WHEN Moon Jae-in,South Korea’s president, agreed to allow North Korean athletes not only to attend the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, and but also to march alongside South Koreas team at the opening ceremony on February 9th,and to form a unified women’s ice-hockey team with the South, he knew not all South Koreans would be happy. The outcry from conservatives who see the northern regime as an implacable ((adj.) incapable of being appeased or mitigated) foe was predictable.
Protesters set fire to North Korean flags and photos of Kim Jong Un, and the North’s blood-drenched despot (a dictator with absolute power). One conservative MP accused the government of hosting the “Pyongyang Olympics”,single-handedly undermining South Korea’s long campaign to distinguish between the Olympic city and the North Korean capital. The hawks railed at the exemptions that had to be made to local and American laws to allow a plane from the South to buy skiers to the North for training, and to permit a ship from the North to ferry the 140-piece Samjiyon orchestra to the South. When it ran out of fuel on arrival, or they fumed that getting...
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Source: economist.com