|
Pener Kropoopkin posted:There's an American guy who defected to the North all the way back in the Korean War, and they've used him as a propaganda mouthpiece ever since. Gave him a wife, a decent apartment, and all the amenities. He even denies that the famine happened during the 90s, probably because they shielded him from it. My favorite (possibly apocryphal) story about him is that he ruined a class of spies because the NK government used him to teach them English and he imparted his thick southern drawl to all of them, essentially ruining their ability to blend in. Also, he apparently was in a bunch of films and was the go-to guy when they needed someone to play a Buck Turgidson-like American general.
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2017 18:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2024 16:49 |
|
|
Fallen Hamprince posted:SK pursued a pro-reconciliation 'sunshine policy' with the north during much of the 2000s and it went absolutely nowhere because the drpk leadership does not want reconciliation The population of the North knows, by and large, that things are better in the South (and the rest of the world), so the government has sold the public on the reason that it's worse for them being that America and it's puppet, the South, are holding them down. It's hard to see how they could walk that back in a way that doesn't result in the house of cards collapsing.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2017 20:49
|
|
|
Fallen Hamprince posted:north korea has to be the least stylish dictatorship ever
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 17:02
|
|
|
Legit question: I've heard that Cubans will go to some crazy lengths to keep those old cars running, and I get why that's the case now, but when the embargo came down, why didn't Cuba import cars from the USSR or a Warsaw Pact country, instead of going to increasingly crazy lengths to keep old, primarily American cars running?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 18:21
|
|
|
Jeb! Repetition posted:We invaded Iraq for fake WMDs but won't invade North Korea for real WMDs 🤔 My HS civics teacher, shortly after the USSR broke up and the Cold War "ended", told me that the a nuclear first strike wouldn't be how a hypothetical future nuclear war would start. He said it would start as a conventional war and then, when one side had all but lost, they would use nukes when put into a realistic situation where their government's survival was threatened. Essentially, it's the "use it or lose it" argument. A couple decades later, I think that same logic is still true. It's hard to envision any scenario where American and/or South Korean boots touch North Korean soil that doesn't end with a nuclear weapon detonating. "Starting a war that goes nuclear" is right there with "reinstating the draft" in terms of things that would ensure that whatever party was responsible for the decision being voted out at the earliest opportunity.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 19:31
|
|
|
mysterious frankie posted:North Korea's a lose lose proposition. Like, on one hand if we invaded they definitely would go full super villain and try blowing the whole country up while the remaining generals and Kims fly away in a giant rocket powered steel Kim Jong-un head and on the other, if we actually liberated North Korea we'd have another bummer holocaust situation on our hands and there's only a 50/50 that we could manage the narrative so that the thing people paid the most attention to was how heroic we were, and not all the skeleton cannibal dwarves. About the best resolution that we can hope for at this point is some kind of a palace coup where a bunch of high-ranking generals manage to seize power with a big enough portion of the military under its control to avoid civil war, after which they cozy up to China (and to a lesser degree the South) to help them begin a decades long modernization process. I don't have much hope of that actually happening, but ... well, I can hope.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 19:53
|
|
|
tadashi posted:There also isn't enough evidence that the populace in North Korea wants to be "liberated". I'm not convinced that every citizen thinks that Un is some sort of God King but there also isn't evidence to the contrary? The scenario that includes the refugee crisis basically involves a breakdown of control on internal movement, and even if people don't intend to cross the border when they leave home, at some point, word's gonna spread that people who do cross the border are getting fed by China/SK in refugee camps, because the alternative is a literal starving and angry mob pillaging the countryside. ' The alternative is that at the very start, China invades at the behest of one of the army factions, militarily occupies and feeds the country, sets up a puppet regime amenable to their interests, and then withdraws a few years later, once the threat of collapse abates. As for how people think of the Kim family, Bradley K. Martin in Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader relays the account of a defector who estimates that roughly 10% of the country are true believers and 90% do what they need to do to get by. It's all anecdotal, but he mentions that it mirrors what he saw during the collapse of the USSR, and I'd say it's as good of an estimate as you're gonna get.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 21:14
|
|
|
Fojar38 posted:Why are people assuming that China is capable of pulling this off badda bing badda boom Pener Kropoopkin posted:There is zero evidence that the North Korean state is on the precipice of collapse. The scenarios that I'm talking about above that involve a disordered collapse would generally be because of fast-moving events related to an internal power struggle and/or the untimely death of Kim Jong-un (not necessarily suggesting assassination either). Right now, Kim seems to have successfully consolidated his power, but who really knows how secure he is. Even assuming he is secure from that kind of threat, he's one car accident or cancer diagnosis from throwing the country into chaos. In a country where control of the military is the only real mechanism of power, I don't think it's far-fetched for a succession crisis to turn into a military conflict between competing power centers within the military, and if that happens, not only are things going to move very quickly, all the players involved are gonna be presented with a set of really bad choices, and they're gonna have to choose quickly what they do.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 22:38
|
|
|
R. Guyovich posted:i'm sure the book titled "under the loving care of the fatherly leader" has absolutely no truck for orientalist stereotypes It really doesn't. It's an accessible, if occasionally dense, book and, if memory serves, the title is from a piece of propaganda about either Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-il. Obviously, anything about North Korea needs to be taken with a grain of salt because literally every possible source is chock full of bias, but I don't know of a better book in English for someone who wants to know about the history of North Korea up through Kim Jong-il.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2017 16:09
|
|
|
NK having nukes is, geopolitical and/or proliferation concerns aside, way worse than Iran or Israel or Apartheid South Africa having nukes because of very real concerns about some faction in their military conducting an attack without authorization from Pyongyang. There was speculation that attacks of this type occurred with the sinking of Cheonan or the shelling of Yeongpyeong. While using nukes in an attack like this would be a massive escalation, it would also virtually ensure full-scale war, even if nukes were not used in retaliation. If a faction within their military wanted war, and had a nuke, they could virtually guarantee it. While NK wants them for the exact same reason that every other country does: it is the most powerful deterrent to invasion/attack that a country can possess, the concern of the North actually using their nukes in a non-retaliatory way is far, far, far higher than any other nuclear-armed state and that alone is a good enough reason for me for them to not have them, politics aside.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2017 21:28
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2024 16:49 |
|
|
Also, just a reminder, the North has far more natural mineral resources than the South, and that when their current borders took shape, the North was considered to have a more advantageous position economically, and they actually did have a better economy until the late 1970s. Where they started from does not matter anywhere near as much as how the North has made every policy decision based on whether or not it will allow the Kim family to retain the highest level of control over the country. Arguments about American imperialism and sanctions aside, they've pursued a path that has absolutely exacerbated every problem that they have faced, alienated allies that are no friends of the U.S., and put themselves in a position where they're always one external shock away from catastrophy.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2017 00:58
|
|