North Korea goes full retard

The problem with North Korea is really that if you do decide to take out the regime there, you really are stuck with having to indoctrinate and educate 20 million absolutely starved rotten peasants. I mean the second war breaks out they will literally be trying to get into South Korea and China by the millions.

North Koreans are already about 6 inches on average shorter than South Koreans due to malnutrition. Then you have the fact that they've been literally stuck in an alternate 1950s style universe for the past 60 years. Its just awful.

We, as in the world community, China, the US, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, should actually unite and do something about the situation, just based on the concentration camps alone that justifies world intervention in my mind.

But no one wants the responsibility of cleaning up the mess that has been created there.

Its really pretty awful. Of all the places in the world where the US has intervened in the past decade, none of them were as deserving of intervention as North Korea, they just all had easily extracted resources like oil that made them more important.

Sucks that real humanitarian crisis get absolutely zero real attention, but that's the world we live in.

The current regime knows it can never fire a nuclear warhead at one of its neighbors. It knows this. It can threaten, it can hoot and holler, but the moment they actually do carry through, they will be utterly and completely annihilated. They talk a good game about their military, and their willingness to die in nuclear hellfire and armageddon, but they're really just trucking around in old worn out Soviet era leftovers and telling themselves they can handle nuclear war because they're delusional, like someone who talks a lot of shit about being a great fighter, then gets their asses handed to them when push comes to shove. Its about intimidation and appearances, that's it. They don't mean it, they've been far too pragmatic in how they use threats of nuclear weapons and violence over the years to actually be crazy/out of contact with reality.

North Korea doesn't have the industry, doesn't have the wealth, doesn't have the capability to feed and to support its armies in a time of war anymore, hasn't for most of a decade. The fastest thing a war there would bring is revolution against the standing government. Threats to destroy South Korea are paltry. Maybe in the 70s North Korea could have carried through on its threats to wipe out Seoul, but now? Not happening. The South Koreans have spent decades preparing, during massive economic prosperity in their nation mind, for the day they go to war with the North. The North has no idea how far US and Korean capabilities exceed theirs. Maybe some of the leadership at the upper most echelons do, but the vast majority of North Koreans are told that their nation is the most powerful, most glorious, most prosperous, most militarily ready nation on the planet, they really have no idea how bad the baseball bat up their asses would be if they actually did try to start some shit.

So basically my point is this: North Korea is the dog with too much bark and not enough bite. I'd say almost everything they're doing now is the result of a military who dominates the new leader and is telling him that they need more food aid, and the best way to go about that is to cry nuclear war over sanctions and demand more rice from the US and China.

Hate the US all they want, it hasn't helped them one iota over the past half century. At a certain point, when you're hungry, and your family members are starving to death around you, hate becomes a meaningless concept.

There really isn't any justice to be gained, and none suppressed. You can't erase history, and the history of modern Asia is ultimately the responsibility of the Japanese. They're the ones who tried to conquer the entire region prior to World War 2. They are the ones engaging in the types of activities seen during the Rape of Nanking, where people were herded by the tens of thousands and mass slaughtered with hand grenades and machine guns. Japan didn't just do that to China, they did that to every society they attempted to conquer. North Korea today is as much a result of rebelling against the Japanese conquest as it is anything else. Juche ideology is born of a complex mix of Japanese and Korean ideas and concepts on the order and nature of the universe. Without Japanese conquest, there was no North versus South Korea, because there was no need for US/Soviet intervention into the nation after the end of WW2 if it had not been for the fact that the Japanese held the peninsula and had to be governmentally replaced after their defeat in the conflict.

Regardless, I'd much rather be born a South Korean than a North. Its not even remotely debateable.

They had every right to self determination, the problem is that you can't self determine if your government has been subsumed by another state entity which just got its ass nuked into last century.

Once the Soviets and the US started divvying up the planet, it was inevitable that there was going to be places divided up along ideological lines. Same shit happened after the Ottomans collapsed after World War 1, and Africa and the Middle East were divvied up amongst European powers.

The goal wasn't to prevent self determination, it was to try and rebuild these societies, albeit along ideologically favorable lines. It would not have made sense for the US to build up the South Korean government to be communists, any more than it would have made sense for the Chinese and Russians to help North Korea rebuild as a capitalist state.

The same shit happened to Germany, and all of Europe. The Koreas are not unique in this.

Sanctions don't work, so the argument then would be....? Let all of Korea fall under the purview of the old Soviets? How did that work out for the world they ruled? Not very well.

Now, where I think the US fucked up, big time, in post Cold War politics, was not extending a hand out to many of the old Soviet allies and satellite states. But again, this isn't an issue reserved solely for the Koreas. Lots of little African nations also felt the brunt of that. If you side with the losers in a conflict, there tends to be consequences. Is that fair? Probably not. But it is reality.


The idea, though, the over the past two decades, under Clinton, Bush and now Obama, that if North Korea had actually played ball nicely, and acted like a willing partner on the world stage, realizing the Cold War was over and that their side lost and now was the time to get on board and work with the rest of the globe to rebuild their society, that they would be in the situation they are in today, is ludicrous. China is all the proof you need that the idea that modern North Korea is the result of US sanctions and US refusal to work with them is nonsense. China was as communist as you can get, and our enemy, but they're one of our most important economic partners today. All it took was them being willing to come to the table to make it happen. No one in the US gives a shit that they forcibly abort women's babies in the countryside on a regular basis, or that they have more execution with less due process than any nation on Earth each year, etc, or at least, no one with any authority to do anything about it does.

This is what could have happened to North Korea had they just been willing to play ball since 1989.

Julian the Apostate_sl said:

Japan has as good a reason to hate the US from 60 years ago as anyone yet they seem to be doing fine.

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With all due respect, I disagree. Japan has zero reason to hate anyone, everything we gave them they earned, ten times ten thousand fold. The bastards got off lucky, frankly, with just two nukes being used against them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoW2WYdOsvg

Mikhail, going down the list of your responses:

Self determination can't exist when your nation no longer exists, and the Korean nation no longer existed for all intents and purposes it was part and parcel of the Japanese Imperialist cult, subsumed to it, and controlled by it. There was no one to lead, except revolutionary governments, of which there were two, one Communist and the other Capitalist. Both were backed by larger powers. A stalemate was the result. There is no one to self determine themselves in that situation, because you have ongoing conflict. If the US had just said "Meh, let the South go to the North" then today, all you would have, is the entire peninsula in the state North Korea is in.

Second statement: You're arguing a point that I did not and was not making. It was not in US or Soviet interests to spend their economic strength during the Cold War to build nations which were friendly into competing economic and governmental systems. The Soviets did not go around making "capitalist" states, and the "capitalist" states weren't going to go around making "communist states".

Its the justification of a real world fact that governments take actions which they perceive to be in their best interests at any particular moment. To pretend that they can do anything but, is naivety of the highest order. States exist to promote their points of view, their interests. That's why they are states to begin with. That's all they exist to do. To care for their interests. Not to do "right" or "wrong" which are wholly defined by the individual's perception, and which states redefine solely based on their interests on a daily basis anyway. In the mind of the State, it is always doing "good" when it is working in its own interests. So there is no moral argument to make here, because morality in this situation is defined by the powers involved in the conflict. To the Soviets, they were the good guys and the US the bad guys, to the US, they were the good guys and the Soviets were the bad guys, to all the little people around the world, there are no good guys. Never has been. Never will be.

How does it prove your point? What point do you have? That the US should be held responsible for not spending precious resources to build up hostile nations during a global conflict? Nonsensical, and the Soviets didn't do it either. Its not our job to build up enemies. It may be wise in some cases, like when those nations come to you and make concessions which are actually reasonable, like China did in opening up its economy to growth. North Korea has not done that. The most they've done is promise to stop building nukes, then keep building them anyway, and then when caught, threatened to launch those nukes at their neighbors. The United Nations voted to sanction them UNANIMOUSLY over this latest nuclear test. Meaning China, the Russians, everyone is on board because everyone knows the North Koreas are being obstinant and just confrontational enough to keep things interesting, because that's the way the military government stays in power over there.

I think you and I have very different definitions of communism.

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I don't have a definition of communism. Because there is no singular valid definition of communism. Which type of communism? Marxism? Bakuninism? Leninism? Trotskyism? Stalinism? Maoism? Juche? What about Pol Pot's agrarian communism? What about the communism that exists at a local level in tribal societies? Or the Anarcho Syndicalism in Spain before they were massacred by Franco's forces? Or the Communism of the Paris Commune during the French Revolution? Which one? I know which one I prefer (hint: the one that actually worked for two hundred thousand years minus the 12,000 years since the advent of agriculture), but there is no singular definition of communism which could be applied equally across the board. I'm merely using the terminology as it is commonly understood to define East and West polarities as they existed during the Cold War. I don't have a problem with communism or employing communist thought in finding ways to run a society, to make things more equitable. If it weren't for critical theory, which is heavily predicated on Marxist thought and post Marxist thinking, archaeology and anthropology and sociology would be decades behind where they are today. I'm not anti communist so please don't strawman my statements into one because it serves your rhetorical desires.

All that said, however, to argue Mao was not a "communist" because he wasn't "your kind of communist" is a no true scotsman fallacy, and just wrong, historically and factually. Mao was a Communist. His entire ideology was based in Communism. Everything he did, from the start through the Cultural Revolution, was predicated on Marxist and Communist thoughts and ideas as they existed in that realm of ideology at the time. Mao was one of the most prolific writers of Communist theory. His entire book on guerrilla warfare is predicated on Communist ideology. Its absurd denialism to say Mao was not a communist, or that the Chinese government "weren't really communist" because he wasn't "your kind of communist" which is what you're doing when you claim your special definition of communism is the only valid one. The problem is you've got a mythical notion that theory and reality are in harmony, and they are not. Communist theory allows one a very specific and very useful world view, when one is looking at concepts of power relationships, social status, etc. but as with anything good, taken too far it can go off the rails, as it has when implemented time and time again. All ideologies are, fundamentally, burgeoned by this reality, it is not unique to Communism or Marxist based thought, unlike what some conservatives and what have you may assert to the contrary.

Let me ask you something: Was Lysenkoism a communist idea? Or a capitalist one? Do you know what Lysenkoism was? Do you not realize that Lysenkoism is a really good argument that Communist theory can lead to really bad results, just like fanatical adherence to a free market ideology can and do? Purism is unreality, and impossibiliity, fanaticism draped in near religious devotion to theory versus practice. Robert Heinlein I think said it best when he said "One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority."

"Play ball" in this case means "reconfigure their economy so that we can rape their labor pool

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Really, RAPE their labor pool?

Which economy is having their labor pool raped? The one with zero capacity for industry or development, because it all rusted or was stolen to sell for food on the black market in Pyongyang and Chongjin? Where people literally had to peel bark from trees and boil it to eat to survive, where dogs and frogs were hunted nearly to extinction within the borders of the nation because of the mass starvation and desperation, where every economic interest is subsumed to the military complex and the cult of personality figurehead? Or the nations with a thriving middle class, with some of the best global economies and the best economies in Asia? What does "raping a labor pool" even mean, or imply? Does it imply that people who would have been stuck in a rural area, with little education, no contact with the outside world, and reduced to poverty for their entire lives have the opportunity to move to a city, get a job, work their butts off, send their kids to a good school, pay for good tutors, so their children can get good jobs and help support them in their retirement? Or does it imply that entire industries will be shut down, and millions left starving as the government fails to function because it cannot meet the demands placed upon it by society with a command economy so incompetently organized and run? Your entire outlook is so massively one sided and ideologically driven you can't see how disconnected from reality your statements are. You're a good person, but goddamn man. Just goddamn.

Why should they (North Korea) do it (get with the times and join the rest of us in the globalized economy)? So they can stop being in a situation where the entire world hates them and fears their unstable and inconsistent choices and actions, and so they can stop being forced to use starvation as a population control mechanism and creating the closest thing to hell on Earth imagineable. It was not our responsibility, nor in our interests, to throw money hand over fist at nations which had declared us mortal enemies during the Cold War. Especially when, since the end of the Cold War, we HAVE thrown money, food, and other aid at them hand over fist for two decades, and in the end they've only gotten more aggressive, more wanton, and more malicious.

You're blaming it on the US, but its really the Soviet's and the Juche leadership's fault, who were fighting a losing battle and dug in their heels for decades, grinding their entire society, and all the societies under their umbrella, to a halt. When they collapsed, all their former satellites, who used to get foreign aid from them, fell apart. The Soviet food aid and money and military aid were the only, I repeat ONLY, things that kept North Korea from becoming what it has become decades earlier due to Juche mismanagement of their economy. This is just the unfortunate reality. To blame that on the US is to be willfully, almost maliciously, ignorant of the facts as they stand historically.

Deng Xiaoping, upon taking power after Mao's death, quoted Mao saying "Shi shi qiu shi" ( ????) "The time has come to seek truth from facts" What he meant by that was that China could no longer afford to be ideological in its economic relations. This is the example North Korea should be following, if they desire similar prosperity as Japan, China and South Korea have. But that would undermine the credibility of the military run government they have, and by undermine I mean completely destroy, because it would call into question the entire purpose of their existence, because they have existed solely to "oppose the evil American imperialists" for decades now. The people responsible for the post Cold War situation in North Korea more than anyone else is the military elite in North Korea for being obstinant and absurdist, and resistant utterly to change.

Trollface_sl said:

Japanese were dipshits but considering the time, I am not surprised. They were playing the game of imperialist (1900 and Onward) To name a few, Germany (Central Africa), Italy (Ethiopia), France (Southeast Asia, West Africa, and more), Britain (fuckton), and USA (Philippines, "Protectorate" treaty over ENTIRE South American continent). Americans, particular, were debating to expand their sphere of influence over China for "market share." Funny thing. That's what Japanese did as well. They forced China into shitty treaty after First Sino-Japanese War that granted Japan exclusive trade rights over Liaodong and other coastal cities. After this treaty, their manufacturing exports skyrocketed. What about League of Nations after WW1? lol those dipshits didn't care if Japanese conquered China. British and French were occupied with colonial problems and they also wanted a buffer against Soviet Union.

Don't kid yourselves. Japanese were playing the European game. It's the fucking Europeans that split South and North Korea.

Fuck you white people.

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Agreed, but what they (the Japanese) were doing just prior to World War 2 in Asia and the Pacific was actual live experiments on human beings, going into Chinese villages and gassing them all to death, raping women in front of their mothers and then stabbing them to death, making people dig their own graves then setting them on fire and laughing at them as they burned to death in their own self dug grave pit, etc. In Nanking in one day they gathered 30,000 people in a square and slaughtered them with grenades and machine guns.

It went far beyond just plain old Imperialism, and straight into atrocities and human rights abuses like the Germans were doing to various groups in Europe proper. So it makes sense that the people affected by those atrocities, like the Chinese, still hate the fuck out of them, and the Japanese really don't have much right to complain they got nuked at the end of all of it. If anything, it was only Karma. Do the Japanese believe in Karma? I bet some hindi teachings made it over there to the islands.

Eh that's okay.

I still like him. He's a good fella.

Julian the Apostate_sl said:

Do you think N Korea is anything but completely responsible for the situation they are currently in? Japan has as good a reason to hate the US from 60 years ago as anyone yet they seem to be doing fine.

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Of course they are fine we made them part of our economic system for globalization, we control them through our oil, All the Alaskan pipeline oil goes directly to Japan America doesn't use any of it, Remember japan went to war in WWII to start an empire, they wanted access to oil and we provoked japan into war by revoking our sales of oil to japan.For a long peroid of time We made Japan the equivilent to a vassel state.