It seems to defy logic that they haven’t been overthrown long ago. Are the top brass so richly rewarded that they completely abondon any sense of fairness? Is it fear? Or do they actually believe they are doing something great?
The top brass and to a lesser degree the military are the only ones that have a decent diet. And maybe a few niceties. They don’t want to lose that.
The real question is why hasn’t there been a revolution. The answer there is that most of the population have been successfully brainwashed by the Kim dynasty into thinking that North Korea has it better off than the rest of the world.
This is changing as information seeps in.
The top brass know they will be tortured and killed in a revolution. The masses are too disorganized, isolated, terrorized and brainwashed to do anything. The international community knows an invasion will result in wmd and artillery being used against south Korea and Japan. As a result there is no revolution from the top, bottom or outside.
The book the real north Korea by Andrei lankov is a good book on the subject. The nk regime knows how to play realpolitik . supposedly the top brass knows that the Kim worship is bullshit but they don’t feel they personally would come out ahead in a revolution. Besides nk is so orwellian that people can’t organize resistance.
I just read a fascinating memoir by Suki Kim, Without You There Is No Us, about the time she spent teaching in a North Korean college. It’s truly mind-boggling.
Yep that’s good. Also -
The Aquariums of Pyongyang.
Nothing to Envy (mostly about the famine in the 90’s) and
Escape from Camp 14.
I read that, too - what amazed me was the total lack of even the most basic critical thinking skills in her students. They had problems with any writing assignment that required them to defend or disprove a thesis as they didn’t understand the basic concept of questioning.
And on a personal level:
She might see a group of her students outside exercising and she’d speak to them and interact with them … Then two hours later they’d say " we’ve been inside all day, we didn’t go out" and they’d expect her to believe them. They, quite literally, didn’t know the meaning of truth.
Yep. And speaking of questioning, they would be assigned to stand outside all night in freezing weather guarding a building.
An empty building. Why? Dear leader had visited it once.
Nicely put. Essentially, anyone with access to power in NK knows that they are all riding a tiger together, and that there is no way to get off. At this point, the system is so rigid and fragile that there is no way to manage meaningful change. People who might be tempted to seize power as reformers know that they will just get swept away in the ensuing chaos. The leadership is frightened by what happened to Gorbachev, let alone Ceaucescu and more recently Qaddafi, after he attempted to shed his pariah-nation status, so nothing changes.
To me, the best hope is if China realizes they are better off w/o the Kim regime and help plot a coup in the country, where the new regime in NK can then become a China friendly authoritarian nation that follows Deng Xiaoping’s cultural and economic reforms.
In theory, everyone wins in that situation.
[ul]
[li]The region isn’t destabalized by NKs actions anymore. [/li][li]NK stops sellings drugs and weapons on the international market. It stops aiding WMD proliferation and aiding terror groups. [/li][li]The NK WMD program is stopped, and NK stops its belligerance[/li][li]The people in NK have a shot at a better life and future. [/li][li]South Korea is not on the hook for trillions of dollars in aid and funding to rebuild the north. [/li][li]China gets to keep a friendly ally as a bulwark against US friendly South Korea and Japan.[/li][/ul]
I’m surprised China hasn’t done this already.
Ergo, the recent purges have tended to take out the pro-China people at the top.
The only time in the near future something interesting could occur is when the Great Big Guy croaks and there’s some serious squabbling over who becomes the next Super Cool Dude. So, we wait it out and hope another Kim family member isn’t well groomed to take over.
The short distance from the DMZ to Seoul is main driving force behind trying not to tick off the North too much. If the RoK only had the brains way back when to locate the capital, etc. a lot farther to the south, people wouldn’t be losing quite so much sleep.
Check a recent map of the Koreas - Seoul has been built up to the DMZ.
At least a part of this is military planning - lots of buildings can conceal lots of weapons and make an invasion much more difficult.
Then there are the tunnels - at least some of those buildings are sitting on known NK tunnels.
But mainly - a whole lot of people who live next to the loons are betting that the 10,000 artillary pieces NK has along the DMZ will never be used.
GAH… Post eaten.
IMHO, one of the reasons that NK hasn’t opened up is that the people will realize that they have been completely and totally screwed by the Kim dynasty for 75 years. And then… well…
Sure, they have a big ill equipped army, many of whom are disaffected too. They are not going to be able to turn back the tide of 26 million pissed off people.
It will take another decade before it’s impossible to keep information to get to all the people. Or, perhaps China will do something first.
Or can’t be used. A lot of it if not most is 50 years old.
If there was a war (or a continuation of the current one :rolleyes: ) South Korea would have to deal with 25 million refuges. The only way to save the people of North Korea is a slow introduction to the 21st century.
Kim Jong un, and the ruling elite of course do not want that. Jong un and his father and grandfather are treated as if they are gods. Odd, in a forced secular country.
This.
It’s one thing to want a revolt. It’s another to get millions to all rise together at once.
Many might flee to Russia or China.
I don’t think they’re going to be able to rise up simultaneously. A few dozen might be “disappeared” here and there as they do but that would be it.
Of course. That happens now. If anyone in your family disrespects the Kims, well that’s pretty much it for 3 generations of your family. Work camps to be either frozen to death, starved or worked to death.
Sad, sad situation.
Maybe, if the people could learn about what is really happening to them, in 10 years, perhaps there could be some change.
NK has plenty of mineral resources that could prop them up if only the ‘leaders’ would stop trying to be gods, and help the people instead of themselves.
Also, China would get access to a huge pool of cheap labor.
Good for their economy, especially as the one-child policy seems to have created an upcomming shortage of workers.
This would be a good thing, except a problem I see is that China itself has become a future powder keg. Since it finally instituted market reforms over 25 years ago (to finally stop recurring famines and likely peasant revolution) it has fast become a capitalist nation in all but name. Eventually its middle class will want to vote out the anachronistic communist party. And I don’t see the old guard quitting without a (literal) fight.
And if China became seriously destabilized I predict NK would eventually go ‘all in’ and preemptively nuke Seoul at the drop of a hat, probably after a failed (or at least stalled) conventional massive southern invasion. They’d, of course, lose as we would probably respond with a handful of strategic nukes vaporizing their border military, any other predicted nuclear launch sites, and govt leadership. It’d be a rather senseless bloodbath…
I wonder: If China launched a full-fledged regime-change invasion of North Korea, how could the South stop it? They (the South) want the Korean Peninsula unified on their terms.