[shrug] If they defect, they can spill intel – but they can no longer be a threat to Kim in any other way, can they?
Interesting that according to that story, it has long been well-known both to regime insiders and outside observers that all of those show-trial charges against Jang were perfectly true. He was a grafter, a womanizer, a substance abuser, and:
As opposed to all those empires which have lasted ?
Many empires have lasted much longer than Alexander’s or Napoleon’s.
The place is more and more like Unterland every day.
What is this Unterland?
Perhaps Jang was purged for opposing another nuke test:
EXECUTION IN NORTH KOREA WAS FIGHT OVER 4TH NUKE TEST
Well, if we do get another “satellite” launch-cum-supplication for rice, this claim might end up imbued with some credence.
The Kim family dynasty will fall only when they finally cross the Chinese one too many times. It won’t come from the inside and it won’t come from the West, as long as they have Chinese backing. Even if the Kims personally are removed the Elite will continue with the bureaucracy in place becasue the profit too much from it to replace it.
North Korea has already lasted longer than Alexander’s or Napoleon’s empire.
Not only that it has lasted while the entire world changed, its sources of outside support (the USSR) have fallen and there has been massive failures and dysfunction internally due to government incompetence (the 90s famine). NK has survived despite pressure from far wealthier and more powerful nations like SK, Japan and the US wanting them to fail.
They are probably the best example of a Machiavellian dictatorship surviving against the odds. Hell even in Saddam’s Iraq you had ethnic and religious tensions dividing people (Kurds, Shi’ite, Sunni, etc). I don’t think there is anything like that in NK.
With the appointment of Un as the new dictator I guess there was hope there would be reforms. But so far it seems Un may be even more of an authoritarian than his father. He has expanded prison camps, increased border security with China, purged someone who was a proponent of Chinese business trade.
I read in a book about NK that Jong Il changed policies that family members were no longer punished if a single person commits a crime. If that is true, I wonder if Un will reverse that policy. That doesn’t sound true, Jong Il was in charge for almost 20 years and I’m sure it still happened.
Point being, I wonder how this plays out. Maybe the ‘best case’ scenario is Jong Un ends up overreaching and pissing off everyone.
He could piss off the Chinese, SK, US & Japanese with constant nuclear tests.
He can piss off the Chinese by ending trade with them, and making the area unstable.
He can piss off the public in NK by stopping the black markets (that are the only things keeping a lot of NK citizens from starving) and stopping trade with China (which is how they find out about the real world)
He can piss off the military and political elite by doing mass purges like he is doing now (something like half the highest ranking military and political officials have been purged in the last few years).
With luck maybe he’ll overreach and piss off the right combo of NK political/military elites, Chinese politicians and the public and be overthrown by a dictator who follows China’s model of reform. But who knows. He could just rule that shit country for another 30 years and create another generation of brainwashed, diseased, terrified robots.
It was my impression that Jong Il was actually a competent dictator. He had decades to build a base in the government, and he knew how to manipulate the outside world. Jong Un could be in over his head and end up making too many enemies.
ABC News is reporting that the Baby Dictator’s aunt – wife of his recently executed uncle – is now missing. She was not any any official photos commemorating the second anniversary of Baby Dictator’s father’s death.
Too much eggnog. That’s what caused this ― Kim Jong-un ‘very drunk’ when ordering executions
:smack:
Drunk or not, it sounds like it was hardly a capricious decision if the two aides in question were responsible for armed resistance against North Korea’s army:
Not to defend Kim, but it looks like his uncle was using one of the country’s few sources of hard currency to enrich himself and create a faction loyal to him rather than to Kim’s regime. Any rational autocrat with the slightest instinct of self preservation would probably do just what Kim did in this instance.
Sometimes, that’s how these regimes fall - not when the people on the bottom rise up, but when the people on top start squabbling for what little’s left.
Whatever the minutiae details may be, we can rest assured that envoy Rodman is on the case. 
Don’t any of you grasp that the people being purged aren’t the hard-liners?
The hard-liners are Military, & are the strongest advocates of war & invasion of South Korea.
And now, they have Kim’s ear.
The risk of war on the Korean Peninsula is the highest it has been since the 50s.
Jang loyalists drove off a company of NK soldiers? I can see Kim the Threequal becoming concerned about this.
That struck me too. Were I Kim, and one of my cronies had the ability to repulse a company of my army, I’d take that ability away. One way or another.
I’d probably agree with this; based on what reports are saying about the already paltry [legitimate] North Korean income streams waning and there being a young Kim with renewed hubris sitting on the corpse pile.
Heaven forfend some natural disaster or Fukushima related ‘contamination’ further curtails Kim’s income… They might not be left with any choice but to attack the south.
“Might not”?
They’ve been selling off North Korea’s Gold reserves.
While North Korea does sell some Gold annually, mostly to China, the amount of Gold sols over the last six months may be as high as 25% of North Korea’s total reserves.
That is unprecedented.
NK never sells its reserves.
Never.
Armies need money as much as bullets.
Now, Kim has both.
And The Bomb.