Nope, the Kim family isn't into phasing.
Posted on 05/25/2012 11:58:27 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
P!
If North Korea is to ever be free, the only option is to give an absolute guarantee that the leaders can retire without fear of consequence.
“people will quickly begin to regard themselves as poor”
How do a people that are starving, year after year, that are concerned with simple survival, day after day, ever arrive at a point where they can compare themselves with a standard of living that is hidden from them by their own government?
Lankov discussed this in an 2009 interview:
The North Korean government is afraid that if they begin reforms, the result will not be economic growth, a Chinese-style economic miracle, but rather Eastern German or Romanian collapse followed by reunification. And they are afraid that in a unified Korea they will find no place for themselves.
But these people’s major goal is not economic growth. When someone asks, “What is the strategic goal of North Korea’s leaders?” I usually answer, “Their major strategic goal is to die in their beds.” They want to stay alive, they want to keep the regime going, and they don’t care much about economic growth because they believe that economic growth will take them to prison. And they are probably correct. So maybe, sooner or later, someone will try reform. But I would not expect it to happen anytime soon.
Q: We occasionally hear from defectors that there are reformminded officials in the middle levels of the government and Party who realize that the whole system—political, economic, and everything else—has failed. Can these people, who have enough information to know how bad things are, have any influence over the long term?
A: In the long term, maybe, yes. But we shouldn’t forget that once these mid-level people become high-ranking people—and this is a necessary precondition for them to have any influence—they acquire a vested interest in keeping the system going. Because if the system collapses, its leadership will be in trouble, and they know it. This is partially because their rule has been exceptionally brutal and, at the same time, economically very inefficient. So the major problem of the North Korean elite—maybe most of them, and probably Kim Jong Il himself—is that they understand very well that the system is not delivering, but they simply don’t know what to do about it. They don’t see any way out. They don’t have any exit option, and honestly I don’t know what can be done about this.
http://www.rfa.org/english/commentaries/lankov-nk-02202009171534.html
North Koreans are told routinely that everybody else has it as bad or worse.
Animals on two feet.
Perhaps Kim Jong Eun can take a cue from Obama and blame all of his problems on his predecessor - oh, wait...
What’s Behind China’s Fresh Crackdown on N.Koreans?
...
But some others think the move aims to tame the North Korean regime. Since Kim Jong-un came to power, high-level exchanges between North Korea and China have mostly stopped, and there is little communication on strategic matters going on between the two allies. The tensions surfaced publicly when North Korean launched a rocket earlier this year and soldiers held Chinese trawlers to ransom.
North Korean government officials who are involved in dodgy dealings in China will also be subject to the crackdown. This includes businesses and North Korean restaurants that supply hard currency to the North Korean military. A diplomatic source in Beijing said, “A large restaurant called Daedonggang in Beijing set up by the North Korean military has been closed for two months because China did not issue work visas for some 50 North Korean workers there. It may be that China is trying to hold the regime’s activities in check.”
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/05/26/2012052600375.html
I was stationed in West Berlin from 84-88 and went into East Berlin many times. The TV antennas mounted on the East German apartment buildings were all pointed towards West Berlin. I also read that there was one community in the extreme southeast of East Germany where West German TV was not available. For East Germans this was considered a hardship location.
For practical purposes, the answer is close to zero.
Anyone in North Korea with access to significant information about the world outside North Korea is part of the government or an enabler of the system, and therefore has a vested interest in keeping the regime alive.
Another key difference between East Germany and North Korea is that the East Germans understood that Germany, until the collapse following the Second World War, had been one of the most powerful, most wealthy, most educated, and most culturally sophisticated nations in the world. Average East Germans knew from firsthand experience that in the post-war environment, they were laboring under significantly straitened circumstances.
We simply cannot understand North Korea in Western terms. This is a not a nation which went from a typical European monarchy into Communism; this is a nation which has never had even pre-1917 Russian levels of contact with the outside world. Horrible things go on regularly in North Korea, but it is not at all clear that the average North Korean, even those few people old enough to remember the days before Communism, would consider what goes on now to be bad compared to pre-Communist rule of the Japanese or even before that, to the rule of the native Korean "Hermit Kingdom."
I'm not disputing that modern North Korea is worse for its mid-ranking educated officials than Korea was for the pro-Japanese collaborators from 1910 to 1945, or for the yangban class of pre-1905 independent Korea. A scholar or a businessman living in North Korea had greater opportunities before 1950 than he does today.
However, the North Korean regime can make a realistic case to the average North Korean that he is better off today than his ancestors were as peasants in the Hermit Kingdom of monarchist Korea, which was much more isolationist than modern North Korea and ruled its people with an iron fist. A North Korean who knows virtually nothing about the West has good reason to say that his great-grandfather lived in a mud hut with a thatched roof, had to gather sticks to heat his home, and was starving because he had to give most of his food to a hereditary noble in a big house in his village, but as a modern North Korean, he now lives in a home with solid walls, a solid roof, access to rudimentary medical care, and access to enough schooling so he can read. That's an improvement, and while North Korea certainly lags far behind the rest of the developed world, that doesn't mean there haven't been some improvements.
The major problem average North Koreans know they have today which neither they nor their government can deny is famine. Yes, North Korea has famines today, but the nation has often had trouble feeding its people, and a side problem of improved medical care is that mortality rates drop leading to more mouths to feed. There's no way for the Korean peninsula, especially its colder and rockier northern half, to sustain modern population levels without foreign trade.
Also, as bad as North Korea is on human rights when compared to the West and to South Korea, even the horrible nightmare situations of sadistic public executions and punishments of entire extended families of “wrongdoers” have direct parallels in pre-Communist Korea. For example, when Koreans from the educated classes illegally converted to Roman Catholicism under the persecutions of the last Korean kings of the 1800s, it was not uncommon for all their relatives to be punished by removal from government service, confiscation of their property, and reduction to poverty and even beggary as a result. I read a report from the 1800s about the martyrdom of the first Bishop of Seoul a few weeks ago, and the tortures administered to him and his priests sounded very much like something out of a modern North Korean prison camp. Controlling dissent by group punishment of relatives and severe torture of dissenters are not new to Korea.
Essentially, North Korea has exchanged a hereditary king and the privileged “yangban” class of educated and mostly hereditary court officials and local rulers for a hereditary Stalinist dictator and a privileged group of Party and military rulers in Pyongyang and the provinces. Because of its Communist roots and advocacy of the proletariat, as hypocritical as that can be, successful advancement through the ranks of the Party and the military are things to which an academically talented scholar or physically strong and well-disciplined soldier from a poor background has at least some possibility of aspiring toward.
While being born into a powerful family is certainly very helpful, that always had been the case in Korea. Communism is certainly a bad thing, but Asian feudal monarchies weren't a whole lot better.
How to interpret what is happening in North Korea?
Obviously they have an Imperial cult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_cult with a dynasty that is worshipped as gods that can make wonderful things like 11 hole-in-ones http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/from-fashion-icon-to-golf-pro-mind-boggling-facts-about-kim-jong-il/story-e6frf7lf-1226226100974
They borrowed the cult from Mao http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=3684 and Stalin. This followed a long tradition that can be explored in The Golden Bough by Frazer http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/bough11h.htm
from http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2822160/posts?page=901#901
This is the type of activities that will cause China to dump the Norks:
On the morning of 21 May (Monday) three Chinese commercial fishing trawlers and their 29 crew members, captured and detained by DPRK forces on 8 May, arrived in their home country through the port in Dalian. With the fishermen’s return, accounts about their detention have emerged in Chinese media.
Their strategic goal of the Party Elite is for the Party Elite to live like royalty. Part of it is the lifestyle (which is much higher than the common people) but a big part of it is the power. There are some people who just get a hard-on over the idea of having power over people, to make them beg for favors.
Nope, the Kim family isn't into phasing.
Thanks for the ping.
I’ve long thought that behind the scenes, China and South Korea are discussing how to solve the North Korea problem in a manner that won’t result in millions of NoKo refugees overrunning their borders.
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