Once they’ve seen Paris

by BRIAN LOCKHART

“How ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm, After They've Seen Paree?”

That's an old song from the First World War.

It suggests that someone who has the opportunity to travel and see what the world has to offer may no longer be content with their current surroundings and may decide to explore further.

There's a lot of truth in that.

I recall my first trip to downtown Toronto as a teenager. Seeing the hustle and bustle, the skyscrapers, and all the activity really impressed me. I did actually move there only a few years later.

The song was a reference to all the young men who were shipped overseas during World War One and had an opportunity to travel from a one-horse town where they grew up, to an entirely different world and culture. The song reasons that many of those farm boys may not want to return to the farm after seeing what the rest of the world has to offer.

North Korea, has, for some reason, signed a pact with Russia, to help in its war of aggression against Ukraine.

Why North Korea would consider Ukraine a threat, makes no sense at all. Countries with similar ideologies tend to stick together.

As a result of this pact, up to 10,000 North Korean soldiers have been deployed to the Kursk region where, no doubt, they will learn what it's like to see your friend blown to bits by an artillery shell.

This number of soldiers may sound like a lot, but it's not.

These 10,000 soldiers are nothing more than cannon fodder for Putin. He's running so low on his own soldiers that he has to recruit criminals from prisons and give them a rifle.

These 10,000 North Korean soldiers were defeated before they even arrived.

No doubt that most, if not all, of these soldiers were drafted and forced into the army.

Conscripted armies, as history shows, never do well. A conscripted army is not motivated, has low morale, and is usually not trained as well as they should be.

A conscripted army will always lose to a volunteer professional military force that is well-trained and well-equipped.

A lot of these North Korean soldiers are going to die or receive life-altering wounds while fighting on foreign soil, for a cause they don't believe in, and an enemy they have no quarrel with. These soldiers are being sent to fight an enemy they have no knowledge of, in a region they probably haven't even heard of.

So what does this have to do with soldiers seeing Paris in World War I?

These North Korean soldiers are going to see things they have never seen before. They are going to experience things that are not in North Korea, and go against everything the regime of man/child goofball dictator Kim Jong Un, has ever told them.

They will experience things they have not been taught in school. They will learn that things are not quite the way they were told when sitting behind a desk and ordered to pay allegiance to the ‘dear leader.'

The problem is, once their mission is over, either through the war ending or a landmine blowing off one of their feet, these North Korean soldiers won't be receiving a hero's parade through their hometown. They won't receive veteran's benefits. Most likely they will never be in touch with their families ever again.

The last thing North Korea wants is soldiers returning home and telling everyone what the world is really like on the other side of the barbed wire that keeps them inside the borders of their country.

They don't want soldiers telling townsfolk that in other countries, people chose their leaders. They don't want soldiers telling their friends that they saw private individuals actually driving their own cars and that the movie theatres show films from around the world.

They don't want soldiers explaining to their families that the World Wide Web has information from around the entire world, not just what the government wants them to see.

It has already been suggested that once these soldiers are done fighting, their future is bleak.

Most likely they will be shipped off to a gulag somewhere for re-education, or some similar fate.

It will be a sad ending for 10,000 soldiers who have no idea why they have been sent to fight in a foreign country against an enemy that they don't even know.