North Korea is on my "I Don't Get It" List

[Gaybutton]

I don't get it. I don't understand North Korea's actions and saber-rattling statements. The way I see it, that country's behavior is like the mean little neighborhood bully making more and more threats after the other neighborhood kids decide not to put up with it anymore, thinking he can frighten the other kids into giving in to him.

 

North Korea must know that if they actually start attacking other countries, that's tantamount to their own suicide in the end. They are now alienating their closest allies.

 

Why? What are they really trying to accomplish? I don't see what they believe they can gain from all this nonsense.

[Bob]

Probably the most repressive regime in the world. What's amazing is how tightly they control information to their own citizens - citizens who reportedly believe that they have a better standard of living than their brethern in South Korea! The crackpots ruling that country live to stay in power and don't give a damn about hundreds of thousands of its citizens starving every year.

 

If China ever has the balls to no longer tolerate this crazy regime on its border, things could change; but China, for its own reasons, acts as if it believes that nobody is allowed to interfere with the internal business of a country no matter how repressive its leadership is towards its own citizens.

But, then again, what's happening in Burma largely falls on the same lack of moral leadership from China.

 

 

[Guest laurence]

Why? What are they really trying to accomplish? I don't see what they believe they can gain from all this nonsense.

 

They are doing this for the benefit of their own citizens not the best of the world. Keep the citizens scared and confused and under the protection of the Dear Leader.

 

[Guest lvdkeyes]

They are doing this for the benefit of their own citizens not the best of the world. Keep the citizens scared and confused and under the protection of the Dear Leader.

Sounds like Bush/Cheney tactics.

[Guest laurence]

Sounds like Bush/Cheney tactics.

 

Absolutely!

 

[Guest fountainhall]

If China ever has the balls to no longer tolerate this crazy regime on its border, things could change

 

One key reason for China's stance is its fear of a flood of millions of refugees streaming across the border if the ghastly North Korean regime implodes.

 

Saw a documentary a few months back in which one woman was smuggled out of North Korea and made it to her relatives in Seoul. Yet, even having rejoined her family and witnessed for herself the lies behind all the North Korean propaganda about the outside world, she still decided she had to return. Her constant moaning about "betraying the Dear Leader" was the most dreadful illustration of how North Koreans are brainwashed.

 

What are they [North Korea] really trying to accomplish?

 

I guess everyone is trying to make sense of the seeming senselessness of their actions. You build nuclear bombs, intercontinental missiles, you build a mega capital city for no cars and few people, yet you starve your people close to death! What sane people do that - and why? Perhaps its partly the fact that they are not actually sane as we define the word because they have been in power for so long that they are a perfect example of Lord Acton's dictum of absolute power corrupting absolutely. They have created a fiction in their minds that has become reality. Creepy!

[Gaybutton]

They have created a fiction in their minds that has become reality. Creepy!

Do they truly believe if they start launching nuclear weapons at other countries they would have a prayer of surviving the outcome?

[Guest laurence]

Do they truly believe if they start launching nuclear weapons at other countries they would have a prayer of surviving the outcome?

 

Easy answer to that, they would be annihilated. But, so far, many of their missile tests have been duds, and if one is successful it is doubtful it could even hit the target plus they are not likely to have the capacity to carry a nuclear warhead. At least the type of nuclear weapons they are now developing which are first generation, primitive devices.

 

 

[Gaybutton]

primitive devices.

I wouldn't want to be anywhere near one of those primitive devices if it ever goes off.

 

Meanwhile, I still don't get it. What are they trying to do? I hope they're not crazy enough to actually use any weapons like that. I hope they're not crazy enough to do anything at all other than make their threats, but who knows how nuts those people really might be?

 

I'm no war monger, but I wouldn't have any objections to seeing them invaded and that idiotic government of theirs overthrown.

[Guest laurence]

I'm no war monger, but I wouldn't have any objections to seeing them invaded and that idiotic government of theirs overthrown.

 

The US did do that in the fifties and it ended in a stalemate. And look at what happened in Iraq. North Korea will topple by itself without help from anyone, same as the USSR.

 

[Guest fountainhall]

I hope they're not crazy enough to actually use any weapons like that

 

In bringing the world to the very brink of nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis, the US and the Soviet Union were fortunate that their leaders finally recognised that whoever fired the first nuclear missile would virtually wipe out the world. Having just read a riveting new account of that crisis, "One Minute to Midnight" by Michael Dobbs, I am now more aware than ever that Commanders in Chief are at the mercy of rogue generals and officers in the field. Evidence has recently come to light about several incidents during the final crucial days of the Cuban crisis - in a Soviet nuclear submarine unable to communicate with Moscow whose commander believed nuclear war had actually broken out and wanted to fire his missiles, in a software glitch which indicated a missile had actually been fired at the US from Cuba, in a U2 spy plane accidentally overflying the Soviet Union by several hundred miles, and others - any one of which could have seen the launch of nuclear war without formal authority. Since then, the MAD doctrine (mutually assured destruction) began to govern superpower relations for the rest of the Cold War.

 

To my thinking, such awareness and restraint is absent from the thinking of the crazies in Pyongyang. And that makes me concerned that they could, for no discernable logical reason, fire off a missile aimed at a neighbouring country. Seoul is literally just down the road and virtually indefensible against a nuclear missile. I think it's really scary.

[Bob]

North Korea will topple by itself without help from anyone, same as the USSR.

 

Probably but the problem with that scenario is millions of their own citizens will likely die of starvation in the interim (and presuming the crazies there don't start a war that may also kill millions of South Koreans).

 

The world ought to act now before it's too late.

[Rogie]

The world ought to act now before it's too late.

 

If you mean from a humanitarian point of view I agree

 

Clearly a time will come when the regime runs out of steam but by then the human cost within N. Korea itself will have been incalculable.

 

I don't think we can make a comparison with Iran for example. Iranians. although living under a repressive regime, are pretty savvy and have access to modern 'gadgets'; means to communicate between themselves.

 

N. Koreans could be living in the dark ages as far as any comparison goes. I am reminded of the (possibly mythical) stories of Japanese soldiers holding out in the wilds of Borneo for decades, not realising WW2 had long since ended. There must have been something 'strange' done to their minds in their military training to hard wire that focus. I believe N. Koreans have been indoctrinated along similar lines.

 

I feel desperately sorry for Joe Public in North Korea. I would dearly love to wring the necks of those miserable chickens who run the show. And that's all it is really, a show. A fairground. Like one of those pathetic little fairground booths claiming the earth - you go in and realise you've wasted your money. Smoke and mirrors.