Isn't North Korean media just one big onion bureau? With the unfortunate truth that what they report happens to be at the expense of a whole nation of people minus .01%?
>Someday these people are going to be free of oppression.
If only they had some natural resources, then the state of their government would be a massive moral issue for the world. Unfortunately until they strike oil they're just gonna have to rot.
Are you judging people morally for not doing the impossible? Or are you just generally outraged by dirty realpolitik? I just can't see a third alternative to these non-starters:
- China could stop the regime, maybe even without a catastrophe. How would you motivate China to do that, when the West today is as dependent on China as China is on the West?
- The military way to help the NK population would be an economic and humanitarian catastrophe, not only in NK.
Edit: I could agree with that position on e.g. Zimbabwe, but NK seems carefully designed by the junta to keep them safe by using their own population as hostages (as long as China don't sell them down the river).
Edit 2: A third possibility is to offer the junta a better deal than to control the lives of many millions of slaves. But they are obviously happy as it is.
Stop using the removal of dictators as a justification for invading countries you're strategically interested in, because it looks really fucking stupid when NK is allowed to ban haircuts and starve people.
Just because you can't remove all dictators doesn't mean you shouldn't try to remove those you can.
Any country with a built up military is probably not going to be invaded; the possibility of a world war is not something we can risk in the nuclear age.
The fact is that the west has been dealing with North Korea for decades. The US, for example, has had huge numbers of military forces staged in South Korea for decades. The US and others have continuously worked toward keeping North Korea in check, also for decades. That's not easy, nor is it cheap. But there are no quick and easy solutions to the problem of the North Korean totalitarian regime, especially not military ones. Starting a war in the Korean peninsula is a recipe for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, in South Korea as well as in the North. And that's just from conventional weapons without getting into chemical weapons (which North Korea is known to have) and nuclear weapons (which they also are known to have).
The problem of North Korea is that it's a hostage crisis that continues to unfold in slow motion. The fact that there are incredibly terrible conditions inside North Korea doesn't make it any easier to decide to pull the trigger and doom perhaps millions of civilians to die just to get rid of the regime.
>But there are no quick and easy solutions to the problem of the North Korean totalitarian regime, especially not military ones. Starting a war in the Korean peninsula is a recipe for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, in South Korea as well as in the North.
My point is, sometimes, that's not considered a barrier to regime change. Mass civilian deaths were apparently worth it in the cases of iraq and afghanistan. Those deaths were, and are, "justified" by the moral good of the removal of evil dictators.
So no, I don't think we should invade NK, for the obvious reasons you state. I'm saying that the impunity with which NK oppresses its people exposes the nonsense that is the "liberal intervention" narrative of recent geopolitics.
Everything is free in The Democratic Republic of Korea. Glorious Eternal Leader pays for everything. This is why everyone votes for socialism every time. Free healthcare, food, education, transportation.
They even went and made it illegal to talk ill about the Eternal Glorious Leader, I mean how could speak ill of the creator of such a glorious socialist paradise?!
I don't follow the reasoning. It's a country that's stuck in a variety of awkward situations with its neighbours, isolated, famine stricken, and threatening to wage war on the South- yet they're worrying about the people having too much freedom with their 10 allowed haircuts? I can't begin to imagine what's going on in their minds. I suppose it could be a distraction from other issues, but restricting to 10 in itself seems almost unreal.
I think the point is that it doesn't matter what is going on in 'their' minds. All that matters is what is going on in the mind of one particular person.
Do you not understand North Korea at all? It's a tyranny subject to the whims of its ruler. The famines, the violence, the terrorism, the oppression, all of that flows from that tyranny. Haircuts are just one more example of it.
That's how totalitarian regimes work. The word "total" in there, that means the government has total control over whatever they want, including the most mundane and personal aspect of anyone's private lives.
Basically I dont think its bad to "force" people go get one of x haircuts in a "country that's stuck in a variety of awkward situations with its neighbours, isolated, famine stricken, and threatening to wage war" for hygienic reasons of the population.
But to force them to have this one spezific one is just dumb and certainly only a innnerpolitic struggle for power by Kim Jong Un, same reason i think he is showing this war waging politics and other stuff, or as u mentioned just a distraction.
> yet they're worrying about the people having too much freedom with their 10 allowed haircuts?
My guess is this is a response to something specific. They're tightening the clamps to assert their control and once people fall back in line they'll loosen the restrictions just a little to show that they are benevolent.
What about bald men? Will they be punished for not being physically able to replicate the hairstyle? It's just mental. Thank god they're not doing the same thing with David Cameron...
Honest question - let's say at some point in the future North Korea sees their current regime fall and a more democratic or at least benevolent dictatorship takes over.
What sort of mass psychological issues are we looking at here? I can only imagine how the minds of the current citizenship work, would it be nearly impossible for those raised only knowing what they know to recover from the previous trauma?
I believe people everywhere in the world are used to supressing the difference between the stated ideals of their land (equality, liberty, free elections) and the reality (prejudices, xenophobia, racism, assassinations ordered by the government, voter sway via public ads).
If our minds can supress the differences between ideals and reality in USA, Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan or any other country of residence, I believe North Koreans can do the same -- focus on their daily life and ignore the atrocities.
All of that is just my opinion, obviously. My family adapted fine after the fall of the Soviet Union, but that's just anecdotal.
Interesting - I am curious if that's common in North Korea. I can imagine there are a lot of under the radar rumblings about how things are supposed to be as opposed to how they are. Thus I could assuming that most obedience is fear based as opposed to actual loyalty.
I think you should see how the difference of mentality clashed between East and West Germans after the reunification, and amplify that a bit. I suspect it would take one or two generations to close the gap between the two Koreas after the hypothetical reunification.
East Germans were generally quite knowledgeable about life in the West and were aware of the deficiencies of their own society. I don't think North Koreans are quite so aware of conditions outside their country. Last year there was a big crackdown on "knowledge smugglers" [1] bringing "subversive" western and Chinese material into North Korea.
The only state that I can think of that is remotely comparable to North Korea is pre-1992 Albania [1] - isolated and repressive, with a kind of leader-worship cult going on. After that all fell apart in the mid-nineties things didn't work out too well economically and socially, though I'm not sure that was due to mass psychological problems in the population. Survivors of cults such as Scientology that encourage isolation and obedience to a leader figure might also provide some pointers.
The problem is that it is hard to be sure about the state of mind of the general population. They could be mostly completely brainwashed and controlled; or going along with the charade out of necessity while behind the scenes there is widespread shared disgust at the leadership; or they could be living terrified, isolated lives unable to speak about their private thoughts to anyone, even their families, out of fear of police informers. People do attempt to escape the country, though, so there is some dissent.
Overall I'd say NK is unique, and when it disintegrates the social effects probably won't be like anything we've seen before.
I'd say you're right that it is quite unlike all we have seen before, however, there are more precedents (although you picked an excellent one with Albania).
One example comes to mind is post-defeat Germany in 1945. This is particularly interesting because here we have the total, absolute and undebatable annihilation of an entire worldview. North Korea will very likely also experience this "everything you ever believed is wrong" moment, so some parallels might apply. The Germans mostly kept their heads down and tried to ingore the past for a few decades. This might not be possible for the North Koreans, however, as they are not surrounded by rubble but by prosperity.
Another example would be the core-to-periphery of the Soviet Union when that collapsed. Around here there are many former inhabitants of the SU and they tell stories of chaos and desorientation with many people using their newly-recieved freedom to cheat others or be cheated. I think the Albanians experienced something similar with a snowball-scam of national proportions. It would be unfortunate if the economic reality of "the little man" in democratic post-North Korea were similar to this, since these things usually trigger a backlash.
I'd say it lasted just long enough. 1933-45 was enough time for a generation of schoolchildren to have grown up knowing nothing else.
Also, you must remember that living in the Weimar Republic was pure hardship for many people. So there's a large part of the populace for whom "the movement" was the first time they had been on track for a better future. (Sounds horrible from our perspective, but remember that we have the benefit of hindsight.)
In multi-cultural countries people have significantly different hair. In North Korea hair is somewhat harmonised, i.e. black and straight. Length is the only variable available to play with when it comes to style of cut. From their perspective this edict may be no more of a big deal than having to have your fingernails trimmed.
You lack imagination about all the different things that can be done with uniformly black, straight, fine hair. Length is not the only variable, and there is still a huge range of hairstyles that people could choose from if they were free to do so.
Also, if I was subject to an edict requiring me to trim my fingernails, that would be a pretty big deal to me. A big, intolerable deal. You imply that from their perspective it wouldn't be, but are you so much of a cultural relativist that you think such a perspective isn't seriously unhealthy?
"When the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea was left in dire economic straits. There were reasonable expectations that its government would soon collapse, leading to the unification of the Korean Peninsula. Naturally, the goal of the North Korean government was regime survival, so it was terrified that outside powers would invade or support an uprising against it. It needed a strategy that would dissuade anyone from trying that. Being weak in every sense, this wasn't going to be easy, but the North Koreans developed a strategy that we described more than 10 years ago as ferocious, weak and crazy. North Korea has pursued this course since the 1990s, and the latest manifestation of this strategy was on display last week. The strategy has worked marvelously and is still working."
I guess the haircuts would be the "crazy" part of the strategy.
56 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadSomeday these people are going to be free of oppression.
If only they had some natural resources, then the state of their government would be a massive moral issue for the world. Unfortunately until they strike oil they're just gonna have to rot.
(Also IIRC china protects them in order to irritate the west and to use as a bargaining chip.)
Am I missing something?
Are you judging people morally for not doing the impossible? Or are you just generally outraged by dirty realpolitik? I just can't see a third alternative to these non-starters:
- China could stop the regime, maybe even without a catastrophe. How would you motivate China to do that, when the West today is as dependent on China as China is on the West?
- The military way to help the NK population would be an economic and humanitarian catastrophe, not only in NK.
Edit: I could agree with that position on e.g. Zimbabwe, but NK seems carefully designed by the junta to keep them safe by using their own population as hostages (as long as China don't sell them down the river).
Edit 2: A third possibility is to offer the junta a better deal than to control the lives of many millions of slaves. But they are obviously happy as it is.
Military intervention? They'll lay waste to Seoul. Sanctions? Already there, and, generally they hurt the people rather than the leader.
What's your solution?
Similar things apply to zimbabwe etc.
EDIT: "you" used here in a general sense.
Any country with a built up military is probably not going to be invaded; the possibility of a world war is not something we can risk in the nuclear age.
The fact is that the west has been dealing with North Korea for decades. The US, for example, has had huge numbers of military forces staged in South Korea for decades. The US and others have continuously worked toward keeping North Korea in check, also for decades. That's not easy, nor is it cheap. But there are no quick and easy solutions to the problem of the North Korean totalitarian regime, especially not military ones. Starting a war in the Korean peninsula is a recipe for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, in South Korea as well as in the North. And that's just from conventional weapons without getting into chemical weapons (which North Korea is known to have) and nuclear weapons (which they also are known to have).
The problem of North Korea is that it's a hostage crisis that continues to unfold in slow motion. The fact that there are incredibly terrible conditions inside North Korea doesn't make it any easier to decide to pull the trigger and doom perhaps millions of civilians to die just to get rid of the regime.
My point is, sometimes, that's not considered a barrier to regime change. Mass civilian deaths were apparently worth it in the cases of iraq and afghanistan. Those deaths were, and are, "justified" by the moral good of the removal of evil dictators.
So no, I don't think we should invade NK, for the obvious reasons you state. I'm saying that the impunity with which NK oppresses its people exposes the nonsense that is the "liberal intervention" narrative of recent geopolitics.
ONE MILLION YEARS DUNGEON!
That's how totalitarian regimes work. The word "total" in there, that means the government has total control over whatever they want, including the most mundane and personal aspect of anyone's private lives.
My guess is this is a response to something specific. They're tightening the clamps to assert their control and once people fall back in line they'll loosen the restrictions just a little to show that they are benevolent.
What sort of mass psychological issues are we looking at here? I can only imagine how the minds of the current citizenship work, would it be nearly impossible for those raised only knowing what they know to recover from the previous trauma?
If our minds can supress the differences between ideals and reality in USA, Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan or any other country of residence, I believe North Koreans can do the same -- focus on their daily life and ignore the atrocities.
All of that is just my opinion, obviously. My family adapted fine after the fall of the Soviet Union, but that's just anecdotal.
[1] http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/north-ko...
The problem is that it is hard to be sure about the state of mind of the general population. They could be mostly completely brainwashed and controlled; or going along with the charade out of necessity while behind the scenes there is widespread shared disgust at the leadership; or they could be living terrified, isolated lives unable to speak about their private thoughts to anyone, even their families, out of fear of police informers. People do attempt to escape the country, though, so there is some dissent.
Overall I'd say NK is unique, and when it disintegrates the social effects probably won't be like anything we've seen before.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albania#Communist_Albania_.2819...
One example comes to mind is post-defeat Germany in 1945. This is particularly interesting because here we have the total, absolute and undebatable annihilation of an entire worldview. North Korea will very likely also experience this "everything you ever believed is wrong" moment, so some parallels might apply. The Germans mostly kept their heads down and tried to ingore the past for a few decades. This might not be possible for the North Koreans, however, as they are not surrounded by rubble but by prosperity.
Another example would be the core-to-periphery of the Soviet Union when that collapsed. Around here there are many former inhabitants of the SU and they tell stories of chaos and desorientation with many people using their newly-recieved freedom to cheat others or be cheated. I think the Albanians experienced something similar with a snowball-scam of national proportions. It would be unfortunate if the economic reality of "the little man" in democratic post-North Korea were similar to this, since these things usually trigger a backlash.
Also, you must remember that living in the Weimar Republic was pure hardship for many people. So there's a large part of the populace for whom "the movement" was the first time they had been on track for a better future. (Sounds horrible from our perspective, but remember that we have the benefit of hindsight.)
Also, if I was subject to an edict requiring me to trim my fingernails, that would be a pretty big deal to me. A big, intolerable deal. You imply that from their perspective it wouldn't be, but are you so much of a cultural relativist that you think such a perspective isn't seriously unhealthy?
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/ferocious-weak-and-crazy-nort...
"When the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea was left in dire economic straits. There were reasonable expectations that its government would soon collapse, leading to the unification of the Korean Peninsula. Naturally, the goal of the North Korean government was regime survival, so it was terrified that outside powers would invade or support an uprising against it. It needed a strategy that would dissuade anyone from trying that. Being weak in every sense, this wasn't going to be easy, but the North Koreans developed a strategy that we described more than 10 years ago as ferocious, weak and crazy. North Korea has pursued this course since the 1990s, and the latest manifestation of this strategy was on display last week. The strategy has worked marvelously and is still working."
I guess the haircuts would be the "crazy" part of the strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queue_%28hairstyle%29#Queue_Or...
[1] http://www.economist.com/node/16743613
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4157121.stm