North Korea
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Morrigu 
Joined: 11 Aug 2001
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| pietillidie wrote: | | swoop42 wrote: | | Someone should do the world and people of North Korea a favour and assassinate little kim. |
Except you don't know if Little Kim is a better choice than his rivals who may actually believe the whacky press releases. The idea that NK has no factions is no doubt as false as the view that China is a narrow autocracy when it's actually a very complex spread of factions and power.
Put it this way: The deranged buffoons who predictably made an absolutely horrific mess of Iraq know infinitely less about NK. |
Exactly - I have little faith in the ability of the USA to assess ANYTHING realistically ( and honestly) 
Are you worried at all? I find myself a little twitchy - but I don't know enough to know if the twitches are just a seasonal itch??
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Not really, if at all. It's likely to remain a stalemate seasoned by the usual rhetorical flourishes and exchanges of fire along the maritime border. The overwhelming weight of forces (China, Japan, SK, the US, the NK ruling faction and military, and the money invested in the region) are aligned to keep things as they are or to shut down serious conflict quick smart. That doesn't mean it could never happen, but much like say terrorism in an Australian city there's no point dwelling on it if decent security measures are in place.
The media depiction of things is, as ever, hysterical, misleading and poorly thought through.
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Bruno
Joined: 19 Sep 2003
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I record the 7pm on the Foxtel IQ thing and watch it later on in the evening so I can fast forward through stories which don't matter.
With this in mind, the Korean situation is one of the stories I have indeed been fast forwarding through these past few nights.
I notice also that tonight it had dropped from almost leading the bulletin to being dropped down to just before Alan Kohler came on. |
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Bruno
Joined: 19 Sep 2003
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| pietillidie wrote: | | swoop42 wrote: | | Someone should do the world and people of North Korea a favour and assassinate little kim. |
Except you don't know if Little Kim is a better choice than his rivals who may actually believe the whacky press releases. The idea that NK has no factions is no doubt as false as the view that China is a narrow autocracy when it's actually a very complex spread of factions and power.
Put it this way: The deranged buffoons who predictably made an absolutely horrific mess of Iraq know infinitely less about NK. |
I'll assume when you mention the deranged buffoons who predictably made an absolutely horrific mess of Iraq you are referring to Iran and Al Qaeda. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Bruno wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | | swoop42 wrote: | | Someone should do the world and people of North Korea a favour and assassinate little kim. |
Except you don't know if Little Kim is a better choice than his rivals who may actually believe the whacky press releases. The idea that NK has no factions is no doubt as false as the view that China is a narrow autocracy when it's actually a very complex spread of factions and power.
Put it this way: The deranged buffoons who predictably made an absolutely horrific mess of Iraq know infinitely less about NK. |
I'll assume when you mention the deranged buffoons who predictably made an absolutely horrific mess of Iraq you are referring to Iran and Al Qaeda. |
Yes, them and their close allies in the Coalition of the Willing.
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Jezza 
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 06 Sep 2010
Location: Ponsford End
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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An interesting perspective on what might be going on inside of Pyongyang at the moment:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/04/04/rundle-is-north-korea-on-the-warpath-or-is-it-a-ruse-yes/
| Quote: | Is North Korea on the warpath, or is it a ruse? Yes.
Guy Rundle
North Korea: what the ****?
The world is staring open-mouthed as the tiny, ancestral, Juche dictatorship moves towards a nuclear footing and threatens the by-now familiar lake of fire against its enemies. Both South Korea and the United States have put themselves on a war footing, allegedly, as the North restarts a nuclear reactor, suspends the crisis hotline between North and South and shuts down a joint industrial complex on the border.
Whatever panic there might be among the American public remember, a poll released today shows one in four Americans believe President Barack Obama may be the Antichrist is not shared by its elite, who know the hermit kingdom has not yet managed to perfect an anti-ballistic delivery system for a nuclear weapon. No easy thing, apparently.
They also know well something Western audiences are barely told: the US and South Korea have, in recent weeks, been engaged in large-scale war games on the peninsula, involving up to 40,000 troops and hundreds of planes and tanks. The line in the Western press, when this is aired at all, is that these are purely defensive measures, because, well, we never start wars against countries we have nominated as part of the axis of evil, do we?
Simultaneously we are told North Korea is a joke country that no one could take seriously so why the large-scale war manoeuvres? The North Koreans have one idea: the imperialists intend to annihilate them. Do the power elite in the country really believe that? Or is it all a ruse designed to keep the game on the road?
The question is impossible to determine, because the answer might be: both. North Koreas leaders are split between those who have spent time overseas children of the elite, raised in Swiss boarding schools and those, in the military chiefly, who have never known anything else. Various diplomats, and the occasional feted Western Stalinist, have said Kim Jong-il had told them they knew the whole thing was a sham and they would have to transition out of it at some point.
Yet on the other hand, the army is an entirely self-supporting system that reproduces itself generation on generation, defining itself not only against the world, but against the bleeding heart liberals in the elite of the Workers Party, who dally with notions of rapprochement and international co-operation.
So, one theory is the Norths response is entirely external to the movements of the US. Another theory is that its internal, whereby the Workers Party elite tries to assert its power against the army, which accuses it of backsliding. Six weeks ago the leadership made some token measures towards greater openness chiefly, allowing tourists to use their mobile phones while in the country (there are quite a few tourists, valued for their foreign currency, traipsing through on guided tours).
The third theory is its both, combining the two. In the trade we call that dialectics. Whatever the case, it has created plenty of opportunity for foreign correspondents to trot out the usual stories on the essential weirdness of North Korea, alternatively portraying it as entirely brainwashed or an entirely captive nation.
People are either goose-stepping in front of missiles in ardent fanaticism or they are all faking tears whenever one of the now eternal presidents dies. The popular story flicks between the two. Whats the truth? Both are right, and I would refer you to the earlier answer on dialectics. From extensive accounts of North Korean life, such as Barbara Demings Nothing To Envy, its clear the North Korean public is entirely split between those devoted to the Kim-il cult and the idea of Juche and those who think its a crock of shit.
To some extent the split is geographical those closer to the Chinese border and the major crossing city of Dandong, a Wild East gambling/smuggling/pornorama, have a better idea whats going on because they can get DVDs of Lindsay Lohan movies smuggled in, etc. Its also divided in Pyongyang, a relatively prosperous city though everyone there, to judge from their Los Angeles lithe elegance, is on 1300 calories a day with some vestigial international connection.
Outside of that, well, as far as one can tell (your correspondent is an expert, based on a four-day tour) its simply a dirt-poor farming barracks. Villages have been demolished to house the population in concrete housing blocks, which stand isolated in the fields. There are no shops, no pubs, no clubs, little electricity and not much food. Half the population is in uniform, but a lot of them dont seem to be doing anything useful. In Pyongyang, thousands of them seemed to be planting flowerbeds, very slowly, like the whole place was a school full of kids whod been excused phys ed for the afternoon.
What Western media outlets find hardest to disentangle is the personality cult from the economic system, the 10-storey gold-plated statues from the starvation. Theyre inter-related obviously, but not identical. It would be quite possible for the North Koreans to loosen the total economic system, allow private farming, small business and move steadily to a mixed economy, while still preserving the Kimist idolatry. Unless youre a mad Hayekian and theres a personality cult if ever there was one you realise by now, glancing at China, this is not only possible but quite a feasible historical trajectory.
One reason its so hard to think about North Korea in that way in the West is that if we did start to distinguish idolatry from efficiency, wed start to look askance at out own system. Lets face it, if youve lived in Brisbane or Adelaide, or half-a-dozen other places for the past two decades, the wall-to-wall media has been of singular voice, no matter who owns it, which is overwhelmingly Murdoch; the party system is more or less unitary; life offers a smooth singularity, lacking real difference. Yes, since you ask, it is considerably more pleasant than North Korea which simply makes my point.
You never know when youre in the middle of a wrap-around ideology, so all-encompassing that theres very little opportunity for most people to think outside it. So places like North Korea become extremely useful in that situation. You can run relentless military exercises on their border, and construct any response as the product of a paranoid totalitarian self-enclosed state, a surviving mutant of 20th century history. Of course half the time it is, but the other half, its just a mixture of rational statecraft, and internal politicking, and it might be useful if the meeja offered better analysis than North Korea: what the ****?. |
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Proud Pies 
Joined: 22 Feb 2003
Location: Knox-ish
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Jesus Christ, the Murdoch media are treating this as an active war. Look at their infographics! Ridiculous.
As always, Chris Morris did it better years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg
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Pi 
Joined: 13 Feb 2006
Location: SA
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Thanks for asking, Jezza.
We're used to the threat-pacification cycle here and take it with a grain of salt. And I don't mean just me and I don't mean that in a careless way, it's just that the SK and US forces here are more potent than people realise, not to mention Japan is paranoid about NK and has a much bigger "purely defensive" (cough, cough) military apparatus than people realise. Add that to the fact that China is keen to keep its economic development on track and war here has been averted under much more trying circumstances over the past six decades and you can begin to see why panic is not on the agenda.
As I say, anything is possible, but so are terrorist attacks in major Australian cities.
Just looking at some of the hysterical rhetoric from the usual media sources you can see the same old creeps who benefit from war (the media, the arms companies and their parasitic ecosystems, nutter conservative authoritarians who revel in fear and chaos, etc.) are just dying to turn this into something more than the usual to and fro. Nothing gives declining media outlets and arms companies bigger boners than talk of missiles/weaponised phalluses!
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Morrigu
Joined: 11 Aug 2001
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“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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^^^
I enjoyed that. Thanks  |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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By the way, the main discussion I've picked up here in Seoul is related to the way the half-witted chest-beating conservatives have mishandled the situation, ultimately damaging local value through the recent dip in the market (buy in now, folks!). How hard is it to simply shut up, stand your ground firmly and calmly play the game knowing you're in a stalemate which presents you with a narrow set of options, the most likely and best of a bad set by far is the continuation of the status quo until internal economic change takes root? Apparently very hard if you're an authoritarian whose twenty-first century body is still being animated by your 1960s emotions.
You may recall my dismay at the election of the current president a few months back. A mollycoddled conservative party hack, she also happens to be the internationally-cloistered daughter of a 1960s/1970s autocrat who was NK's public enemy number one for two decades. You can be sure his memory still lingers in the bizarre North Korean subconscious, not to mention his ghost was substantially responsible for the "good old days" generation of SK voters imagining his entirely unqualified daughter could grow the economy at the same rate it grew four decades ago, restoring some imaginary golden period of national pride when young people still had respect and the dictator gave us succour on a nightly basis on his all-but-personally-written news broadcasts. God love 'em, old people the world over; it's hard to judge them given their generation suffered so much and gave so much for their countries, but by geez their ignorance and fear of the contemporary world can be damaging.
Dated conservatives in quality countries like SK and Australia might seem harmless enough when in office, especially when the global economy is good, but as with John Howard's widening of the socio-economic gap and narrowing of Australian minds the damage they do to the nation on behalf of their cultural religion and fundamentalist convictions only becomes apparent afterwards, while they are a massive liability during crises when their whacko base and military-industrial sponsors bay for blood (Howard's absolutely idiotic blind support of Bush and Blair's disasters, as well as his disgraceful uncorking of the racist genie to win the 2001 election, are classic cases in point). Equipped with the born-to-rule delusion, such conservatives are trained and groomed from a young age to serve the narrow interests of their class to the exclusion of all other good and necessary considerations that don't register in the polls. This of course doesn't mean the alternative is always much better, but at least as we saw with say Keating or Lula da Silva in Brazil it has a shot at being far better, without all the extremist downside crisis risk.
I mention this because the main concern I have with the current situation is that dated provincial conservatives here in Korea and the US are dealing with global complexities well beyond their simpleton mindsets, reminisce of the ignoramuses Anglo-America elected to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan. You only need to recall how hopeless the likes of institutional conservatives such as George, Tony and Little Johnny were when it came to dealing with the Middle East and Central Asia to get the gist of my wariness. That said, any concern I have with that is offset by the fact that in this instance much greater socio-economic forces control the physics of the matter despite vile arms and media companies licking their chops, with the SK version of the neo-cons being hemmed in by factors beyond their control including the interests of US and regional wealth, and the twin elephants in the room as ever looming large: the reality of short-range missiles that surely scare even the dumbest amongst the neo-cons given for once they are actually in the line of fire, and the strategic designs of China. But the gratuitous chest beating they engage in to please their extremist base is a dangerous game nonetheless.
(Let's hope once he's in office Australia's own totally unqualified dunderheaded cultural conservative, Tony Abbott, doesn't have to face any worldly complexities beyond the daily Australian media circus he is trained to deal with. The bloke doesn't know the first thing about the wider world and international relations, not to mention his complete ignorance of science, technology and the staple of future global wealth, the knowledge economy, on which future high-paying jobs and housing affordability depends. Why people keep handing power to such grossly unqualified, intellectually incurious, and modestly-equipped or entirely beholden conservative politicians is beyond me.)
As a matter of curiosity, this article in the KH touches on the bizarre back-to-the-60s battle going on inside SK between ultra-paranoid reds-under-the-bed conservatives and lost-in-time underground Che Guevara wannabes: http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20130405000261 , explaining where a lot of the more extreme pronouncements in the media come from. The average Korean I work with does not believe the nonsense peddled by either extreme (though as ever there are enough on the far right and far left to push such nuttiness to disruptive levels and onto the front pages of equally dated and declining Western newspapers). Indeed, the bright spot I can report over the irrational din is that the average person here fully gets the present stalemate, even if this is totally (or conveniently) misread as nonchalance by the circling hawks both here and abroad.
As usual, Western media outlets, drilled as they are in reporting on behalf of the Absolute Empire, are like floundering fools when it comes to a region outside the sphere of Absolute Control. Take a look at this NYT article and tell me they have even half a clue about what's going on:
| The NYT, groping about like a man with his eyes poked out, wrote: | China, which has been deeply suspicious of the American desire to reassert itself in Asia, has not protested publicly or privately as the United States has deployed ships and warplanes to the Korean Peninsula. That silence, American officials say, attests to both Beijings mounting frustration with the North and the recognition that its reflexive support for Pyongyang could strain its ties with Washington.
The timing of this is important, Tom Donilon, Mr. Obamas national security adviser, said in an interview. It will be an important early exercise between the United States and China, early in the term of Xi Jinping and early in the second term of President Obama.
While administration officials cautioned that Mr. Xi has been in office for only a few weeks and that China has a history of frustrating the United States in its dealings with North Korea, Mr. Donilon said he believed that Chinas position was evolving.
Judging whether China has genuinely changed course on North Korea is tricky: Beijing has appeared to respond to American pressure before, only to backtrack later. China, the Norths only strong ally, has long feared the United States would capitalize on the fall of the North Korean leadership by expanding American military influence on the Korean Peninsula.
Nor has China given clues about its intentions in its public statements, voicing grave concern about the rising tensions while being careful not to elevate Mr. Kims stature.
Chinese analysts say there are internal debates within the Communist Party and the military about how to deal with Mr. Kim, and how strongly to enforce the United Nations economic sanctions that China signed on to last month.
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What we have seen is a subtle change in Chinese thinking, Kurt M. Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, said in a speech Thursday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The Chinese now believe North Koreas actions are antithetical to their national security interests, he said.
That thinking has also surfaced in recent articles by Chinese scholars that have called into question Chinas policy. Deng Yuwen, the influential deputy editor of a Communist Party journal, wrote in The Financial Times that Beijing should give up on Pyongyang and press for the reunification of the Korean Peninsula.
And yet Mr. Deng has since been suspended from his job, which underscores how little Chinas attitude has changed.
Some voices are urging China not to be rattled by the crisis. A hawkish major general in the Peoples Liberation Army, Luo Yuan, who often writes in the Chinese state-run news media, appeared unperturbed by the actions of Mr. Kim or by the dispatch of American ships and planes in support of South Korea.
When the current American and South Korean joint military exercises end this month, he wrote in a blog post on Chinas social media site, Sina Weibo, North Korea will calm down and return to the status quo of no war, no unification, which remains in Chinas favor.
Jeffrey A. Bader, a former Asia adviser to Mr. Obama, said he believes that any change will be subtle. The Chinese, he said, will continue to use similar language, and their public demeanor will be similar, but quietly, they will be much more aggressive, much more fed up and much more prepared to treat North Korea differently than in the past.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/world/asia/us-sees-china-as-lever-to-press-north-korea.html |
If the media knows that little about East Asia, just imagine how pitifully little they knew about the Middle East and Central Asia when the Iraq War broke out. They could've and now we know clearly did make up any nonsense their paymasters liked.
In sum, once you sift through the media rubbish there's one thing to be grasped about the present situation and it is this: If "sorry" is the hardest word for the proud to say, then "stalemate" is the hardest word for people used to being in control of things to comprehend.
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Interesting.
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