Well MTI, we have given you our assessments, which are in fairly close accord and you don't seem especially enamoured of them. Show us your stuff. What have you got hidden in your pocket that makes you blush?

Here's another perspective.

Bot

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They, The People

by John Derbyshire (Aug. 2006)


You cannot be objective about an aerial torpedo. And the horror we feel of these things has led to this conclusion: if someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother. The only apparent alternatives are to smash dwelling houses to powder, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with thermite, or to be enslaved by people who are more ready to do these things than you are yourself; as yet no one has suggested a practicable way out.
—George Orwell, reviewing Arthur Koestler’s Spanish Testament
for the magazine Time and Tide, Feb. 5, 1938.
I’ve been thinking about North Korea. Not the leaders—not that chubby freak with the Little Richard coiffure, nor his stone-faced generals, but the actual people of North Korea. They are, of course, in a sorry state. I have read The Aquariums of Pyongyang and you should, too; and things have gotten far worse since the experiences that author describes. You can’t help but feel sorry for the poor devils. And yet... Well, perhaps it is unjust, perhaps it is blaming the victim, but peeking out from behind my sympathy is the subversive little thought: What kind of people are these?

It is not as though North Korea is under foreign occupation. Nobody is oppressing the North Koreans but... other North Koreans. China and—to their everlasting shame, it seems to me—the South Koreans are enablers of the Kim Jong-il regime; but nobody would mobilize to rescue Kim if his people rose against him.

This has been certainly true since the end of the Cold War; arguably, it has been true since the Sino-Soviet split around 1960, in which Kim Il-sung declined to take sides. For nearly half a century, on the latter argument, the North Koreans have been putting up with those appalling levels of oppression at the hands of other North Koreans, with no third party being much involved.

Why? Montesquieu—and, I think, all the other 18th-century gents who thought about these issues—believed that “if the insult be great enough, the people will rise.” That, of course, was a lot easier to say in the age of swords and muskets and horse-borne news, than it is in the modern age, when civil discontent can be nipped in the bud very easily and quickly by a regime that is unscrupulous in methods of observing and intimidating its people. Still, you can’t help asking yourself whether we Americans would put up with a regime like the Kims’ for forty years. Are the people of North Korea entirely victims? Thirty years ago, Igor Shafarevich , speaking from the depths of Brezhnev’s Russia, told us that as tyranny descends on the people, there is something in the human soul that rises to greet it. Is that true everywhere? Would it be true of us?

What, come to think of it, are we to make of the South Koreans? For decades they have watched their kin—for some, literally their kin—in the North being starved, tortured, and brutalized by the Kim despotisms. Yet the Southrons are a capable people, productive and resourceful, with a large and well-equipped military—easily a match for the North, with its underfed peasant soldiers and its antiquated, rusting tanks. Would we Americans go about our business so smugly if, say, the old Confederacy were taken over by a Kim-ist tyranny, whose leaders fattened and indulged themselves while their people starved in rags? Would we make no effort to liberate our fellow Americans? Even at the cost of some sacrifice to ourselves?

We are told that the first act by North Korea, if attacked, would be to start firing artillery shells into Seoul. Now, I am sure it must be a very distracting thing to have an artillery shell come in through your office window. Cities have endured worse, though. Over 1,300 V-2 ballistic missiles hit London during the closing months of WWII, yet Londoners regarded this as a passing incident in the larger war, and have largely forgotten about it. A V-2 delivered a far bigger explosive punch than a mere artillery shell. How long would it take South Korea to neutralize those Northern artillery batteries? Yet apparently South Koreans have no interest in liberating their fellow-countrymen. They prefer to enjoy the good life, driving their new cars, chattering into their cell phones, settling back before their 72-inch plasma TV screens. Perhaps it is impertinent of me to judge them. I am only recording passing thoughts.

More at http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=3657&sec_id=3657