8 ms·

The one good, albeit tragic, thing about the existence of North Korea is that it serves as a constant reminder of what society can become if we're not vigilant

The one good, albeit tragic, thing about the existence of North Korea is that it serves as a constant reminder of what society can become if we're not vigilant about educating each generation about the dangers of certain ideologies and modes of social organization.

ue_ 10y ago
Can you go into more detail please? I am very much against authoritarianism and the state as a whole, though I am in favour of certain modes of social organisation some consider unorthodox. I think we should educate each generation on the influence of power on people, the benefits and drawbacks of democracy, care for one's fellow man, the societal structure of capitalism, among other things. Edit: preferably via Priestly, Orwell, Wilde, Bernard Shaw and H.G Wells :)
- linkmotif 10y ago
  I mean it's this spot on earth where the nightmare reality of total authoritarianism lives today. We can look at it from without, to whatever extent possible, and remind ourselves that every generation earns the freedom that it has. Having something concrete like North Korea is much more powerful than a book like Nineteen Eighty-Four, a work of literature about some hypothetical place. What's interesting about total authoritarianism is that it never stems from one person but actually depends on a whole large group of people to perpetuate the social order that makes it possible. Authoritarianism is as much a collective phenomenon as the maintaining of free elections in free countries. Once organized in a certain way, people seem to maintain that inertia of organization no matter who or what is served by that mode, interrupted in their organizational mode by revolutions that shift societies from track to track.
  - tstactplsignore 10y ago
    Strong disagree. North Korea is a disastrous country run by a truly evil government. However, it does not perform the role you suggest. We merely look on it from the outside in, with all of our small and little prejudices, and selectively picked historical knowledge. From such a vantage point, authoritarian always seems wrong. From the outside, it's trivial to understand and trivial to criticize. From within, from a perspective where authoritarianism has hijacked our own cultural values, our own patriotism, our own media, our cultural history, and historical stories, where the truth is always disputed and considered unpleasant to discuss in social gatherings, where friends and families really believe in it, criticism becomes far more difficult. What we need is both fictional and nonfiction insight into what it's like to experience authoritarianism firsthand, not picture-book,elementary school level accounts of how evil North Korea is. I recommend Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco as starting examples.
    - linkmotif 10y ago
      My grandfather was head of the main construction "trust" in Kiev and a member of the communist party. Thus he was head of all construction in the city. He was part and parcel of the system that all together constituted what really was rightfully called the Evil Empire. A true prison. Was he evil? No. For him it was his job. He had a passion for construction and building. But he did nothing to subvert the Soviet way of life, derived benefit from it, and most likely thought it was correct. Multiply that by millions and you get your average society, whether individuals are contributing to a Soviet Socialist State or a Western Society. You can't just run a country by fear. Many people must be on board, from the oligarchy to the top level beaurocrats to the mid level apparatchiks to the common man. Society is ruled by broad social currents. Mao didn't personally kill 65 million people. He and many other people set up an environment that manipulated common human features—cult worship, paranoia, herd mentality—and steered them in an evil direction. But the mob, the herd mentality was the grand perpetrator. And you'll find that common to all groups everywhere. That's why the Federalist Papers are so beautiful. Any group can slip from a civil society to a nightmare wreck. PS Thank you from the recommendations. I've tried some of those and couldn't get in to them. Will try again maybe it's the right time. PSS > However, it does not perform the role you suggest. I think that depends on who's looking, and at what. The OP is what really got me. Can't imagine having an app called "Trace Viewer" on my phone. Really brought me in to that day to day. And maybe my perspective on NK is different because I was born in the Soviet Union, and despite leaving at age 5, that has been the backdrop to my entire life.
      - tstactplsignore 10y ago
        That's very interesting- Thanks for the response.
        linkmotif 10y ago
        Thanks for your responses. I'm not often moved to make long comments but this "tablet computer" and the apparatus that was necessary to create it really hit me hard for some reason. So real.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
IslaDeEncanta 10y ago
The government of North Korea is one of the two puppet dictatorships established in the Korean peninsula after World War II. It was the will of the Korean people to establish a socialist democracy, not a Juche dictatorship, but in 1946 the USSR and USA decided that what the Korean people wanted was the least important concern. The point is that it wasn't the ideology of the Korean people that mattered, it was the clash of 2 imperialists and its result.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Dictators have come to power through many methods through history. Being given power by an outside force is only one possible route to totalitarianism. Many dictators start out popular and sometimes even democratically elected. The scariest thing about modern dictatorships is they may never go away once established. As surveillance technology improves, perfect ideological control becomes possible. As drones and robots replace human soldiers, uprisings become much less practical. Nuclear weapons eliminate the threat of foreign invasion. Eventually anti-aging will prevent the dictators from even dying. That was always the scariest part of 1984 for me. Not that the world was a dystopia, but that it was completely stable. The state could continue on for thousands of years. Or at least until they ran out of natural resources.
- linkmotif 10y ago
  That's a good point. Relevant.
Theodores 10y ago
There is more to it than that though, what do the North Koreans actually want? They want a federal Korea with two systems, two leaders, united as one country and with a seat at the U.N. for that one country. A united Korea would be a true world power within a generation, with GDP and population that would outshine all but one of the security council permanent members. None of the North's weapons point at the South, I think the North just want the USA out of the peninsula and for there to be an orderly reunification process without external interference. The South also expect unification to happen one day, it not being a hostile takeover. A united Korea with nuclear weapons would be deserved of veto rights at the U.N. and I don't believe the U.S. wants someone else at the top table. So a war is very much being fought, Korea can't be allowed to be united!!! It is easy to condemn the crazy Kim guy and slag off North Korea but I think that we are the ones propagandised against as much as them. In all my decades of watching and reading the news I have not once been told what the goals of the respective sides are regarding unification. None of these newsreaders have told me the implications of a united Korea either. I wonder if the U.S. is at war to keep Korea divided, as opposed to keeping their South Korean buddies safe from those crazies up North. I also think that North Korea is okay to censor out capitalism in its many advertised forms from the web since they are very much under siege/at war with the U.S.A. Would you want your people to be using electronic devices that the CIA could 'Arab Spring' a faux revolution from? Would you want your population drowning in fake news? Is it really that bad to just ban the mainstream media?!? To Ad-Block everything, for everyone? Is access to Facebook or being able to tweet now a human right? If the international community wanted to resolve North Korea it could be simple - unification - let Korea become a united country with the U.S. taking their tanks out, sorting out their issues by themselves with those pesky nukes swapped for a top seat at the U.N.
- paradite 10y ago
  This is one of the most interesting comments that I've seen on HN. Let me do some research on that when I am free. Edit: After reading the wikipedia article on Korea reunification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_reunification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_reunification), I start to wonder why both countries are not actively pursuing this goal that is obviously beneficial to both now. Maybe some details are missing from the wiki article?

ue_ 10y ago

Can you go into more detail please? I am very much against authoritarianism and the state as a whole, though I am in favour of certain modes of social organisation some consider unorthodox. I think we should educate each generation on the influence of power on people, the benefits and drawbacks of democracy, care for one's fellow man, the societal structure of capitalism, among other things. Edit: preferably via Priestly, Orwell, Wilde, Bernard Shaw and H.G Wells :)

linkmotif 10y ago
I mean it's this spot on earth where the nightmare reality of total authoritarianism lives today. We can look at it from without, to whatever extent possible, and remind ourselves that every generation earns the freedom that it has. Having something concrete like North Korea is much more powerful than a book like Nineteen Eighty-Four, a work of literature about some hypothetical place. What's interesting about total authoritarianism is that it never stems from one person but actually depends on a whole large group of people to perpetuate the social order that makes it possible. Authoritarianism is as much a collective phenomenon as the maintaining of free elections in free countries. Once organized in a certain way, people seem to maintain that inertia of organization no matter who or what is served by that mode, interrupted in their organizational mode by revolutions that shift societies from track to track.
- tstactplsignore 10y ago
  Strong disagree. North Korea is a disastrous country run by a truly evil government. However, it does not perform the role you suggest. We merely look on it from the outside in, with all of our small and little prejudices, and selectively picked historical knowledge. From such a vantage point, authoritarian always seems wrong. From the outside, it's trivial to understand and trivial to criticize. From within, from a perspective where authoritarianism has hijacked our own cultural values, our own patriotism, our own media, our cultural history, and historical stories, where the truth is always disputed and considered unpleasant to discuss in social gatherings, where friends and families really believe in it, criticism becomes far more difficult. What we need is both fictional and nonfiction insight into what it's like to experience authoritarianism firsthand, not picture-book,elementary school level accounts of how evil North Korea is. I recommend Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco as starting examples.
  - linkmotif 10y ago
    My grandfather was head of the main construction "trust" in Kiev and a member of the communist party. Thus he was head of all construction in the city. He was part and parcel of the system that all together constituted what really was rightfully called the Evil Empire. A true prison. Was he evil? No. For him it was his job. He had a passion for construction and building. But he did nothing to subvert the Soviet way of life, derived benefit from it, and most likely thought it was correct. Multiply that by millions and you get your average society, whether individuals are contributing to a Soviet Socialist State or a Western Society. You can't just run a country by fear. Many people must be on board, from the oligarchy to the top level beaurocrats to the mid level apparatchiks to the common man. Society is ruled by broad social currents. Mao didn't personally kill 65 million people. He and many other people set up an environment that manipulated common human features—cult worship, paranoia, herd mentality—and steered them in an evil direction. But the mob, the herd mentality was the grand perpetrator. And you'll find that common to all groups everywhere. That's why the Federalist Papers are so beautiful. Any group can slip from a civil society to a nightmare wreck. PS Thank you from the recommendations. I've tried some of those and couldn't get in to them. Will try again maybe it's the right time. PSS > However, it does not perform the role you suggest. I think that depends on who's looking, and at what. The OP is what really got me. Can't imagine having an app called "Trace Viewer" on my phone. Really brought me in to that day to day. And maybe my perspective on NK is different because I was born in the Soviet Union, and despite leaving at age 5, that has been the backdrop to my entire life.
    - tstactplsignore 10y ago
      That's very interesting- Thanks for the response.
      - linkmotif 10y ago
        Thanks for your responses. I'm not often moved to make long comments but this "tablet computer" and the apparatus that was necessary to create it really hit me hard for some reason. So real.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

IslaDeEncanta 10y ago

The government of North Korea is one of the two puppet dictatorships established in the Korean peninsula after World War II. It was the will of the Korean people to establish a socialist democracy, not a Juche dictatorship, but in 1946 the USSR and USA decided that what the Korean people wanted was the least important concern. The point is that it wasn't the ideology of the Korean people that mattered, it was the clash of 2 imperialists and its result.

Houshalter 10y ago
Dictators have come to power through many methods through history. Being given power by an outside force is only one possible route to totalitarianism. Many dictators start out popular and sometimes even democratically elected. The scariest thing about modern dictatorships is they may never go away once established. As surveillance technology improves, perfect ideological control becomes possible. As drones and robots replace human soldiers, uprisings become much less practical. Nuclear weapons eliminate the threat of foreign invasion. Eventually anti-aging will prevent the dictators from even dying. That was always the scariest part of 1984 for me. Not that the world was a dystopia, but that it was completely stable. The state could continue on for thousands of years. Or at least until they ran out of natural resources.
linkmotif 10y ago
That's a good point. Relevant.

Theodores 10y ago

There is more to it than that though, what do the North Koreans actually want? They want a federal Korea with two systems, two leaders, united as one country and with a seat at the U.N. for that one country. A united Korea would be a true world power within a generation, with GDP and population that would outshine all but one of the security council permanent members. None of the North's weapons point at the South, I think the North just want the USA out of the peninsula and for there to be an orderly reunification process without external interference. The South also expect unification to happen one day, it not being a hostile takeover. A united Korea with nuclear weapons would be deserved of veto rights at the U.N. and I don't believe the U.S. wants someone else at the top table. So a war is very much being fought, Korea can't be allowed to be united!!! It is easy to condemn the crazy Kim guy and slag off North Korea but I think that we are the ones propagandised against as much as them. In all my decades of watching and reading the news I have not once been told what the goals of the respective sides are regarding unification. None of these newsreaders have told me the implications of a united Korea either. I wonder if the U.S. is at war to keep Korea divided, as opposed to keeping their South Korean buddies safe from those crazies up North. I also think that North Korea is okay to censor out capitalism in its many advertised forms from the web since they are very much under siege/at war with the U.S.A. Would you want your people to be using electronic devices that the CIA could 'Arab Spring' a faux revolution from? Would you want your population drowning in fake news? Is it really that bad to just ban the mainstream media?!? To Ad-Block everything, for everyone? Is access to Facebook or being able to tweet now a human right? If the international community wanted to resolve North Korea it could be simple - unification - let Korea become a united country with the U.S. taking their tanks out, sorting out their issues by themselves with those pesky nukes swapped for a top seat at the U.N.

paradite 10y ago
This is one of the most interesting comments that I've seen on HN. Let me do some research on that when I am free. Edit: After reading the wikipedia article on Korea reunification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_reunification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_reunification), I start to wonder why both countries are not actively pursuing this goal that is obviously beneficial to both now. Maybe some details are missing from the wiki article?