North Korea: Misunderstood

Is North Korea to be feared, or revered. Are they misunderstood.  Two Rookers dissect and discern the rumors from reality.  Spoiler alert, I don’t think they’re misunderstood.

Scott:

Does your mouth water at the possibility of eating mud for lunch and grass for dinner?  Do you yearn to practice for a parade for about nine months a year, so diligently  that once said parade is executed will be the most smoothly-run thing in the entire country?  Does the notion of not knowing anything about the rest of the world except for the fact that you hate and are afraid of most of it because your government says so turn you on?  How about a nice trip for the rest of your life to a place known only as Camp 14 where you’ll be separated from your family all because you threw out a newspaper clipping with your president’s face on it?

 

Well buddy, if that sounds like the best time you haven’t had yet, have I got just the place for you…North Korea!  Nestled in the Asia’s southeastern corner on a little over a thousand square miles of landmass, North Korea is one of the most fascinating places on the planet, and not because it’s awesome, in fact, anyone who’s not a citizen yet has paid North Korea a visit will tell you that it’s frightening, horrifying, oppressive, and just plain weird.  However, a lot of people don’t really know much about North Korea other than the fact that they love Dennis Rodman and George Bush named them last in his Axis of Evil trio.  So, let’s learn a little more about North Korea, why they’ve been in the news lately, why we may or may not care about what they have to say, and why they just don’t like the United States, South Korea, or anyone who isn’t China or Russia.  North Korea doesn’t even like China or Russia that much, in fact, I’d wager a guess that secretly North Korea doesn’t even like North Korea, but we’ll get to that.

 

North Korea is a battle born nation to say the least. Without getting prehistoric, we’ll look at recent world history. From about 1910 – 1945, the Korean peninsula was one big Japanese colony.  The Koreans, like other folks we know, decided that being ruled by a foreign empire wasn’t anything they wanted a part of, so, this guy, Kim Il-Sung, got a bunch of peasants together, taught them a little bit about Marxist-Leninism which he learned from the then-Soviets, and, according to who you ask, “single-handedly threw the Japanese” out of the Korean peninsula.  After the Japanese went home and they slowly began to lose their front of World War 2, Stalin decided that the Russians would invade Japan through Korea, however, he required a man-in-charge sympathetic to his cause. and who would be a better fit for the job? Why the same guy who was Soviet educated but Korean born, and responsible for ousting imperialist Japanese in the first place.  Enter Kim Il Sung.  However, at that point, it was a little late for Stalin’s raid on the land of the rising sun because by that point the United States bombed Japan into the Stone Age and World War 2 was essentially over.  A few years lapse, Kim Il Sung gets bored, turns his gaze south, and decides “Hey, it’s the fifties!  Happy Days! Let’s make everyone a Communist!”  So with Stalin’s blessing, Kim and his North Korean army supplied by both the Russians and the Chinese invade US occupied South Korea.  The Korean War ensues, and, again depending on who you ask, Kim almost overruns the entire South Korean peninsula until the UN steps in.

 

Then the rest is history- we have an armistice, or a cease fire, between the two Koreas, the US stays behind to protect it’s friends in the South as well as it’s democratic and capitalist interests abroad, and the Soviet Union crumbles leaving North Korea with only China to turn to for political camaraderie.  Kim Il-Sung, bathing in the glory of defeating yet another foreign enemy, capitalizes on a cult-of-personality style of leadership stylizing himself  “The Great Leader”.  He instills a policy called “Juche Communism” or “military first” and begins to raises an army which nowadays numbers about nine million strong.  The common folk go nuts.  They have to.  Remember the prison camps? If you don’t go wild for Kim, well, you won’t be seeing your family for a really long time and you’re going to be digging corn kernels out of cow dung to sustain the next few decades of your life in good old Camp 14.  Kim Il-Sung organizes parades in his own honor, builds statues all over Pyongyang to immortalize both his legacy and the legacy of the Korean Communist Party, and enjoys an unopposed rule until about 1994. Kim Il-Sung passes away, his son, Kim Jong-Il steps in calling himself The Supreme Leader (Great Leader was already taken), Kim Jong-Il dies, and his grandson, Kim Jong-Un ascends to the throne. This brings to the present.

 

I mean, let’s face it, South Korea, really won the breakup from the Korean War.  South Korea enjoys a prosperous democratic economy and open trade from the United States, and why not?  We made them see the light of nation building and hubris and so now they can send some action figures and flat screen TVs our way.  Seoul, South Korea’s capitol, is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, while Pyongyang looks like a ghost town or a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”  While North Korea is probably bitter at how lousy of a hand they were dealt even though technically they won the Korean War, it’s not all petulance and jealousy.  North Korea, like South Korea, believes that they are both ONE Korea however divided across the line they may be.  This yearning for unification has been a fly in the ointment and point of contention since the Korean War Armistice was drafted.  People flee North Korea for the south in droves.  They cross the demilitarized zone or go through China and cross their fingers hoping they make it in.  If they do, South Korea accepts them, if they don’t, well, North Korea deals with them via firing squad.  They’re really bitter about defectors.

 

Lately we’ve seen a lot in the news about North Korea.  In fact, every six months or so, the free world remembers that North Korea is a country because they either fire off a bunch of artillery shells at South Korea and kill a dozen or so people, or they start dusting off their nuclear reactors and test fire missiles like its still the Cold War.  On a good day, North Korea threatens a thermonuclear war against the United States, South Korea and all of its enemies (read: the rest of the world) because the US flew a jet fighter too close to the DMZ in the closet.  Historically, that’s about as bad as its gotten.  Since the beginning of April 2013, however, people have started paying a bit more attention to North Korea.  Just a bit though, let’s not get carried away. See, North Korea has Kim Jong-Un,  a new leader who’s still surrounded by the old guard of generals, business people, Juche fanatic politicos, and a really zealous populous who still believes that they’re in the greatest country in the world.  Kim Jong-Un is the Joffrey of the House Baratheon for that part of the world – an ambitious young leader with a lot to prove who was raised in a country where his father was Jesus, Buddha, Mick Jagger, and Justin Beiber combined. He’s also well schooled in North Korea’s history of dealing with foreign policy:  throw them out if they come here, and if they don’t come here, throw some harsh words around so they remember why we earned that bronze medal in the Axis of Evil.  Kim Jong-Un has taken the warspeak a step further; beyond simply threatening the United States with an open nuclear war, he’s gone so far as to close one of the very few borders shared with the South and the requisite industrial plant that went with it; he’s also moved medium range missile launchers to North Korea’s east coast and has the White House AND the Pentagon saying that an attack is “imminent”.   So what does this mean?  Do we finally pay attention, or is North Korea posturing?

 

For the short period of time that North Korea had our attention, they’ve now been pushed to the back burner in light of the tragedies at the Boston Marathon which the news is saying but not saying smells a lot like Middle Eastern flavored terrorism.  That sort of terrorism still makes the top of the stuff-we-care-about-list even in post-Bush America; Islamic fundamentalists still pose a bigger threat than a conventional army backed by a sovereign nation still clinging on to Communism ever will.  I mean, how many dead soldiers have come back as a result of anything that North Korea has dished out since the 50s?

 

See politically, at least, we’ve gone about the whole “caring about what happens with North Korea” a totally different way.  The United States still has a fairly concrete foothold on the Korean peninsula to the South, and as of last week one thing has become abundantly clear, this is going to be China’s problem.  After China basically told North Korea to slow it’s roll, we made sure we sent our man John Kerry over there to bore the Chinese Prime Minister to death about an “unified” approach to dealing with North Korea.  If there’s anyone in the Pacific Rim that can get North Korea to shut up, it’s going to be the country that can also get the United States to shut up.  China has expressed an interest in denuclearizing the North Korean peninsula, North Korea balks China, China says “Look, we gave you the stuff you needed, we keep your country barely afloat, we’re the ones that can call the shots around here, and look, United States, if you piss us off, we’re just going to deflate your dollar even more and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

 

While the American people may get a little of the Cold War hide-under-your-school-desk nostalgia from North Korea’s momentary mouth off and muscle flexing, we’ve basically said “China, you deal with it, because we’ve got our own problems now, see?  And by the way, you’re still going to build all of our stuff for really cheap right?”  So does it really matter if North Korea is posturing now or not?  Will the United States people really begin to lose sleep over a country we forget about every half-year or so?  Are we that unsure of our own military’s capability to disrupt any hostile action North Korea takes especially when the bigger and stronger China will ultimately be left holding the bag?  Will we really flip to page 4 of the “International News” section of our hometown paper next week in the wake of what’s happened in Boston this week?

 

In this writer’s opinion:

 

NOPE.

 

Jake:

North Korea sure has been on the news a lot lately. And by news, I mean that I see a lot more pictures of Kim Jong Un on the internet while I take breaks from searching for pornography. Like most good American’s, I don’t understand what the hell is going on in the world today. It really goes right over my head. However, when I try to find out, I come to find that the media and government too are in the same dilemma. What should be my window into understanding my world seems to just muddle the issues at hand even further. Right now, the North Korean (Crisis? Dust up? Show of force? Display of Cocksmanship?) Situation is a perfect encapsulation of why Americans are so distrustful of their government and media.

Do you remember when we were supposed to be afraid of North Korea?

Just four short years ago they were a card carrying member of the ‘Axis of Evil’, that rogue group of sinister nations hell bent on taking down the United States. The only difference NK and its Axis compatriots, Iraq and Iran, is that Korea actually stated that they want to destroy the US. In fact, in recent history, they are the only sovereign nation to overtly state that they would engage in us nuclear war and bragged that they had the capacity to do so. And what was the mighty US’s response to these threats?

Shrug

As excitable a nation we have been in regards to threats, for some reason the North Koreans never seem to register as a danger. It would seem that they have all the ingrediants for some solid fear mongering: nuclear weapons, the backing of the communists, and an entitled, deluded, insecure fatty pants at the helm. You couldn’t invent a seemingly more dangerous powder keg of potential terrorism if you tried, and the Bush administration tried really hard to do that.

Even back before we defeated racism forever 2008 and again in 2012, we were sold Iraq as a much more imminent threat than our friends on the Pacific rim. Granted, most of us didn’t buy it, but low and behold, we somehow all managed to pay for it in blood and dollars. When we discovered that Iraq really had no way to harm us, it didn’t come as a shock. We had already moved passed the reasoning phase, and forged head on into the mired in an endless conflict phase. And all the while, the original Mad Man in the East, Kimmy J the Ill, blustered and threatened his Margaret Cho looking ass off. The biggest difference between Iraq and NK at the point was a simple one: Iraq didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction and North Korea actually, and verifiably, did.

So why were we so eager to get into Iraq for a hypothetical danger rather than attack a genuine one? The short cynical answer is oil. The longer more complex answer is…. oil with a side of Chinese influence. However, the truth is, it really doesn’t matter why we went in.  We were never given enough information from any official channel to make an informed decision. We all have our pet theories, but apart from the powers that be, no one really knows.

Now, there’s a new threat from the fruit of Ill’s ill loins, Kim Jong Un.  Or is there? The media has been reporting in its great tradition of sensational panic attacks over nothing that Un is making threats. Nuclear threats. Dire threats with potentially catastrophic consequences. And what has been our response been?

Shrug

            The government has given no strong stance one way or the other. So far, the only thing that even resembles a stance on this issue is John Kerry letting us know that North Korea shouldn’t be doing that in his eminently dull John Kerry fashion. But the news keeps on chattering about nukes and threats and targets. And the government keeps on shrugging. So what are we to make of this?

We aren’t.

Like the Iraq war before, we, as a populace have not been given enough information to make an informed decision. And likely, we’re probably never going to. To maintain its credibility, the news can’t make a conclusion about North Korea this early. If they do, and NK does the opposite, whatever good will they have will be blown away. And the government can’t give us a decided level of urgency either. If they come out and say that North Korea is a threat with their nukes, then why the hell didn’t they do something earlier?  Korea has been making these threats for years. But if they say that North Korea isn’t a threat, then they directly contradict every news outlet and look ill informed.

No one ever wants to look like the asshole. And we, as consumers of information, are looking to the only suppliers we in town and are coming up wanting. The powers that be are forcing us to draw our own conclusions on topics that we are not fit to draw conclusions about. How are we to know the genuine threat level of a country half a world away? How are we to know the global ramifications if that country decides to make good on its claims? Who’s to say that all the bluster isn’t a smoke screen for a terrorist attack on the horizon?  Is there any real threat or is it just filler for a news cycle that relies on constant crises?

Sadly, the answer to those questions is always the same:

Shrug

Then, a couple bombs went off in Boston and North Korea didn’t exist anymore.

And, thus, the crisis, or not, resolves itself.

Until it resurfaces next time.

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