# When will North Korea collapse? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 5, 2003, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004 "2003-02-05T18:07:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/21 "2003-02-06T15:19:37Z")
Doghouse Reilly: > [@](#): > > enabling the last Stalinist dictator Oh, is Castro dead or out of power yet? ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/22 "2003-02-06T15:24:00Z")
What makes you think that Castro is a Stalinist? Communist, sure, but Stalinist? ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/23 "2003-02-06T15:26:17Z")
And in case you think I’m just engaged in a niggling parsing of definitions, take a gander at Cuba and ask yourself whether citizens are reduced to eating weeds and tree bark under a regime of deliberate starvation–you might come to understand the difference. Stalin pioneered the use of famine as a political weapon. Again, thanks, Jimmy. ---
**Author:** ![bayonet1976](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/77aa72/32.png) [@bayonet1976](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bayonet1976)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/24 "2003-02-06T15:43:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Doghouse Reilly \* > \*\*And in case you think I’m just engaged in a niggling parsing of definitions, take a gander at Cuba and ask yourself whether citizens are reduced to eating weeds and tree bark under a regime of deliberate starvation–you might come to understand the difference. Stalin pioneered the use of famine as a political weapon. > > Again, thanks, Jimmy. \*\* Cubans have been on rationed food since the mid-60’s, and the alloted rations are rarely delivered complete. Most Cubans depend on a black market economy to provide the minimum nutrinional requirements. ---
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/25 "2003-02-06T20:02:49Z")
Doghouse Reilly: > [@](#): > > And in case you think I’m just engaged in a niggling parsing of definitions, take a gander at Cuba and ask yourself whether citizens are reduced to eating weeds and tree bark under a regime of deliberate starvation–you might come to understand the difference. Stalin pioneered the use of famine as a political weapon. I didn’t realize that calling someone a “Stalinist” meant that he specifically used all of Stalin’s tactics. I thought it meant a regime that came to power under the aegis of the Stalin-led Soviet Union, a definition that fits Castro quite well. Chaim Mattis Keller ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2003, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/26 "2003-07-16T05:37:12Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by cmkeller \* > \*\*Doghouse Reilly: > > I didn’t realize that calling someone a “Stalinist” meant that he specifically used all of Stalin’s tactics. I thought it meant a regime that came to power under the aegis of the Stalin-led Soviet Union, a definition that fits Castro quite well. > > Chaim Mattis Keller \*\* Sorry, I know it’s been a long time, but I can’t let the thread die on a note of ignorance like this. Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Castro came to power on January 1, 1959. Even under cmkeller’s contrived definition, Castro is not a “stalinist”. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2003, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/27 "2003-07-16T06:12:06Z")
Castro is a Stalinist in the sense that he uses Stalinist tactics to maintain control of his society. Brutal suppression of dissent, internal exile, forced labor, etc. The difference is that Cuba is a relatively small island nation, so the policies are necessarily somewhat different. But there is no doubt that Castro leads a repressive police state. ---
**Author:** ![Fang](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/96bed5/32.png) [@Fang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fang)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2003, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/28 "2003-07-16T06:18:16Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Doghouse Reilly \* > **Um, ElvisL1ves, I’m saying that Carter/Clinton got nothing for their deal except enabling the last Stalinist dictator to stay in power for another decade** Well, they stopped their nuclear weapons program. Oh, wait. Never mind then. Sounds like it’s time for more negotiation! ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2003, 7:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/29 "2003-07-16T07:33:25Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Ryan\_Liam \* > \*\*Yes but without an adequetly fed population, in the long run, they’ll all be as tall as twelve year olds. \*\* I don’t remember where I heard this but the average S. Korean soldiers weighs 40 pounds more then the average N. Korean soldier and is considerably taller. Maybe someone else here has more concrete information. Marc ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2003, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/30 "2003-07-16T11:52:02Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Sam Stone \* > \*\*Castro is a Stalinist in the sense that he uses Stalinist tactics to maintain control of his society. Brutal suppression of dissent, internal exile, forced labor, etc. > > The difference is that Cuba is a relatively small island nation, so the policies are necessarily somewhat different. But there is no doubt that Castro leads a repressive police state. \*\* But aren’t “brutal suppression of dissent, internal exile, forced labor, etc.” features of most authoritarian systems? [Others](http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/EE07Dg01.html) argue that “Stalinism” has distinguishable characteristics within the general universe of autarky: > [@](#): > > While agreeing that survival is ultimately the name of the game for the Dear Leader, I’d maintain that the sobriquet Stalinist is of great analytical utility in explaining North Korea as a system. Indeed I’ve argued as much here before (see Is North Korea Stalinist?, September 5, 2001). > > Without repeating all the details now, I fully endorse the Australian Koreanist Adrian Buzo’s view. In his fine book on North Korean politics, The Guerrilla Dynasty (Westview, 1999), Buzo listed no fewer than 24 separate ways in which the term “Stalinist” applies there: ranging from party organization and political style to ideology and economic organization. Which pretty much covers the waterfront. > > Here are just a few of Buzo’s examples. A militarized and abusive political vocabulary. Violations of even socialist legality, eg irregular party congresses. Exaltation of violence, and of acute class struggle. Remolding human nature to create the new socialist man. Heavy use of kinship metaphors (“Fatherly leader”, etc). Liquidating all the Leader’s rivals: first physically, and then rewriting history to wipe them out again. A wholly planned economy: too much emphasis on heavy industry, too little on consumers; constant speed battles, grandiose monuments. And so on, and so on. Sound familiar? And recognizing North Korea as uniquely Stalinist is no mere academic exercise: > [@](#): > > Why does this still matter? For example, just to say that Kim Jong-il seeks to remain in power begs the question: what formed the mindset with which he mulls how best to do this? Why, in particular, does he not emulate China since Deng Xiaoping: strengthening his state and position via economic reform, instead of the false and downright dangerous pseudo-security of nuclear and other noxious weapons? > > Answer: Stalinism, in more ways than one. Kim Jong-il himself may be a cynical sybarite, but North Korea’s ideologues and generals are still fighting the good fight. For them, truth and strength reside in a totalitarian militarized party state, and nowhere else. On this view, the rot set in with Nikita Khrushchev and “modern revisionism”, and ended with Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That’s their nightmare. > > Ideologically too, even something seemingly as idiosyncratic as North Korea’s juche (self-reliance, sort of) philosophy is an echo of Stalin’s “socialism in one country”. Contra the FEER, it was Lenin and the old Bolsheviks who sought to foment world revolution. Stalin by contrast turned inward. Had Adolf Hitler not invaded in 1941 and been defeated, it’s far from certain that communist rule would have expanded as it did, in the wake of World War II, to Eastern Europe - or, for that matter, northern Korea. (China and Vietnam, or indeed Cuba, which had their own home-grown revolutions, are a different matter.) ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2003, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/31 "2003-07-16T12:54:52Z")
> [@](#): > > I thought that Sung was training his son to be his successor? That is what happened in theory. Kim-Il Jung is borderline wacko, has an ego complex the size of Siberia, and is generally a total loser who couldn’t get a job at Wal-Mart. He just happens to be a total loser who also happened to luck his way into absolute power in North Korea. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2003, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/32 "2003-07-16T17:52:07Z")
I’ve got to agree with Doghouse Reilly here. Castro is an authoritarian criminal, but he’s more on the lines of Mussolini than Stalin. While people in Cuba are poor and oppressed, they aren’t actually starving to death like they are in North Korea. Of course Castro is guilty of murder, torture, repression, etc etc etc, but communist North Korea is on a whole different level than communist Cuba. Sure both are bad, but Castro is sane, his military is for internal control purposes only, he has a desire to keep good PR with his fellow travellers, and he doesn’t currently threaten any of his neighbors. Cuba allows tourism, for crying out loud, even if all tourism is run by the government. ---
**Author:** ![bayonet1976](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/77aa72/32.png) [@bayonet1976](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bayonet1976)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2003, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/33 "2003-07-16T19:04:49Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Lemur866 \* > \*\*Cuba allows tourism, for crying out loud, even if all tourism is run by the government. \*\* You should note that this is a recent development, following the collapse of the USSR and the Cuban economy. Castro’s government refers to this as “Periodo Especial”, or special period, and has said over and over again that it is not permanent. ---
**Author:** ![Beagle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/85f322/32.png) [@Beagle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beagle)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/34 "2003-07-17T01:34:57Z")
[Korean forces exchange machine gun fire in the DMZ](http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=535&ncid=535&e=2&u=/ap/20030717/ap_on_re_as/koreas_dmz_shooting) > [@](#): > > SEOUL, South Korea - South and North Korean soldiers briefly exchanged machine gun fire along their border on Thursday, but the South Korean military said it did not suffer casualties in the shootout. > > It was not immediately known whether any North Korean troops were injured or killed in the firefight in the Demilitarized Zone, a buffer area that was created at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War to keep opposing armies apart. > > Tension on the Korean Peninsula is high over North Korea’s suspected development of nuclear weapons, and such shooting incidents in the DMZ are rare. In recent years, however, reconciliation efforts have moved forward despite such outbreaks of violence. ---
**Author:** ![Apos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/838e76/32.png) [@Apos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Apos)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/35 "2003-07-17T01:42:30Z")
According to Kim’s crazy belief system, triplets pose the greatest threat to his regime: if they are allowed to come together, they will have the power to depose him. I’m not kidding. I don’t know if he read this in the Weekly World News or had someone read his palm, but he apparently believes it enough to have all triplets separated at birth and raised in seperate internmentcamps/prisons. So all we have to do is airlift in some triplets. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/36 "2003-07-17T03:23:58Z")
**Doghouse Reilly:** Fair enough. By those standards, Castro isn’t a Stalinist. But then, Saddam was labelled a Stalinist by many, and his government lacked many of the features you mentioned. It’s probably a silly argument anyway. Stalin is a datapoint of one. Trying to fit that label on other regimes is probably a questionable idea. Especially a regime running an island culture, which is almost guaranteed to create a different type of beast anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/37 "2003-07-17T05:27:00Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Sam Stone \* > **Doghouse Reilly:** Fair enough. By those standards, Castro isn’t a Stalinist. But then, Saddam was labelled a Stalinist by many, and his government lacked many of the features you mentioned. That’s kind of a weaselly statement. My point was that “Stalinism” has specific implications and shouldn’t be thrown around sloppily in an effort to tar the distasteful regime du jour–as the terms “Nazi” and “Hitler” have long been misused. If “many” labelled Saddam a Stalinist, than “many” were wrong. What does that have to do with what we’re talking about here? > [@](#): > > It’s probably a silly argument anyway. Stalin is a datapoint of one. Trying to fit that label on other regimes is probably a questionable idea. Especially a regime running an island culture, which is almost guaranteed to create a different type of beast anyway. But if there are identifiable features of “Stalinism”, and if a regime’s behavior can be predicted thereby, isn’t that relevant? The link I provided above indicates that there is a rationale supporting North Korea’s otherwise inexplicable behavior. ---
**Author:** ![Daoloth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/82dd89/32.png) [@Daoloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Daoloth)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/38 "2003-07-17T05:31:13Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Doghouse Reilly \* > \*\*Sorry, I know it’s been a long time, but I can’t let the thread die on a note of ignorance like this. > > Stalin died on March 5, 1953. > Castro came to power on January 1, 1959. > > Even under cmkeller’s contrived definition, Castro is not a “stalinist”. \*\* Enver Hoxha was a Stalinist, was he not? What about Sung and Jong? Anyway, back to North Korea directly… You wouldn’t have any interaction with foreigners. You would not be allowed to learn foreign languages. You would not be allowed to leave the country. You would not be allowed access to any foreign media. You would be raised in a school system that worships the government, and would have no reason to believe to the contrary. In short, you’d be roughly brainwashed. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004/39 "2003-07-17T12:34:42Z")
I am not actually so sure the regime has been as successful in convincing its people as it pretends. Lets face it - there are famines everywhere, and people constantly try to get into China. The government evidently believesthat it can only survive by controlling the military (which they do through food). And after all, controlling outsider’s impressions and contact with locals of the nation is one of the prime reasons for the Communist restriction on travel and such. I highly doubt that people would feel able to speak their minds if they disagree with the government. That gets you “vanished”, you know? Plus, most of the quotes I’ve seen come from top government officials or are printed in the naitonal media, which is controlled by loyal part officials. So we reall have no clue what the ordinary person thinks. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-will-north-korea-collapse/153004.md?page=1)