So today in North Korea there are millions of people starving. Trying to leave the country without permission will result in execution. If discovered in China North Koreans will be turned over to the NK government to be tortured and killed. Their family will also be killed or put into reeducation camps. Government officials who work outside the country are required to have families which are then held hostage to ensure their return. Children are born in these reeducation camps and are trained from a young age to turn in their families and anyone else who attempts to escape for, you guessed it, execution. An underground railroad has developed to get NK refugees to safety.
Listen to some of the stories from escapees and you’ll see what people there live with day in and day out. On top of all that they are aggressively perusing nuclear weapons and missiles.
How can we as a moral people condemn these people to their lives of quiet desperation?
We are a “moral people”? I disagree. In the US especially, the current ruling party (Republicans) doesn’t want morality to have anything at all to do with government policy. They’ve made that very clear.
North Korea is a difficult problem. I think everyone agrees Kim Jong Un is a danger to society and a menace to mankind. And if a coup were to happen tomorrow, we’d all be ecstatic to lend a hand, albeit a surreptitious hand.
But what to do? If you attack him, you risk opening Pandora’s Box, which is probably worse in our imagination than in reality because we know so little about their true capabilities.
I do feel very badly for the poor North Koreans who have suffered for years under this despot.
You just have to accept that you can’t fix some problems. North Koreans are thoroughly brain-washed. They aren’t East Germans that know better and want to escape over the Berlin Wall. They have been raised since birth to believe that the Ung family is divine and any symbolic wall they have is to keep everyone else out.
Given no constraints by anyone else, I am certain that the U.S. military could topple North Korea in a few days but then what? Powerful militaries like the U.S. are great at destroying things but terrible at nation building. We can’t even get Afghanistan completely under control after about a decade and a half of occupation with no end in sight.
You also run the very real risk that Kim Jung Un has more nuclear capability than we think and would nuke Seoul, South Korea out of spite once he felt his power was truly threatened. The crazy, fat shit gives no indication that he is a stable person. He probably had his brother and other family members killed because they simply ticked him off. There is no reason to think he wouldn’t hesitate to destroy a major world city on a whim.
I think he’s picturing something from a movie, you know, a black silent helicopter drops in on Kim’s headquarters, elite ninja troops rappel down and silently comb through the building, silently shooting everyone whom they meet. Kim comes out of a room where he’s been having drunken sex with a dozen blondes, stumbles bleary-eyed into the hall where he’s met by several of our elite troops who then cut him (silently) to pieces with their guns. Then they fan out to make sure they got everyone in the building. In the meanwhile, using super secret intelligence that told us their locations, all the Kim relatives and the rest of the top echelon of the government are also assassinated. Silently.
You know, that would be a good start. It would be funny if there were some sort of deadman switch built into their military such that, if the top brass doesn’t check in with the ground troops and the missile launchers every couple of hours, they have instructions to immediately attack South Korea, and then all hell breaks loose. Good start, yup, that’s what that is.
There are plenty of immoral things that exist, not because people like injustice, but because righting the wrongs would cause immense damage and mayhem. North Korea is a prime example.
Also, prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many people said: “So many Iraqis are suffering under the Saddam regime, we must liberate them!”
After the invasion: “Why did we invade? It led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. SHAME on America for invading!”
We can expect to see that about-face happen again, if the US tries to liberate North Korea.
Mmm. Perhaps we should reflect whether attitudes like this - confrontation, polarisation, us-and-them, are perhaps the cause of the problem, rather than its solution?
If the current situtuation is intolerable, “What do we do about it?” is a perfectly valid question. But an equally obvious question is “How did we get here?”, and it doesn’t take a genius to realise that some time spent considering that question may be profitable, since it may inform the answer to the “What do we do about it?” question. If a war, followed by five decades of armed confrontation and mutual imcomprehension, has brought us to the present pass, the notion that we can fix the problem by intensifying the attitudes and policies that have brought us to this point is not intuitively appealing.
On the list of countries capable of doing something about North Korea, the US is at best #4. And the options of #2 and #3 are seriously limited, too. Really, all we can do is to continue to smuggle as much food and radios into North Korea as we can, and to keep missiles aimed at as many artillery sites as we know of.
What do you think would happen after that? Reminder that in 2003, we were told that after that horrible Saddam was out, we would be welcomed as liberators.