Yeah, I remember reading about that. Quite the metaphor for misguided direction in NK. The hotel may or may not have been what touched off comparing NK to 1984 due to its uncanny resemblance to the Ministry of Truth. To wit:
I’d say you pretty much nailed it BrainGlutton. I think that’s exactly what’s happening in Pyongyang. Then again, you don’t just find this in dictatorships. I’m quite sure that a lot of the problems America’s facing now, including the war in Iraq and the gay marriage ban boil down to the fact that no one close to Bush can quite bring him- or herself to bother the man with the cold hard facts.
Perhaps, but that is not a basic design flaw of democracy. Democracy has other design flaws. E.g., it involves being ruled by people who are good at getting elected, and the qualities necessary for that are not always the same as the qualities that make for a good leader or policymaker. Still, it is, you know, the worst form of government except for all the others.
It’s much worse than the dude living in an echo chamber. He lives on an altar. The minions in his country worship the dude. Imagine if you had been raised to believe you were, essentially, deity incarnate.
On the other hand, it can be seen as making a hideous sort of sense.
Kim ignores the famines that kill millions of his subjects. Does anyone believe that the prospect of millions of North Koreans dying in a nuclear war would cause him to lose any sleep when starvation does not?
The power of his nuclear weapons is hugely enhanced by the realization that he might be crazy enough to use them. Because he has allowed it to become clear that, if he is pushed into a corner, he will strike against Tokyo or something. The next step is to convince enough people that denying him anything he asks for is “pushing him into a corner”.
It doesn’t even matter if it is an act, or he really is crazy, or some exotic mixture half-way between. It’s working.
Oh, it matters. If it’s all an act, if he’s not really crazy, then his actions will at least be to some extent rational and predictable. If he’s crazy, every crisis is a new roll of the dice.
Yeah. And the worst part is that no one seems to know if he’s crazy or not. It’s the not knowing that worries me about NK and KJI’s next move in particular.
Wow, I see NK has reached the goals of all modern societies: having common people squat by boxes next to statues of bears playing accordians, living in austere spaces that would give Ikea nosebleeds, farming with ox-drawn plows, washing laundry in a river by hand, bicycling on unpaved roads, peeing in the open into rivers (seriously!!! look at the picture with the river and the pillar, just over halfway down), living like rabbits in a warren, and paying for statues of Dear Leader Gesturing Toward the Glorious Communist Future[sup]TM[/sup].
Nope, there is no difference between acting crazy because you are crazy, and acting crazy because you want people to think you are crazy. It is purely a matter of how good an actor you are.
So far, Kim is a pretty good actor - or pretty crazy. Or both.
Well, I can’t agree with this. The number one difference is that people who act crazy generally know when to stop acting crazy.
If KJI is causing trouble because he’s acting crazy, then presumably there’s a line he might not cross. If he’s causing trouble because he’s genuinely off his rocker, then he very well might decide to turn Seoul into a glass parking lot for no good reason.
Personally, I think he’s just acting. He seems to play the game of brinksmanship well enough, and if he were genuinely crazy, I don’t think the NK military leadership would just sit back and let him run things. His father could get away with being insane, no question, but not him. That’s not to say that he might not come to the decision that war on the peninsula is the best way, but I don’t think he’s actually insane.
Well, OK, how do you determine? Kim lets millions of his people die by starvation. He kidnaps actresses. He provokes and offends his major patron. He builds nuclear weapons and threatens to use them. He murders people by the tens of thousands.
But he isn’t crazy; he’s just acting.
And this is different from the decision reached by a nuclear madman - how, exactly? And how do we treat him differently knowing that there is a line he won’t cross? How can we tell what that line is?
If this is an act, it’s one he’s gotten away with all his life. Because he is the Son of the Great Leader, and because he has nukes and no compunction about lying thru his teeth.
But I still don’t believe nuking Tokyo is going to be any different for a madman than for an actor who got carried away. He’s like Hitler - he has a rap that worked for him all the way up to the top, and is still working now. Why would he stop, even if he isn’t certifiable?
I agree that Kim is a terrible leader and a tyrant, and I’m not excusing anything he does, but one thing is coming through in all this: The peasantry takes it in the ass, and KJI lives. This is the work of a tyrant, not necessarily of a madman. Whatever Kim does, however callously he treats his populace, he’s looking out for number one. If he flips out and decides on suicide and that he’ll take everyone else down, then he’s a madman.
You can deal with a tyrant. As distasteful as it may be, the US has dealt with plenty of countries whose commitment to democracy is shakey at best. I’m not proud of it much myself, but it’s a question of choosing the lesser of two evils. Do we isolate KJI and cut off aid, thereby bringing war on the peninsula one step closer to reality while not really doing anything to solve the problem, or do we play the game of brinksmanship right alongside KJI averting war (at least for the time being) and perhaps gaining the advantage?
Now all that is assuming that he’s a tyrant and not a madman. If he’s a madman all those bets are off. You can’t deal with a madman.
Those days are slowly drawing to a close in North Korea, and KJI probably knows it. With a disaffected military, starving citizens who are beginning to lose their fear of speaking out, and the loss of his former political allies, Kim is beginning to be forced into a corner.
Because Kim Jong Il knows what happened to Hitler. If he’s got an ounce of sanity, he knows that if he goes all out, he’s a dead man. Is he going to just roll over and capitulate? Well, no, I don’t see that happening, because KJI also knows what happened to Erich Honecker after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Still, that’s a chip on the table we could probably play somehow assuming KJI is sane!
That’s why the question of whether or not KJI is mentally stable is so important. One way or another, the Korean peninsula is going to reunify. Whether it reunifies through diplomacy or a bloodbath depends to a large extent on whether KJI is someone who can be reasoned with. I hope he is. I sincerely hope he is, because the alternative is going to involve a terrible loss of life.
Well, Augusto Pinochet managed to let go of power in Chile while remaining alive and free (for a while) . . . I guess it’s situation-specific. Depends on how strong a position you’re negotiating from.
