Won’t happen - without a Kim in charge, there is no North Korea. The Kim and the land are one.
Shit. You can’t swing a dead cat in North Korea without hitting a Kim.
Doing anything regarding NKorea other than what they’re doing now will cause them much more of a “Korean problem.” They’d have to deal with the aftermath, which would be huge.
The Chinese do not want the PRNK to fall in a catastrophic way that would send 20 million starving refugees flooding across the Chinese border. Given a choice, they will do everything they can to maintain the status quo.
Agreed. The Chinese don’t want a war, and they won’t let NK start one. At some point, they are going to take NK into the fold, and turn that country into at least something of a sustainable nature.
What do you mean “some day”? The information is already out there if you care to look for it.
The privations of the mid-1990’s famine are well documented, and even the regime acknowledged food shortages (see the “let’s eat two meals a day” campaign). The famine has permanently stunted a sizable portion of that generation of North Koreans. The North Korean military has had to lower their minimum height requirement as a result. During the famine the government built barricades along the beaches and punished people who grew their own gardens because all good things, including food, are supposed to come from the state (eventually, the government stopped enforcing this so stringently - when the alternative to beach-combing and gardening is death by starvation jail time is not much of a deterrent).
North Korean defectors to the China and South Korea have amply provided information on the day-to-day deprivations they endured as ordinary life in North Korea. Medical care is lacking. Electrical power is lacking. Clean water is intermittently available. There have been times people have worked for years at state-provided jobs, under penalty of jail if they don’t show up, but gone years without being paid or provided rations from the government. There is fear of being taken away in the night (see political prison camps in next paragraph) because when a person does something offensive to the state the entire extended family can be imprisoned for life without any form of trial, without even ever being told why they have been imprisoned.
Shin Dong-hyuk has provided ample testimony of life inside the “total control zone” of a North Korean labor camp for political prisoners and their descendants. Hyuk Kwon was once a guard at the same camp and has provided video footage of life inside the camp. The closest thing to those camps were the labor camps of Nazi Germany in WWII and some of the worst of the Soviet gulags. They don’t ship people off to gas-spewing showers when they arrive at such camps but the constant hard labor, systematic starvation, lack of adequate clothing, and constant violence and abuse are nothing but apalling. Worse yet, children are born in these camps (as was Shin Dong-hyuk) and grow up believing all this is perfectly normal and it is right and proper they be imprisoned for life, abused, starved, and tortured for the crimes of their parents (or even grandparents). Somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people are currently suffering under such conditions and there is no parole. If the regime endures they will die in those camps where merely starving to death slowly is one of the less awful ways to go.
The information is out there, if you care to look, but it’s not widely publicized.
But back to the OP - to some extent this really is business as usual. Every year during the joint US/ROK military exercises the DPRK does the hostile posturing. Every time a new Kim succeeds an old Kim you get the belligerent speeches. We have both going one this year. Every time new sanctions are imposed we get the ravings and threats.
The thing is, North Korea is becoming a nation that cries wolf. When will we know that they really mean it this time!? We won’t. Sure, the situation has been stable for 60 years - let’s just ignore the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong island, both of which resulted in people dying - but like they say about the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
What is very clear to me is that no one, except possibly some in the government of the DPRK - wants war and that those surrounding North Korea have refrained from a resumption of hostilities even when people have been killed by the DPRK’s regime. IF Pyongyang wants war - by no means a true statement, take it solely as a hypothetical - they’re going to have to do more than just kill a few people to get one started. They keep waving bigger and bigger sticks, and now they have a nuclear one. If their current posturing doesn’t get the results they want (I’m guessing more [del]tribute[/del] humanitarian and and fuel) I’m not sure what more they are going to be able to do. If it looks like the regimine is about to fall I don’t know what the power elite will do - go into exile? Commit suicide? Surrender? I don’t think anyone else knows either.
The thing is, the only alternative to containment (which is what the current practice comes down to) is invasion. History shows that invading someone to “liberate” the people usually doesn’t have wonderful results. Case in point: Iraq. Now, most Iraqis were informed enough about the world that they see other people, including the invading US, as human beings (most of the time). Saddam did a lot of nasty things but keeping his people completely isolated and uninformed about the outside world was not one of them. The people of North Korea have been extremely isolated, kept deliberately ignorant, and pumped full of propaganda. Again, this information is out there. Anyone who isn’t Korean is depicted as sub-human. The US is depicted as a race of evil creatures who delight in killing and subjugating others. It doesn’t matter if the invading army is American, international, or Chinese they will not be seen as liberators, they will not be welcomed with open arms, and there will be massive grass-roots resistance. “Liberators” will be about as welcome as a gay orgy in Fred Phelp’s living room. It will get very ugly.
So… do we continue the policy of containment despite the certain and ugly cost in human life that entails: the suffering, the shortened life spans, the debility from lack of basic medical care and adequate food and clean water, not to mention the cesspits of the labor camps? The toll in human life there might be tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even a million or two depending on how you count it all up. Or do we try to remove the regime and risk a war that could have casualty rates in the multiple millions?
As horrific as the current status quo is, it does seem the lesser evil. The problem is that both sides have to believe that. If something happens to tip the balance then war breaks out.
You can’t swing a dead cat in North Korea at all - they ate every one of them.
Regards,
Shodan
No, it’s appropriate; that leadership is the state, which might or might not commit “state suicide”; the people will just have to accept what happens.
Thank you for pointing out that both of these are going on right now. I was wondering why they were peaking the crazy meter so often recently. They usually pace themselves a little bit and space things out. I know they reacted like this when both happened, but for some reason I was thinking Un had taken power a lot longer than a year ago, but it’s only been a year and 4 months, and he’s added a few titles since then.
I don’t think they will do a lot of turning the threats up to 11 right before attacking though. It’s pretty obvious that all of the words, and as you point out, some of the attacks are all just grandstanding. If that path isn’t successful at getting them what they need, I think that we’ll have a few weeks of nothing while they try to figure out if they can put out a credible nuke on a missile in a hurry. If that doesn’t work out, the first warning we’ll have is the guns being pulled out of their tunnels and loaded. I wouldn’t telegraph it, why would they?
ETA: And wow, he’s not in firm control.
I have been to Pyongyang and watched the city go from moderately lit to completely black at 10pm one night from my hotel. It was deathly quiet too… you could hear a baby crying perhaps a kilometer away and I saw 2 cars moving. Very eerie place.
You can’t swing a dead cat in North Korea because that would be wasting food.
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they’re insane. They want (from their point of view) respect and security and the aid they need to keep the country just barely afloat.
The US is full committed to the defense of South Korea; while the majority of the ground forces in such a war would be South Korean, the US role would not be restricted to air support. US Forces Korea includes the headquarters of Eighth Army and the 2nd Infantry Division, which is stationed close to the DMZ, north of Seoul. It was elements of the 2nd Infantry Division that carried out Operation Paul Bunyan in response to the axe murders in 1976. Just a hop and a skip across the water the 3rd Marine Division is stationed in Okinawa, Japan which would rapidly deploy to Korea in the event of war. Additional ground forces would be sent from stateside.
Indeed, this has been going on for a very, very long time. Aside from the axe murder incident in 1976, just a few of the many incidents with North Korea:
DMZ Conflict (1966-69). 43 Americans killed.
Tunnels into South Korea under the DMZ discovered (1974). Not small tunnels, tunnels large enough to allow the transit of 30,000 troops per hour each.
Pueblo Incident (1968). US intelligence ship attacked and captured by North Korea, crew held captive for 11 months.
North Korean abduction of Japanese citizens (1977-83). Abducted from Japan to train North Korean spies.
Gangneung submarine infiltration incident (1996). North Korean mini-sub grounds while recovering an infiltration team. Infiltration team kills the crew of the sub as deadweight and a 49 day long manhunt for them ensues. Sixteen South Koreans killed, one infiltrator captured, thirteen killed in firefights.
Blue House raid (1968). Unsuccessful attempt by a 31 man North Korean commando unit to assassinate the President of South Korea.
EC-121 Shootdown (1969). US electronic intelligence gathering plane shot down by North Korean MiGs 90 miles off the coast of North Korea. Thirty-one Americans killed.
Crab Wars (1967, 1999-2010). A string of incidents on and around islands off the west coast of Korea. Ships sunk on sides, artillery shelling, and ~ 150 dead.
And that’s just as few, there are many more.
I think you are over estimating how much sway China has over North Korea. North Korea doesn’t take its marching orders from China, if they want war they can start one and it won’t be because China let them. I can’t see China taking North Korea “into the fold”, aside from other considerations Korea has a very long history of remaining distinct from China.
I seriously doubt that - the costs of doing that would be enormous, with no return for a long, long time.
My understanding is that he has been coopted by the inner circle, and that it includes amongst others, relatives of him. I don’t think North Korea is a personal dictatorship currently. In which case, there’s no need to organize a coup. They would just tell him to change his stance/policies.
Don’t rely on me for expert opinion on NK, though.
However, they might have a weird point of view. The leadership must have been influenced to some extent by its own propaganda, having lived in NK for their whole life (I know that the current leader spent a lot of time in the west, no need to nitpick)
And it’s a very, very weird, country. The only quite similar place I can think of was Albania during the cold war (although they didn’t went as far as deifying the leader, it was almost a perfect copy). Possibly the Red Khmer regime, but they didn’t have 60+ years of indoctrination. Apart from that, you’d have to read “1984”. Not even Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin were comparable.
IOW, I generally just shrug when I read comments about some country’s leadership being crazy (say, for a common occurrence, Iran). But in the peculiar case of NK, I’m not sure that there couldn’t be a kernel of truth in such a statement. Not mental illness, but possibly a somewhat deeply deformed perception of things.
This might be a little bit of an understatement. And I do wonder if they’re feeling some pressure to live up to their own propaganda at this point. But anyway the main reason they’re acting so crazy lately is that in the past they’ve been able to act crazy and get what they want, and now it’s not really working, so they’re taking it further and further.
Is it true that in NK there is absolutely no culture or society outside the state? Not even the USSR was ever quite like that, but I’ve heard it said about NK.
I believe NK has stated they have a moral superiority since only the US has used nuclear weapons so it would indeed be ironic if they become the second country to use nukes.
Maybe that’s how they killed them.