The Secret History of Kim Jung Il -- written by one of his high school teachers (opens in new tab)

Should Kim Jong-Il have been ousted a la Saddam Hussein in Iraq? How dangerous would that have been, considering that North Korea has nuclear arms? What to do in case of a conflict that spills over into neighboring countries? What would China's take on all of it be? Would they stand idly by or back up their Communist cousin?

Once the dictator is gone, what do you do? Let the military take over and potentially let it establish a junta government, Myanmar-style? Or do you try to install democracy forcibly? Would the right thing to do be to hand North Korea over to South Korea, integrating the two countries by shotgun wedding?

The complexities quickly exponentiate. Consider the cultural shock of the North Koreans once they're introduced to modern South Korean culture alone. If German re-unification is any indicator, putting together two halves of a country that have been split into Communism and western capitalism is not a trivial task.

Also consider the cult of personality built up around Kim Jong-Il. The situation in N. Korea could quickly become explosive once people realize the deceit they've been living in.

So it's difficult thing to do, just by itself. All the econo-political ramifications just make it that much harder.

But, from a cold, inhumane, and strictly logical perspective, North Korea is a problem that will probably solve itself. Assuming that most of the non-mainstream stuff that I read and hear about it is true (and I'm a little unsettled at even wondering that, let alone specifying "non-mainstream"), North Korea is badly starved for resources.

When your population is starving, when your media singularly carries fictional programming about your state and leaders, when your education is tightly authoritarian, you are less likely to produce the geniuses needed to solve engineering challenges like accurate long-range guidance systems.

Ordinarily, a resource-starved state would devolve into desperation; in North Korea's case, I'm not sure whether to expect that, because the entire state seems to be so uniquely dependent upon the whims and notions of a single individual -- its party leader at the time. If Kim Jong-Un continues to place pride before population, then it's likely that the state will collapse in our lifetimes in a mostly nonviolent way. If, on the other hand, he decides to try to take some kind of action, he'll eventually be forced into a game of poker where everyone at the table knows that he's got the weakest hand. Although he could certainly do a lot of damage on the way out -- mostly to neighboring South Korea and Japan -- he could not destroy the Earth, and he'd be faced with an immediate and deadly counterstrike from more capable nations.

It certainly is a terrible situation for the poor souls born into that country. Still, sometimes the best strategy is to simply wait out your opponent and let him starve to death, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this was in fact the Western strategy.

There is only a handful of people that are in charge in North Korea that can try to effect some kind of change. But even if suddenly one day they wake up with the best of intentions and all cleared up about where they would want to go, i.e. to achieve some sort of South Korean democracy, it will be extremely hard to improve anything in a short amount time (and by short time I mean around 10 years).

Basically the people living there today are screwed. Ideologically they have grown up to expect everything handed down from the state. How can the state hand down everything if it doesn't own everything? Economically, maybe 90% of economic activity is useless. In a free economy all of them would be closed. How would you cope with 90% unemployment?

It begins here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-preview

I believe a strategic systems perspective reveals why that stability is so durable, but reveals little opportunity to change it. I can tell you what won't work -- military, diplomacy, aid, and sanctions. The most effective agent of change so far is the smuggling of dvds into the country, which reveal how different the outside world from the government propaganda.

(by the way, I'm in the process of making an e-book out of it. If you're willing to read it critically and give constructive criticism, I'll send you an advance copy)

The learnt that the state provides everything, that they are nothing without the state. People over 20 years old are not going to learn ever to live by their own means. They need communism.

If you can't (are not allowed) to look over the fence, you won't know that the grass is greener on the other side.

My bibliography -- http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-bibliography -- has many sources more valuable for learning about North Korea. I found the New Yorker pieces particularly valuable, as well as the work by Barbara Demick.

I blogged extensively on North Korea since my visit there -- http://joshuaspodek.com/category/northkorea. My goal is to promote understanding, not to sensationalize. I've gotten good reviews on

- My series on North Korean strategy --http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-preview

- My series on playing in the first ever Ultimate Frisbee tournament and about sport in creating bonds -- http://joshuaspodek.com/ultimate-frisbee-north-korea-part-1

To Vice's credit, their recent series on exploring the North Korean logging camps in Siberia is more mature, though is outside North Korea.

From without it's also difficult to imagine toppling the North Korean regime. To do so would almost inevitably result in quite literally hundreds of thousands of dead South Korean civilians in a matter of hours (through artillery). And perhaps just as many dead South Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, or American civilians dead through a nuclear attack. That sort of cold calculus makes it very hard to make the decision to end the DPRK regime.

As anyone who is the parents of teenagers can tell you: That describes pretty much describes a large fraction of that age group.

There is a psychological growth phase which involves separation, and that is one manifestation.

I'm not sure if it is just powerful people. I think in many ways we all want to live in a world that fits with our image of ourselves. And some work harder than others to make it happen.

P.S: Yes, but did you also escape from Nazi Germany in a sub?

While your argument is defensible, I think characterizing the NK autocracy as a natural progression of pre-occupation Korea is misleading and perhaps unfair.

It's important to remember that at the time of the NK invasion in 1950, Korea had only recently been freed from the 35-year Japanese occupation in which the Japanese actively sought to eradicate Korean culture. The successor to this was another occupation by the US and USSR.

Although the new interim governments were more benign I don't think it was clear that the future would hold any kind of true independence from foreign states, and certainly US style democracy seemed quite far fetched.

And so it seems to me that if I was a young man of fighting age in Korea in 1950 (and thus born during the occupation), I would have found the NK motto of "Juche" (self-reliance) much more compelling than the murky, foreign roadmap offered by the US. Indeed, the professor in this article, Kim Hyun Sik, expresses this sentiment.

Even for many years after the Korean War, it wasn't clear that the US-led South was superior in ideals or in practice. The industry-heavy North (aided by infrastructure built by the Japanese and by Soviet engineers) flew ahead of the South in terms of economic growth and actual standards of living. Meanwhile, South Korea was embroiled in poverty, military coups, and cruel suppressions of student riots. You really couldn't have called SK a democracy until the late 1980s.

Of course, fortunes changed for NK. The classic Soviet style N-year plans were failing to meet their quotas, and as this began to happen, Kim Il Sung, who was really a foreign plant from Stalin, began to emulate Stalin's tactics of self-aggrandizement and brutal extermination of opponents.

If you wished at this point to question why it was that nobody stood up to Kim Il Sung in his rise as tyrant, you could very well blame Korean Confucianism and the hierarchical nature of Korean language and society. This is a strong reason, but I don't think it's sufficient.

There is a simpler answer: NK is a very tiny nation, with a reluctant ally on one border and a perpetual enemy on the other. Total control in a country of NK's size is actually possible, and with a constant menacing enemy, it was relatively easy to manipulate a small society into subservience. Think "1984", or the "War on Terror", but constrained to the state of Indiana.

I think this is a fascinating question, but one that's not tied up in culture at all. It's not just the Koreans and Chinese that have succumbed to this, but also the Russians, Germans, Yugoslavs, and South Americans that I can't name.

In any case, your reference to linguistic differences probably doesn't hold up.

- - - Quote [1]

Whorf presents a moving target, with most of his claims coming in both extreme and in more cautious forms. Debate continues about his considered views, but there is little doubt that his bolder claims, unimpeded by caveats or qualifications, were better suited to captivate his readers than more timid claims would have been.

When languages are similar, Whorf tells us, there is little likelihood of dramatic cognitive differences. But languages that differ markedly from English and other Western European languages (which Whorf calls, collectively, “Standard Average European” or SAE) often do lead their speakers to have very different worldviews.

- - - End Quote

and also

- - - Quote [2]

...the strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that language determines thought, is also thought to be incorrect. ...

Among the most frequently cited examples of linguistic determinism is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit people, who were thought to have numerous words for snow. He argues that this modifies the world view of the Eskimo, creating a different mode of existence for them than, for instance, a speaker of English. The notion that Arctic people have an unusually large number of words for snow has been shown to be false by linguist Geoffrey Pullum; in an essay titled "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax", he tracks down the origin of the story, ultimately attributing it largely to Whorf and suggesting the triviality of Whorf's observations.

... A recent study by Peter Gordon examines the language of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil. According to Gordon, the language used by this tribe only contains three counting words: one, two and many. Gordon shows through a series of experiments that the people of the Pirahã tribe have difficulty recounting numbers higher than three (Gordon, 2004). However, the causal relationship of these events is not clear. Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count numbers higher than three for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. Moreover, a more recent study suggests that the Pirahã have a basic understanding of geometry despite their language.

- - - End Quote

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.htm...

[2] http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis

Because that requires a particular tipping point, which sits on a sliding scale.

With the economic crises, and the draconian anti-freedom laws in several western countries, one could ask us the same.

Essentially, despite being thought of as a communist country, in reality North Korea is (by ideology) traces its ideological roots to the race-based nationalism of the early-20th-century Japanese colonization. In the book written by the interviewee, he describes how the main ideologues of North Korea were not pre-war communists, but rather pre-war collaborators with the Japanese, who picked up the official line that Koreans were an innocent, childlike sub-branch of the Japanese master race (post-war, they just excised the Japanese from this picture). Hence the North Korean propaganda emphasis on intermarriage with foreigners in South Korea, the effort put in (in the parent article) to eugenicist approaches to disability, etc.

I was a CS student who had a very alike mindset and I regret that. In hindsight I wish I had not let the "being a CS student" mentality serve as an excuse in my lack of literacy in other important subjects.

"The next room contained more gifts from the South, including a Hyundai Grandeur donated by the former chairman of Hyundai (whose family is originally from the North). Mr. Huk asked me if I had ever seen one of these cars during my time in the South. When I said, "sure, my neighbor has one just like it," he gave me another one of his 'you have to be lying' looks. How could such a great gift, a gift implying so much respect, belong to some normal person like my neighbor?"

North Korea, on the other hand, already had nuclear weapons, not to mention a conventional arsenal that, as others on this thread point out, can lay waste to the South.