alabaster American privilege”), Warmbier had developed an “arrogance,” a “subconscious yet no less obnoxious perception that the rules do not apply to him, or at least that their application is negotiable.” But there was more. As we’ll see tomorrow, La Sha actually compared Warmbier to the Aurora, Colorado, mass murderer.
The New York Times hasn’t always been a totally loyal participant in the struggle against totalitarianism – note that our poster boy for useful stoogery is the Times‘s own shameless apologist for Stalinism, Walter Duranty – but now and then it comes through. It certainly did so on March 26, when it ran a splendid op-ed, entitled “Please Cancel Your Vacation to North Korea,” by Marie Myung-ok Lee.
Otto Warmbier
Lee, who teaches writing at Columbia University, began by referring to the case of Otto Warmbier, which we’ve already discussed here. Warmbier, it will be remembered, is the American college student whose ill-advised New Year’s vacation in Pyongyang turned into a nightmare after he was caught on closed-circuit camera taking a propaganda sign off of a wall in the hotel where he was staying. This innocent attempt to snag a souvenir resulted in a 15-year sentence at hard labor in a North Korean prison.
Marie Myung-ok Lee
“In photographs from the trial,” writes Lee, Warmbier “seemed utterly shocked that he was being prosecuted.” Lee adds: “I was not shocked.”
The reason? Lee’s parents fled North Korea in their teens and settled in America. Lee knows how brutal the Kim regime is. After leaving the Hermit Kingdom, Lee’s father “tried several times to return to visit his homeland, including with a medical group bringing in supplies.” He was denied entry every time. Lee, however, was able to visit in 2009 as part of a group of teachers and students. She was also able to take her mother on the trip.
“Our group,” writes Lee,
was briefed several times about the things we could and couldn’t do. We were not allowed to bring Bibles, satellite phones, cameras with telephoto lenses, notebooks, pornography. We were told to expect that our group would probably be spied on and to not bad-mouth any of the regime’s leaders, past or present, even in private.
On arriving in North Korea, as Lee puts it, “you lose control.” They take your passport. They control your movements. They select your meals. They decide whom you get to meet. And they house you in a Pyongyang hotel that’s located on an island by itself, separated by water from the rest of the city. Of course there’s no possibility of making a phone call to the family back home or sending them an e-mail.
Kim Jung-un
The reality of North Korean tyranny is no secret in the rest of the world. But for many Americans, tyranny is simply not a reality. They can’t process the idea. Living all your life in freedom can make it difficult to realize what it really means to live without freedom. As Lee writes, “reports of ‘drunken high jinks’” on the part of Americans visiting Kim’s realm “are becoming more common.” As we’ve noted previously on this website, the travel agency Warmbier used, Young Pioneer Tours, encourages a frivolous attitude toward totalitarianism.
Lee warns fervently against such attitudes. She recalls that during her North Korean visit, a tour bus she was riding on “stopped in the middle of the countryside” and she “noticed a bicycle leaning forlornly against a tree and felt that would make a compelling photo.” But before she could take a picture, “the bus was stormed by soldiers.” Another tourist, it emerged, had already snapped a photo – which was a particularly serious offense, because, unbeknownst to the passengers, they were in the middle of a military installation. The offender, a fellow student of Lee’s, was removed from the bus. A Warmbier-like situation was averted – but only because the student was a citizen of China, North Korea’s only ally.
Yesterday we started looking at Young Pioneer Tours, a firm that conducts tours to North Korea – and one of whose recent clients, an American college student named Otto Warmbier, was sentenced on March 16 to 15 years at hard labor for stealing a propaganda banner from his hotel in Pyongyang.
Otto Wambier
You might think an American tourist in North Korea would know better than to commit even so minor an offense as stealing a propaganda banner from a hotel wall. After all, doesn’t everybody in the West know how monstrous the Kim regime is? The answer to this is that when you combine the ignorance about the world (and especially about Communism) that is common among young Westerners nowadays with the wall-to-wall B.S. on YPT’s website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and Instagram account, all of which repeatedly insist that North Korea is a safe, fun country that loves tourists, it’s not hard to believe that Warmbier thought he was doing something innocuous.
Rowan Beard and friends
Certainly YPT didn’t rush to take responsibility for Warmbier’s action. How exactly, you ask, did YPT respond to his sentencing? With the following statement, posted online by YPT representative Rowan Beard:
Young Pioneer Tours are fully aware of the recent sentencing of Otto Warmbier that was announced by KCNA on Wednesday the 16th March 2016. This should be viewed in similar context of previous cases of Americans being sentenced in the DPRK. We are continuing to work closely with relevant authorities to ensure a speedy and satisfactory outcome for Mr Warmbier. Thus for obvious reasons we cannot currently make any comments related to what is an ongoing case.
Pretty lame. That awkward sentence about how Warmbier’s case “should be viewed in similar context of previous cases,” etc., comes off as a feeble attempt to absolve YPT of any responsibility. Otherwise, Beard’s statement isn’t really saying anything. One might have expected that a company with a greater sense of responsibility and/or more of a sense of shame at its relationship with such a regime would, say, decide to call off all tours to North Korea until Warmbier is released. But YPT, of course, made no such decision.
Gareth Johnson, British founder of YPT, who on the firm’s website declares his “love for the people and culture of the DPRK”
James Kirkup of the Telegraph had a few choice things to say about YPT’s shameful stoogery. Noting that the firm’s site “makes North Korea [look] like just another delightful tourist destination,” with its “numerous photographs of young tourists having a jolly time around North Korea, marvelling at various monuments to the regime and giving (presumably ironic) salutes in the style of its soldiers,” Kirkup reminded readers that the people of North Korea “have seen every basic freedom and dignity stripped from them by the world’s worst and most oppressive regime….When it comes to human rights abuses, North Korea isn’t so much in a different league as a different planet.” Precisely.
YPT’s Shane Horan, of Ireland: “I’m passionate about travel to so called ‘rogue nations’ and changing people’s often incorrect perceptions of them”
Kirkup quoted a UN commission’s 2014 determination that “abuses in North Korea were without parallel in the contemporary world,” with prison camps housing some 200,000 regime opponents who experience “torture and abuse, starvation rations, and forced labor.” On one occasion, prison officials cooked an inmate’s baby and fed it to their dogs. North Korea, Kirkup concluded, isn’t a country; “it’s a prison camp and a torture chamber. Taking a tourist trip there means spectating on the murder and abuse of your fellow human beings, and putting hard currency into the hands of the people responsible for those crimes.”
Yep. But even in the midst of the Warmbier crisis, YPT has clung tenaciously to the line that North Korea isn’t as bad as you think. Just the other day, YPT retweeted an Al Jazeera video about three or four fake stories that have circulated recently about North Korea – the point obviously being to support the premise that the evils of Kim’s regime have been exaggerated.
The king of fun
By the way, YPT also conducts tours of other tyrant-run countries, including China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Turkmenistan, and it hasn’t stopped whitewashing those regimes, either. On March 10, YPT posted the following statement on its Facebook page: “A lot has already been said about Turkmenistan’s repressive nature, and cult of personality surrounding the leader. There’s more to the country than this.” On February 25, YPT posted on its blog an interview with an 86-year-old Red Army veteran that was pure propaganda, whitewashing Mao’s atrocities and attributing China’s recent economic success to Communism.
Despicable. How do these stooges find one another? And, having found one another and gone into such a disgusting business, how do they live with themselves?
On March 16, North Korea’s highest court sentenceda 21-year-old American tourist, University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier of Wyoming, Ohio, to 15 years at hard labor. His crime? Stealing a propaganda banner from his hotel in Pyongyang. The U.S. State Department called the sentence “unduly harsh”; the White House called it politically motivated. Warmbier had come to the Hermit Kingdom for a five-day New Year’s Day group tour, and when he was at the Pyongyang airport about to leave the country, he was taken into custody. Charged with subversion, he was found guilty at a trial that lasted less than an hour. The prosecution demanded a life sentence, but Warmbier’s lawyer managed to bring the punishment down to 15 years. Reporting on the conviction, the North Korean news agency called Warmbier’s offense “serious” and described it as “a bid to impair the unity” of the North Korean people. In a public statement, Warmbier insisted he had been “used and manipulated…lured by the United States administration to commit a crime in this country.”
YPL logo
How did Warmbier find his way into North Korea in the first place? He signed up for a tour package with a firm called Young Pioneer Tours (YPT), which arranges vacations for Westerners who want to visit Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship. What kind of outfit is YPT? We checked out its website. Featuring a cutesy-wootsie logo and written in a colloquial English plainly addressed to cool young backpacker types, it explains that the firm “started from humble beginnings as a group of expats living in China brought together by our love of being on the road.” The company’s founders “have tweaked and experimented with our tours to best fulfil what you guys out there are looking for, making a lot of new friends and having some interesting and bizarre experiences along the way.”
A closed-circuit camera image of Warmbier stealing the propaganda banner
Well, Warmbier has certainly had an interesting and bizarre experience, though we’re sure this isn’t exactly what the stooges at YPT are talking about.
The YPT folks go on to brag about themselves. They have a “great reputation for awfully fun guides who bring out the travel bug in people while ensuring that everything runs smoothly.” They nurse a noble belief in “going out of your way to help others on the road, share experiences and make friends wherever you can,” and say that “this attitude…has opened doors to us that can’t be opened in other ways.”
Mr. Fun
They also go out of their way to reassure us that North Korea isn’t anywhere near as bad as it’s cracked up to be. “How safe is it? Extremely safe! Despite what you may hear, North Korea is probably one of the safest places on Earth to visit. Tourism is very welcomed in North Korea, thus tourists are cherished and well taken care of. We have never felt suspicious or threatened at any time.” The last time we looked, this text hadn’t been removed from the YPT website, despite what happened to Warmbier.
To be sure, the YPT site warns against “having a debate with the guides.” Not because you might end up spending the rest of your life in prison at hard labor, but because “their beliefs are important to them” and should be respected. “Everyone has read or seen lots on North Korea,” the YPT sages tell us; “this is your opportunity to listen to the other side. If you’re quiet and listen you’ll be surprised just how much you can learn.”
Yes, shut up and listen to the propaganda. More about these appalling idiots tomorrow.
