Correct that he was executed. But, I don't know that his uncle was the "sane" family member who would have been a boon to North Korea if he were in power which was the basis of the short conversation being commented upon.He would have been a boon, or at least an improvement. He was very close to China and had a plan to turn North Korea into a 'mini-China' by opening it up to investment, opening factories for cheap labour etc. His idea was that the regime could remain in power whilst easing its harshness and restrictive measures and enriching both the country and its people. His nephew clearly saw even this as a threat to his position and that of the family.
Perhaps he was at least moderately pragmatic with regards to external forces, then.
About the only people who want NK are South Korea.Why would they? So that they can ruin the awesome country they have now?
Compassion for the people they share a lot of history with, who are their next door neighbors, and for the many family members across the border?
Brothers and sisters of South Korea, save North Korea from the barbarism of juche, the betrayals of the PRC and the unremitting hostility of US imperialism!
For Revolutionary Reunification!
i've been reading the UNHAC report (300+ pages) and feel ill. It's as bad, as well, yeah, anything. It's Pol Pot. And the damn PRC gets to pay for it all, and the world is too weak to do anything about it. Never Again, my left foot.
International proletarian socialist revolution.
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Not good enough reasons to ruin their lives over.
You tell me this isn't enough... Koreans re-unite after 60 years.
International proletarian socialist revolution.Well yeah, that works
Vive le Bachuan!
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Not good enough reasons to ruin their lives over.You tell me this isn't enough... Koreans re-unite after 60 years.
That is all fine and dandy, until SK has to take on all of NKs debt, has to repair all infrastructure, has to tear down most of it and rebuild from scratch, has to invest incalculable amounts of money for re-education blah blah. Nothin is worth destroying your country.
That is all fine and dandy, until SK has to take on all of NKs debt, has to repair all infrastructure, has to tear down most of it and rebuild from scratch, has to invest incalculable amounts of money for re-education blah blah. Nothin is worth destroying your country.Not good enough reasons to ruin their lives over.You tell me this isn't enough... Koreans re-unite after 60 years.
To the Koreans, it's enough. That's why SK and NK have been in off-and-on talks about reuniting the nation for over a decade. It's primarily NK's government being unrealistic that is getting in the way, and even then there's a lot of people within the NK government who want reunification to happen. SK is all for it, as long as they don't have to give up their style of government.
I think the idea is that South Korea wouldn't have to take it on by themselves, other countries would help. They'd have to, the imbalance between NK and SK is almost as huge as it can be. NK is in many respects a Third World country with a Third World economy (just trying to keep a toe in the big leagus with nukes). Asking SK to uplift it to an equal level by themselves is very challenging. One problem you might have is people in North Korea saying sod it and emigrating en masse to the more developed south, which won't work at all.
SK is probably the only nation that can uplift NK. The U.S. and a lot of its allies simply don't have the resources, China has too many projects that require its resources and wouldn't be welcome to help anyway, Japan wouldn't be welcome to help, and Russia has too many of its own problems for a project like this.
SK might get some assistance... but end of the day, SK is alone on this.
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Some pretty damning claims are coming out against North korea including outright concentration camps and deliberate mass starvation.
Are these true or *casts summon goblin* some capitalist plot?
If so what can/should we do about it?
Yeah, but lets get it right. The deliberate mass starvation occured in the middle of a national famine, as a consequence prisoners were given even less than non prisoners...ergo mass starvation of prisoners. Thats like expecting the poorest Americans to set aside half the food they buy to feed murderers and rapists.
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SK is probably the only nation that can uplift NK. The U.S. and a lot of its allies simply don't have the resources, China has too many projects that require its resources and wouldn't be welcome to help anyway, Japan wouldn't be welcome to help, and Russia has too many of its own problems for a project like this.
SK might get some assistance... but end of the day, SK is alone on this.
As an Australian i'm more than happy to take north Korean women, children and elderly as commonwealth citizens. Communists are descent hard working folks once they get a bit of Aussie socialism. That way south Korea and north korea can nuke the s%&& out of each other.
SK might get some assistance... but end of the day, SK is alone on this.
I agree. The US and it's other allies might send money and consultants, but at the end of the day, you're looking at a lot of need for labor and not enough available workers to do it.
Which means either decades of triage or a mass influx of foreign labor (who are superfluous after the rebuilding ends and the foreign money goes away). Either ways means a lot of economic and cultural instability.
Not to say it isn't worth doing: it's better than leaving NK to its own devices. But it'll be far from painless.
Enough labor for what? And isn't there plenty of labor available in North Korea if the countries re-unify? The problem is more food and other resources than manpower. The North needs serious investment but I don't think labor would be the limiting factor.
Infrastructure renewal on a massive scale. The stuff that North Korea does have is often extremely outdated. Even if the Northern population can handle that themselves, you still have two huge swings of retraining: construction jobs during the building boom, and then to train those people to do something else afterward. And every architect/engineer/construction manager who gets shipped up from the South needs someone to take over the job he had been doing in the South before.
All while trying to set up North Korea to have a sustainable economy in the long term.
Outside of North Korea's major industry becoming construction for some time, there is also the issue of doing things like staffing new schools and hospitals. If South Korea is anything like other developed nations, they have a permanent shortage of doctors, nurses, and teachers. And the Northern versions of the same would probably need a lot of retraining to come up to modern standards and non-dictatorship sensibilities.
Anyway, logistics and long-term economics are hard, and I've already gone way outside my area of competence in commenting on it this far.
Of course, that's all assuming you can get the NK government out of the way without serious bloodshed, which doesn't seem very likely.
Of course. Stein's Law says things that can't continue forever will stop. North Korea will have to burn out sometime. When that will happen, and how it will happen, I can't venture to guess. But it will happen.
When enough people have nothing to lose by revolting. Starvation on a big enough scale tends to do it. This is why food distribution problems are a serious threat to dictatorships. If people don't get water, they die. If they don't get food, they can still travel to the capital and join an uprising.
Peaceful Korean reunification is about as likely as the US peacefully annexing Cuba.
The same would have been said of East and West Germany a decade prior to reunification.
Not saying it'll happen within a decade, but if it does happen, it will only be in hindsight that it was obviously going to happen.
When enough people have nothing to lose by revolting. Starvation on a big enough scale tends to do it. This is why food distribution problems are a serious threat to dictatorships. If people don't get water, they die. If they don't get food, they can still travel to the capital and join an uprising.
If this was true, then the revolt would have already happened. In the 90's, several million people died during the famine.
The most likely scenario is China absorbing North Korea not South Korea doing so. Their economy is much larger and better equipped to do so. Further, politically they don't want a free and capitalist South Korea expanded right to their doorstep. North Korea only exists because China wants it to.
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No, it exists because Korean's want(ed) it to exist as well.
The Jeju Uprising happened in 1948. Communists on Jeju Island (off the south end of Korean Peninsula) attempted to block and disrupt elections taking place "nationwide" (South Korea). Eventually the protests turned into armed rebellion. According to the South Korean government, military forces killed 14,373 people.
The South Korean military would assault villages, kill the young men and take away the girls, who would be raped and often killed after a week or two. Article with some first hand accounts.
When the Korean War started, the SK government made lists of potentially disruptive individuals and classified them in categories of A, B, C and D. On Jeju Island, the military was instructed to round up and execute everyone in the C and D categories.
This isn't to say that North Korea is some sort of haven of democracy and human rights. It isn't. But there were events that made South Korea unpopular to a lot of people before and during the war.
Korea has a lot of history and it all highly influences what has and is happening. Not all of it has to do with the US, China, Russia or Japan (though they are major influences).
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No, it exists because Korean's want(ed) it to exist as well.
The Jeju Uprising happened in 1948. Communists on Jeju Island (off the south end of Korean Peninsula) attempted to block and disrupt elections taking place "nationwide" (South Korea). Eventually the protests turned into armed rebellion. According to the South Korean government, military forces killed 14,373 people.
The South Korean military would assault villages, kill the young men and take away the girls, who would be raped and often killed after a week or two. Article with some first hand accounts.
When the Korean War started, the SK government made lists of potentially disruptive individuals and classified them in categories of A, B, C and D. On Jeju Island, the military was instructed to round up and execute everyone in the C and D categories.
This isn't to say that North Korea is some sort of haven of democracy and human rights. It isn't. But there were events that made South Korea unpopular to a lot of people before and during the war.
Korea has a lot of history and it all highly influences what has and is happening. Not all of it has to do with the US, China, Russia or Japan (though they are major influences).
The USA left South Korea out of the announced sphere of influence that we would defend in the Pacific. 3 months later, the war started.
RoK was awful to its people yes, but the DPRK couldn't invade the south w/o Soviet backing, and the Soviets weren't going to risk a war with the USA over Korea. When the USA openly said that the RoK wasn't under the US defensive umbrella, the USSR permitted the DPRK to invade.
But that's talking about the war, not the mere existence of DPRK.
Two separate things are not the same thing.
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so Kim jong un executed the north Korean state choir for taking selfies during naked sweaty sex?
But spared his ex girlfriend.
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But that's talking about the war, not the mere existence of DPRK.
Two separate things are not the same thing.
The DPRK exists b/c the USA and the USSR drew a line approximately halfway across the Korean peninsula in 1945. That's the beginning of it. It continues to exist b/c it has been propped up / actively defended by the USSR and the PRC since then. That's the present state of it.
No, that is a factor of why it exists, not the complete story.
See above in my much wordier post. There were active political divisions in the country that your explanation doesn't account for. Which means that relying on your explanation alone will lead you to false conclusions about the country and why it behaves the way it does.
The difference between what you are saying and what I am saying is simple...
You: X is the cause of the problem.
Me: X is a major cause of the problem, but Y and Z are also factors that help explain many things.
If you think I'm wrong, feel free to explain why Y and Z are not problems. Because I agree with you, X is a cause. That isn't the difference between our statements. You have to show that Y and Z are non-factors.
Please feel free to show that Korean history has nothing to do with the current state of Korean affairs.
Some pretty damning claims are coming out against North korea including outright concentration camps and deliberate mass starvation.
Are these true or *casts summon goblin* some capitalist plot?
If so what can/should we do about it?
Yep.
Hitchens visited NK, and this is what he had to say:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/02/a_na tion_of_racist_dwarfs.html
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No, that is a factor of why it exists, not the complete story.
See above in my much wordier post. There were active political divisions in the country that your explanation doesn't account for. Which means that relying on your explanation alone will lead you to false conclusions about the country and why it behaves the way it does.
The difference between what you are saying and what I am saying is simple...
You: X is the cause of the problem.
Me: X is a major cause of the problem, but Y and Z are also factors that help explain many things.If you think I'm wrong, feel free to explain why Y and Z are not problems. Because I agree with you, X is a cause. That isn't the difference between our statements. You have to show that Y and Z are non-factors.
Please feel free to show that Korean history has nothing to do with the current state of Korean affairs.
The Korean people did not have any say in the aftermath of WW2. Everything that happened, from the division of the country, to who was put in charge, to what those people were allowed to do, was imposed on them by the Great Powers.
Korea's current political division is solely, entirely, the result of the end-game politics of the Second World War.
On the positive side, although unification will cost a lot of money Korea could look forward to 100 percent employment for a couple of decades. Nothing like re-building an entire country from the ground up to get an economy booming. Look at Germany. Pretty painful at first but the German economy came out even stronger....
Which is probably another reason why China would never let it happen.
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On the positive side, although unification will cost a lot of money Korea could look forward to 100 percent employment for a couple of decades. Nothing like re-building an entire country from the ground up to get an economy booming. Look at Germany. Pretty painful at first but the German economy came out even stronger....
Which is probably another reason why China would never let it happen.
East Germans had these things called "skills."
North Koreans on the other hand... the costs are going to be INSANE.