talkpolitics | Simple Question of International Import

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north korea

Simple Question of International Import

What are the odds that this gets a LOT worse by the traditional spring time offensive season when a young general's fancy turns to invasion?

Brief timeline:

North Korea is accused of torpedoing a South Korean warship.

South Korea fires at North Korean fishing boats crossing the maritime border North Korea refuses to recognize.

North Korea is revealed to have highly modern facilities for nuclear material enrichment.

Not to mention, North Korea is facing the challenge of passing along the regime to a third generation of the Kim family.

North Korea is known for rattling its sabre and demanding to have attention paid to it when it is being ignored, but this is looking like a very different than recent years -- South Korea really has to retaliate...and half of South Korea's population lives in the Seoul metropolitan area within artillery range of the DMZ.

So a question -- is North Korea suicidal or are they betting that this behavior can get them some more winter grain shipments?

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Kim Jong Il drives the country in truly independent way

But that's simply not true. Kim's regime rests entirely on China's support. The moment China decides that it's no longer in their interests to maintain a totalitarian regime next to its border, the Kims are history.

I agree with you on this 100%.

This is exactly what was meant yesterday when a point was made here that bullshit should be fought with facts and logic. So, well done.

Of course they in no small part prop it up for the same reason South Africa props up Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe: the collapse, while inevitable, is going to hit them hard and like most people across the world they prefer to put off the inevitable and thereby ensure when it happens it's far far worse.

That said, right on. *two thumbs up.*

The main reason SA props up Zim is fairly pragmatic at this point (forget all the inter-comrade hugging). It's that if Zim collapses abruptly, it'd cause a massive migration crisis which would hit mainly SA, as the nearest prosperous destination. Yet they ignore the simple fact that the more they postpone the collapse, the heavier it'll be. The signs of what's coming could be seen all over the place, like immigration problem, and the upsurge of xenophobia in this country. So yeah. The more we hold our heads in the sand, the worse the shit will smell when it hits the fan.

And that makes the NK/Zim situations very similar.

Which is what I've said: the humanitarian and economic crisis is already there but like SA they're choosing to ignore it as opposed to addressing it when the solution would have been simpler. In that sense it's also like the USA's complete willful ignorance of the disaster NAFTA's proven to be for Mexican farming at the same time as the xenophobes here attribute the mass immigration to everything *but* that.

Wrong. Until 1991, DPRK rested on USSR's huge support. There is no USSR for almost 20 years. North Korea is still there and rules it's own way.

If by rule its own way you mean allowing a second Holodomor to happen and becoming a shithole so bad that the DRC is more preferable to live in.

Why do you hate DPRK so much?

I hate it because it gets away with blatantly holding another country hostage and that it does so is entirely the result of *both* Cold War superpowers never trying to actually resolve the situation. North Korea by this point is beyond salvaging.

What about democracy? Since 1991 there is only one superpower in the world. Russian president don't have any idea what Russia should do on Korean peninsula. Why don't USA just leave ROK alone? Why forcing NK to surrender with world trading embargo? Developing nuclear weapons? Hahaha! Ask Israel about it!

Are you saying that what NK has now is "democracy"?

What is democracy? They live the way they like using their own resources, no matter how it is called.

They live the way Kim likes. Has anyone asked any of the remaining 24 million North Koreans?

There are that many left?

(no subject)

htpcl.livejournal.com - 2010-11-24 15:26 (UTC) - Expand

The thing is that Israel is the USA's friend. North Korea's so friendless *nobody* would really be bothered to break sanctions on them. In fact their actions thus far have been extorting to *keep* harsh fate from reaching them.

There is nothing of "friendship" in global politics. USA closed global markets to NK so they physically cannot reach mass production efficiency. USA did it by threatning the world with their armed forces, not because some are 'bad' and others are 'good'.

North Korea brought that on themselves by holding to Cold War-era paranoia and militant politics past the point that became economically viable for *big* societies, let alone small poor ones.

That's some pretty blatant history revisionism, IMO. DPRK's main sponsor and supporter has always been China. Reference: the Korean War.

Actually he's right. The USSR created North Korea before the Chinese Communists had even really won the Chinese Civil War. North Korea was founded in 1948, while the Chinese communists did not win their war until 1949. The PRC *did* intervene in the Korean War not out of a reservoir of kindness for Kim Il Sung but instead out of fear that the USA would try to reverse the barely-won Chinese Civil War with an invasion across the Yalu.

During the Cold War, after the Sino-Soviet split North Korea chose to side with the Soviet Union, not the PRC as Kim Il Sung preferred a Soviet-style system to Mao's more peasant-based system. And these days the PRC props it up out of fear of and avoidance of a catastrophe, not anything broader or deeper than that.

OK he's right.

Only on that. In everything else he really, really minimizes how evil North Korea's dictatorship is, and how it's only propped up for fear that the economic and refugee crisis will get dramatically worse. The PRC's never particularly liked the Kim family dictatorship. It's one thing that actually cannot be blamed on them.

Check out NK history overview. Sovet weapons, soviet-like economics, soviet-like industry with soviet-build factories and plants etc.

So how's that go for them right now?

Mostly Chinese and local manufacturing. You're right here.

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