Ah yes, the classic "you aren't currently hanging from the cross, so there's no reason to talk about ways the world could be better" argument. It's so intellectually lazy. Why not say what you actually mean: "I like the way things are, I don't care that other people are mistreated, and I wish everybody would shut up about it already".
I think it reads more like a specific criticism of the term "Systemic". North Korea being a very clear example of what systemic harm looks like, to the point of people starving to death because the societal systems are designed to keep the population in a state of near starvation and desparation.
> Like most women in North Korea, she is the main earner in the family. The meagre wages men earn in their compulsory state jobs are all but worthless, forcing their wives to find creative ways to make a living.
Really interesting! Economic policies have created a system where women earn much more than men on average. I think that's quite rare globally.
Can’t tell if this is clever propaganda to put a positive spin on this by using the words “much more”.
They are still starving to death. “Much more” is relative in this case. The men are paid state sponsored wages and it’s not enough to survive on, literally. Women only make more because they are selling black market items to keep their children and families alive, and to keep their neighbors from starving to death, which, as the article says, is not even possible anymore.
This is not in any way a victory for feminism, or for anyone else. The men are basically slaves, and the women are considered to be too inferior to be slaves so they do black market work.
I think when looking back through history, the continued torture of the entire North Korean population is going to be one of the most tragic events of the 21st century. Despite the regime originating earlier, it feels to be most tragic now; long after any maligned geopolitical reason for the regime to exist has since disappeared. It’s something we don’t think about often currently, because it’s almost become a joke. The crazy hermit kingdom. But I really feel like we’ll look back at how we ignored it for so long shamefully. I don’t know what we could be doing though of course. I hope that will become clear soon.
What would you have the world do? Tens of thousands of Americans died trying to prevent it in the Korean War. Even if North Korea didn't have nuclear capabilities, it's asking for Iraq 2.0 (dictatorship threatening others, populace under severe oppression)
Do you have a citation for that? The only sources I've seen have said that others suggested offensive use of nuclear weapons, then scapegoated MacArthur when the studies were leaked/released to the public.
What you are referring to is allowing MacArthur to have nuked China when they entered the Korean war, aka killing millions of civilians and leaving the eastern seaboard of China irradiated for generations. We should be glad he was kept on his leash.
MacArthur repeatedly rejected suggestions for such use of nuclear and chemical weapons, stating that he would only use them to prevent an ultimate fallback. It seems that others, such as Bradley, Ridgeway, Truman, and even Eisenhower were more in favor of escalation than MacArthur, who seems to have been made something of a scapegoat upon his dismissal.
I mentioned at the end of my comment I don’t have a good solution. I think something being tragic and shameful is possible even if we don’t have a solution. Just on a human level, this is humans doing horrible things to other humans. To me that’s shameful for all of us on the scale of history.
I’m probably being needlessly emotional about it. Anytime you look back in history you have all of the foresight from however many years after. I’m sure we’ll know a even more about what’s going on currently in 2023 way off into the future.
On a purely logical level, we did what we could. But when people talk about other world events (WW2 for example) they’ll often wonder why the average person didn’t fight whatever horror was going on then.
Does it ignore the entire context of the situation, yeah. But it’s odd that I think we’re in that time now.
I’m being emotional because I have a cold, I’m in bed, reading something that made me sad. Take that with a grain of salt haha
If China decided they would no longer back North Korea, the regime could be replaced in hours. Most of the time, when toppling regimes, you have to be worried about someone even worse taking over. In this case, I don't see how it could get any worse.
What I imagine would happen is the North Koreans who have suddenly stopped becoming prisoners in their own land trying to enter China, and then China would have to post guards at the border, and be responsible for the mess, including violence, trying to stop them coming in. So the Chinese government probably has an interest in keeping an NK government alive, that way they can claim "He's the evil dictator oppressing his citizens, the mess over there is not our problem!".
I wonder why that's my first thought, rather than the citizens wondering "Well, the government is gone, let's build a collective to self-govern." -- I guess people would rather join a structured society somewhere else rather than try to build one themselves (probably out of nothing, in NK). Not to mention yeah, even if the current asshole is gone, the next asshole is probably busy setting up shop to resume the oppression.
An important matter to understand is that a power vaccum fills very quickly, and often a power vacuum is filled by the most sociopathic, brutual and ruthless people around because they are willing to do anything necessary to secure and retain power.
Many good and normal and moral people would want to self organize and self govern and build something better from the ashes of a fallen country, the problem is that those good and honest people will be manipulated, tricked, and murdered by those who are more brutal and cunning than them.
The embattled regime could employ a scorched earth policy and will launch all the weapons they've got, resulting in millions of civilian deaths. That seems worse to me.
It's not like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, or even Putin's Russia.
If it wasn't for that Korea could be reunited and it will probably end up fairly well, similar to how the reunification of Germany ended up well.
The economic, industrial, agricultural, social, technological and cultural differences between north and south Korea are far, far greater than between east and west Germany.
PRC has little control over NK whose the one that's been limiting cross border trade. NK would rather starve a few people in exchange for autarky / independance. NK only started openning up to agri imports from PRC / RU in Q1 this year, but that's mainly due to may/june being toughest period for NK agri production - "sprint poverty" right before harvest. All PRC can do is deal with NK like everyone else, while also encourage their missile program since they'd rather NK fling their target at Japan or US West Coast than PRC.
> I think when looking back through history, the continued torture of the entire North Korean population is going to be one of the most tragic events of the 21st century.
1. Not the utterly pointless, banal conflicts started by lies and personal vendettas that have already killed hundreds of thousands and millions of people, spilled over into neighbouring (and not so neighbouring) countries, and destabilized entire parts of the world?
2. If this is going to be among the worst of this century, you must have an incredibly optimistic outlook on what the next 80 years are going to look like!
I’m not going to get into a conversation comparing tragedy to find the top 10. I said “one of” specifically for that reason. I don’t think deciding if there’s actually worse things going on actually adds anything here. (A thread specifically about North Korea)
When you say "one of the most" key word here being most, yes, you are 100% inviting comparison. I'm not interested in the discussion itself but you were definitely inviting comparison.
> I really feel like we’ll look back at how we ignored it for so long shamefully
One of the big problems has long been that North-Korea has a large network of artillery within shelling distance of Seoul. Now they also have rockets and nukes and stuff, but even without those any serious threat to NK would come with devastating cost of civilian lives in South-Korea.
See e.g. [1], which estimates that "the DPRK could cause thousands of casualties in just a minute and more than 100,000 in an hour" and some of the case studies in that report have more than 200,000 in an hour. And all of that assumes only conventional HE rounds – no chemicals or nukes. And all of that is in the first hour alone: a full war would cost millions of lives (during the Korean war, South Korean casualties were about a million civilians and 250,000 soldiers).
You need to move carefully when you've got almost 6,000 pieces of artillery pointed at your head, never mind nukes, and the people in control of them seem rather unhinged.
I've seen people express this kind of "we should have just intervened" opinion before, and in principle I don't disagree, but it's really not that simple: both due to the strong risk of heavy civilian casualties, and the geopolitical impact with the USSR during the cold war (and to lesser degree, contemporary China and Russia – I can already see China invade Taiwan using "but you invaded NK!" as an excuse).
It's a complicated issue. Part of the problem is nobody really wants to fix it because the costs will be enormous. When and if the regime falls it's going to take tens of billions of dollars in aid to keep it from destabilizing South Korea. Not to mention the massive refugee crisis that will occur. I'm pretty sure that's one of the many reasons why China hasn't dealt with it. Because the vast majority of refugees would go north across their border.
China has made it clear they aren't particularly thrilled with the idea of having someone not under their thumb next to their border as well. As a consequence of that... the "best" scenario would probably be China invading. But "best" is definitely in scare quotes as that could go VERY wrong very very quickly. I think the PRC is aware of that too. So unfortunately that means the DPRK will starve, because the realpolitik is such that solving the issue is just not a tenable solution for all the other parties.
> When and if the regime falls it's going to take tens of billions of dollars in aid to keep it from destabilizing South Korea.
On the other hand, the current costs of hostilities isn't free either as militaries don't pay for themselves; e.g. a 10% decrease in military spending for countries like South-Korea and Japan would save billions every year (right now, both are increasing spending).
I agree it's not a simple situation because there are 25 million mostly uneducated starving North-Koreans you've got to do something with, but in purely financial terms you're probably going to save money in the long run.
That's military industrial complex propaganda. The North Korean air force consists of just 40 MiG 29's. The ROK military outclasses NK in every way that matters, including 167 F16's, 60 F15E's, and 40 F35's. This is in addition to the 160 F16's the US has stationed there.
I'll assume that is the case, but that says exactly nothing about artillery capability or the damage this can do in just a matter of hours. How many pieces of (often fortified) artillery do you think those 427 places can take out before shelling starts?
The report you link to provides no evidence that NK has the capability to launch such an attack. The idea that NK has 6000 serviceable artillery tubes and large stocks of serviceable ammunition in the field and ready to be used within an hour is difficult to believable, especially without evidence. This would require propositioned weapons and munitions similar to the Maginot line, which NK does not have nor can it afford.
I'll also point out that ROK and the US maintain 24/7 surveillance of NK depots and munitions storage areas (and pretty much everything else). NK could not attempt to mount such an operation without being detected. Unless they use their 100 year old stealth biplanes, then all bets are off.
I was about to say the same thing. It’s not that it was ignored. They are doing their awful things because they have guns pointing at South Korea while being backed by China. And now some quite capable cruse missiles.
Why do you say there's no more geopolitical reason for the country to exist? The Cold War is long over but China may well see DPRK as a valuable buffer and a means of diluting the military capabilities of rival countries. Belarus, another dictatorship that seems to be frozen in time, has a similar role vis-a-vis Russia.
Not only 21st century. While we've seen brutal dictatorships in the past, we've never seen one with access to 21st century technology to further their goals. The old dictatorships could only be so efficient, but the scale and sophistication of North Korea's actions is unprecedented.
Unfortunately, it's not as much ignoring as it is the few options available. If there is one country that can do something about it, that would be China - they currently prop the regime. But I wouldn't hold my breath that China, also one of the most immoral regimes in history, would care about what North Korea is doing as long as it keeps bothering the US.
> the continued torture of the entire North Korean population is going to be one of the most tragic events of the 21st century. Despite the regime originating earlier, it feels to be most tragic now; long after any maligned geopolitical reason for the regime to exist has since disappeared
Their real "torture" is western sanctions and exclusion from global trade. The reason for the regime to exist has never disappeared and will persist for as long as North Korea is being attacked. Everything about it being "crazy hermit kingdom" stems directly from the dominant political-economical institutions isolating North Korea and by extent all the individuals from the rest of the world.
There is no excuse for treating people like that for generations. Worse than that, this ends up serving as a self-fulfilling prophesy that allows propaganda state media like BBC to push its narratives.
Yeah, for sure people will suffer, but that's not their government who is being tyrannical - everyone is pretty much aware who specifically fuck with their livelihoods.
Even worse, there seem to be lots of people in the west who actually seem to think that this approach is doing something positive and it's ok to be completely fascist as long as it serves some glorious political purpose.
Do the sanctions prevent other countries from providing humanitarian aid?
Russia helped North Korea previously, but has been strained in years, plus the war probably further strains any aid.
China could certainly help, but that relationship I think is also strained by North Korea not being able to pay their bills for crucial resources to keep the lights on.
The sanctions from outside generally don't limit outside countries from providing aid, but the north korean government closing its borders clearly does. They've never allowed foreign aid workers in generally, and now they've evicted pretty much all foreigners. As the article says, they don't want anyone to understand how much better life is in other countries. Even when foreign countries attempt to send them aid materials no strings attached, the government typically stockpiles it for the benefit of those in power.
And yeah, the argument of "other people have it worse than you so you have no right to complain" is lazy self-serving garbage.
This is mentioned in the article, even when foreign aid is brought in the state ensures no one gets it or knows that it exists, holding it back for the powerful, so that their people don't start to understand how good the life outside of NK is.
> They must attend their weekly Life Review Session, compulsory for every citizen. Here they admit to their mistakes and failures, whilst reporting the shortcomings of their neighbours.
This sounds like something taken straight from https://elan.school/. Or is it the other way around?
My parents lived through communism and even during the worst days of the system it wasn't this bad - chiefly because it was impractical to put so much effort into exerting control over the population.
You could get jailed for being at the "wrong" student gathering - just like my dad was more than once, but that was it. They would eventually release you because even the most corrupt representatives of the system had better things to do with their time.
I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead?
> > They must attend their weekly Life Review Session, compulsory for every citizen. Here they admit to their mistakes and failures, whilst reporting the shortcomings of their neighbours.
This is agile/scrum's sprint retrospectives, for every aspect of life and even more often. Seems horrible.
> This sounds like something taken straight from https://elan.school/. Or is it the other way around?
Totalitarianism kind of tends to take the same shape no matter the initial ideology. It's kind of like how crabs keep spontaneously re-evolving across genera.
To me it sounded like the "struggle sessions" of communist China, or "sec checks" in Scientology. St. Augustine showed us that it's much easier to keep control of a population if you can infuse them with guilt and get them to police themselves (and each other). Other cults and states just applied that principle in different ways.
> I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead?
For the Workers' Party of Korea, if the country gets run into the ground doing the right thing that beats a thriving country living outside the rules of Juche.
North Korea runs contrary to my intuition about dictators. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of regicide, but most dictatorships, even among the most horrific, represent some sort of misguided attempt at benevolance.
Killing dissidents? Sure, they're getting in the way of your utopian plan. Failed economic plans that lead to famine? Well, the idea had some justification, better pivot to avoid further harm. Hell, even overtly fascist ideologies have some subset of the "common folk" that they attempt to promote.
North Korea's leadership doesn't seem to have any interest at all in the wellbeing of the populace. I'd expect radical, top down changes to be common place until they found some solution that didn't have almost half of the country malnourished. Yet they just seem to double down, consistently.
In Kim Il-Sung's (the first of the Kims) time there was some sort of attempt at improving the lines of the North Koreans (as ineffectual as it was), but certainly in the reigns of his son Kim Jong-Il and his grandson Kim Jong-Un, it does look like power for the sake of power. I suspect at this point there is a fear (not just from Kim Jong-Un but also the higher ranks of the military and administration) that any sort of reform will lead to them not only losing power but also their lives.
> represent some sort of misguided attempt at benevolence
This is the image dictatorships sell to their poor, uneducated, and ill-informed public.
The reality is much worse. Rulers tend to make decisions that benefit those who they share power with (no man rules alone). Dictatorships thrive where there are abundant natural resources combined with an uneducated public. Democracies tend to thrive where a country's main resource is it's people.
North Korea has neither. But those in power wish to remain so, and the cult of personality around "the ruler" and his benevolence helps maintain some form of control over those that are starving. Well that and a lot of guns. North Korea has a well deserved reputation for brutality and suffering.
Checkout the video series Rules for Rulers. It's pretty eye opening, and helped me change the way I look at countries and geopolitics. [1]
I've seen the series, and I'm not talking about the politics of maintaining power. I'm talking about the leadership's motivation: Why do you become Supreme Leader instead of merely being one of those oligarchs? Life's a lot easier for those power brokers, people who rise to the very top of power have a reason, at least for themselves.
If you're still talking about North Korea, well the current Supreme Leader was born into it. I suppose he likes the lifestyle, and the ability to order people around and generally do what he pleases. It's better than being an underlying, or a starving person. Plus it's all he knows.
He's demonstrated his willingness to execute people (including his half-brother) to maintain his grip on power. So this isn't a guy who is worried about ethics and morals. He understands the politics of power, and is clearly capable of doing what it takes to hold on to power. These are men not to be trifled with. It's probably kill or be killed at this point. He's smart enough to have recognized that early on, which is why he's still around and his brother isn't.
Sometimes power and prestige, getting your way, winning and being right all the time are the ends in and of themselves. Having worked with many C-level people, I can say that their one common motivation seems to be "winning at any cost". If people are helped along the way, great. If people are hurt, well... tough decisions had to be made.
It definitely takes charisma, and the ability to convince people that you have their best interests in mind. Steve Jobs' reality distortion field comes to mind. The essence of a politician is they always seem to agree with you and be on your side, but you never know what they're really thinking, and don't be surprised if they blindside you at some point.
Evolutionary biologists suggest that there's a reason our species tolerates sociopaths (it's seemingly in our gene pool) -- they have the ability to get things done and build empires, skills that are needed to navigate/survive at the very top of large power structures.
>North Korea's leadership doesn't seem to have any interest at all in the wellbeing of the populace.
It's a manufactured impression.
Western oligarchy controlled media doesnt like to talk about how they pay $0 for college and medical care. They focus exclusively on the prison camps, etc.
North Koreans are fed an impression of America that centers around stuff like Guantanamo bay, Abu ghraib, medical bankruptcies and the unfair cost of college. I'm sure many are equally perplexed about why Americans haven't yet "risen up".
Making that argument about, say, Cuba makes plenty of sense to me. Sure, there's a relatively oppressive regime, but they also have made a lot of moves that genuinely have the people's interest at heart, and most people's needs are being met. That claim doesn't work when almost half your populace is starving: literally the second most important human need is being failed.
There's a number of ways the media continues to manufacture this impression, including:
* Interviews with people who fled North Korea a long time ago - closer to the famine.
* Paying North Koreans they can gain access to for good stories - at which point they get some really juicy stories. A small number of these apart under the weight of their own contradictions - the rest, of course, can't ever be verified.
* Looking at satellite photos and drawing dubious conclusions (like if there isn't food being imported from China this month that they don't have food).
* Looking at trailing indicators of the famine like stunted height.
* Comparing everything to South Korea - which has really good metrics even by first world standards - rather than, say, an average middle income or 3rd world country.
I remember years ago reading about someone from the north who had defected to South Korea after they were shown an episode of a SK TV show about two women fighting over a car parking space. Seeing a normal person in the country next door being able to argue over something so inconsequential because they already had every basic need met cut through.
I'm sure SK tries to send propaganda information to the north. Maybe they should saturate them with bullshit first world problem complaints instead.
Perhaps more harsh is that the entire population of NK cannot just defect south. A few people have managed. The only path would be an uprising and that will only work if it includes the military personnel and security apparatus. I never understand why those folks are ok doing what they do and being the tools of dictators against even their own family. But time and again we're shown people will do their job to the bitter end.
I just can't understand what motivates so much violence towards a whole population. This is a mystery to me.
Even if it's greed or something, how are you happy with yourself and sleep well when you are causing so much harm? I usually try hard to understand fellow human beings but I'm badly failing here.
It's not any different from capitalists having terrible working conditions in their factories. Humans have an enormous capacity to ignore others' suffering as long as they have a good life themselves. And somehow they always find a way to rationalize this.
> It's not any different from capitalists having terrible working conditions in their factories
Is it not, really? Have we read the same article?
I hate capitalism, and I hate many consequences it has including horrible working conditions for some workers, sharp inequalities, terrible incentives like preferring to produce stuff in countries with terrible laws because it's cheaper and therefore promoting horrible working conditions and terrible environmental practices, etc. I see capitalism as a worldwide oppressive system. However, as a human being, I can see how capitalism can be applied in good faith by other human beings, and the things I listed being somewhat unintended consequences (at least I can hope so - and now we know the consequences I would hope we would move away from it).
But this?
(this is not a communism/socialism vs capitalism debate by the way, what this article describes is not communism or socialism. It's torture)
Capitalism is best described as both progressive to the past and regressive to a better future it prevents. The tension of NK running a revolutionary and ideological state and surviving in global geopolitics led them down this path. The more ideological would see this as biding their time for their enemies to collapse under the weight of their contradictions. However, the people in this article want to live a better world now. Unfortunately, the world and realpolitik is messier than fulfilling human desires.
I think the article has mistaken markets, trade, and side hustles for capitalism. These things existed before capitalism and may still exist after. Capitalism is private ownership over the means of production, and I am not sure how much ownership common people can have in a country that owns everything.
What is present here is that NK is supposedly centrally planning the economy, but there are gaps which are filled by the black markets.
People in this thread itself are talking about how they wish NK would be invaded. You can justify pretty much anything using any justification as long as enough people believe or support it.
Well, from the article, some people there seem to hope for something like this.
> “Only with a war, and by getting rid of the entire leadership, can we survive,” he says. “Let’s end this one way or another.”
> Myong Suk agrees. “If there was a war, people would turn their backs on our government,” she says. “That’s the reality.”
I don't have any opinion myself. I would hope the world could do something about it and put an end on this, but nobody has figured out how so far apparently. I would naively hope we could avoid war and convince the Kim family to stop the disaster…
Okay...you can find people in the US who wish the US would be invaded by another country and taken over too so they can be free from a capitalist hellscape or whatever. Doesn't really say much except you can find those types of people everywhere.
> People in this thread itself are talking about how they wish NK would be invaded. You can justify pretty much anything using any justification as long as enough people believe or support it.
So what is your point here? That it would be...wrong to invade? Something else?
Many (though far from all) dictators started out with fairly good intentions: Mao, Gaddafi, Mugabe, Castro, etc. all fought against oppressive regimes and were more or less justified in their fight. Turns out that the required skill sets of "freedom fighter" and "effective democratic leader" don't have a whole lot of overlap, and that people with the right skills for both are relatively rare.
Once you've got absolute power fewer and fewer people will call you out on your bullshit and you quickly become more detached from reality – humans are very good are rationalizing our own actions, even when it's wholly irrational, and if there are never any real consequences ... well ...
My point being: Kim Jong Un may genuinely believe he's doing the right thing.
Sounds like a Conservative/alt-right/Christofascist fairy tale that they look towards for inspiration. They are certainly implementing the thin edge of similar repressions in places like Florida and Texas.
I've been to the border and spoken with Chinese who live there, the stories of death and poverty are horrific. I find it appalling that Switzerland knowingly welcomes the leaders children to educate themselves there and live luxuriously, as they do for many other regimes.
> It is not just the police she fears, it’s her neighbours. There is now almost no-one she can trust.
This is interesting. Reading a book recently called Ivan's war about the Soviet Union under Stalin one of the things it emphasized was the effort by the state to ensure no one could trust each other, to make sure each person felt isolated and alone.
Remember the purpose of propaganda isn't to convince you of something it is to convince you; you are alone.
Flagged. Pure propaganda, just as expected from BBC.
The sheer amount of emotive epithets is a dead giveaway.
It's not even a closed country. It's not hard to visit (unless you are the US citizen and your own government forbids you to) and there are lots of North Koreans outside North Korea in other Asian countries. There were much more until 2017 UN sanctions, restricting hire of North Korean workers.
To understand the real reason behind the sorrow state of modern day North Korea, one has to simply acknowledge the fact that North Korea has been pushed into isolation by much more powerful actors for more than half-a-century.
It's as simple as that. "Tyrannical rule of Kim Jong Un" has no tangible effect here.
The only tyrannical actor here is an entity trying to achieve its political goals by making North Korea inhospitable.
Unfortunately people are naive and arrogant enough to be convinced that this is actually a good thing, that it's worth it, and that they are actually helping instead of actually being the tyrant. It really strokes their egos - who cares about collateral! And all you really need is a nice narrative, woven of cherrypicked and properly presented pieces of reality.
We're undermining a tyrant here, can't you see we've been doing this to you for generations for your own good? As long as it's a glorious cause, it's clearly all worth it! At the end of the day, if North Koreans want to live decently, they simply have to collapse their country and that evil regime. And don't worry, we'll totally help you how we helped Libya wink-wink /s
> It's not even a closed country. It's not hard to visit
So you're saying I can just go into North Korea as a tourist and I won't need a North Korean tour guide? I would like to learn more about this opportunity.
> So you're saying I can just go into North Korea as a tourist and I won't need a North Korean tour guide?
I've said specifically what I wrote and nothing different to that. Moving goalposts?
You'll need a guide to enter the country with a tourist visa, but beyond that it's up to your traveler skills, whether you can ditch the guide or where would they bother to go with you. There are also other kinds of visas, that don't imply a guide.
Though I imagine it could be more challenging for someone faring from a western country. Convincing them that you are not here for some scandal and could be treated with good faith would probably be an issue.
Nevertheless, for most people around the globe visiting Pyongyang is relatively easier than visiting New York. I don't suppose that not being overly tourist friendly equates to being a "closed country", do you?
This is ridiculous. All responsibility lies with Kim Jong-Un. If he wanted to, he could call Yoon Suk-Yeol today, and negotiate a deal to transfer the entirety of North Korea to the ROK in exchange for immunity, asylum in Switzerland, and a couple billion dollars for himself and his friends. He could then continue living his luxurious lifestyle while NK is slowly integrated into the rest of Korea through some variation of "one country, two systems for 50 years". The North Korean people would finally become free.
99 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadReally interesting! Economic policies have created a system where women earn much more than men on average. I think that's quite rare globally.
They are still starving to death. “Much more” is relative in this case. The men are paid state sponsored wages and it’s not enough to survive on, literally. Women only make more because they are selling black market items to keep their children and families alive, and to keep their neighbors from starving to death, which, as the article says, is not even possible anymore.
It might depend on the particular warhead, but this was not the case for Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_of_Douglas_MacArthur#Nu...
Sidenote: I am not a MacArthur 'fan', but he was a very complex character
Tragic, disappointing sure. I also happen to disagree that it is ignored or forgotten, this article just being the latest example.
On a purely logical level, we did what we could. But when people talk about other world events (WW2 for example) they’ll often wonder why the average person didn’t fight whatever horror was going on then.
Does it ignore the entire context of the situation, yeah. But it’s odd that I think we’re in that time now.
I’m being emotional because I have a cold, I’m in bed, reading something that made me sad. Take that with a grain of salt haha
I wonder why that's my first thought, rather than the citizens wondering "Well, the government is gone, let's build a collective to self-govern." -- I guess people would rather join a structured society somewhere else rather than try to build one themselves (probably out of nothing, in NK). Not to mention yeah, even if the current asshole is gone, the next asshole is probably busy setting up shop to resume the oppression.
Many good and normal and moral people would want to self organize and self govern and build something better from the ashes of a fallen country, the problem is that those good and honest people will be manipulated, tricked, and murdered by those who are more brutal and cunning than them.
The embattled regime could employ a scorched earth policy and will launch all the weapons they've got, resulting in millions of civilian deaths. That seems worse to me.
It's not like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, or even Putin's Russia.
If it wasn't for that Korea could be reunited and it will probably end up fairly well, similar to how the reunification of Germany ended up well.
Germany still has east-west integration problems.
1. Not the utterly pointless, banal conflicts started by lies and personal vendettas that have already killed hundreds of thousands and millions of people, spilled over into neighbouring (and not so neighbouring) countries, and destabilized entire parts of the world?
2. If this is going to be among the worst of this century, you must have an incredibly optimistic outlook on what the next 80 years are going to look like!
One of the big problems has long been that North-Korea has a large network of artillery within shelling distance of Seoul. Now they also have rockets and nukes and stuff, but even without those any serious threat to NK would come with devastating cost of civilian lives in South-Korea.
See e.g. [1], which estimates that "the DPRK could cause thousands of casualties in just a minute and more than 100,000 in an hour" and some of the case studies in that report have more than 200,000 in an hour. And all of that assumes only conventional HE rounds – no chemicals or nukes. And all of that is in the first hour alone: a full war would cost millions of lives (during the Korean war, South Korean casualties were about a million civilians and 250,000 soldiers).
You need to move carefully when you've got almost 6,000 pieces of artillery pointed at your head, never mind nukes, and the people in control of them seem rather unhinged.
I've seen people express this kind of "we should have just intervened" opinion before, and in principle I don't disagree, but it's really not that simple: both due to the strong risk of heavy civilian casualties, and the geopolitical impact with the USSR during the cold war (and to lesser degree, contemporary China and Russia – I can already see China invade Taiwan using "but you invaded NK!" as an excuse).
[1]: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA619-1.html
China has made it clear they aren't particularly thrilled with the idea of having someone not under their thumb next to their border as well. As a consequence of that... the "best" scenario would probably be China invading. But "best" is definitely in scare quotes as that could go VERY wrong very very quickly. I think the PRC is aware of that too. So unfortunately that means the DPRK will starve, because the realpolitik is such that solving the issue is just not a tenable solution for all the other parties.
On the other hand, the current costs of hostilities isn't free either as militaries don't pay for themselves; e.g. a 10% decrease in military spending for countries like South-Korea and Japan would save billions every year (right now, both are increasing spending).
I agree it's not a simple situation because there are 25 million mostly uneducated starving North-Koreans you've got to do something with, but in purely financial terms you're probably going to save money in the long run.
Part of the problem is that threatening North Korea plays into the hands of the Kims - it makes the "strongman leader" more attractive.
Invading Iraq and tearing Libya to pieces really didn't help.
I'll also point out that ROK and the US maintain 24/7 surveillance of NK depots and munitions storage areas (and pretty much everything else). NK could not attempt to mount such an operation without being detected. Unless they use their 100 year old stealth biplanes, then all bets are off.
It's just a single branch of military, quite useless if there is modern missile-based air defense in place.
Unfortunately, it's not as much ignoring as it is the few options available. If there is one country that can do something about it, that would be China - they currently prop the regime. But I wouldn't hold my breath that China, also one of the most immoral regimes in history, would care about what North Korea is doing as long as it keeps bothering the US.
Their real "torture" is western sanctions and exclusion from global trade. The reason for the regime to exist has never disappeared and will persist for as long as North Korea is being attacked. Everything about it being "crazy hermit kingdom" stems directly from the dominant political-economical institutions isolating North Korea and by extent all the individuals from the rest of the world.
There is no excuse for treating people like that for generations. Worse than that, this ends up serving as a self-fulfilling prophesy that allows propaganda state media like BBC to push its narratives.
Yeah, for sure people will suffer, but that's not their government who is being tyrannical - everyone is pretty much aware who specifically fuck with their livelihoods.
Even worse, there seem to be lots of people in the west who actually seem to think that this approach is doing something positive and it's ok to be completely fascist as long as it serves some glorious political purpose.
Russia helped North Korea previously, but has been strained in years, plus the war probably further strains any aid.
China could certainly help, but that relationship I think is also strained by North Korea not being able to pay their bills for crucial resources to keep the lights on.
And yeah, the argument of "other people have it worse than you so you have no right to complain" is lazy self-serving garbage.
This sounds like something taken straight from https://elan.school/. Or is it the other way around?
My parents lived through communism and even during the worst days of the system it wasn't this bad - chiefly because it was impractical to put so much effort into exerting control over the population.
You could get jailed for being at the "wrong" student gathering - just like my dad was more than once, but that was it. They would eventually release you because even the most corrupt representatives of the system had better things to do with their time.
I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead?
This is agile/scrum's sprint retrospectives, for every aspect of life and even more often. Seems horrible.
Totalitarianism kind of tends to take the same shape no matter the initial ideology. It's kind of like how crabs keep spontaneously re-evolving across genera.
To me it sounded like the "struggle sessions" of communist China, or "sec checks" in Scientology. St. Augustine showed us that it's much easier to keep control of a population if you can infuse them with guilt and get them to police themselves (and each other). Other cults and states just applied that principle in different ways.
> I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead?
For the Workers' Party of Korea, if the country gets run into the ground doing the right thing that beats a thriving country living outside the rules of Juche.
Killing dissidents? Sure, they're getting in the way of your utopian plan. Failed economic plans that lead to famine? Well, the idea had some justification, better pivot to avoid further harm. Hell, even overtly fascist ideologies have some subset of the "common folk" that they attempt to promote.
North Korea's leadership doesn't seem to have any interest at all in the wellbeing of the populace. I'd expect radical, top down changes to be common place until they found some solution that didn't have almost half of the country malnourished. Yet they just seem to double down, consistently.
This is the image dictatorships sell to their poor, uneducated, and ill-informed public.
The reality is much worse. Rulers tend to make decisions that benefit those who they share power with (no man rules alone). Dictatorships thrive where there are abundant natural resources combined with an uneducated public. Democracies tend to thrive where a country's main resource is it's people.
North Korea has neither. But those in power wish to remain so, and the cult of personality around "the ruler" and his benevolence helps maintain some form of control over those that are starving. Well that and a lot of guns. North Korea has a well deserved reputation for brutality and suffering.
Checkout the video series Rules for Rulers. It's pretty eye opening, and helped me change the way I look at countries and geopolitics. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
He's demonstrated his willingness to execute people (including his half-brother) to maintain his grip on power. So this isn't a guy who is worried about ethics and morals. He understands the politics of power, and is clearly capable of doing what it takes to hold on to power. These are men not to be trifled with. It's probably kill or be killed at this point. He's smart enough to have recognized that early on, which is why he's still around and his brother isn't.
Sometimes power and prestige, getting your way, winning and being right all the time are the ends in and of themselves. Having worked with many C-level people, I can say that their one common motivation seems to be "winning at any cost". If people are helped along the way, great. If people are hurt, well... tough decisions had to be made.
It definitely takes charisma, and the ability to convince people that you have their best interests in mind. Steve Jobs' reality distortion field comes to mind. The essence of a politician is they always seem to agree with you and be on your side, but you never know what they're really thinking, and don't be surprised if they blindside you at some point.
Evolutionary biologists suggest that there's a reason our species tolerates sociopaths (it's seemingly in our gene pool) -- they have the ability to get things done and build empires, skills that are needed to navigate/survive at the very top of large power structures.
It's a manufactured impression.
Western oligarchy controlled media doesnt like to talk about how they pay $0 for college and medical care. They focus exclusively on the prison camps, etc.
North Koreans are fed an impression of America that centers around stuff like Guantanamo bay, Abu ghraib, medical bankruptcies and the unfair cost of college. I'm sure many are equally perplexed about why Americans haven't yet "risen up".
They're not. This is another consistently manufactured impression - that the famine never ended.
They were starving in the 90s but it wasn't like that was deliberate and it ended 25 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine
There's a number of ways the media continues to manufacture this impression, including:
* Interviews with people who fled North Korea a long time ago - closer to the famine.
* Paying North Koreans they can gain access to for good stories - at which point they get some really juicy stories. A small number of these apart under the weight of their own contradictions - the rest, of course, can't ever be verified.
* Looking at satellite photos and drawing dubious conclusions (like if there isn't food being imported from China this month that they don't have food).
* Looking at trailing indicators of the famine like stunted height.
* Comparing everything to South Korea - which has really good metrics even by first world standards - rather than, say, an average middle income or 3rd world country.
I'm sure SK tries to send propaganda information to the north. Maybe they should saturate them with bullshit first world problem complaints instead.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/forever-strang...
Even if it's greed or something, how are you happy with yourself and sleep well when you are causing so much harm? I usually try hard to understand fellow human beings but I'm badly failing here.
Is it not, really? Have we read the same article?
I hate capitalism, and I hate many consequences it has including horrible working conditions for some workers, sharp inequalities, terrible incentives like preferring to produce stuff in countries with terrible laws because it's cheaper and therefore promoting horrible working conditions and terrible environmental practices, etc. I see capitalism as a worldwide oppressive system. However, as a human being, I can see how capitalism can be applied in good faith by other human beings, and the things I listed being somewhat unintended consequences (at least I can hope so - and now we know the consequences I would hope we would move away from it).
But this?
(this is not a communism/socialism vs capitalism debate by the way, what this article describes is not communism or socialism. It's torture)
What is present here is that NK is supposedly centrally planning the economy, but there are gaps which are filled by the black markets.
> “Only with a war, and by getting rid of the entire leadership, can we survive,” he says. “Let’s end this one way or another.”
> Myong Suk agrees. “If there was a war, people would turn their backs on our government,” she says. “That’s the reality.”
I don't have any opinion myself. I would hope the world could do something about it and put an end on this, but nobody has figured out how so far apparently. I would naively hope we could avoid war and convince the Kim family to stop the disaster…
So what is your point here? That it would be...wrong to invade? Something else?
Once you've got absolute power fewer and fewer people will call you out on your bullshit and you quickly become more detached from reality – humans are very good are rationalizing our own actions, even when it's wholly irrational, and if there are never any real consequences ... well ...
My point being: Kim Jong Un may genuinely believe he's doing the right thing.
This is interesting. Reading a book recently called Ivan's war about the Soviet Union under Stalin one of the things it emphasized was the effort by the state to ensure no one could trust each other, to make sure each person felt isolated and alone.
Remember the purpose of propaganda isn't to convince you of something it is to convince you; you are alone.
The sheer amount of emotive epithets is a dead giveaway.
It's not even a closed country. It's not hard to visit (unless you are the US citizen and your own government forbids you to) and there are lots of North Koreans outside North Korea in other Asian countries. There were much more until 2017 UN sanctions, restricting hire of North Korean workers.
To understand the real reason behind the sorrow state of modern day North Korea, one has to simply acknowledge the fact that North Korea has been pushed into isolation by much more powerful actors for more than half-a-century.
It's as simple as that. "Tyrannical rule of Kim Jong Un" has no tangible effect here.
The only tyrannical actor here is an entity trying to achieve its political goals by making North Korea inhospitable.
Unfortunately people are naive and arrogant enough to be convinced that this is actually a good thing, that it's worth it, and that they are actually helping instead of actually being the tyrant. It really strokes their egos - who cares about collateral! And all you really need is a nice narrative, woven of cherrypicked and properly presented pieces of reality.
We're undermining a tyrant here, can't you see we've been doing this to you for generations for your own good? As long as it's a glorious cause, it's clearly all worth it! At the end of the day, if North Koreans want to live decently, they simply have to collapse their country and that evil regime. And don't worry, we'll totally help you how we helped Libya wink-wink /s
So you're saying I can just go into North Korea as a tourist and I won't need a North Korean tour guide? I would like to learn more about this opportunity.
I've said specifically what I wrote and nothing different to that. Moving goalposts?
You'll need a guide to enter the country with a tourist visa, but beyond that it's up to your traveler skills, whether you can ditch the guide or where would they bother to go with you. There are also other kinds of visas, that don't imply a guide.
Though I imagine it could be more challenging for someone faring from a western country. Convincing them that you are not here for some scandal and could be treated with good faith would probably be an issue.
Nevertheless, for most people around the globe visiting Pyongyang is relatively easier than visiting New York. I don't suppose that not being overly tourist friendly equates to being a "closed country", do you?