Jason Y: North Korea uses similar logic to explain deaths and other problems in it’s own land. They claim the embargo is to blame.
Nobody’s dying of starvation in North Korea these days. Forget it.
And the North Koreans have never “deliberately starved their own people.” Go out into the countryside at harvest time and the fields will be full of ears of corn. Rural villages look nice and there will be ears of corn spread over every rooftop. And you will see truckloads of happy farmworkers riding in trucks everywhere you go.
Now go to Pyongyang. Everywhere you go, you see men working, often at manual labor. They are working on streets, sidewalks, buildings, everything. And there are trucks full of male workers going here and there every time you look up. The whole place is working all day long.
Yes, the lights go out at night, but some people are still out. You can go out at 9 PM and see groups of teenage girls and young women hanging out in the dark. You walk by a darkened street and there is a 40 year old woman with her stand selling whatever. She is selling it at dark at midnight. The only light is a small light where her little street stand is. The interesting thing is that North Korea is quite safe. Like Japan, pretty young women can walk down the street in the middle of the night and nothing will happen to them.
Nobody’s starving to death, but if you go out to the countryside, you will see some middle-aged men who still look pretty thin.
But keep in mind. North Korea is locked out of the whole world banking system.
They have all these great products, like mineral reserves, and they cannot really sell them anywhere on Earth. They do sell them to the Chinese, but the Chinese are breaking sanctions to do that.
We have locked them out of the whole world banking system. We have made it so almost no one on Earth can buy their stuff. Then we scream and yell about how poor and starving they are.
It’s really messed up. One thing I assure you: North Korea does not “starve its own people on purpose.”
One argument was, “They spend all their money on their military, so their people starve!”
Now whether that is true or not, look at how we just threatened to attack them the other day. You don’t think it is pretty damn smart of them to spend all their money on their military? If they didn’t, we would have attacked them. We are forcing them to spend all their money on their military. Has that ever occurred to anyone? If they spent less on their military, we would attack, invade and conquer them.
That regime just wants to survive, first and foremost. Everything else is secondary. Yes, they are terribly brutal, but on the other hand, they sure have that place locked down good, don’t they?
And look at how hostile we are. We have come out and said that North Korea is enemy #1. OK, don’t you think they should lock their country down to keep out any American spies? They have that place locked down so good that we cannot even get spies in there. It’s either too risky or once they get in, they get caught fast and executed immediately. North Korea is a black hole. We have no idea what is going on with that regime. They have ~15 usable nuclear weapons already fastened as warheads to medium range missiles. These missiles are deep underground and almost impossible to get at. Yet we have no idea where on Earth those missiles even are. All we know is that they are hidden far deep under mountains somewhere. That’s pretty smart of them to lock that place down like that, isn’t it?
One more thing. Kim Jong Un is not a lunatic at all. He is a very smart man. He is shrewd. He had to be wicked smart and extremely sane to rise to power in that brutal system of theirs. He has killed some of the opposition, including his own brother. This is given as a sign that he is that is insane. But it’s not a symptom of insanity. Un is a murderous dictator, brutal as Hell. Un is as nuts as Stalin or Mao. Was Stalin nuts? Was Mao a lunatic? Kim is no different. He is a brutal dictator. Kim, Stalin and Mao were all amazingly sane.
There’s sane and insane and good and evil. People mix them up all the time. Some very bad people are rock-solid sane. Some very good people are pretty damn crazy.
These are two different axes were are discussing here.
