This National Geographic segment was on the other night. Lisa Ling goes undercover into North Korea with a surgeon who helps blind people see again. After he fixes them, they thank their “dear leader”, ignoring the surgeon, and start crying because of how much they love Kim Jong-il, the sole reason many of them are blind in the first place. For those of you who are very, very libertarian, this will make you sick to the stomach.
Thank you for sharing this.
How could the liberation of North Koreans be brought about (besides using a statist military)?
I think liberating North Korea without a statist military would have to be in the same fashion as China is slowly liberalizing: by having goods cross borders. With goods, slowly, come ideas. It’d be very hard to pierce the initial veil, to get past this silly philosophy of “self-reliance”–though one can hardly call their starving and mal-nourished populace “self-reliant”–but once the first steps were taken, I believe the rest would come naturally. Slowly, perhaps, but with less bloodshed.
McDonalds
I feel like it would be very difficult. Here, civil disobedience can work in some circumstances. In North Korea, civil disobedience will get you and your family sent to a concentration camp.
Maybe some individuals can fly their private planes over North Korea and drop down automatic weapons to the citizens who are most likely to fight back. Kind of kidding. But not really.
Hahaha. Didn’t that just say ‘Halliburton’ before I left my response? McDonald’s is more dangerous than Halliburton, actually. All that heart disease is killing us.
Well what happened in China is the senior communist party ruling officials died off and people who didn’t live through the revolution now rule and they are much more reasonable.
Now this situation is much different, a communist dynasty means it is likely that Kim Jong Ill’s son Kim Jong-Un will end up ruling the country. This situation is different in several ways:
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The cycles in North Korea are much longer because in China it seems the senior communist party officials were replaced by other communist party officials who were also quite old Kim Jong Ill will die sometime in the next 20 years by then his son who will be in his 30s or 40s will take over vs in China the people who take over are probably at least 20 years older
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In China there seems to be a competitive process to get to these top positions, post Mao they actually seem to be concerned with the opinions of the body politic
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What do you think living in their world as virtually the son of a god would do to someones psyche? Kim Jong-Un I speculate will be something of a modern day Caligula Actually even the Roman emperors were probably much more accountable and much less powerful than Kim Jong Il’s regime
So basically Kim Jong-Un is their only chance of internal change… however this seems unlikely so for the next 50 years or so I can’t imagine things getting much better by means of internal change. Perhaps China will continue to get more liberal as the years pass and as the US takes on a lesser role at the table of foreign policy China could enter a more imperialistic phase and the interventionist(foreign policy) attitude, where they start telling other countries how to govern themselves could cause them to put some serious pressure on North Korea as the Chinese of the future will likely be appalled by that sort of thing happening pretty much in their back yard.
Anyway just some thoughts/speculations I thought I’d share.
Jon Catalan did an interesting post about this over at his blog Economic Thought.
Tried to open the video and got this nice message:
This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.
Somebody on this forum will go nuts over this.
Thanks for posting that video was really interesting. I didn’t realize how brainwashed so many people in North Korea are until after watching it. However, as the narrator brings up, were they saying what they were because they really believed it or was it all out of fear? This was blatant idolatry and sickening to watch.
With blue jeans and American sitcoms, like the USSR.
“McDonalds”
How are you gonna force them to allow McDonalds to open up shop?
Bloom: I can think of one method of imperialism that may work. This American outpost recently “invaded” my neighbourhood strip-mall…
Concluding a peace settlement with them would be a good start.
Didn’t Gorbachev and Reagan conclude the Cold War had ended on Malta in 1988? In 1991 fall of Communism followed.
I wish there were a ‘like’ button for this comment.
I knew a Communist Manifesto thumper from Chile who couldn’t stay away.
That part of the world has never seen much better than this regime.
As somebody already said you are a true hero of the revolution!
Thanks a lot.
We should show them real christian values and they would be saved. GO WEST