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?
It will be fascinating to watch the modernization of North Korea if we end up heading in that direction. I'm particularity interested to see if it is possible for a leader/party with a brutal a reputation as that of Kim Jong Un to retain power as the country opens up (although to be fair we are a _long_ way from any real change).
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 wish this means the end to that regime, or at the very least some sort of Khrushchev type loosing of control will occur.
I dont think there is any other group of people on the planet that have been suffering for such a continuous period of time as the North Koreans. It's the greatest tragedy of our age
This is a small sample of what's to come should North Korea collapse.
I can see that south korea can experience a huge boost in their labor force that's currently filled by foreigners.
On the other hand, feeding, educating, housing, employing North Koreans to integrate into South Korea is going to be pretty hard.
China is also unlikely to allow US bases so close to the Yalu river.
When I factor in all these things, I believe that Korea will go through a transitionary state where two systems in one country emerge.
All in all, it could be that the unification collapses due to the structural pressure it places on South Korea and it's citizens to oppose it-Nobody in a capitalistic society is willing to trade away their good life.
Whatever happens, I only wish North Koreans live a free life, whether it's under South Korea's control or not.
Because North Korean collapse could mean a significant economic burden as East Germany's collapse was to West....but they've only had couple decades apart, North Korea is like dealing with Chosun dynasty.
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've been twice to North Korea on tours and I just don't see a true reunification happening anytime soon. This isn't like West/East Germany where both sides were still similar. North Korea is a fundamentally different country to South Korea in almost every single way. Any comparison between the two situations is stupid and naive.
There are plenty of opportunities for economic integration. But how exactly do you plan to reunify when significant parts of the North Korean government are actively against it i.e. they are doing well under the current regime. Or when the narrative has always been reunification under the DPRK banner ?
The only way any of this is happening is if China stops supporting North Korea and the UN Security Council/Agencies puts much of the government in jail for crimes against humanity. Then South Korea would effectively just take over and Pyongyang would be turned into a tourist attraction.
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?
It isn't over until the fat lady sings as they say. Anything can still happen with North Korea. Personally I imagine a revolution of some sort to be rather much more likely than North Korea somehow being the first eternally stable state in the world.
Sad news. North Korea starves millions of it's own people to build weapons, which shows the current leadership would rather kill it's own people than give up broken ideals that have lead the country to nothing but poverty. Hopefully when Kim Jong-Il passes away the country can unite again, and the North Korean people can then eat without worry of starvation and live a life they choose to lead.
South Korea is one of the great places on earth right now, and North Korea is just the polar opposite. Very strange.
Democracy and freedom isn't going to feed the North Koreans. They need an authoritarian government that understands geopolitics and economics, and has the ability to exploit the former to jump-start the latter. It's how every successful East Asian country has done it - Japan (Meiji bureaucracy and then LDP post-WW2), South Korea (Park Chung-hee), Singapore (Lee Kuan-yew), Taiwan (KMT in the 70s/80s), and now China (CCP). Of course, it's possible that they end up with a shitty dictator (like in the Philippines), but democracy only produces change very slowly.
My bet is when change eventually comes in NK, it will not be some kind of pro-democracy popular movement. It will be a coup during a time of weakness from a group of second-tier elites who think they could have it better if the depose the dictator and replace it with a council.
If we're lucky, that comes along with some reforms. These would be reforms geared towards making those second-tier elites better off, of course. Perhaps just a change to how resources are spent and distributed. Perhaps some de-collectivization and private property. Perhaps secretly negotiated reduction in sanctions in exchange for some liberalization. But that could still be a move in the right direction.
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.
Yeah, I don't want that part for sure. I could have been clearer, but what I meant is that the idea has been put forward that the people of North Korea have the Juche ideology so deeply ingrained in them that, if the regime were gone (hopefully through peaceful means), the country would struggle to put something better in its place.
Right now, things are pretty bad. People are starving, there are human rights abuses, etc. If you want to change the course of a country, you have to remove the old order and (the part everyone forgets about far too easily) fill the void by somehow creating a new order that is stable and effective. This second part fails really often in history. I think it might be a huge challenge for North Korea if they ever get to that step.
Is the regime doomed? The people are screwed, sure, but once a government turns into a self-serving dictatorship, it can stay that way for a long time.
Usually the first thing dictators do is disarm civilians and beef up the military, so the only way out is via a military coup (which usually just trades one regime for an equivalent one). In just 2 decades, North Korea will have had a dictatorship for a century.
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.
The part that makes this story different from the other stories about starving children is that the girl in this story was the daughter of a doctor. Where else do you find a doctor's children starving but in North Korea?
We Americans don't speak nearly enough about the suffering of North Korean people. As someone who grew up in the second worst communist dictatorship in the world I can say that the worst part about living in such a country is not lack of food or shoes or clothes and not even lack of freedom. The worst part is lack of future. Their system is totally frozen. Nothing moves. Most of the work that is done is just for the sake of appearing like people are working. Every intelligent person looks around and sees that something needs to be done to change the situation but nobody knows what to do, let alone find the courage to actually do something. It has been 23 years since I lived in a similar situation and I still feel out of breath thinking about it.
If the North Korean regime falls today we are likely to witness one of the worst humanitarian crisis we have ever seen. We can just hope that the current North Korean leaders find both the desire and the ability to do a transformation like China did in the 70's. U.S. played a large part in that transformation and it could play a large part in helping North Korea too.
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.
> If the population starves, there's a huge higher chance of revolution
What makes you think so? They already went through one horrible famine (the "Arduous March", back in the '90s, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine) without support for the regime shaking.
The absolutely stunning amount of indoctrination and thought control the government has put its people through has made North Korea a place where the normal political laws of nature do not apply. Light bends by itself, water flows uphill. It's a deeply weird place, which makes predicting how its people will react to events very difficult.
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