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9 posted on Sat May 26 2012 05:55:34 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by Gay State Conservative: “My understanding is that one of the big problems that the East German government had was that many of its citizens could watch West German TV and listen to West German radio.This gave East Germans a clear picture of what life was like in some parts of the world.I don't know how many TVs and radios there are in private hands in NK (very possibly not many).”

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.