Guns, barbed wire, and a wall

In the American Spectator, Larry Alex Taunton travels to

The DMZ — Demilitarized Zone — is a 250-kilometer long and 4-kilometer wide border cutting the Korean Peninsula in half. On the southern side, squat trees and bushes populate the gray landscape; on the northern side, there is nothing but grass and dirt as all vegetation has been flattened to provide clear sightlines for North Korean machine gunners. On the southern side, a free society flourishes economically, politically, and culturally; on the northern side lies a human and economic wasteland ruled by a hardline communist regime. This place, running roughly along the infamous 38th parallel, has been one of the most dangerous borders in the world and the spot many feared would be the flashpoint for the next World War.

...Adding to the eerie quality is the ominous silence. But there was something else, and it took me a while to identify it. All of this felt like an anachronism, an embarrassing relic of the Cold War that should have fallen in November 1989 along with the Berlin Wall. Didn’t the reunification and freedom fervor that swept Germany three decades ago penetrate these remote regions of Asia? It seems that when Berliners were rocking to the music of the Scorpions, the North Koreans were still goose-stepping to the awkward beat of communist propaganda. Reagan needed to make a visit here, too:

“Mr. Kim Il-Sung, open this gate! Mr. Kim Il-Sung, tear down this wall!”

...North Korea’s government and string of wicked, murderous dictators were indeed an anachronism more befitting the time of Lenin or Stalin or Mao than the era of chic celebrity presidents like Macron and Trudeau and Merkel… well, Macron and Trudeau anyway. This is the kind of wall Democrats would have you believe Trump wants to build: a threatening, barbed-wired symbol of tyranny. Nonsense. Unlike Trump’s proposed wall, this one is meant to keep people in rather than keep them out. At least, that is the purpose the North Koreans have in mind. For their own part, the South Koreans man their wall defensively. Just as South Koreans are not fighting to cross the wire in a desperate bid to reach the communist Utopia of North Korea, the United States’ southern frontier problem is not one of Americans crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico so that they might take advantage of that country’s wonderful social welfare benefits and overturn their electoral process through illegal voting. Trump’s wall is defensive in nature and meant to enforce a sensible immigration policy.

Here on the 38th parallel it is done with guns.

And barbed wire.

And a wall.

Read more here.