We all see and hear what goes on over there. Kim will execute kids if they don’t cheer hard enough at his birthday party or something? He’s always threatening to nuke countries and is probably has the highest domestic kill count out of any world leader today.
So I ask? Why don’t any other countries step in to help those people. I saw a survey asking Americans and Escaped North Koreans would they migrate to North Korea and to the US if given the chance (hypothetical for the refugees). And it was like <0.1% to 95%. Obviously those people live in terror.
Why do we just allow this to happen in modern civilization? Nukes on South Korea? Is just not lucrative to step in? SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME PLEASE!?
Short answer is that NK is pretty much self-contained. Occasional Kim might rattle his sabre but no one is too worried about it. Until they start making serious threats to the stability of other countries it’s just a case of leave well enough alone.
Sure it sucks what the people of NK have to endure but it’s not for other countries to tell them how they should live unless they directly ask for help or start threatening the sovereignty of other countries.
As someone else in the comments mentioned, WW2 wasn’t an intervention to protect the German citizens that were being persecuted, it was a reaction to German invasion of other nations.
Because China doesn’t want anyone to.
America was never about helping the people of the world. Many who believe that are mostly victims of propaganda. It’s all about American interests. If it’s in their interest they will give some reason like liberating a people as a pretence to enable military action.
Also to directly answer the question, they have nukes trained on Seoul, have the backing of China which considers it a buffer against western influenced south kr
Jesus Fucking Christ. Stop trying to “liberate” other countries. Don’t you understand what that entails? Rampant slaughter of civilians followed by propping up a colonial regime. How many times are you gonna try this shit before you learn? When has it ever worked?
At least DPRK minds it’s own business. Imo, the country most in need of a war of liberation is the United States, which not only has a backwards, oppressive regime that’s disappearing people off the streets, but also has been directly involved in multiple wars of conquest and aggression, and indirectly involved in more. Whatever you wish upon Korea, let it happen here, let’s let China or someone bomb our cities and set up a government they like. Will you be greeting them as liberators? Not so fun when the shoe’s on the other foot, is it?
Someday I hope y’all are able to see yourselves for the warmongers you are. I have no idea how liberals are able to convince of themselves as “peace-loving” while saying shit like this.
They have nukes
World powers typically let countries do whatever they want to their own citizens, it’s only when they do stuff to people of other countries that they get involved.
More like when it threatens some status quo or be inconvenient for them to deal with or might cause a shift to some power dynamics.
I mean nobody(western leaders) gives a fuck about whatever is going on in Africa and Asia. And it’s quite literally mindboggling how the shit in Urkaine and Palestine is still ongoing without any major consequences for the aggressors other than mayyyybe harsh words or hurrdurr sanctions. Soo…as long as it does negatively not impact then, world leaders don’t give a shit about what other countries do.
Simple and to the point. WW2 didn’t happen just because the Nazis were killing Jews, it happened because Hitler decided to barge into other countries.
Not really an answer, but I think this Laibach song vibes well with your question - How do you solve a problem like Korea?
Because north korea only make empty threats and the west are hypocrites and never gave a damn,about internstional law, democracy and human rights in other countries
Or, just hear me out, because the west doesn’t want to enter into a war with China in Korea a second time.
In that case they should stop pretending to care about what i mentioned instead of acting like they care about Palestinians but still buying arms from them and keep great economical relation with the terrorist state , celebrating Israel attack on Iran under of the pretext that Iran is ruled by authoritarian regime while having great connection with Saudis, not pressuring UAE to stop support the RSF in Sudan using UAE, Israeli and USA arms
The goal poasts moved so far that I can not even see them in the field. Good talk!
Same reason why no one does anything about the atrocities that happen within the US.
So… Nukes.
Part of it.
How many children have been killed because an insurance company refused payment for healthcare.
We all see and hear what goes on over there.
Bullshit.
Yeah all the terrible shit we see is just a tip of the iceberg.
Why would you believe your media regarding a country they admit is “closed off”?
Do you seriously believe they execute ppl for having the same haircut as Kim? And then execute ppl for having a different haircut from him?
They execute generals all the time, then the generals appear alive a few months later. That’s that mystical Juche necromancy for ya.
I fully agree that a lot of the shittalk about them is exaggerated and ill-informed. They don’t execute people for having wrong haircut (dyeing can get you into some trouble), no, I do not believe that.
People live there. It’s certainly not nationwide Auschwitz as you might think.
But they also execute/punish people(and their family members) for trying to leave the country for good or talk shit about their supreme leader. I don’t know you but if that’s not a red flag I seriously don’t know what is.
They execute generals all the time, then the generals appear alive a few months later. That’s that mystical Juche necromancy for ya.
Can’t get all the shit right, yes. That doesn’t make their countless crimes-against-humanity testimonies and proof any less valid. And since they are so closed off that even the whereabouts of high-ranking generals are often hard to know, it really is just the tip of the iceberg.
But I’m very sure that you are going to say all the defectors and reporters are liars and parrot all the wild cringe tankie shit that no less than 14 should you have outgrown and that’s fine. You do you. I hope someday you can make a personal visit to North Korea and leave the horrific, capitalistic hellhole of a society the West is.
If you are an American, eat what’s on your plate before you worry about NK.
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I’m Korean.
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America already tried to save the North Koreans once. It was called the “Korean War”.
We bombed them back to the stone age, then permanently isolated them from most of the world. Despite having good reasons for the start of the war, America treated NK like Israel currently treats Gaza.
Even if North Koreans tried to forget that America bombed every hospital, every water purification plant, all the electricity production, etc; the Kim regime’s propaganda will make sure they never forget.
If we actually wanted to help those people, the first step would be removal of economic sanctions. There is no clean way to remove dictatorship, but the “Arab Spring” model is much more effective and humane than the “Afghanistan War” model.
Til that I don’t know enough about the Korean War. Jfc
Ohhhhh it’s so much worse. Here’s the intro to the BlowBack podcast S3, which is all about the Korean War https://open.spotify.com/episode/4ZX1YIvtHhxuoOTaH41VNC
Very informative listen so far. Thanks for sharing
North Korea does not allow its own people to leave. The situation is nothing like Gaza, and to claim otherwise is some dipshit 16 year old tankie nonsense. North Korea is the most oppressive country to have ever existed
If you read the previous comment more closely you’ll realize that the commentor wasn’t comparing today’s NK to Gaza, but Korea during the Korean War to Gaza. That is a reasonable comparison, as nearly every standing structure was bombed.
That’s war for ya
Damn, maybe we should stop doing them then.
You have obviously misunderstood me.
I was comparing the United States actions in the Korean War(1950s) to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The mass civilian bombing campaigns, complete destruction of civilian infrastructure, manmade famine, widespread preventable disease, and imposed economic isolation are very similar between the two cases.
I am not comparing current-day North Korea to current-day Gaza, and I agree with you that would not be a good analogy.
North korea had comparable standards of living to south korea until the late 1980s, mid-1990s when they stopped getting bankrolled by the soviet union. Leaning on the war in the 1950s to explain modern NK is factually wrong. The reason North korea is in such a poor state is because
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Their country clings on to a pseudo-scientific economic ideology which has destroyed their country
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Their monarchist dictatorship is hell bent on an unsustainable nuclear weapons program and regularly threatens to annihilate their neighbors in a blaze of atomic glory. Sanctions against North korea are designed to prevent them from acquiring fissile materials for further development of weapons of mass destruction. Considering the stakes here, hitting them with sanctions is letting them off easy
If the North Korean government cared about its people (which it doesnt) then they would do 4 things:
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End their nuclear ambitions
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Implement market reforms to allow the free flow of trade and end centralized planning of their economy
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Free all political prisoners and the 3 generations of their family which are considered guilty by association, and end the mass system of concentration camps which they run
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The Kim dynasty must step down and allow free and fair elections
None of these things will happen because North korea exists solely to be the personal theme park/prison state for Kim Jong-Un, who does not care an iota for the wellbeing of the North Korean people
So your thesis is that the 1950s war was inconsequential, and then you lay the entire blame on the Kim regime and their policies?
My dude, how do you think the Kim regime became a dictatorship?
Before the 1950s war, Kim was a weak puppet leader propped up by the Soviet Union. By the end of the war, the Kim regime had dictatorial power, which persists to this day.
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Because - improbably, given its track record elsewhere - the world has worked out that the solution to someone killing kids isn’t to kill more kids.
But not after having killed a lot of kids first.
We are still … learning
Generally countries in the west only get involved in conflicts if they get something out of it, be it directly via getting wealth from the country, or indirectly like curbing successful non-capitalistic economies before they catch on and their own people start questioning the billionaires. The “we’re there to liberate people” is just marketing speech.
I wonder why you say “countries in the west” and not just “countries”. It’s not like, I don’t know, Banín is shouting about North Korea every day and nobody listens.
I don’t know enough about how the rest of the world runs to generalise further
You’re saying that no one with empathy has any power to help these people?
no one with political power gets that power through empathy
People in power in the west are barely moving the needle for their own people sadly.
Also even if they did, they’d still need a valid cause to start an international conflict I think, it’s why Russia tried the “it’s actually russians in Ukraine that are being oppressed and we’re liberating them” excuse
It’s more that there’s little that can be done that doesn’t also risk making the situation much worse.
Something like going to war to depose Kim would lead to mass death and risk spilling over into a much wider conflict since North Korea has the backing of China.
It seems as though unfortunately any people with the capacity for empathy never end up in positions of real power… :(
It’s not a lack of empathy as much as a kind of educated empathy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. We historically have a notorious and awful track record of nation building, and I think a lot of people believe this boils down to the fact that it’s very difficult to impose a national identity on people from outside, even with direct, physical intervention. We have tried to get around this at times by only supporting what we believe are legitimate independence movements which clearly already possess a strong national identity. Unfortunately even those tend to devolve into ethnic cleansing campaigns and dictatorship as soon as we leave. And if we don’t leave, then we have to stay there forever and we have to keep interfering every time things threaten to go off the rails and then it becomes paternalistic colonialism.
Keep in mind too that a lot of people living under oppressive regimes are genuinely damaged people and there is nothing but time that can heal those wounds. They are traumatized, they are angry, they have lost loved ones, they have been subjected to horrors we can only imagine and clinically document, without feeling the fear and emotional scars those things inflicted on millions of people. If you suddenly give them back power again, even small amounts of power, it is in human nature for many to seek revenge for what they’ve gone through (and not always against the right people). They’ve learned how to operate within the context of a deeply flawed and dangerous regime, and it is natural to adopt some of the same tools and practices. As resilient as the human spirit is it still is difficult to teach new ways.
At some point, people have got to learn to stand on their own two feet and find a way to build an equal, fair and just nation for all of themselves, by all the people and for all the people. While we certainly can do a better job of supporting this, we can’t do it for them and our attempts to do so have typically ranged from highly questionable to disastrous and extremely counterproductive. We fought for our own freedom, and it is not out of selfishness that we tell them they must fight for their own too. It’s not that we enjoy the fighting, it’s that as awful as it is, it appears necessary to get that hostility out into the open and understood to be as awful as it is, for a successful outcome to be possible.
On the other hand, even that hasn’t helped in Israel/Palestine where it seems like we’ve tried almost everything and failed. The fact is, nobody has the answers. We don’t know the way to fix this. We are always trying, even when it doesn’t seem like it, but we have to be abundantly cautious that we’re not making it worse, because we often are. For that matter, we have our own problems, and we haven’t figured those out either. Just because we’re doing much better than the worst countries in the world or even much better than average doesn’t mean we’ve got it all figured out or even that we’re doing anything right at all.
It’s one of the most heavily fortified countries with an extreme nuclear power regime out in the mountains. How could a country like the United States help North Koreans without threatening intense military conflict?
I think the answer is simple: end the sanctions.
McDonalds and Starbucks can take down the Kim regime much more effectively than B-2 bombers and Hellfire missiles.
Is that hard to believe?
Ah, the old question about what to do about North Korea, it occupies the minds of many, there are some answers, many lead to more questions, and so on.
The stakes are increadibly high, so we have to tread very carefully.
Let’s bring up a few key facts.
- NK is a totalitarian state with a huge personality cult surrounding the Kim family.
- NK is supported by both China and Russia, they both have a highly vested interest in keeping the status quo.
- NK is located within artillery range of SK’s capital city, Seoul.
- NK’s society is vastly different from all of it’s neighbours, even the language used in NK is noticably different from the language spoken in SK.
- NK has nuclear weapons.
- NK does not have a problem ignoring the normal rules of diplomacy.
Now, you ask what other countries can do to help the people of NK, that is a hugely complicated question, which in general is mostly answered with an answer no one really wants to hear:
Support the current regime
For any proper aid to get into NK you need the support of the regime, and they will take the credit for the aid.
I saw a documentary of a film crew following a team of surgeons travelling to NK to help people who had lost their sight, it was a simple operation, preformed and funded by foreign organizations, the regime had only allowed the team access.
The operation took maybe a few min per patient, they replaced a lens in the eyes of the patient, and as soon as the patient was done, they rushed to the portraits of the leaders of NK, got on their knees and thanked them deeply for their graciousness of restoring their eyesight.
This is the kind of society NK is, everything is tied to the leader.
This is the starting point, and you have 26 million people to deal with…
Ok, say that a world power decide that they have had enough with the Kim family and this is worth going to war over.
What can we expect?
Regardless of what countries are involved, Seoul WILL be bombarded.
So now the attacker is hated both in NK and SK as well as probably a lot of other countries.
NK will use their nukes, and possibly other WMD they have.
Then comes China…
China loves NK as a buffer against the west, so they would and have deployed the PLA to save NK.
I fell asleep a few times while writing the pervious comment, so if it seems cut off, that is why.
Now, there are a few more things to talk about.
- What is more likely with regards to real change, military action by a foreign power, political collapse, or a gradual change?
- What will have to be done after thing have changed?
Lets start with 1 first:
I think we can rule out direct military action by a foreign power, any action will see Seoul in SK destroyed within a day, and even Japan is at a high risk here.
Political collapse is possible, but not realistic to happen in the current situation, remember that the government has an extreme level of control over the media in NK, this includes extreme control over the smartphones sold in NK, everything you do is monitored, any photo you take with the camera is cryptographically signed on the device so the government knows the origin of any photo spread around in NK, you can see more here: https://youtu.be/czJaA0S2AjE . With this level of control of the media, the regime will probably not fall soon.
Gradual change is the most probable, but will take a long time, people in SK do send baloons with USB sticks containing SK media, so people in NK are somewhat aware of life in SK. But as I noted earlier this will take a long time.
Ok lets move on to number 2, what would happen after a collapse of the NK government.
The most probable thing is that China will come and run NK as a kind of colony, NK lacks a LOT of modern infrastructure, and the citizens will be at extreme risk of exploitation.
Whoever colonized NK would face the daunting challenge of integrating 26 million people into a modern society, meanwhile other groups will try to exploit the cheap labour NK citizens can provide.
Bringing NK citizens into modern society with zero oversight will end in disaster, look at Albania as a warning, there was little knowledge of financial scams in the times after communism and several pyramid schemes was established and later collapsed, wiping out 50% of the GDP of Albania at the time and contributed in large parts to the 1997 Albanian rebellion.
Teaching the NK citizens about the dangers and advantages of modern society will take a long time, it will involve a lot of shattered illusions, plenty of people will want to go back their old ways, other’s will want to go full steam ahead, making their own paths without help.
This is just a small taste of the issues to come…
Because that roads leads to war. The moment one country decides it has the authority to overule another’s sovereignity because they disagree with what’s going on there, it becomes a free for all.
This line of thinking is the very reason why there are two Koreas today, because of two superpowers who thought they knew better and could make a nice profit in the process.
We have a word for this: Colonialism.
And we certainly don’t do THAT anymore.
If NK was oil rich and off the coast of the US, we’d colonialism the shit out of it.
It’s not because the world is now too enlightened for colonialism. It’s because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. NK has nothing of value, and China wants it to stay there as a buffer to SK.
