"Even today, long after becoming the sole supreme leader of North Korea, Kim refuses to allow graduates of the Namsan School in his inner circle. After all, those who have known Kim Jong Il since youth are bound to see him as human -- not the center of a god-like cult of personality."
In the new Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson quotes Steve on why he didn't let his parents come to his school's campus: "I didn't want anyone to know I had parents. I wanted to be like an orphan who had bummed around the country on trains and just arrived out of nowhere, with no roots, no connections, no background."
Interesting how powerful people manipulate the story of how they got to be where they are. Speaking of which, I was raised by wolves.
"There is a psychological growth phase which involves separation, and that is one manifestation."
I wonder if this phase is actually about teen social structures and hierarchies as they've developed in Western countries. I'm reminded of something pg wrote in "Why Nerds Are Unpopular:" http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html :
I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.
So I wonder if a large fraction of the age group want to reject their parents because of the way they've been raised and schooled.
You obviously didn't argue that this phase is universal, but I still find the idea interesting.
Historically most people had "adult" responsibilities much earlier than they do today. At 13 or 14 many people were done with formal schooling and either working at farming, learning a trade or "seeking their fortune." They didn't have time to sit around wondering about the meaning of it all.
I'm not sure if it is just powerful people. I think in many ways we all want to live in a world that fits with our image of ourselves. And some work harder than others to make it happen.
I found the article to be an interesting read but I wish that someone could talk about the psychology, history behind why the country became that way instead of just finger pointing on how terrible the conditions were. While its difficult to feel any empathy towards a manipulative, despotic, authoritarian regime, I also think that most westerners misunderstand and underestimate the people and their situation.
The NK brand of communism is just a thin veil for the old dynastic feudal caste society that Korea traditionally was. This is just how the country was for over 2 millennia. The north, especially due to its easily defensible mountainous terrain, has always played a pivotal role in keeping larger more powerful threats from absorbing the whole. Considering its history it sheds some light into understanding their extreme xenophobia.
Westerners always raise the question, why don't the people rise up against the injustice? This is a culture steeped in confucianism, the patriarch is supreme and group cohesion and harmony is of higher importance than the needs of an individual. Even linguistically, social order is embedded into the language with many different levels of honorifics for different rank and class.
> The NK brand of communism is just a thin veil for the old dynastic feudal caste society that Korea traditionally was.
While your argument is defensible, I think characterizing the NK autocracy as a natural progression of pre-occupation Korea is misleading and perhaps unfair.
It's important to remember that at the time of the NK invasion in 1950, Korea had only recently been freed from the 35-year Japanese occupation in which the Japanese actively sought to eradicate Korean culture. The successor to this was another occupation by the US and USSR.
Although the new interim governments were more benign I don't think it was clear that the future would hold any kind of true independence from foreign states, and certainly US style democracy seemed quite far fetched.
And so it seems to me that if I was a young man of fighting age in Korea in 1950 (and thus born during the occupation), I would have found the NK motto of "Juche" (self-reliance) much more compelling than the murky, foreign roadmap offered by the US. Indeed, the professor in this article, Kim Hyun Sik, expresses this sentiment.
Even for many years after the Korean War, it wasn't clear that the US-led South was superior in ideals or in practice. The industry-heavy North (aided by infrastructure built by the Japanese and by Soviet engineers) flew ahead of the South in terms of economic growth and actual standards of living. Meanwhile, South Korea was embroiled in poverty, military coups, and cruel suppressions of student riots. You really couldn't have called SK a democracy until the late 1980s.
Of course, fortunes changed for NK. The classic Soviet style N-year plans were failing to meet their quotas, and as this began to happen, Kim Il Sung, who was really a foreign plant from Stalin, began to emulate Stalin's tactics of self-aggrandizement and brutal extermination of opponents.
If you wished at this point to question why it was that nobody stood up to Kim Il Sung in his rise as tyrant, you could very well blame Korean Confucianism and the hierarchical nature of Korean language and society. This is a strong reason, but I don't think it's sufficient.
There is a simpler answer: NK is a very tiny nation, with a reluctant ally on one border and a perpetual enemy on the other. Total control in a country of NK's size is actually possible, and with a constant menacing enemy, it was relatively easy to manipulate a small society into subservience. Think "1984", or the "War on Terror", but constrained to the state of Indiana.
Essentially, despite being thought of as a communist country, in reality North Korea is (by ideology) traces its ideological roots to the race-based nationalism of the early-20th-century Japanese colonization. In the book written by the interviewee, he describes how the main ideologues of North Korea were not pre-war communists, but rather pre-war collaborators with the Japanese, who picked up the official line that Koreans were an innocent, childlike sub-branch of the Japanese master race (post-war, they just excised the Japanese from this picture). Hence the North Korean propaganda emphasis on intermarriage with foreigners in South Korea, the effort put in (in the parent article) to eugenicist approaches to disability, etc.
Westerners always raise the question, why don't the people rise up against the injustice?
I think this is a fascinating question, but one that's not tied up in culture at all. It's not just the Koreans and Chinese that have succumbed to this, but also the Russians, Germans, Yugoslavs, and South Americans that I can't name.
In any case, your reference to linguistic differences probably doesn't hold up.
- - - Quote [1]
Whorf presents a moving target, with most of his claims coming in both extreme and in more cautious forms. Debate continues about his considered views, but there is little doubt that his bolder claims, unimpeded by caveats or qualifications, were better suited to captivate his readers than more timid claims would have been.
When languages are similar, Whorf tells us, there is little likelihood of dramatic cognitive differences. But languages that differ markedly from English and other Western European languages (which Whorf calls, collectively, “Standard Average European” or SAE) often do lead their speakers to have very different worldviews.
- - - End Quote
and also
- - - Quote [2]
...the strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that language determines thought, is also thought to be incorrect. ...
Among the most frequently cited examples of linguistic determinism is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit people, who were thought to have numerous words for snow. He argues that this modifies the world view of the Eskimo, creating a different mode of existence for them than, for instance, a speaker of English. The notion that Arctic people have an unusually large number of words for snow has been shown to be false by linguist Geoffrey Pullum; in an essay titled "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax", he tracks down the origin of the story, ultimately attributing it largely to Whorf and suggesting the triviality of Whorf's observations.
... A recent study by Peter Gordon examines the language of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil. According to Gordon, the language used by this tribe only contains three counting words: one, two and many. Gordon shows through a series of experiments that the people of the Pirahã tribe have difficulty recounting numbers higher than three (Gordon, 2004). However, the causal relationship of these events is not clear. Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count numbers higher than three for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. Moreover, a more recent study suggests that the Pirahã have a basic understanding of geometry despite their language.
> I think this is a fascinating question, but one that's not tied up in culture at all. It's not just the Koreans and Chinese that have succumbed to this, but also the Russians, Germans, Yugoslavs, and South Americans that I can't name.
That's probably because you need to study more history.
It would also help to know a bit about current events (NazBols/Other Russia protests, the Caucus wars going on for the past 10 years, etc.).
By Germans I assume you're referencing Nazis. Where was the Nazi injustice for the Germans? Given how much ordinary Germans profited (http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Beneficiaries-Plunder-Racial-W...), it's surprising more of them didn't support the Nazi party.
> That's just the largest, most-well known events.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The fact is that all of those nations I listed have, at one point or another, knuckled under (collectively, if not in the case of every individual) to a despotic government. There's no question that the Russians were cowed to the point that they were afraid to protest, for fear of being ratted out by their neighbors.
Are you trying to say that because some people protested, it's a different story? I that doesn't wash. For every one that stood up, countless people were ground down (e.g., accused of being "Kulaks"[1] or "wreckers" [2]), sent to the Gulags.
> Where was the Nazi injustice for the Germans?
It was positively rampant. If you didn't toe the party line, you were doomed. See, for example, Defying Hitler, by Sebastian Haffner [3]. Quote regarding the latter [4]:
The book is carried forward by waves of contempt and disgust — for the Nazis; for the people who believed them; for those who didn't, yet failed to do anything to stop them; and for the German character itself — but reason is the source of its passion. ...
The question that always springs from accounts of Hitler's Germany is "Why didn’t the Germans resist?" Some of the reasons have long been obvious. There is a natural human instinct for survival, however odious the forms it takes or the lengths it may go to.
...Haffner takes it for granted that Germans knew about the brutality of Nazi rule — brutality that, logically, would only increase as the state consolidated its power — and that they lacked the will to resist it.
...
If by now the incidents that follow are familiar — the intimidation, the erosion of press freedom, violence in the streets, people fleeing or attempting to flee — it’s their novelty to Haffner that carries the book, the distorting mirror effect of the degradation of the ideas of freedom and individuality that should be the very stuff of everyday life. And at the book’s end (Haffner never finished writing it), Haffner sees how easy it is to get swept up in the spirit that was taking over Germany.
It’s announced that all law candidates (including Haffner) must, before taking their final exams, attend training camps for ideological indoctrination and to perform military exercises. Haffner goes off with trepidation, determined to keep to himself lest he reveal his true political beliefs...
Perhaps we're having different conversations here...
EDIT: Added some citations. Upon re-reading the thread, I do think we're viewing this differently. I believe that your point is that some people, maybe many people, did protest. My point, however, is that most people knuckled under. The questions "why did some people stand up for themselves?", and "why were most people cowed?" are both worthwhile, but distinct.
Yes, we are viewing things very differently. You're pretending that huge groups of people spread out over vast distances in different circumstances all act the same, just because you can assign a convenient label to them ("Russians", "Germans" etc.) and do not know about the internal processes of the government. "The People vs The System". This is not how history works, and it is a mistake to view it as such. Manuel de Landa calls this historical fallacy "reifying generalities" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZUotjDvJyM)
To take an example from your reply, what is the "party line"? Forget about Rohm vs Hitler - Goring, Himmler, Speer, top Wehrmacht officers, etc., etc. - they all had different ideas that resulted in different policies in different times.
I don't understand your counter-argument re Germany. I said that most people had absolutely no motivation to go against the Nazis because they were benefiting from their rule. It makes no sense to say that they were afraid of defying Hitler, because defying Hitler is something that never occurred to them as a logical or possible course of action in the first place. Just like stabbing yourself in the eye with a fork doesn't occur to you over dinner.
"Most people" don't care about minorities like Haffner. Look at the immigration issue in the US today. In fact, people use the same logic as you have to question "why is nobody resisting Obama?"
You're pretending that huge groups of people spread out over vast distances in different circumstances all act the same, just because you can assign a convenient label to them ("Russians", "Germans" etc.) and do not know about the internal processes of the government. "The People vs The System". This is not how history works, and it is a mistake to view it as such.
Not at all. I'm recognizing that huge groups of people spread out over vast distances in similar circumstances, forced upon them, each individually decides that surviving by going along is the correct decision. If you don't mind, I'd like to switch this part of the discussion from Germany to China, just because I know the details much better.
Of course the experience of every individual is different. Some are farmers, some are urban, some are wealthy and some are poor. Central to my point is the fact that at some point in time, despots have put the same shackles onto all of these people (other than their chosen supporters). If you were in China during the Cultural Revolution, it didn't make very much difference whether you lived in Shanghai or in the mountains somewhere. Every person in that vast nation (one made up of many different cultures, it's worth pointing out) was forced to submit to Party Rule.
That submission involved performing the actions that you were told (down to performing a ridiculous dance in honor of Mao), saying the things you were told to say. Above all, you needed to avoid any appearance that you were not another person struggling for Communist progress. Because others needed to prove their own allegiance, you always needed to take pains not to allow the slightest excuse to be denounced.
It's absolutely legitimate to generalize the experience of these people. I've concluded this not just from reading history books, but from intimate conversations with dozens of people who actually experienced it (and hence, no citations you can look up; sorry). So I can assure you that in at least the Chinese case, I'm not generalizing from crappy books: I'm getting the story directly from a diverse group of first-person observers.
It didn't matter that there was other politics going on with Jiang Qing, or that the movement itself was a maneuver to consolidate power over other officials like Deng Xiaoping. The fact that those other people in positions of power had their own interests was of absolutely no concern to the Chinese masses. There was, indeed, a single party line that everyone must follow.
Getting back to Germany...
I have less in the way of first-person reports from those fleeing Germany. Honestly, I can only think of one non-Jewish person (if you want to leave them out of the discussion for some reason) meeting the description. But in my conversations with him, he makes it clear that pre-war Germany was not a nice place to live.
So I don't think I'm guilty of reifying generalities, when so much of what I'm think is coming not from generalities, but from individual specifics delivered by the actual participants.
I don't understand your counter-argument re Germany. I said that most people had absolutely no motivation to go against the Nazis because they were benefiting from their rule.
This is simply false. In some ways the people did benefit from Nazi rule. The chaos of Weimar hyperinflation was checked, they had renewed nationalistic pride. But there are countless reasons for Germans to be motivated to oppose the Nazis. But, for example, the economic success came at the price of throwing women out of work, and requiring men to perform national service. Later in the '30s it became mandatory for Aryan young people to join the Hitler Youth. And, of course, there's the simple moral objection to seeing one's neighbors -- the Jews, Communists, homosexuals, etc. -- treated so badly. There were innumerable reasons for Germans to dislike Nazi rule.
"Most people" don't care about minorities like Haffner. Look at the immigration issue in the US today.
Are you saying that the widespread anti-immigration sentiment in the USA shows that people don't care about minorities? If so, I find that difficult to believe. I see little evidence that many people object to those racial minorities that already live and work with us here in America. The objection appears to me to be more related to (a) economic ignorance and the belief that immigrants steal jobs, etc.; (b) the opportunity for abuse of the welfare system; and (c) the incorrect belief that immigrants, not having achieved stability, are more likely to commit crimes.
To tell you the truth, I grudgingly half-agree with you that most people don't care about minorities, at least here today in the USA. While most people give lip service to ideas like universal human rights, that seems to be little more than hot air. If people really believed it, there would be much less grumbling about free trade, outsourcing jobs and manufacturing, etc.
In fact, people use the same logic as you have to question "why is nobody resisting Obama?"
I'm having trouble reading this in the same context as your comments about immigration and minorities, since I don't see that Obama has done very much with the status quo in those areas.
Perhaps you mean that sentence to stand on its own, in which case I agree with you (and would also agree with you had you applied the same question to GWB). Indeed, a more generalized writing of that question is what I'm trying to ask. And I can provide generalities of an answer, regarding the relative values and risks to the individual's utility function overall. But I'm interested in more specifics, about where the lines between abstract values and material values get drawn.
> Are you saying that the widespread anti-immigration sentiment in the USA shows that people don't care about minorities? If so, I find that difficult to believe. I see little evidence that many people object to those racial minorities that already live and work with us here in America. The objection appears to me to be more related to (a) economic ignorance and the belief that immigrants steal jobs, etc.; (b) the opportunity for abuse of the welfare system; and (c) the incorrect belief that immigrants, not having achieved stability, are more likely to commit crimes.
Let me put that into perspective for you:
Are you saying that the widespread anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany shows that people don't care about minorities? If so, I find that difficult to believe. I see little evidence that many people object to those French and Slavic minorities that already live and work with us here in Germany. The objection appears to me to be more related to (a) economic ignorance and the belief that Jews steal jobs, etc.; (b) the opportunity for abuse of the banking system; and (c) the incorrect belief that Jews, not having achieved stability, are more likely to commit crimes.
> I'm having trouble reading this in the same context as your comments about immigration and minorities, since I don't see that Obama has done very much with the status quo in those areas.
No, but a lot of freedom-loving concerned citizens still want their country black, errm, back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkmxTIUq4L0 Cheers to them for standing up to oppression.
> But I'm interested in more specifics, about where the lines between abstract values and material values get drawn.
Again, let's put things into perspective with a personal example. Why are you not at #OccupyWhatever right now? (check one or more):
I would recommend not watching the Vice Guide to North Korea. That series is more about Vice (which I've read and enjoyed for over a decade and otherwise recommend), using North Korea and their preconceptions to show themselves off, than about North Korea (though North Korea does show through). Yes, the place is weird, but Vice sensationalizes it out of proportion and shows themselves off. Great for Vice, but at the expense of understanding.
My bibliography -- http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-bibliography -- has many sources more valuable for learning about North Korea. I found the New Yorker pieces particularly valuable, as well as the work by Barbara Demick.
I blogged extensively on North Korea since my visit there -- http://joshuaspodek.com/category/northkorea. My goal is to promote understanding, not to sensationalize. I've gotten good reviews on
wow....thanks for that!...kinnof reignited my interest in Chomsky and his ideas of libertarian socialism!...If anyone wants to learn more about the role of propaganda in our society I highly recommend the documentary "The Century of the self".
This National Geographic episode about an eye doctor who visited North Korea shows North Korea from the inside without showing off how cool the film makers are.
That guy strikes me as "Bridge on the River Kwai" - happens to be rarely well educated in a crippling environment and knows the "leader" is not a good person but to hell with that he is going to do his job as good as possible even if it means his own destruction and furtherment of the enemy standing right in front of him.
Evil dictators are evil - so are all the people that do their little part to help him because they cannot find anything wrong with doing their little job as best they can.
But so is a mindless military in ANY country who sign on to take directions to kill other people at the behest of a single leader that they aren't supposed to question.
That's an interesting and a well-written story. But yet, I find his "I pray for Kim Jong", "I don't want him to meet a tragic end" et al. a bit strange.
I don't know, it seems like denial and rationalization. A dictator got his family killed(possibly tortured before killing them), there is nothing he can do about it, so he is trying to find solace by believing he doesn't want Kim Jong Il hurt; and to justify why he thinks so, he is imagining good and innocence, when none exists.
He is well aware of things Kim Jong Il did to his family and common masses, and yet he is trying to imagine good in him - I can't find a rational explanation for his line of reasoning.
Because in the end, him meeting a tragic end all to appease the author's anger does no good. While if Kim Jong can open up it would have a larger and more positive impact. Just a matter of trying to break the cycle of violence.
> Just a matter of trying to break the cycle of violence.
What "cycle of violence"? Hasn't North Korea been run brutally by the same family for 50+ years? That is what needs to be broken, and it's far more likely to come to an end in a violent/tragic downfall than in a peaceful handover of power to his son.
I don't know that it's so hard to believe that someone could get past a base desire for revenge and take a more thoughtful approach? Especially considering that the author seems to be a religious person (he talks about praying daily, his mother wanting him to become a minister, etc.), I think it's completely possible that he could suppress a desire for vengeance and instead express forgiveness.
As a computer science student, I don't really have time to read as much material unrelated to Computer Science as I would like, so this was quite a treat. Thanks for bravely humanizing Kim Jung Il and North Korea, and reminding us why we need to change the world, Mr. Kim Hyun Sik (author).
"As a computer science student, I don't really have time to read as much material unrelated to Computer Science as I would like..."
I was a CS student who had a very alike mindset and I regret that. In hindsight I wish I had not let the "being a CS student" mentality serve as an excuse in my lack of literacy in other important subjects.
It's more like having to take 19 credits a semester to graduate within my budget and working 20+ hours a week does not leave me much time for unassigned reading, but I will take that suggestion to heart whenever possible (hopefully during this winter break).
There is time to catch up afterwards. After I graduated, I knew almost nothing outside mathematics and programming, but 3 years, even just reading newspapers, will catch you up on a lot.
I've had couple 19-20 credit semesters which I barely survived; and I did not work during school. I've always admired those (especially international students) who worked while handling such workload as yours; yet excelled in their course works.
Poor excuse. (But "lack of time" almost always is a poor excuse.) Even assuming the ridiculous credits*2 hours outside of school for school work, and assuming 8 hours of sleep every night (haha), and assuming the standard 1 credit = 1 hour in class, you still have 32 hours of free time across Saturday and Sunday that you could probably spread around if you wanted.
"Lack of time" is such a handy excuse, I'd try hard to investigate an underlying reason since there are so many. As an idea of just a few, it could be that you really have no interest in other subjects (probably not if you enjoyed the article), or that you don't want people to think you're goofing off, or that all your free time is unwittingly sucked away through passive relaxation like t.v.
"Perceived poor allocation of time" seems like a real thing to me. Lately I've noticed myself beating myself up for spending time "reading/making things I don't have to", since I love random Wikipedia walks or interesting pages from google searches or reading online papers or books (even paper ones from the library sometimes), I love reading things that aren't necessarily computer related (and especially things I know they don't teach me in school or at work).
But if I beat myself up over it and/or spend time with "passive relaxation" such as entertainment (whether because humans need a certain amount of passive down time or because I want to avoid thinking about [meta-]berating myself), suddenly I can't focus enough to read those interesting things since that background thought is always present. This happened a lot last semester; 20 credits is the average at my school. (People still find time to play lots of video games.)
My current solution is to take a reduced load in the spring (possibly a gap year if my grades continue to suffer) and massively inflate my free time such that spending a large chunk of time reading about quantum physics doesn't feel like something I shouldn't do, and such that my free time isn't used up hating 6.5/7 of my classes since it'd be reduced to maybe 3/4. (There are only two classes left in my program I actually care about.) I'm glad my burnout is localized to school, though, since even some of the cruft work at work is 100 times more interesting than any of my previous semester's assignments.
Take an hour a day to read some news, the articles are typically short enough that it's more "relaxation" than "work", and after a while you're caught up enough on the context to understand the significance of stories and to put on your critical thinking cap and notice agendas once in a while.
Read _good_ newspapers, critically. Seek out good writing of views you disagree with.
When you start asking questions the articles don't answer, shift time and attention into books in the core subject. Even the best journalism doesn't go anything like deep enough. Your understanding should reach a point where an hour a day in newspapers is like taking a long walk to train for a marathon.
19 credits and 20 hours of work a week does not really allow an hour a day of "relaxation" time. Unless 19 credits is a bit lighter than what I am familiar with.
I would recommend you spend a fair amount of time reading material on human behavior such as biographies and histories. It will save you a lot of time in designing systems and processes for people.
As a counterpoint, I would encourage you to absorb things that are utterly useless, such as poetry. One must remember that not everything needs a practical function to justify itself. "Enriching the human spirit" sounds handwavey, but it's a very real and important idea.
Or you could approach poetry with critical thought and understand how and why it is made, perhaps even improving your own writing and reasoning skills at the same time, instead of treating it as "utterly useless".
I meant it in the sense of the Oscar Wilde quote: "All art is useless." It's what distinguishes it from worldly concerns. Its uselessness confers on it a nobility, if you will.
I guess what he really meant is that art is purposeless, rather than useless, but the statement doesn't have the same impact that way.
Obviously this is but one way to conceptualise it.
Here is a (long) story about an American who lived in SK who got a chance to go to NK. It's an incredible read and well worth the time. His interactions with NK citizens and his gov't minder are really eye opening.
I don't know about you guys, but reading his story is really sad. It's like a whole country, with limitless human potential, is developmentally frozen.
Probably one of this best parts of this story was when he visited a shrine to the Great Leader:
"The next room contained more gifts from the South, including a Hyundai Grandeur donated by the former chairman of Hyundai (whose family is originally from the North). Mr. Huk asked me if I had ever seen one of these cars during my time in the South. When I said, "sure, my neighbor has one just like it," he gave me another one of his 'you have to be lying' looks. How could such a great gift, a gift implying so much respect, belong to some normal person like my neighbor?"
It is easy to say that North Korea should change. What is difficult is articulating the type of change that one would like to see occur and how to implement it.
Should Kim Jong-Il have been ousted a la Saddam Hussein in Iraq? How dangerous would that have been, considering that North Korea has nuclear arms? What to do in case of a conflict that spills over into neighboring countries? What would China's take on all of it be? Would they stand idly by or back up their Communist cousin?
Once the dictator is gone, what do you do? Let the military take over and potentially let it establish a junta government, Myanmar-style? Or do you try to install democracy forcibly? Would the right thing to do be to hand North Korea over to South Korea, integrating the two countries by shotgun wedding?
The complexities quickly exponentiate. Consider the cultural shock of the North Koreans once they're introduced to modern South Korean culture alone. If German re-unification is any indicator, putting together two halves of a country that have been split into Communism and western capitalism is not a trivial task.
Also consider the cult of personality built up around Kim Jong-Il. The situation in N. Korea could quickly become explosive once people realize the deceit they've been living in.
So it's difficult thing to do, just by itself. All the econo-political ramifications just make it that much harder.
Nuclear weapons barely change the equation. The best estimate is that North Korea could begin firing around 10,000 artillery shells per minute into densely populated suburbs areas around Seoul on a moment's notice. Even if through some masterful and historic level of effort we managed to shut down those artillery bombardments or evacuate the targeted areas in a mere half an hour that still leaves hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and huge numbers of homes and businesses destroyed. It would be a destruction on the scale of a natural disaster such as the earthquake off Japan earlier this year. Add in the very real possibility of North Korean nuclear weapons landing on Seoul, Tokyo, Taiwan or maybe even the US mainland and that starts focusing your thinking about how worthwhile it would have to be to depose the North Korean regime.
There has been a lot of work put towards North Korea -- some of it we know about, and probably some other that we don't. For example, there have been numerous attempts recently to draw them into nuclear disarmament talks, and a lot of aid has been provided as a carrot for those talks.
But, from a cold, inhumane, and strictly logical perspective, North Korea is a problem that will probably solve itself. Assuming that most of the non-mainstream stuff that I read and hear about it is true (and I'm a little unsettled at even wondering that, let alone specifying "non-mainstream"), North Korea is badly starved for resources.
When your population is starving, when your media singularly carries fictional programming about your state and leaders, when your education is tightly authoritarian, you are less likely to produce the geniuses needed to solve engineering challenges like accurate long-range guidance systems.
Ordinarily, a resource-starved state would devolve into desperation; in North Korea's case, I'm not sure whether to expect that, because the entire state seems to be so uniquely dependent upon the whims and notions of a single individual -- its party leader at the time. If Kim Jong-Un continues to place pride before population, then it's likely that the state will collapse in our lifetimes in a mostly nonviolent way. If, on the other hand, he decides to try to take some kind of action, he'll eventually be forced into a game of poker where everyone at the table knows that he's got the weakest hand. Although he could certainly do a lot of damage on the way out -- mostly to neighboring South Korea and Japan -- he could not destroy the Earth, and he'd be faced with an immediate and deadly counterstrike from more capable nations.
It certainly is a terrible situation for the poor souls born into that country. Still, sometimes the best strategy is to simply wait out your opponent and let him starve to death, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this was in fact the Western strategy.
I do not think that an unpredictable loose cannon could be referred to as a "puppet state", no. Although China has been (and still is) North Korea's largest source of aid, China has also been distancing themselves from North Korea over the past decade.
China is a very different, and very complicated situation, but they are currently enjoying more political influence than at any time in recent history, and as they are poised to become a dominant world power, North Korea is a liability that they may well decide that they cannot afford.
I would also point out that our respective notions of "live on" must be a bit different; assuming that the data I've read can be trusted, North Korea has almost no paved roads at all [1], which means that the movement of supplies throughout the country is badly hindered. Given the well-known height differences between North Koreans and their South Korean neighbors, the gulags and other oppressions mentioned in this article and others, the threats which North Korea uses to squeeze aid in the form of energy and other supplies from other nations, their nearly complete lack of electrical lighting after dark, and what's known of their trade with China, I find it difficult to see North Korea as being on anything more than the barest of life support from China.
> North Korea is a liability that they may well decide that they cannot afford.
Hard to tell. On the other hand, their influence over North Korea is an asset they can use in negotiations with other superpowers. Plus, they start to look good in comparison.
I've not gotten the impression that North Korea really likes China, just that they tolerate them (because they are the only ones willing to deal with them). Maybe things will change a bit now, but I was always under the impression that N.K. could have easily lobbed a nuke at China 'just because.' That kind of uncertainty is a liability.
My impression is that at this point 'puppet' is far too strong a term.
North Korea still relies on the PRC's tolerance and patronage, and the PRC doesn't prefer any outcome that boosts the influence of the US and South Korea. But the PRC's influence and patience with North Korea are limited. Some of the Wikileaks cables indicate China has begun backing away from the regime:
North Korea is a vassal state of the PRC, and exists because it is politically advantageous to China for them to do so.
Until recently, China hasn't liked to take a direct approach to many aspects of international affairs. So they influence countries like North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran as tools to achieve their political aims.
They aren't whole-hearted supporters of all aspects of the North Korean regime, frankly, I'd say that they don't really care about what happens in North Korea, as long as they are achieving their foreign policy goals.
China's interests (and hence, position) are "don't fuck around and create trouble for us".
A collapsed NK state creates more trouble for China in the form of refugees than a still-functioning one, so we see enough aid for them to keep functioning.
An occasional diplomatic poke in the eye to the US helps China too, but that's a want, not a need. Don't confuse the rhetoric with the reality.
Yeah, in the event of actual war, there's no way they intervene as long as the North Koreans are the aggressors -- they know North Korea will lose on its own, and they don't want to get into a fight with the US. South Korea's one of their major trading partners now, too.
I think they let a US/SK operation clean up while issuing various diplomatic missives decrying the violence, then wrangle a treaty barring major military installations or exercises in northern areas of, and establishing free trade with, the reunified Korea.
Partly because MacArthur was looking (and talking) like he was going to press on into China as he stormed up the peninsula after the landings at Incheon.
Indeed, but it also has some factors in common through different pathways - I grow nervous when I read of the ultranationalist riots permitted by the Party, because it seems like the kind of thing that would itself to the leaders deciding to enter 'a short, victorious war'. (Defending the Middle Kingdom, defending the Revolution; rather similar.)
Entirely different, see my comment above about Deng Xiaopeng's ascendance in the late 1970s and the quite severe repercussions for the perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution. There's no linkage between the revolution and nationalism anymore. "A cat that catches mice is a good cat, whether it's white or black".
Nationalist pride, sure, that's been a constant through any cohesive nation's history. Koreans aren't Chinese, though, and the leaders of China are too smart to look for a "short, victorious war" on the Korean peninsula..
Mao's China was far more brutal and crazy than modern China, and 1950 North Korea was to some degree less brutal and crazy than modern North Korea. In 1950 they were peas in a pod. Since then, they have grown in different directions.
China wasn't a growing economic powerhouse in 1950. In fact, it didn't have much of an economy, period. They've made too much progress, established too many economic links, gained too much international influence to throw it away on a stupid war that, even in "victory", would be a loss.
They don't even have an idealogical interest -- we throw around the word "communist", but North Korea's modern ideologies are so far removed from Chinese communism that it's practically apples and oranges.
And the Cold War is long over, nobody's out to "eradicate" or even "contain" communism. US-Chinese relations are strained, but not hostile, and they know we wouldn't be looking to cross the Yalu.
Even more than the macro factors, the 1950s Chinese state was a revolutionary state bent on the worldwide spread of communism.
In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaopeng killed off the last group of leaders trying to keep that sentiment alive (the Gang of Four) and since then they've been all pragmatism, all the time. Any talk of communism is window-dressing, their regime is ideologically committed to doing what's practical.
So even aside from the cost-benefit, they have no ideological incentive to throw their lot in with the North Korean gov't. As I said upthread, the reason they give them aid right now is because a refugee crisis in Manchuria would be inconvenient. Pragmatism.
It's my understanding that NK is far from a PRC puppet state, and have a strained relationship, but being that NK depends heavily on China for it's continued existence and security, they do have some sway.
Kim Jong Il has conducted several actions, like the 2006 nuclear test, which has embarrassed and/or annoyed China considerably, underneath the public facade.
Saying NK is a PRC puppet is like saying South Korea is a US puppet.
China is glad NK exists as a buffer against the US zone of influence (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan), but NK causes China a lot of problems too (eg, there is a crystal-meth problem in the border zones because North Korea produces it as a medicine(!!)[1])
Coming from a country that had it almost as bad as North Korea, I can say that nothing can be done from outside and little can be done from inside.
There is only a handful of people that are in charge in North Korea that can try to effect some kind of change. But even if suddenly one day they wake up with the best of intentions and all cleared up about where they would want to go, i.e. to achieve some sort of South Korean democracy, it will be extremely hard to improve anything in a short amount time (and by short time I mean around 10 years).
Basically the people living there today are screwed. Ideologically they have grown up to expect everything handed down from the state. How can the state hand down everything if it doesn't own everything? Economically, maybe 90% of economic activity is useless. In a free economy all of them would be closed. How would you cope with 90% unemployment?
You remind me of a National Geographic article on post-communist Russia, and how the elderly wanted to go back, since the new system was much harsher on them.
And post-communist Russia is an example of what could happen in North Korea, replacing one group of tyrants with a mafia. Only N.K. doesn't have the kind of natural resources Russia has. Maybe Albania might be a better example.
Albania is the nearest one can come to find a similar regime to North Korea's. The country was so totalitarian you weren't free to choose almost anything. The school where you went, including the branch of study in University was decided by the state. Where to work was decided by the state. The state provided you with a house (after many, many years of waiting). The state even told you where to buy the bread, where to buy the milk, where and in what day to buy the meat, all in different stores of course. The state "guaranteed" the right to work, so almost everyone got a job and all jobs had quite similar salaries. Almost nobody had savings since salaries and prices were calculated to balance themselves for a normal family. Since everybody had to work, lots of fictitious jobs were invented. And people learned soon enough that no matter how much you worked you still got paid and got paid the same, so nobody was really working.
So, when the communism collapsed in 1990, the country collapsed too. What saved the people was the fact that Albania is a very small country of 3 million in the middle of Europe so about 30% of people were able to immigrate. Now where would 8 million of North Koreans immigrate if suddenly communism collapsed in their country? I don't know.
"Now where would 8 million of North Koreans immigrate if suddenly communism collapsed in their country? I don't know."
Many would migrate to China, and this is probably one of the main reasons why China tries to keep the status quo in North Korea. China does not want a collapse of their neighbour.
Special Economic Zones are the name of the game, and yeah, it'd take decades to transform the whole economy -- China's still working on it. But the standard of living can start increasing almost immediately with the combination of trade and increased aid once they stop being an international pariah.
"Screwed" is on a spectrum, and you can start moving up immediately, if slowly.
I wrote an extended series on North Korean strategy that begins by explaining the current incredible stability. Until Kim Jung Il died, since 1945 a country the world disliked and actively tried to change had two (!) leaders, father and son.
I believe a strategic systems perspective reveals why that stability is so durable, but reveals little opportunity to change it. I can tell you what won't work -- military, diplomacy, aid, and sanctions. The most effective agent of change so far is the smuggling of dvds into the country, which reveal how different the outside world from the government propaganda.
(by the way, I'm in the process of making an e-book out of it. If you're willing to read it critically and give constructive criticism, I'll send you an advance copy)
It is not possible to change North Korea in the short term. Like any communist society, everybody has learned to live according to the rules. It takes generations to change that, and even then it is difficult.
The learnt that the state provides everything, that they are nothing without the state. People over 20 years old are not going to learn ever to live by their own means. They need communism.
I think saying that they need communism--or even that they would be worse off without it--is a little much. While the state provides everything, that's just a relative measure: in an absolute sense, it does not provide very much at all. I think that they would be better off without communism even in view of the inevitable difficulties transitioning.
Russian life expectancy plummeted in the decade after the fall of communism. Don't downplay the extreme difficulty of transitioning from a command economy to a functioning liberal market economy.
Thank you, that's exactly my point: since the government isn't doing much anyhow, going over to a different system is almost definitely going to be an improvement.
The North Korean constitution (2009) "officially rejects North Korea's founding ideology of communism." (Quote from Wikipedia, and I've heard it elsewhere.)
It's better to say it's an absolute dictatorship, or absolute monarchy (with the Divine Right of Kings thrown in for good measure).
There was once a documentary about the mass games. It was very strange to see that a lot of people were very honored to play for the big leader. They had little to eat, had to work hard, but they were doing it all for the big leader.
If you can't (are not allowed) to look over the fence, you won't know that the grass is greener on the other side.
Well there's only so many dictators we can knockout at any one time. We've been targeting those oil rich countries in the past decade where the ROI will be worth our while. The minerals of North Korea do look pretty sweet but we need some time to refill our barracks and sort out our own economic mess first. Don't worry though we've got economic sanctions in place against NK already so they won't be developing much.
I don't understand why all this urge in the "west" to change the north korea ? Not only that you believe all the western propaganda against NK but you have no doubts that you definitely know whats better and best for NK. Yes, you have no doubts that the west should rob them like they did with Irak and "set them free" and give them the shitty innefective democracy which strangely works only to make the western rich richer and the rest rich enough to not die.Why doesn't the west mind his damn business ? Why this arrogance that you know what others had to do ? If the US/Europe is a paradise, why are the poverty/corruption/unhappiness levels so high ? Why are u still in denial about what's really going on home but u have no doubts about whats really going on in NK and China ? This is some incomplete and not structured rant but still i make a case that the west and it's cool kids are arrogant, doubtless and biased like hell and work involuntarily to fulfill their invisible master's plan (again and forever ?).
I guess you're trolling, but anyway.
All politics aside, the people in NK are hungry. Hungry as in "I don't have anything to eat". There's no doubt about the fact that the Western World managed to get this right.
I'm not trolling. Even if the people in NK are hungry (but they are not more hungry then the poor in the west), this does not give you the right to "save" them and take their little left posesions in the process, because you know, US never saved anyone without the army taking ground. If you see a poor man hungry on the street and you give him food, that's "saving him" but if you take his home and take his belongings because you can "manage" them better than him and if you force him to work for you, that's not "saving" him. That's slavery hidden in the form of charity. Isn't it strange that US goverment never saves the real poor of the world (saharian africans - they leave their salvation to red cross and independent charity) instead somehow US gov. always finds some richer "poors" and if they can't be "saved" by corruption and bribery, they are "saved" by armed invasion?
> I don't understand why all this urge in the "west" to
> change the north korea
Going in and 'freeing' a country is never as simply as it seems. That said, North Korea is not in a very good situation currently. There is a very real temptation to 'swoop in' and 'save' them. The idea being that rather than waiting for (possibly) decades for change to happen (and all of the suffering along the way), we could instantly change things for the better. The problem is that this drastic change is tantamount to revolution, and revolutions are never easy or clean.
Assume for a second that the US was perfect, and we could somehow attempt to impart this to the North Koreans. The population of North Korea has under gone over a decade of anti-US/anti-West propaganda. A not-inconsequential number of these people are going to violently resist US/Western involvement in North Korea. Even if we were able to produce irrefutable proof that all of the propaganda was a lie, there would be enough people that would violently refuse to believe even the truth that was right in front of them to produce significant turmoil.
The US can't save themselves. US never saved anyone, they only changed regimes and took huge economic advantages from the chaos it generously created (include here the "saved" europe). US government + their corporate backers does not care about their own citizens, don't tell me they really care about third world countries. They want you to care because they need your approval to go to war.You get the illusion that the war is "freeing" someone and the corporations get their money. See Halliburton, Bechtel and so on. By saving and freeing others US actually is saving their corporations and their interests. Everything else is american propaganda which I have to admit, brainwashes more efectively and more people than the NK propaganda. You don't even slightly consider that you are disinformed by western media and thats a huge success for them.
> The US can't save themselves. US never saved anyone,
> they only changed regimes
You're either incapable of understanding my post, or you're just trollin'. I'm not even going to bother continuing a conversation with you.
> You don't even slightly consider that you are
> disinformed by western media
This is the problem with your arguments. You're presenting counter-points (i.e. "western media is lies!") without anything to back it up. This has 'troll' written all over it. Why? You're not responding directly to anything that was actually said (e.g. what parts of my post are mistaken based on 'western media lies?'). You are also going out of your way to be as not specific as possible, just controversial (e.g. What is western media lying to me about? Everything? So when western media says that I need to eat to stay alive that's a lie too?).
The situation in NK is continuously presented in negative terms(lots of speculative numbers and information is presented as facts). The people "die of hunger" (and the media presents images with sick kids as if this is the fault of Kim Jong Il), they are oppressed and the immediate suggestion is that US and the world somehow has this obligation to solve this problem.They forget somehow (lie by omision) to mention that a lot of the hunger and sickness is provoked by the embargo imposed on them by US.The second lie is that the leaders of north Korea are crazy, and that they have atomic bomb and want to attack others around, without rational reason.This is a lie, they only threatened to defend themselves in case they are attacked (all this while they are surrounded and provoked by US and South Korea navy). If you watch closely, it's the same recipe applied to Iran and Irak. Present rumors about victims and atrocities, weapons of mass destruction, insane leaders and intentions of war as facts and propose an invasion if some vague terms are not respected by the "rogue state" all this because we have to defend ourselves right ? Did Iran or NK ever say they want to implement preemptive strikes like US ? No, but still they are seen as the aggressors here and not US which is all over them spying and making plans and publicly announcing that "nothing is off the table". And tell me this is possible because mass media tells the truth (we know in the case of Irak that mass media lied together with the Bush administration but now you want to pretend that was an "isolated case").
Are you able to consider North Korea's situation on its own merits, rather than harping on the deeds of the United States? Can't the Kim family dynasty be brutal and oppressive independently of the US? I think that they can be, and have proven it.
I suggest you look at the material that comes out of North Korea, from human rights groups and the like. The "rumours" of how life is inside of North Korea are backed by very credible evidence. Much less evidence exists to support the claims made by North Korea's government. Or do you think that there were actually celestial events to herald the birth of Kim Jong-Il?
The NK guys may not be right but that does not make the US guys automatically right. Today we approach the point when the main difference between China/NK and US/Europe is that in China u can't protest openly and say anything u want while in US/Europe you can protest orderly and you will be widely ignored (by commercially controlled mass media) no matter how much sense you make or if you will protest in a more "disorderly"(guess who decides what is orderly or not these days http://thedailywh.at/2011/12/19/this-is-all-kinds-of-wrong-o...) way you will be labeled as a hippie, crackhead, conspiracy theorist, terrorist, communist, islamic fanatic and beaten and pepper sprayed by the police like in China.Yeah, we're far much better in the west. We have the right to work and pay our forever increasing visible and invisible taxes.
And in the US, you have the choice to read things besides "commercially controlled mass media," or even to start your own newspaper if you'd like!
If people ignore protests, whose fault is that? The government or the people? And you know, there have been some very successful protests... the US didn't originally have things like the Civil Rights Act.
While perhaps your favored ideological points are not currently being heard by the people you think should hear them, that does not discount the fact that US citizens have pushed for all sorts of laws that have been enacted. To draw upon a recent example, a good number of Republicans voted against NDAA 2012 when they initially were going to vote for it, solely because of citizens contacting them and expressing their concerns. The very fact that that happened proves that, for all we might complain, representatives (and other citizens) do listen.
It might be hard to get people to listen sometimes, and we might see incidents like the misuse of pepper spray, but if you think that puts us on the level of China then frankly you're completely deluded! You do realize that in China you can be incarcerated for talking about democracy, and that they have their own party-appointed leaders for religions like Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism?
In China they prevent you to speak. In the west they let you speak as much as you want but the state ignores you and propaganda machine covers you with noise. The european powers fear the referendums like hell. If still by some miracle some bunch of guys manage to unite over some slogan or message not tolerated by the state and put pressure on the state institutions in unauthorized meetings(unauthorized by the same state - duh conflict of interests) then the police kicks in and abuse and arrest everything that moves. I don't ask you to agree and praise some other regimes, I don't ask you to go somewhere else where it's better. I just ask you to see the bullshit and the hypocrisy of the west.
This is ridiculous. In the West we have open discussions even in the "Media" about how much corruption and so forth goes on in the government. In fact everything you say is pretty common knowledge/cliche to hear on any Cable News network. These kinds of discussions could never occur in North Korea. Perhaps things could be better but you cannot compare this to a secretive state such as North Korea in which people believe their "Dear Leader" never had to deficate or urinate. You're hatred for the West is just making you miss a huge problem of scale.
It's interesting info. I don't think you're going to find anyone who is able to speak with the full story. Given how locked down that country is, and how many smart people were murdered for no reason.
Agreed; my response reads a bit dismissive, but I did enjoy the article. I would still love to read more about the process of a (presumably innocent) person becoming a dictator. Were they molded, and if so by what forces? How much of it was a natural process like what happened to the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment?
I think the article sort of gave a better reasoning for the madness of Kim Jong Il. Basically he became ruler because he was so ruthless. His father selected the craziest out of the bunch.
Its a political post so my politically loaded question should be forgiven. Wouldn't it have been acceptable, if United States had liberated North Korea instead of Iraq?
At the time the Bush Administration got invasion-happy, it believed that Iraq almost had nuclear weapons. (In retrospect it looks like they weren’t that close, but let’s assume the Administration believed its most pessimistic intelligence reports.)
North Korea, on the other hand, already had nuclear weapons, not to mention a conventional arsenal that, as others on this thread point out, can lay waste to the South.
Hmm. How long has Chrome removed the 'javascript:' when you paste into a URL bar? I assume it's to prevent users from blindly running JS, but is there a way to disable it?
I actually rather like that 'remove on paste', default to educating/transparency instead of blindly running. Manually typing the prepended 'javascript:' works fine.
Don't see any settings to disable (even in chrome://flags).
Could someone edit the link and remove the "print" query parameter? It's pretty annoying that the page pops up the print option on chrome upon loading.
So, the dictator forbid people from his high school to join high ranks, but this former professor boast of a dozen former students that are now in high ranks from that same school?
You have to wonder. Millions of people living under the dictatorship of one man ( with the help of a few dozens leaders). I feel terrible for the young women, and kids. However the rest of the population can get up and fight. Hundreds of thousands will die, but someone has to be willing to die for the sake of the liberty of others.
North Korea is very much a totalitarian regime in every sense of the word. Everything flows from the state. Food. News. Entertainment. Education. Jobs. Everything. And it has been totalitarian for around 2/3rds of a century. It's very difficult to fight against something so ingrained and omni-present.
From without it's also difficult to imagine toppling the North Korean regime. To do so would almost inevitably result in quite literally hundreds of thousands of dead South Korean civilians in a matter of hours (through artillery). And perhaps just as many dead South Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, or American civilians dead through a nuclear attack. That sort of cold calculus makes it very hard to make the decision to end the DPRK regime.
North Korea's military could easily be beaten -- if you don't mind possibly hundreds of thousands of South Korean and Japanese killed by their missiles. You'd win the war but lose a battle no one would consider worth losing.
You'd also have to negotiate with China first, so they know you'll stop invading well before their border. Last time the U.S. incurred too far into North Korea contributed to China entering the Korean War.
North Korea effectively holds South Korea and Japan hostage with its missiles. It acts belligerently to make credible its threats to use them.
Meanwhile, the people don't know things could be better. They aren't stupid or brainwashed. The state simply controls nearly all information entering the country. They believe they have nothing to envy from the rest of the world and that the U.S. is starving them. From their perspective they have no reason to revolt.
They have no internet or knowledge of revolutions elsewhere in the world.
The article points out that one possible reason for the people's reluctance is distrust. In the case of the author, his family died because of a double agent. Who is to say that if you conspire with your fellow comrades to overthrow your leader, one of your peers will not out you. Civil unrest does not work without undying social trust.
There is a problem with even thinking about revolting in NK. If you show any signs of revolting, your entire family including your cousins will be sent to the gulaag and killed(Bad blood). If it is your life you can give it to save the country; but you will think twice if your parents, wife and children are going to be killed.
... And your children, and their children, and their children. 3 generations is the rule of thumb, though surviving that long usually makes the issue moot.
I hate to be smug but that's kind of chicken hawk. Also, who's to say this hasn't happened already and those that have tried were put in prison, tortured, and killed? It's more complicated than that. To put on a resistance, you need food, weapons, etc. This is a country far more closed than Libya or Syria. I suppose you could argue for some Gene Sharp style revolution but I don't know if many people in North Korea have read him.
Much as it's a fascinating story my BS alarm is flashing. Is there anyone at Georg Mason University who can confirm Professor Kim Hyun Sik actually exists?
If he doesn't exist, there's an awful lot of gatherings with him as a guest speaker at universities hitting on Google over the past four years from 07 to 2010, and he was (if Google can be believed) a visiting professor at Yale from 03-06 up until becoming a research professor at GMU.
I am finding a few things hard to believe as well. In the commonwealth games, the Indian Government rounded up beggars and sent them out of Delhi. In the Iraq war, GWB banned the media from covering body bags. Every state is guilty of this ,so unless the deliberate crippling part is true, it may just be another exercise in FUD, much like the weapons of mass destruction.
The control of information and people's lives in North Korea is incomparably more than the examples you gave. Respectfully, your comparisons are not close.
The difference is not merely quantitative.
North Korea's activity is well documented and overwhelming.
The FUD would be a lot easier to refute if NK would actually let people into and (especially) out of their country without a security apparatus monitoring their every move.
In the new Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson quotes Steve on why he didn't let his parents come to his school's campus: "I didn't want anyone to know I had parents. I wanted to be like an orphan who had bummed around the country on trains and just arrived out of nowhere, with no roots, no connections, no background."
Interesting how powerful people manipulate the story of how they got to be where they are. Speaking of which, I was raised by wolves.