If by “long ago” you mean before 1990, perhaps. If U.S. troops had pulled out after then, the NKs still would not have crossed the border by now.
I have trouble seeing the kinds of behaviors exhibited by NK’s government as primarily a means of controlling the populace. Due to this it is difficult for me to say what is the more parsimonious explanation. The simplest explanations for a build up of military forces is either for an invasion or to defend against an invasion. NK has always been the aggressor and always blames outsiders for their aggression. This keeps the public in check as you say but in order to be outwardly aggressive they must be on guard for invasion. I see this type of military build up as having all 3 consequences - invasion/defense/internal propaganda - almost simultaneously. I even think, to a lesser extent, American military build up has had the same 3 intertwined consequences for us.
Looking at the consequences of aggressive policies: Whether looking at Iran, Iraq, NK, or Vietnam the aggressive policies of these governments were/are bound by their proximity to our military or directing this aggression toward our allies. Of these four countries, only Iraq failed to maintain an adequate enough military to prevent a palatable invasion/counter-attack by our forces.
What do all of these countries have in common? Oh yeah, the general consensus is that they are all protected by the US military, which is still the literal “nuclear option” when it comes to conflict. These countries are untouchable and unable to be threatened (or at least think they are.) Israel’s support is less direct, and not suprisingly it’s the least free’n’easy of the group.
What do you think that Israel, Taiwan and South Korea would look like today if the US had never protected them (and yet somehow they still survived as sovereign states). Do you think they would be prosperous democracies? Do you think that without US influence Israel would be a free and peaceful place full of civil liberties and human rights? I’ll give you a hint- it’s still not that now, and their exact explanation is “we are surrounded by hostile nations.”
If Taiwan thought it was on its own against China, do you think it wouldn’t be pre-occupied with arming itself to the hilt? Do you think they’d invest in anything but weapons? Do you think they’d have much tolerance for dissent and political opposition?
If you could show me a country that America has always opposed and has threatened with military force over the course of decades that has become a thriving democracy, then you would have an argument.
Are you kidding? Do you think the NK government is not interested in controlling the populace, which it needs to do to maintain power? Do you think it is not their primary goal? If not, what is?
I don’t think I implied that in the slightest bit and I tried to elaborate below what you quoted.
The leaders of NK want to expand their power. Since it is effectively contained they need to maintain that power via a military force that makes invasion unexciting, makes aggression unlikely to be countered, and keeps rebellious elements of their population in check. The answer in all cases is a strong military.
Sorry sven, but I think your OP and other posters’ responses form another example of this board’s pervasive America-centric view of the world. “America is a force for good in the world!” “No, America is a force for evil!” It’s like a drama queen who alternately preens for being loved by all and vocally censures herself for being such a high maintenence bitch who ruins so many lives – flip sides of the same thing, because the one ghastly idea she cannot stomach is to simply be ignored, Dan.
Believe it or not there are plenty of historical developments where America played little or no role, and political culture in all of Korea is one of them. Japan had been grinding the peninsula under its heel as its own private slave planet for a full half century before America ever showed up, and for centuries before that Korea had been battered and invaded by Japan and and China in turn, not to mention the Mongols.
That’s where the paranoia, beligerency and authoritarianism of this thousand-year-old nation come from. Whippersnapper America has nothing to do with it.
The general population of course doesn’t see it that way because they’re going by what their government allows them to know. The guy in charge–you remember him, don’t you?–knows full well how the war started.
The leaders of NK know they can’t expand their power. They’re goal is to maintain the power they have. They use aggression to extort aid from China and the West, both of whom fear “destabilization” in that area. That aid prevents the population from suffering mass starvation, but still keeps them barely at the subsistence level.
I think it’s time for us to contact that super-secret base in Mount Rushmore.
Lets take a look at notable cults of personality dictatorships in the last hundred years or so:
Pol Pot - The US did destablize the whole region with our war in Vietnam, and we did violate Cambodia’s territory, but Cambodia was really never on our radar, and they knew it. What happened there has nothing to do with US weapons pointed at their heads.
Stalin - Was a US ally who we sent great amounts of aid to. We were never BFF with him, but we weren’t adversaries until long after he had established how he ruled.
Mao - Mostly he ignored the US and we mostly ignored him. He was far far more concerned and influenced by the Soviet Union than he was the US.
Saddam Hussein - For a long time he was a US ally, it wasn’t until long after he established his politics that he became our enemy
Al Queda/Taliban - The US all but ignored Al Queda’s attacks until 9/11. As for the Taliban, we mostly had nothing to do with it, although it’s fairly common to hear it claimed that the US created the Taliban. Either way, neither of these established themselves because they had US weapons pointed at their heads.
And I don’t want to godwin my post, but there is another prominent example of a cult of personality dictator in recent history which infamously had little to do with the US until well into the worldwide war he caused.
Notice what is NOT on the list of cult of personality dictatorships? East Germany. Germany was a nation split in half, where one half of it was a US ally and hosted a large US military presence specifically to threaten/defend from the other half. Which is the closest analogy in recent history to the North Korea/South Korea. And yet East Germany was never even close to as bad as North Korea is.
Face it, history shows that US weapons pointed at a nations head doesn’t automatically mean it will become a cult of personality dictatorship as harsh on it’s people as North Korea is. History also shows that many nations that do have similar cult of personality politics often have nothing at all to do with a US threat. Based on that, it’s rather unlikely that North Korea is the way it is because the US has troops on it’s border.
Did you look at your chart? It shows that both Korea’s were majorly hurt by WWII. Following that, through the Korean war, and for the recovery period after the Korean war they both improved similarly. The division in the 80’s (actually a bit earlier, closer to the mid 70’s) you mention isn’t because South Korea suddenly improved dramatically, it’s because North Korea suddenly quit improved and actually lost some of the gains it made. South Korea’s growth since the 80’s is, basically, similar to it’s growth from the mid 40’s. The point of that chart isn’t to not get rosy-eyed about South Korea, it’s to not underestimate just how much of a shithole North Korea really is.
Regardless, it is noteworthy that the split happened a couple decades after the US pointed weapons at North Korea’s head. Even during the Korean War, when the US was actively using weapons against North Korea, it’s economy was still improving. If the US is responsible for how North Korea has turned out, why was there a delay of decades for our influence to show up, and why did having 50k troops on the border affect North Korea far far more than an actual shooting war did?
I think we are in agreement, but I need to test my theory: So if NK acted in the way you describe (and I completely agree with) but was not militarily strong, would they still exist in the form they do today?
What build-up? US strength in South Korea has diminished and moved away from the border since the end of the Korean War. There has been no build-up. If you mean the US presence in South Korea, that’s a result of the cease-fire ending a war instigated by North Korea.
20th century Communism and the invasion of South Korea by the North aren’t a tragic set of circumstances in which the players had no choice but to act the way they did. They were deliberate choices. The Great Leap Forward, the auto-genocide in Cambodia, and North Korea doing things such as digging tunnels under the DMZ, sending mini-sub full of commandos into South Korea, axe murdering in a dispute over tree pruning and kidnapping foreigners to teach language and culture to their spies weren’t tragic and unavoidable decisions in a Homeric play. They were deliberate, cold-blooded decisions by their respective governments.
Do you mean wield power?
I honestly don’t understand the point you are making here. Yes, there have been other dictators in the world. I’m not clear if you’re blaming the US for those dictatorships, nor am I clear why you think the Kims are different from those you listed.
But here’s my response: the US is not responsible for the continued autocracy in North Korea, or Libya, for that matter. You are not giving any kind of coherent argument why US military bases have anything to do with the continuance of extreme autocrats. You aren’t really laying out a coherent thesis here, just throwing out random arguments in response to our comments.
I’m not sure what this has to do with anything. But we seem to enjoy good relations with the Baltic states, Romania, Slovakia, Czech, Macedonia, and a few others. But what the hell is your point?
The US made an enemy of Mao and the communists by the way we supported the Nationalists during and after WWII. In effect we butted our noses into the Chinese civil war. We didn’t have much choice in being involved in Asia, there was a world war going on, but we actively aided the Nationalist side in filling the vacuum after the war as well. That carried over into the Korean war.
The end may not be far off for the North Korean regime. Things have gotten so bad that even the ruling class is beginning to fear starvation. Factory owners and workers are asking to be paid in rice, not money. Chinese traders note the increasing demand for food and report a sharp rise in the number of North Koreans planning to escape from the country. A huge part of the military is no longer considered reliable; apparently even the Special Operations forces, often used to keep the rest of the military in line, are beginning to have their doubts about the regime. What’s more, it seems that South Korea is no longer afraid of North Korea, and there seems to be a growing resolve by the South Koreans to deal once and for all with Kim’s rogue regime.
Mao was a commie, which meant he would eventually have become an enemy of the United States no matter what we did.
Believe it or not, there are an awful lot of people who aren’t going to like us no matter what we do. Many people, left and right, indulge themselves in a kind of magical thinking, assuming that no one will ever hate us if we can just figure out the right way to behave. A large part of this way of thinking seems to be a neurotic need to be accepted and loved by all – everybody should love us, and if they don’t, it’s only because we did something wrong. This sort of attitdue, of course, assumes a level of power and influence that isn’t possible in the real world.
Eh? I think historians are agreed that with the right approach we could have made friends even of Ho Chi Minh or Castro.
I am not sure if this is good news, or bad.
Good news: that another of the Axis of Evil may be on the way out.
Bad news: the kind of shit they might pull on the way.
We can only hope that Dear Leader commits suicide by shooting himself in the head ten or twelve times, pausing only once to reload, before deciding to use the Bomb on Seoul.
Regards,
Shodan
Ah, the old “why do you hate America” defense,
Of course North Korea was the agressor and has pretty much never acted honorably. But the acts of aggression that started this conflict happened half a century ago. No other country that I can think of, besides maybe Cuba, are still so heavily influenced by drama that old. There has to be some reason why North Korea uniquely has been so unable to integrate into the world system for so long. I don’t buy the “Kim Jong Il is just plain crazy and that’s all you need to know about that” explanation. It is the major contributing factor, for sure. But no other crazy leader on Earth has managed to do what North Korea has done for as long as it has.
I have a little suspicion that being at war for the entirety of it’s existence plays at least some role in that. Yes, South Korea represents a larger force than the US at the present, but the US played a role in making that possible. And that is the only point here: US policy towards North Korea is one of the many factors that shaped this disaster.
What do you think would have happened if the US had never been involved? Is the only possible explanation “North Korea would have ran over South Korea and it’d be exactly the same as today, but bigger.” I just don’t buy that is the only possible explanation in the entire world. I think it’s far more likely (or at least possible) that North Korea would take over South Korea, and then the whole thing would have fizzled out along with the rest of Communism in the 1990s. It’d probably be another post-Soviet state, without nuclear ambitions or grinding poverty. This doesn’t mean we didn’t do the right thing by defending South Korea, hindsight is 20/20 after all.
[QUOTE=even sven]
Ah, the old “why do you hate America” defense,
[/QUOTE]
Huh? Are you talking about what LonesomePolecat wrote? If so, it sounded more like ‘why does the US hate communists’ defense to me.
They maintained a near state of war (there never was a full peace treaty) the entire time, periodically attacking across the border with artillery, commandos and terrorist type attacks. I had some friends stationed on the DMZ and they said the time there was VERY nervous. Remember that recently the NK’s sunk a SK warship for no apparent reason and shelled an island with civilians on it because the SK’s had conducted an artillery drill which involved shooting into the ocean.
I think the ‘Kim Jong Il is just plain crazy’ goes quite a long way to explaining why things have remained the way they have, when you couple that with the obvious fear the NK’s communists and military types have that their people will realize just how crappy things are there and will want some of what the SKs have. It’s pretty obvious that Lil’ Kimmy and his merry men use the tactics they use as much for internal consumption and control as they do to attempt to cow the SKs, Japanese and everyone else. They have fed a bunker mentality and propped up the external threats against them to attempt to instill in their people a fear of outsiders and other countries so that they will accept the privations and sacrifices as necessary to protect their homes and families. The average NK is bombarded with so much constant propaganda that it becomes pervasive in their thinking and thought…it’s almost to the level of a constant background noise. Even if someone disbelieves half of what the government says, they STILL get caught up in the lies because of the sheer volume.
The role the US played was to simply act as the boogie man for the NK leadership to focus the fear of the people on.
-XT