Quote (thesnipa @ May 24 2018 11:26am)
the issue is you're presupposing that isolation isn't Kim's perpetual goal, and that he cares about horrid conditions.
The Kim regime made isolation the way of life, and they are responsible for the horrid conditions. They use them as a tool keep the people down.
It's hard to believe that all the Kims are after is a bit of stuff for propaganda films, but that's the truth. The don't care much how the world sees them or talks about them, because their people have no access to the internet and get told lies about how the world sees them. Every single things about NK needs to be run through the following filter: "The kims wont care if they die as long as every NK citizen dies before them."
to be frank, Kim wouldnt mind if half the population died off. why? they systematically test and check people for loyalty to the regime, and give food in a hierarchy to those who are loyal. everyone who dies off is less loyal, objectively. when people die he maintains control.
I don't buy into this mindset. I don't think we can turn dictators into two dimensional caricatures that fiddle as rome burns. It is an easy way to dehumanize and vilify the opposition, but I think it gives a disingenuous look at their motivations and thus harms our ability to play the game against them. Can you say that you don't think Kim Jong Un is doing what
he thinks is best for his country and his people? When we look at the iron fist used by tyrants like Bashar Assad, Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, etc- their actions are coherent and logical as the product of someone willing to engage in atrocities not out of pure paranoia or megalomania, but out of larger humanitarian desires. Its easy for a tyrant to believe he's a champion of the common people who is looking out for their interests, but knows that extremists and counter-revolutionaries threaten his tenuous regime and have to be crushed mercilessly if he's going to bring peace. Expressed with infantile hackneyed dialogue you get prequel memes. But it describes a huge chunk of the past 150 years of world events, especially after the october revolution.
Put in Kim's shoes, his actions make sense for the future of his country. He's threatened both externally and internally, and the two fathers before him created a relatively stable system based around military loyalty and suppression of minorities. To pursue nuclear weapons was the only plausible path forward that could set up north korea as a world power rather than being one more minor vassal state of pseudoslave labor. He does the same dance Il did in threatening the west to coerce food aid for his people, he kept the same police state in place. His geopolitical actions have the same tit-for-tat proportional and measured responses that we saw all throughout the nuclear powers of the cold war- south korea sinks a ship, north korea sink a ship.
I say Kim is a rational actor. If anything, it might mean we're at a lesser risk of nuclear threat and/or proliferation from North Korea than we are from Pakistan.
Kim wants to develop and modernize his country. He wants to exploit his nukes to force concessions from the west. And its reasonable to say he's got the interest of his country, not himself, in mind.
This post was edited by Goomshill on May 24 2018 11:48am