I want to agree, but a big counterpoint right now is North-Korea, which has been under a totalitarian government for over 50 years now; the majority of the population is completely isolated and (if it's the right term) brainwashed. Sure, there's an underground where technology and media are passed around, but as far as I'm aware, there's no signs of collapse.
I mean I don't believe it's particularly stable, in that if the great leader is deposed there will be a power vacuum. I was kinda expecting that when Kim Jong-il died though.
A lot of people in the world know that the Kim family is strangling North Korea, but you don't see people rising up to overthrow them. Imagine a world where Kim Il-sung was effectively immortal. Imagine a world where the monarchies of the middle ages could last a thousand years or more. Without something to shake up the status quo every once in awhile the situation tends to stagnate, even if it is a bad situation.
It is possible that human mentality would change if we had to start thinking about longer timescales like this, but that seems optimistic.
I think China might already be an example of how that can go, where they've had a pretty strict regime for a long long time but we've seen that evolve over time.
I think North Korea is fascinating because it's been so isolated, and progress is bound to be huge. And the 21st century makes everything so much more visible. And seeing history happen is pretty exciting.
Although yes, the current state of North Korea's government does make meaningful progress difficult to imagine. But it's also not permanent. Either the government will evolve, or Kim Jong Un will die someday...
If NK didn't fall apart from losing somewhere around 10% of their population in the 90's famine, what could possibly make it fall apart? They've been out of money for a long time. They've been imprisoning just about everyone and shooting people left and right for a long time. It's a lot worse there than any western novel about disutopians ever imagined.
I don't think it's falling apart any time soon, especially now that the regime is nuclear armed.
You have an interesting definition of "stable government" if North Korea is one. They're one death away from complete chaos - if Kim Jong-Un dies, it's probably all-out civil war.
Honest question - let's say at some point in the future North Korea sees their current regime fall and a more democratic or at least benevolent dictatorship takes over.
What sort of mass psychological issues are we looking at here? I can only imagine how the minds of the current citizenship work, would it be nearly impossible for those raised only knowing what they know to recover from the previous trauma?
I can't see how the DPRK is anything but meta-stable, but we have so little visibility into it we just don't know.
3 generations of a single family's dictatorship is remarkable in modern times, usually one of the power bases upon which the regime stands swerves it from such a thing.
The nuclear arming just helps with outside threats, I would think, and no one with the means really wants to destabilize them. As I understand it South Korea shudders at the thought of trying to integrate such a population into their country, one which is on average a foot shorter and significantly less intelligent due to pervasive malnutrition.
That even the Army is filled with malnourished men says something significant, and, yeah, indicates more stability that you'd expect on general principles.
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.
I think North Korea is a materially different situation though. They are three generations deep into dictatorial/dynastic rule.
The Kim family managed to keep one generation sufficiently oppressed that they could raise all the children to believe leader to be a god. Then they had a sufficiently clear line of succession (ie it’s a dynasty) that they could continue to build upon the foundation laid in that first generation rather than engage in power struggles.
I think the sanctions and isolation then came later.
Could Putin pull that out of the hat? It doesn’t seem likely to me in this day and age.
I think North Korea is very much an outlier and has a unique set of circumstances.
Here is an even bleaker concern: Looking at North Korea, I've been wondering if with modern technology totalitarian regimes are a one-way street. With the amount of surveillance in place in NK, I am unable to see how any form of resistance could be mounted. NK is behind in tech. How much harder to topple can a system like NK be with the latest tech. China seems to be moving in that direction. Surveillance coupled with modern propaganda methods for full indoctrination.
I also perceive a larger weakness for liberal democracies towards propaganda and in particular the flooding the zone with shit approach. These two things together have me very, very worried. If there is a force moving you towards a state that's very hard if not impossible to leave, it stands to expect that eventually everything will end up in that state. In this case that would be authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
I wonder how many more decades of suffering it will take for the NK People to finally rid themselves of their government. Or perhaps it's at a point were the indoctrination is so complete and the control of the government so absolute that it is essentially stable forever.
Does North Korea have a future? Is it possible that someday that the current rule is overthrown and the rights and lives of people are restored? Can anyone with knowledge about this comment?
Nord Korea is not as stable as it seems, they are really much defined by their foreign policy. Technology there is comparable to Cold War times. UAE or Saudi Arabia is a much better example for something like that.
The issue with all of this isn't the North Korea people. They are well aware of life in South Korea and elsewhere courtesy of all the black market DVDs that have been finding their way there.
It's the government filled with old socialist-era guys who surely aren't going to be so willing to just give up their power.
I might buy the self-determination point of view if the ordinary people of North Korea had any input on their governance, which they hardly do. North Korea is ruled by the Kim family like a monarchy. There are no elections, no referendums, no multiparty system.
I mean I don't believe it's particularly stable, in that if the great leader is deposed there will be a power vacuum. I was kinda expecting that when Kim Jong-il died though.
reply