Saturday, April 06, 2013

The DPRK Game

A 30 year old man sits at the head of the Armed Forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
I've been making some very silly gifs lately reflecting how I feel about what he is doing and why. Yes, though I feel that Kim Jong-un is a veritable puppet and he is not in any way in complete control of North Korea, the North Korean Regime sits on very shaky ground trying to maintain the iron fisted Stalinist ideological absolute physical and mental control of their starving population.   I don't feel as if he is competent enough to take any kind of action to assume control, but the bottom line? His finger controls the trigger. He is a very dangerous person through his inexperience and incompetency.
This young man had had some foreign education. But what he has NOT had may make all the difference in the world for millions of people.
He’s grown up as a child of extreme privilege, doing basically whatever he wanted to do, with little restraint. He’s never moved in the circles most of us move in, and probably has no idea of what life is like for the common prole. Nor, of course, would he have any real concept of consequences.
For perspective, let’s review the life of this fellow’s grandfather. His grandpa had been a guerilla for decades when he rode into Pyongyang at the head of the Soviet occupation army. Like the present leader, his grandpa was a young man when he took over as leader, though he did indeed have a couple of decades of fighting under his belt. In spite of the horrors of war that his grandpa knew all too well, his youthful inexperience with being a leader led him to conclude that he could win a military campaign to bring the southern half of Korea under his leadership. And that young man’s gamble cost at least 3,000,000 Korean lives, and left the entire peninsula utterly destroyed.
This over privileged inexperienced young man knows nothing of war. As a result, I’d wager that he’s more likely than even his grandpa was to gamble a little. He is also very open to the loudest, most ambitious mouth in his coterie of flatterers.
There is some positive news coming our of Pyongyang...in spite of all the bluster, Pak Pong Ju, the former prime minister who was responsible for many of the economic overtures to South Korea was reappointed. He had been in political "exile" for years. The Obama Administration is actually holding talks with the Chinese over their concerns about the noise coming from Pyongyang. China has been the sole lifeline that has kept the DPRK afloat for decades. The Chinese are beginning to get alittle pissed with Kim Jong-un.
But, I keep seeing these political cartoons that highlight the supposed weakness of the DPRK, and the buffoonery of its leader. This completely ignores that, weak or not, the DPRK has thousands of hardened artillery sites within range of Seoul.The warning for a sudden release of an artillery volley on Seoul can only be measured in seconds, not minutes. Win or lose an actual war, the DPRK can utterly flatten Seoul before anything can be done to stop it from happening. At least tens of thousands will die within minutes, and the economy of the Republic of Korea will be destroyed. Whatever happens to the DPRK at that point is almost irrelevant.
Those of us in America seem to think that the situation in Korea is some kind of a high-tech video game. It isn’t. Millions of lives are on the line. This is nothing to be joking about.

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