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Posted on 10/15/2006 9:02:22 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
NOT even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.
In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom.
The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliche, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il-Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint ("Hmmm - good book. Let's see if we can make it work").
Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's imagined world. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop.
Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed).
A recent night-time photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarised zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.
Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed.
In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favourable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation.
The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour - North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave - my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up grains of food from barren fields (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest").
Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned. It seems mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.
Kim Jong-il and his fellow slave masters are trying to dictate the pace of events by setting a timetable of nuclearization, based on a crash program wrung from their human property. But why should it be assumed that their failed state and society are permanent? Another timeline, orientated to liberation and regime change, is what the dynasty most fears. It should start to fear it more.
I agree. And .. when you throw in accomplices to NK and Iran, like China and Russia .. it's even bigger than the world can handle.
And .. hidden in the news is the fact that Syria has openly stated it is preparing for WAR WITH ISRAEL.
Oh, come on. Al Gore is a doofus, a tree-hugger, and a poor leader, but comparing him to an evil nutjob like Kim is going overboard. If Gore ever became President (God forbid) he'd likely screw up the economy, underfund the military, and jack up income tax rates, but it's highly unlikely he'd have his political enemies liquidated or institute a nationwide light-out curfew.
Politics is one thing, but let's keep our shirts on here. The Democrats are wrong about almost everything — and in some cases dangerously wrong — but being wrong and being evil are two different things.
Next, the Cuba embargo is largely just a US embargo. Cuba is not cut out from the rest of the world the way North Korea is.
But, I agree with your basic premise. The Cuban embargo is wrong, for the same reasons as sanctions on North Korea.
Actually I think it's time to take a page from NK's own book and to flood their country with perfectly made counterfeit currency.
bookmk ping-a-ling , and THANKS 2ndDivisionVet
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Unless, of course, we set up refugee camps in South Korea, put up signs that say, "Redeem your NK money here", then move the people so they don't flood any one area. All in all, it might be cheaper than military spending, and not require a single shot.
"And that would be in addition to air-dropping food with American flags on the wrappings."
NK would collect those packets, poison them, then re-drop them in another area for the people to die so they could use situation for propaganda.
We hear that people are starving and that things are very bad for the general populace, but this is the most detail I have seen so far. Is N. Korea capable at nearly completely keeping specific information from coming out!
I submit that during these times, the people in these "workers paradises" were truly enslaved, but were slightly elevated from the status of those currently in North Korea - -
Sort of like still being prisoners, but given trustee status.
Also, where Hitchens mentions "gulag", if one were to isolate that to Stalin's monstrously repressive "great terror", then there should be little doubt in calling it a form of slavery.
This hell wasn't constructed all at once. It is the logical conclusion of an fanatic seeing his ideological programs fail in the real world and responding that the cure is more of the same, whether it be economic, military, or engineering. An awful lot of our own progressives do show that symptom, actually, but I hope they wouldn't take it to starvation. I hope. North Korea is an extreme example of a political theory that refuses to face fact.
Do you recall the scene in 1984 where Smith's interrogator blandly states that if one person thinks he flies and another thinks that he has seen him fly, then he has actually flown? Here is a fellow who thinks he hits multiple holes-in-one on the golf course and his sycophants tell him that he has, and so he has. That's fine if the stakes are a golf scorecard, not so fine if you have to see starvation and convince yourself it is plenty, and he has managed precisely that.
I see some hopes expressed here that the people will rise up and throw off their oppressors. It will not happen. Anyone capable of even starting such a thing has long been rooted out just as Winston Smith was. The secret police and the army know what is likely to happen to them should they ever allow it. It is a torture state whose only hope of staving off collapse is tribute levied from outside, and that is the single explanation for Kim's behavior. Either tribute or he will become the nuclear broker to the world and fund his state that way.
North Korea and Zimbabwe are cases where an entire people may be held hostage by a ruling class and the rest of the world told "levy tribute or watch them starve, and it'll be your fault." Nice work if you can find people stupid enough or frightened enough to give it to you.
"I see some hopes expressed here that the people will rise up and throw off their oppressors. It will not happen. Anyone capable of even starting such a thing has long been rooted out just as Winston Smith was. The secret police and the army know what is likely to happen to them should they ever allow it. It is a torture state whose only hope of staving off collapse is tribute levied from outside, and that is the single explanation for Kim's behavior. Either tribute or he will become the nuclear broker to the world and fund his state that way."
Very good insight.
I heard Hitchens say that Iraq is the most noble thing American has ever done. I guess nobility is beyond a lot of people.
"Send batteries to power the equipment. Start with the areas near the border."
IMO this won't work. Anyone caught with the ipod or computer would be immediately arrested along with their family.
This is a country where schools teach the children to report on their parents. Its a country where if one person commits a crime against the state the entire family is killed. They test chemical weapons using whole families. They rape mothers and daughters in front of the men before killing them. They place large rocks on people to hold them down while pigs and cattle eat them. Fortunately this last means of torture has declined as there are very few pigs or cattle left.
So...what do you suggest we do about it?
You're right - our country is the greatest plum of all - the goon who takes over here could bully the world for generations. And if it did happen here - with our great technology - we'd be enslaved - maybe forever. Dems have no idea how close to the cliff they play... or what falling off would be like...
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