North Korean Escapees Report Solid Support for Dictator Kim

The Wall Street Journal ^ | 08/26/2015 | Jeyup S. Kwaak

[ScottWalkerForPresident2016]

SEOUL—North Koreans who fled the country last year said in a new survey that public support for dictator Kim Jong Un appears solid despite citizens’ frustrations about the poor state of the economy.

The survey suggests grass roots capitalism continues to spread in North Korea to substitute for the failed state distribution system and is likely to continue its uncomfortable coexistence with the nation’s repressive regime.

The Seoul National University Institute for Peace and Unification Studies each year surveys more than 100 North Koreans who defected in the previous calendar year. It provides firsthand insight into developments in the isolated state, though its researchers say the results alone must not be read as generalized facts due to the small pool of respondents.

The release of the report comes as a military standoff between the Koreas ended Tuesday following a crisis that included artillery strikes and mine blasts.

[Olog-hai]

Escapees or agents?

[nathanbedford]

The survey suggests grass roots capitalism continues to spread in North Korea to substitute for the failed state distribution system and is likely to continue its uncomfortable coexistence with the nation’s repressive regime.

We saw this before the fall of the Soviet Union in which an underground black-market economy thrived distributing important commodities to people based not on need but on ability to pay because the black-market was an efficient model of distribution.

When the government model which really is nothing more than Mafia as government breaks down it inevitably causes black markets to spring up and flourish. There is no moral defense against these black markets because the government system is a crony system in which the elite receive the best of everything and the masses wait for hours online to shop from empty shelves.

So that which is unlawful and the equivalent to hoarding, smuggling, bootlegging, black marketing is actually democratic and morally right.

What does that tell us about big government and free markets?

[Mark17]

SEOUL—North Koreans who fled the country last year said in a new survey that public support for dictator Kim Jong Un appears solid despite citizens’ frustrations about the poor state of the economy.

Well, I hear they have an excessive number of anti aircraft guns they can use for executions. Why wouldn't they show support for him? Anti aircraft guns can make quick work of a body.

[ArtDodger]

Stockholm syndrome variation.

[catnipman]

Hmmm. If things are so hunky-dory in Norkland, then why all these folks risk their lives to defect in the first place?

[Jonty30]

It’s probably the way I’d choose to get taken out

[clearcarbon]

"North Korean Escapees Report Solid Support for Dictator Kim"

The most vocal dissidents were eaten.

[WayneS]

North Korea - an American democrat’s wet dream.

[kearnyirish2]

You’re absolutely right; Edward Snowden exposed how our government envies Red China and North Korea the control they have over their slave populations...

[exPBRrat]

The fact they love their Dictator proves the value of the continued and unrelenting propaganda campaigns.

[Vermont Lt]

Kim does not poop. Who wouldn’t love a leader who doesn’t have to waste time with waste?

[katana]

It wasn’t the mob in Rome that finally killed Caligula. It was his own Pretorian Guard. It won’t be the long suffering and brain washed people of North Korea who bring down Kim. It will be someone close who thinks his last breath is very soon to be taken in front of an anti-aircraft battery and his family’s somewhere behind barbed wire.

[bert]

ping.....

barack obama

[Savage Beast]

I think I’d be supporting the bastard too if I were locked in that hellhold!

[arthurus]

“Grass roots capitalism” has spread through the country in other times and is winked at until it is suddenly and violently repressed with lots of death and lots of new denizens of the slave camps.

[Rebelbase]

Grass roots? Isn’t that a North Korean dinner staple?