7 ms·

It boggles my mind how little anyone, inside or outside, has done to change North Korea. Maybe i am just ignorant of how difficult it is or the attempts done.

bitops 15y ago
It is easy to say that North Korea should change. What is difficult is articulating the type of change that one would like to see occur and how to implement it. Should Kim Jong-Il have been ousted a la Saddam Hussein in Iraq? How dangerous would that have been, considering that North Korea has nuclear arms? What to do in case of a conflict that spills over into neighboring countries? What would China's take on all of it be? Would they stand idly by or back up their Communist cousin? Once the dictator is gone, what do you do? Let the military take over and potentially let it establish a junta government, Myanmar-style? Or do you try to install democracy forcibly? Would the right thing to do be to hand North Korea over to South Korea, integrating the two countries by shotgun wedding? The complexities quickly exponentiate. Consider the cultural shock of the North Koreans once they're introduced to modern South Korean culture alone. If German re-unification is any indicator, putting together two halves of a country that have been split into Communism and western capitalism is not a trivial task. Also consider the cult of personality built up around Kim Jong-Il. The situation in N. Korea could quickly become explosive once people realize the deceit they've been living in. So it's difficult thing to do, just by itself. All the econo-political ramifications just make it that much harder.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Nuclear weapons barely change the equation. The best estimate is that North Korea could begin firing around 10,000 artillery shells per minute into densely populated suburbs areas around Seoul on a moment's notice. Even if through some masterful and historic level of effort we managed to shut down those artillery bombardments or evacuate the targeted areas in a mere half an hour that still leaves hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and huge numbers of homes and businesses destroyed. It would be a destruction on the scale of a natural disaster such as the earthquake off Japan earlier this year. Add in the very real possibility of North Korean nuclear weapons landing on Seoul, Tokyo, Taiwan or maybe even the US mainland and that starts focusing your thinking about how worthwhile it would have to be to depose the North Korean regime.
  - cdk 15y ago
    I remember hearing that because of this all large buildings in South Korea are required to have a shelter area able to withstand such attack.
asimeqi 15y ago
Coming from a country that had it almost as bad as North Korea, I can say that nothing can be done from outside and little can be done from inside. There is only a handful of people that are in charge in North Korea that can try to effect some kind of change. But even if suddenly one day they wake up with the best of intentions and all cleared up about where they would want to go, i.e. to achieve some sort of South Korean democracy, it will be extremely hard to improve anything in a short amount time (and by short time I mean around 10 years). Basically the people living there today are screwed. Ideologically they have grown up to expect everything handed down from the state. How can the state hand down everything if it doesn't own everything? Economically, maybe 90% of economic activity is useless. In a free economy all of them would be closed. How would you cope with 90% unemployment?
- GFischer 15y ago
  You remind me of a National Geographic article on post-communist Russia, and how the elderly wanted to go back, since the new system was much harsher on them. And post-communist Russia is an example of what could happen in North Korea, replacing one group of tyrants with a mafia. Only N.K. doesn't have the kind of natural resources Russia has. Maybe Albania might be a better example.
  - asimeqi 15y ago
    Albania is the nearest one can come to find a similar regime to North Korea's. The country was so totalitarian you weren't free to choose almost anything. The school where you went, including the branch of study in University was decided by the state. Where to work was decided by the state. The state provided you with a house (after many, many years of waiting). The state even told you where to buy the bread, where to buy the milk, where and in what day to buy the meat, all in different stores of course. The state "guaranteed" the right to work, so almost everyone got a job and all jobs had quite similar salaries. Almost nobody had savings since salaries and prices were calculated to balance themselves for a normal family. Since everybody had to work, lots of fictitious jobs were invented. And people learned soon enough that no matter how much you worked you still got paid and got paid the same, so nobody was really working. So, when the communism collapsed in 1990, the country collapsed too. What saved the people was the fact that Albania is a very small country of 3 million in the middle of Europe so about 30% of people were able to immigrate. Now where would 8 million of North Koreans immigrate if suddenly communism collapsed in their country? I don't know.
louislouis 15y ago
Well there's only so many dictators we can knockout at any one time. We've been targeting those oil rich countries in the past decade where the ROI will be worth our while. The minerals of North Korea do look pretty sweet but we need some time to refill our barracks and sort out our own economic mess first. Don't worry though we've got economic sanctions in place against NK already so they won't be developing much.
tintin 15y ago
There was once a documentary about the mass games. It was very strange to see that a lot of people were very honored to play for the big leader. They had little to eat, had to work hard, but they were doing it all for the big leader. If you can't (are not allowed) to look over the fence, you won't know that the grass is greener on the other side.
- bitops 15y ago
  That movie "A State of Mind" - a really excellent documentary film.
thaumaturgy 15y ago
There has been a lot of work put towards North Korea -- some of it we know about, and probably some other that we don't. For example, there have been numerous attempts recently to draw them into nuclear disarmament talks, and a lot of aid has been provided as a carrot for those talks. But, from a cold, inhumane, and strictly logical perspective, North Korea is a problem that will probably solve itself. Assuming that most of the non-mainstream stuff that I read and hear about it is true (and I'm a little unsettled at even wondering that, let alone specifying "non-mainstream"), North Korea is badly starved for resources. When your population is starving, when your media singularly carries fictional programming about your state and leaders, when your education is tightly authoritarian, you are less likely to produce the geniuses needed to solve engineering challenges like accurate long-range guidance systems. Ordinarily, a resource-starved state would devolve into desperation; in North Korea's case, I'm not sure whether to expect that, because the entire state seems to be so uniquely dependent upon the whims and notions of a single individual -- its party leader at the time. If Kim Jong-Un continues to place pride before population, then it's likely that the state will collapse in our lifetimes in a mostly nonviolent way. If, on the other hand, he decides to try to take some kind of action, he'll eventually be forced into a game of poker where everyone at the table knows that he's got the weakest hand. Although he could certainly do a lot of damage on the way out -- mostly to neighboring South Korea and Japan -- he could not destroy the Earth, and he'd be faced with an immediate and deadly counterstrike from more capable nations. It certainly is a terrible situation for the poor souls born into that country. Still, sometimes the best strategy is to simply wait out your opponent and let him starve to death, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this was in fact the Western strategy.
- hcho 15y ago
  You are aware of the fact that NK is PRC's puppet state, aren't you? NK will live on as it is, till PRC ceases tp support it.
  - gojomo 15y ago
    My impression is that at this point 'puppet' is far too strong a term. North Korea still relies on the PRC's tolerance and patronage, and the PRC doesn't prefer any outcome that boosts the influence of the US and South Korea. But the PRC's influence and patience with North Korea are limited. Some of the Wikileaks cables indicate China has begun backing away from the regime: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables-china-reunified-korea http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables...
ocdprogrammer 15y ago
I don't understand why all this urge in the "west" to change the north korea ? Not only that you believe all the western propaganda against NK but you have no doubts that you definitely know whats better and best for NK. Yes, you have no doubts that the west should rob them like they did with Irak and "set them free" and give them the shitty innefective democracy which strangely works only to make the western rich richer and the rest rich enough to not die.Why doesn't the west mind his damn business ? Why this arrogance that you know what others had to do ? If the US/Europe is a paradise, why are the poverty/corruption/unhappiness levels so high ? Why are u still in denial about what's really going on home but u have no doubts about whats really going on in NK and China ? This is some incomplete and not structured rant but still i make a case that the west and it's cool kids are arrogant, doubtless and biased like hell and work involuntarily to fulfill their invisible master's plan (again and forever ?).
- middus 15y ago
  I guess you're trolling, but anyway. All politics aside, the people in NK are hungry. Hungry as in "I don't have anything to eat". There's no doubt about the fact that the Western World managed to get this right.
  - ocdprogrammer 15y ago
    I'm not trolling. Even if the people in NK are hungry (but they are not more hungry then the poor in the west), this does not give you the right to "save" them and take their little left posesions in the process, because you know, US never saved anyone without the army taking ground. If you see a poor man hungry on the street and you give him food, that's "saving him" but if you take his home and take his belongings because you can "manage" them better than him and if you force him to work for you, that's not "saving" him. That's slavery hidden in the form of charity. Isn't it strange that US goverment never saves the real poor of the world (saharian africans - they leave their salvation to red cross and independent charity) instead somehow US gov. always finds some richer "poors" and if they can't be "saved" by corruption and bribery, they are "saved" by armed invasion?
- pyre 15y ago
forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
It is not possible to change North Korea in the short term. Like any communist society, everybody has learned to live according to the rules. It takes generations to change that, and even then it is difficult. The learnt that the state provides everything, that they are nothing without the state. People over 20 years old are not going to learn ever to live by their own means. They need communism.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  I think saying that they need communism--or even that they would be worse off without it--is a little much. While the state provides everything, that's just a relative measure: in an absolute sense, it does not provide very much at all. I think that they would be better off without communism even in view of the inevitable difficulties transitioning.
  - dalke 15y ago
    The North Korean constitution (2009) "officially rejects North Korea's founding ideology of communism." (Quote from Wikipedia, and I've heard it elsewhere.) It's better to say it's an absolute dictatorship, or absolute monarchy (with the Divine Right of Kings thrown in for good measure).
  - RyanMcGreal 15y ago
    Russian life expectancy plummeted in the decade after the fall of communism. Don't downplay the extreme difficulty of transitioning from a command economy to a functioning liberal market economy.
    - dinkumthinkum 15y ago
      Russia and North Korea are completely different. I don't think North Korean life expectancy has very far to plummet.
      - tikhonj 15y ago
        Thank you, that's exactly my point: since the government isn't doing much anyhow, going over to a different system is almost definitely going to be an improvement.
spodek 15y ago
I wrote an extended series on North Korean strategy that begins by explaining the current incredible stability. Until Kim Jung Il died, since 1945 a country the world disliked and actively tried to change had two (!) leaders, father and son. It begins here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-preview http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-preview I believe a strategic systems perspective reveals why that stability is so durable, but reveals little opportunity to change it. I can tell you what won't work -- military, diplomacy, aid, and sanctions. The most effective agent of change so far is the smuggling of dvds into the country, which reveal how different the outside world from the government propaganda. (by the way, I'm in the process of making an e-book out of it. If you're willing to read it critically and give constructive criticism, I'll send you an advance copy)

bitops 15y ago

It is easy to say that North Korea should change. What is difficult is articulating the type of change that one would like to see occur and how to implement it. Should Kim Jong-Il have been ousted a la Saddam Hussein in Iraq? How dangerous would that have been, considering that North Korea has nuclear arms? What to do in case of a conflict that spills over into neighboring countries? What would China's take on all of it be? Would they stand idly by or back up their Communist cousin? Once the dictator is gone, what do you do? Let the military take over and potentially let it establish a junta government, Myanmar-style? Or do you try to install democracy forcibly? Would the right thing to do be to hand North Korea over to South Korea, integrating the two countries by shotgun wedding? The complexities quickly exponentiate. Consider the cultural shock of the North Koreans once they're introduced to modern South Korean culture alone. If German re-unification is any indicator, putting together two halves of a country that have been split into Communism and western capitalism is not a trivial task. Also consider the cult of personality built up around Kim Jong-Il. The situation in N. Korea could quickly become explosive once people realize the deceit they've been living in. So it's difficult thing to do, just by itself. All the econo-political ramifications just make it that much harder.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Nuclear weapons barely change the equation. The best estimate is that North Korea could begin firing around 10,000 artillery shells per minute into densely populated suburbs areas around Seoul on a moment's notice. Even if through some masterful and historic level of effort we managed to shut down those artillery bombardments or evacuate the targeted areas in a mere half an hour that still leaves hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and huge numbers of homes and businesses destroyed. It would be a destruction on the scale of a natural disaster such as the earthquake off Japan earlier this year. Add in the very real possibility of North Korean nuclear weapons landing on Seoul, Tokyo, Taiwan or maybe even the US mainland and that starts focusing your thinking about how worthwhile it would have to be to depose the North Korean regime.
- cdk 15y ago
  I remember hearing that because of this all large buildings in South Korea are required to have a shelter area able to withstand such attack.

asimeqi 15y ago

Coming from a country that had it almost as bad as North Korea, I can say that nothing can be done from outside and little can be done from inside. There is only a handful of people that are in charge in North Korea that can try to effect some kind of change. But even if suddenly one day they wake up with the best of intentions and all cleared up about where they would want to go, i.e. to achieve some sort of South Korean democracy, it will be extremely hard to improve anything in a short amount time (and by short time I mean around 10 years). Basically the people living there today are screwed. Ideologically they have grown up to expect everything handed down from the state. How can the state hand down everything if it doesn't own everything? Economically, maybe 90% of economic activity is useless. In a free economy all of them would be closed. How would you cope with 90% unemployment?

GFischer 15y ago
You remind me of a National Geographic article on post-communist Russia, and how the elderly wanted to go back, since the new system was much harsher on them. And post-communist Russia is an example of what could happen in North Korea, replacing one group of tyrants with a mafia. Only N.K. doesn't have the kind of natural resources Russia has. Maybe Albania might be a better example.
- asimeqi 15y ago
  Albania is the nearest one can come to find a similar regime to North Korea's. The country was so totalitarian you weren't free to choose almost anything. The school where you went, including the branch of study in University was decided by the state. Where to work was decided by the state. The state provided you with a house (after many, many years of waiting). The state even told you where to buy the bread, where to buy the milk, where and in what day to buy the meat, all in different stores of course. The state "guaranteed" the right to work, so almost everyone got a job and all jobs had quite similar salaries. Almost nobody had savings since salaries and prices were calculated to balance themselves for a normal family. Since everybody had to work, lots of fictitious jobs were invented. And people learned soon enough that no matter how much you worked you still got paid and got paid the same, so nobody was really working. So, when the communism collapsed in 1990, the country collapsed too. What saved the people was the fact that Albania is a very small country of 3 million in the middle of Europe so about 30% of people were able to immigrate. Now where would 8 million of North Koreans immigrate if suddenly communism collapsed in their country? I don't know.

louislouis 15y ago

Well there's only so many dictators we can knockout at any one time. We've been targeting those oil rich countries in the past decade where the ROI will be worth our while. The minerals of North Korea do look pretty sweet but we need some time to refill our barracks and sort out our own economic mess first. Don't worry though we've got economic sanctions in place against NK already so they won't be developing much.

tintin 15y ago

There was once a documentary about the mass games. It was very strange to see that a lot of people were very honored to play for the big leader. They had little to eat, had to work hard, but they were doing it all for the big leader. If you can't (are not allowed) to look over the fence, you won't know that the grass is greener on the other side.

bitops 15y ago
That movie "A State of Mind" - a really excellent documentary film.

thaumaturgy 15y ago

There has been a lot of work put towards North Korea -- some of it we know about, and probably some other that we don't. For example, there have been numerous attempts recently to draw them into nuclear disarmament talks, and a lot of aid has been provided as a carrot for those talks. But, from a cold, inhumane, and strictly logical perspective, North Korea is a problem that will probably solve itself. Assuming that most of the non-mainstream stuff that I read and hear about it is true (and I'm a little unsettled at even wondering that, let alone specifying "non-mainstream"), North Korea is badly starved for resources. When your population is starving, when your media singularly carries fictional programming about your state and leaders, when your education is tightly authoritarian, you are less likely to produce the geniuses needed to solve engineering challenges like accurate long-range guidance systems. Ordinarily, a resource-starved state would devolve into desperation; in North Korea's case, I'm not sure whether to expect that, because the entire state seems to be so uniquely dependent upon the whims and notions of a single individual -- its party leader at the time. If Kim Jong-Un continues to place pride before population, then it's likely that the state will collapse in our lifetimes in a mostly nonviolent way. If, on the other hand, he decides to try to take some kind of action, he'll eventually be forced into a game of poker where everyone at the table knows that he's got the weakest hand. Although he could certainly do a lot of damage on the way out -- mostly to neighboring South Korea and Japan -- he could not destroy the Earth, and he'd be faced with an immediate and deadly counterstrike from more capable nations. It certainly is a terrible situation for the poor souls born into that country. Still, sometimes the best strategy is to simply wait out your opponent and let him starve to death, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this was in fact the Western strategy.

hcho 15y ago
You are aware of the fact that NK is PRC's puppet state, aren't you? NK will live on as it is, till PRC ceases tp support it.
- gojomo 15y ago
  My impression is that at this point 'puppet' is far too strong a term. North Korea still relies on the PRC's tolerance and patronage, and the PRC doesn't prefer any outcome that boosts the influence of the US and South Korea. But the PRC's influence and patience with North Korea are limited. Some of the Wikileaks cables indicate China has begun backing away from the regime: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables-china-reunified-korea http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables...

ocdprogrammer 15y ago

I don't understand why all this urge in the "west" to change the north korea ? Not only that you believe all the western propaganda against NK but you have no doubts that you definitely know whats better and best for NK. Yes, you have no doubts that the west should rob them like they did with Irak and "set them free" and give them the shitty innefective democracy which strangely works only to make the western rich richer and the rest rich enough to not die.Why doesn't the west mind his damn business ? Why this arrogance that you know what others had to do ? If the US/Europe is a paradise, why are the poverty/corruption/unhappiness levels so high ? Why are u still in denial about what's really going on home but u have no doubts about whats really going on in NK and China ? This is some incomplete and not structured rant but still i make a case that the west and it's cool kids are arrogant, doubtless and biased like hell and work involuntarily to fulfill their invisible master's plan (again and forever ?).

middus 15y ago
I guess you're trolling, but anyway. All politics aside, the people in NK are hungry. Hungry as in "I don't have anything to eat". There's no doubt about the fact that the Western World managed to get this right.
- ocdprogrammer 15y ago
  I'm not trolling. Even if the people in NK are hungry (but they are not more hungry then the poor in the west), this does not give you the right to "save" them and take their little left posesions in the process, because you know, US never saved anyone without the army taking ground. If you see a poor man hungry on the street and you give him food, that's "saving him" but if you take his home and take his belongings because you can "manage" them better than him and if you force him to work for you, that's not "saving" him. That's slavery hidden in the form of charity. Isn't it strange that US goverment never saves the real poor of the world (saharian africans - they leave their salvation to red cross and independent charity) instead somehow US gov. always finds some richer "poors" and if they can't be "saved" by corruption and bribery, they are "saved" by armed invasion?
pyre 15y ago

forgottenpaswrd 15y ago

It is not possible to change North Korea in the short term. Like any communist society, everybody has learned to live according to the rules. It takes generations to change that, and even then it is difficult. The learnt that the state provides everything, that they are nothing without the state. People over 20 years old are not going to learn ever to live by their own means. They need communism.

tikhonj 15y ago
I think saying that they need communism--or even that they would be worse off without it--is a little much. While the state provides everything, that's just a relative measure: in an absolute sense, it does not provide very much at all. I think that they would be better off without communism even in view of the inevitable difficulties transitioning.
- dalke 15y ago
  The North Korean constitution (2009) "officially rejects North Korea's founding ideology of communism." (Quote from Wikipedia, and I've heard it elsewhere.) It's better to say it's an absolute dictatorship, or absolute monarchy (with the Divine Right of Kings thrown in for good measure).
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  Russian life expectancy plummeted in the decade after the fall of communism. Don't downplay the extreme difficulty of transitioning from a command economy to a functioning liberal market economy.
  - dinkumthinkum 15y ago
    Russia and North Korea are completely different. I don't think North Korean life expectancy has very far to plummet.
    - tikhonj 15y ago
      Thank you, that's exactly my point: since the government isn't doing much anyhow, going over to a different system is almost definitely going to be an improvement.

spodek 15y ago

I wrote an extended series on North Korean strategy that begins by explaining the current incredible stability. Until Kim Jung Il died, since 1945 a country the world disliked and actively tried to change had two (!) leaders, father and son. It begins here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-preview http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-preview I believe a strategic systems perspective reveals why that stability is so durable, but reveals little opportunity to change it. I can tell you what won't work -- military, diplomacy, aid, and sanctions. The most effective agent of change so far is the smuggling of dvds into the country, which reveal how different the outside world from the government propaganda. (by the way, I'm in the process of making an e-book out of it. If you're willing to read it critically and give constructive criticism, I'll send you an advance copy)