Posted on 10/10/2006 8:25:17 AM PDT by aculeus
The abbreviation for North Korea used by American military officers says it all: KFR, the Kim Family Regime. It is a regime whose demonization by the American media and policy makers has obscured some vital facts. North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, was not merely a dreary Stalinist tyrant. As defectors from his country will tell you, he was also a popular anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in the mold of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist tyrant of Albania who led his countrymen in a successful insurgency against the Nazis. Nor is his son Kim Jong Il anything like the childish psychopath parodied in the film Team America: World Police. It’s true that Kim Jong Il was once a playboy. But he has evolved into a canny operator. Andrei Lankov, a professor of history at South Korea’s Kookmin University, in Seoul, says that under different circumstances Kim might have actually become the successful Hollywood film producer that regime propaganda claims he already is.
Kim Jong Il’s succession was aided by the link that his father had established in the North Korean mind between the Kim Family Regime and the Choson Dynasty, which ruled the Korean peninsula for 500 years, starting in the late fourteenth century. Expertly tutored by his father, Kim consolidated power and manipulated the Chinese, the Americans, and the South Koreans into subsidizing him throughout the 1990s. And Kim is hardly impulsive: he has the equivalent of think tanks studying how best to respond to potential attacks from the United States and South Korea—attacks that themselves would be reactions to crises cleverly instigated by the North Korean government in Pyongyang. “The regime constitutes an extremely rational bunch of killers,” Lankov says.
Yet for all Kim’s canniness, there is evidence that he may be losing his edge.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I think this is an excellent article and fills in my understanding a lot better than previously.
Phase One: resource depletion;
Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletion;
Phase Three: the rise of independent fiefs informally controlled by local party apparatchiks or warlords, along with widespread corruption to circumvent a failing central government;
Phase Four: the attempted suppression of these fiefs by the KFR once it feels that they have become powerful enough;
Phase Five: active resistance against the central government;
Phase Six: the fracture of the regime; and
Phase Seven: the formation of new national leadership.
North Korea probably reached Phase Four in the mid-1990s, but was saved by subsidies from China and South Korea, as well as by famine aid from the United States. It has now gone back to Phase Three.
Just think, Kim's regime could well have collapsed by now, but the Clinton Admin helped prop it back up.
It will be 100 times worse. North Korea is in much worse shape than East Germany was at the fall of Communism. North Korea has WMD's under their direct control, and a massive army with lots of guns and (in the event of a Kim collapse) no pay and no food.
Same reason George Soros did - old men find the game of international politics far more enticing than the Centerfold of the Month. ;)
I wonder how it is that western media unmasked Ferdinand Marco as a poser & fraud when it came to his anti-Japanese military activities while Kim Il Sung gets a free pass?
Sounds like a feature item on a Chinese menu.... I wonder if that comes with fried rice?
Sheeze!
Bookmark
It could come with a lot of fried people if this gets out of hand.
Well, that should lend a little "blast" to his "missile"!
"One of the reasons South Korea is supporting the North Korean regime is that, when the Kim Jong-Il government collapses, a huge stream of refugees will come boiling across into South Korea."
THIS is so true alloy.
But, I believe it also exposes the absolute selfishness of the South Koreans. They can eat, but don't really care that their so-called "brother and sister Koreans" have naught.
They talk a good fight, but they wouldn't do what is right and necessary to free the North. It would get in the way of watching thier plasma TV's and spending Saturday evenings out on the town.
That's fine with me, but I really feel they should drop the fuax concern for their cousins and misguided disdain for the United States as a cover for cowardess.
May not have been your point, but it's just an opinion I've held for a long time.
Robert D. Kaplan is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers, and the reason I always get a copy of "The Atlantic Monthly".
That's because Hugh Hefner is not as insane as little Kim, of course Charlie Manson isn't quite as insane as little Kim. (ok maybe Charlie is)
So, is kim a genius or an idiot?
Yes.
Why should the care - I don't care about Mexicans other than building a wall to keep 'em their country.
Reuniting with NK would be an economic disaster.
What the south wants is a fully reunited Korea. This is why South Korea is hoping for the fall of North Korea.
Do you know if there's a North Korea ping list? I'm looking for a story I read a few days ago and I figure the pinger would know where to look.
I'm dealing with a liberal who thinks NK is a utopia and I was looking for a story about North Korean escapees who are returned from China.
Not aware of such a ping list.
A FReeper whose screen name I forget (it's "rooster" something) follows NK rather closely and may in fact have a list.
I found what I was looking for. It's a horror story.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2393599,00.html
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