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 ...
"It’s true that Kim Jong Il was once a playboy."
If that's the case, why did he stop doing Korean broads and set his sights on blowing up the world? I don't see Hugh Hefner trying to get nukes.
"Yet for all Kim’s canniness, there is evidence that he may be losing his edge."
Blah, blah, blah. There's substantial evidence already in the historical record that he long ago lost his mind.
China won't allow it...regardless of what sanctions might be initiated.NK is far,*far* too valuable to China just the way it is.
Hef's only stockpile is a mountain of Viagra.
If North Korea does collapse, that would be a very defining moment. It would be a message to Iran and Syria, although I doubt that it would cause Iran to change its track.
I would think that somebody who golfs in the low 20s could do much better on the PGA Tour...
Pardon my Korean, but this is absolute, unmitigated horse s@%t.
Kim Il Sung was, at best, a minor resistance figure. He may have taken part in a few anti-Japanese attacks, but even this is under debate. He spent most of the war hiding in Russia, where his son Kim Jong Il was born. His resistance exploits were largely invented after coming to power, and taught as fact to generations of North Koreans.
Kim Jong Il's fanatical love of movies in no way means he's a talented director, any more than his love of blondes makes him a talented lover. Fact of the matter is, North Korean press is required to portray Kim Jong Il as the best at anything he does, in a fantastic way. He's reported to play 18 rounds of golf, hitting 18 holes in one in a row, and to cause flowers to bloom by walking by them.
The fact that a far left South Korean college professor claims this sort of thing has a basis in reality is both absurd and predictable.
Long, confusing article. So, is kim a genius or an idiot? The best part was when the author said the UN and the MSM would be rooting for N Korea.
From who?
I'm not sure that I can buy into the premise of this article. My reading does not support any competing power groups to the Kim government. Any dissent seems quickly eliminated. In a starving nation, survival is all most people are able to think about. The greater the degree of government oppression, the smaller the per cent of active populars support need be. The situation in NK may well be one in which active support of the government is weak but one can see in Burma, for another example, that firm government control needs little more than 20% popular support (Just enough to staff the military and make for an occasional "mass" rally.
If we wait for the collapse of the Kim dynasty, we may have a long wait.
Into the vacuum would return Russia and China, just like they did multiple times in the past. DPRK would go from being covertly supported by them to overtly controlled by them.
Reports of Kim Jong-Il's imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated ... over and over and over again. It seems unlikely that, as long as Li'l Kim keeps the military well fed and whored-up, there will be any kind of coup d'etat. It certainly won't emerge from the general population.
Major point is NK sabor rattling is a sign of weakness. US is largely avoiding the dance as China is their true audience.
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.
Much like the situation between East and West Germany when the Wall came down.
I just hope that we're able to extricate our troops from Iraq before they're needed for this operation.
From who?
I read several serious reference to it on line but don't remember the details.
(BTW, you meant "From whom?")
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