Recently, I went on a bit of a North Korea-related reading binge. One thing I read really stuck with me:
The first time I took the DMZ tour from the South, and on some tours since, the US soldier leading the tour would tell everyone we weren't looking at a real building. Instead the North's building was "a facade designed to look large and impressive, but is in reality only a frame a few feet (one meter) thick."[1]
...followed by a photo of the author sitting inside the very real, functional building during his trip to the North Korean side of the border.
It woke me up to the reality that North Korea is so opaque, that there is really no way of knowing the truth of what you read or hear about the country; the official line from both "our" and "their" sides is not much other than a steady stream of propaganda.
That being said, I believe Shin's experience (I originally wrote story, but felt that it was disrespectful) is authentic, and the continuing existence of concentration camps in this 21st century is yet another black mark on Humanity's record.
I find it sad that after being basically treated like garbage by North Korean society, "defectors" (I hesitate to use that term due to the negative connotation, but can't think of anything else) like Shin wind up isolated within South Korean society. It reaches the point where more than 1/3rd want to leave SK.[1]
That one cannot escape an accident of birth is a huge blemish on humanity.
Well its sad but not surprising. I mean look at it from a young South Korean's perspective. There is a huge economic and many be now even a cultural gap between them and the folks from the north.
For somebody young in South Korea, a North Korean is somebody who shares his mother tongue in a different dialect- nothing much apart from that. By now North and South Korea are two very different countries, with many things being different and few things being common.
When a refugee arrives they may not think of him/her as 'one of us'. More like some troubled person from the neighboring country who will dilute/be a burden on our culture economy.
Especially considering the fact that they are bombarded with anti-American propaganda. So much so that they still celebrate the capture of the USS Pueblo, which is on display as a museum in Pyongyang.
All true stories become distorted through repeated retelling. So the true stories are the one that is told the earliest. Better is the one that is told on camera since computers do not have mechanisms for distortion.
I just read this whole story, and I can scarcely comprehend it's real. I just don't quite know what to say. What are you meant to do when you read something like that?
I am currently reading this due to another post about this same guy a couple of weeks back. I would highly recommend it, though it is truly upsetting, I have to keep reminding myself that what this man went through was/is real.
OP link does seem to gloss over some of the finer details explained in the book.
I get that feeling every time I read about North Korea. At the very least, the ongoing tragedy there thrives in the absence of attention. Imagine how much outcry and public pressure for action there would be if there were video footage of these concentration camps on the news every day. At the very least, helping give it more exposure and awareness could help build momentum for more meaningful action.
Donating time (my labor) and money to effective non-profit organizations that promote human rights. Endeavoring to improve myself so I can do more to help others. Encouraging others to get active.
"When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit to the glories of love. When evil men would seek to perpetuate an unjust status quo, good men must bring into being a real order of justice."
One reaction I get is a lack of fear of their nuclear tests. Rather, I welcome them as each time it might be enough to push larger countries to actually fix the situation.
My father was a holocaust survivor, and he was the exact same way. In fact, all of his surviving relatives were the same also. It seemed completely contradictory to me when I was younger (especially being raised as an atheist jew), but as I grew older I slowly understood. I think being persecuted like that made them hold onto their 'jewish identity' to an insane degree, despite the fact that all of them lost their religion.
It's understandable. When someone tries to stamp out your identity, the natural reaction is to double down on that identity to emphasize that you will not submit to that sort of subjugation.
I think in fact this has a lot to do with the stickiness of religion -- it's completely mixed up with family identity.
> I think in fact this has a lot to do with the stickiness of religion -- it's completely mixed up with family identity.
When you're Jewish religion and family identity are one.
But that still does not mean that you will end up believing in god.
When you're born into a Catholic family you can opt-out at some point, you can renounce the faith. But when you're Jewish you can stop believing in God all you want but you'll still be Jewish.
Being Jewish is a state, not a religion.
Edit: On another note, being Jewish is also something forced upon Jews that want to opt-out by the outside world. They can intermarry, they can assimilate all they want the rest of the world will still treat them as Jewish. The Jewish religion states the conditions for being Jewish, it's circular reasoning that could only stop when everybody involved would stop believing that this is true. But as long as there are people that believe that when you're born Jewish you will always be Jewish this will be to some extent true. There is an element of virality in there.
The Catholic faith (and most other Christian denominations) considered this a 'bug' in earlier religions and fixed it by having procedures where you are voluntarily (as far as you can speak about that after being instilled with certain ideas practically from birth) join the body of the church. There are also procedures for opting-out on a voluntary basis as well as a way of punishing those that fell into dis-favor with Church officials (for instance ex-communication).
Religion and being part of some religion is a very tricky area in that it all centers around what everybody believes in and it appears that to some extent these beliefs can effect real change in the people that have such beliefs. If you believe that some woman gave birth being a virgin then a lot of other things suddenly also become possible. If you believe that God chose a certain family blood line to be the chosen people believing that you can't opt-out from that can be a very real thing. After all, who can deny their mother is their mother?
I agree this tendency is strong among Jews due probably mostly to historical prejudice. But it's clearly the case among many Muslim communities (look up the Maldives) -- you don't even really have the option to give it up.
And as for Catholics, I have known many who say it's always there as part of their identity, regardless of their religious beliefs.
Protestant Christianity seems almost an outlier in the way people come and go in the various sects. But even there, especially in the Southern USA, I've heard people say it is so ingrained into their culture that the thought of professing agnosticism or atheism is a truly life-changing, possibly life-wrecking decision.
I stand by my premise, that religion is way more mixed up with family identity than would be the case if it were simply a pure expression of belief.
How is what possible? The Germans put all Jews on, even pregnant ones. His mother gave birth in the cattle car.
He was lucky. They survived. Most of his relatives did not.
He is an observant Jew. Follows all dietary laws, goes to Temple, observes all religious holidays, etc. He does this as a strong assertion that he is a Jew, he will not let anyone take that away from him. Ever.
Because they obviously did not. Camps varied in cruelty quite a bit. It's worth learning about how a modern society like Weimar Germany could have been influenced to take the course of action that it did. Similar things continue to happen all over the world, and education is important in combating it.
I do not know all of the details, and this was someone I worked with over a decade ago. I've never had any particular reason to doubt his honesty, but I never tried hard to verify that particular claim either.
However I know that he was a Hungarian Jew. His family therefore would not have faced deportation to concentration camps until after the German invasion in 1944. According to http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005142 there were some children successfully hidden by prisoners in camps.
After some time with Google, I wonder whether he could have been the one born on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kastner%27s_train. (Which was indeed a cattle car on its way to a concentration camp - but the people in the car survived.) I do not know and, due to the fact that I have not seen him since I moved to the West Coast a decade ago, am not in a position to ask.
The concentration camps weren't uniform, and even within the camps, some people were able to survive for a while and transfer. The system also varied a lot through time.
Judaism it not a religion. It is a complex mix of culture, religion, language, history, nationality, and ethnicity each to varying degrees. Being a Jew is never predicated on what you believe, athiests and believers - traditionalists and liberals - are both jews to equal measure. There is such a hodgepodge of viewpoints and movements that you will not have to dig long before you find observant Jews who are skeptical about the existence of god - or most likely just don't bother with that question.
Judaism is a religion - it is the name of the religion of the jewish people. But you can be jewish without adhering to judaism. And I suppose you can follow the traditions and rituals of Judaism without believing in the existence of God.
Sounds very similar to my experience with Japanese culture. We call their Shintoism a 'religion' but it doesn't fit either, it's much more like what you list.
I can't speak for his personal beliefs, but the reason one might so often encounter the "atheist jew" phenomena is simply an inherent compatibility. This is seated in the resistance to anthropomorphism of god, skepticism of false idolatry, etc. The past thousand years of rubbing with christianity has formalized what we now recognize as "religious" rite, but faith is the paradoxical belief in something that doesn't necessarily exist -- that's why it's faith.
What is happening in North Korea can only be summed up as epic fail at human rights and people's right to free from an oppressive regime.
Maybe I don't quite understand how mass psychology works, but I know that the population of the country is 24 million people and that the current system probably doesn't benefit 99.9% of that population (the other 0.1% being the regime members, for whom the whole thing works out just fine). Sorry for pulling the numbers out of my ass, but I am trying to convey an idea here.
If that's the currently the case, then why wouldn't those 99.9% rise up and overthrow the regime that oppresses them? Even the soldiers are most likely normal people who have been conscripted at some point, why would they kill their own neighbors, friends and family members in the case of such an uprising? The people of North Korea have EVERY reason on this planet to overthrow their "government", what's preventing them from doing so?
Like I said, I may be totally misunderstanding how mass psychology works in dictatorships, but this kind of thing seems pretty logical to me, even a no-brainer. Is it the lack of critical thinking? Critical mass? Inability to build up that critical mass? If so, why? Do people there really rat on their neighbors and family members like we often hear?
If I were a more dismissive person I would just say "They're just getting what they're asking for", but I really want to understand how this works better, so someone please enlighten me.
Because people are self-interested to the extreme, and powerful, domineering sociopaths can easily manipulate them by setting up incentive structures that play to that self-interest. Individuals and small groups of North Koreans have certainly tried to subvert the leadership--but they simply ended up in the prison camps that the article describes, because everyone else would rather stab them in the back for a reward than assist them and face certain death or imprisonment. This isn't to say that the North Korean populace is stupid or immoral. They are merely powerless. The rules of the game are so perverse, that the players don't even matter. Put any humans in that society and they will behave the same, because there is no other choice--you either play by the rules or you die.
This incentive structure is so firmly entrenched that the death of Kim Jong-Il did precisely nothing. The hydra simply sprouted a new head. (And I'd argue that a Hitler assassination would likely have had the same outcome.)
There is not going to be a North Korean revolution to overthrow the Kim regime. Even if the younger Kim trips up politically and is backstabbed and supplanted by another ambitious psychopath from among the political elite, he will also find the current structure beneficial. But if that person cannot cement their power and the elite descends into infighting and schism, there could be a reform as the factions compete for power (this is what happened in the USSR and PRC).
The only other way the Kims will ever be deposed is through outside military action, and they know it--that's why they are armed to the teeth.
Reading up on the Milgram experiment [1] could provide some insight into how such a social dynamic can be maintained.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most people (most notably the soldiers) probably don't feel like they are being oppressed, or can even identify that they have a "shared enemy", i.e. the state. Revolutions are hard, and it's easy for us from more democratic countries to think of how they all should act united. As an example of that - imagine 300 years from now there are probably a lot of things that will be seen as obviously wrong with the world we are living in right now. Hindsight (or in the case of NK, a different perspective) is 20/20.
The account brought a tear to my eye as I read it. It's very sad.
fail at human rights and people's right to free from an oppressive regime.
You can try to blame the regime; but really, this is the life that the generation in control during the Korean war chose. They fought with their lives to live under tyrannical communist rule.
It's such a shame that their progeny have to live with the consequences of those decisions in perpetuity.
How so? The regime that is in place today is a result of all of the decisions that all the actors made before them, particularly during the events leading up to and during the Korean War. The primary actors dictating eventual outcomes were the North Koreans themselves. Their myriad choices led to the prison society they live in today.
Even a cursory Google search shows how false your assumptions are. There were many external factors which regular North Korean citizens had no control over. Most accounts of the 'origin' of North Korea involve to some degree the proxy war between USSR and USA in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion in Asia. I doubt very much that "regular" North Koreans had any say in how some foreign governments decided to divide up and control their land. Follow that up with a great deal of propaganda, and you have a massively uninformed (or misinformed) citizenry controlled by the state.
Sure, there were external forces at play. There always are. That doesn't negate the fact that they made their own decisions on where to take their society and those decisions were poor ones. As a counter example, I'd say that those who fled or chose to fight the Communist forces made good decisions, at least at a societal level.
Let's put it this way. If the Koreans who fought for Communism in the Korean War could see the situation today. If they could see the thriving success of South Korea vs the tyrannical poverty of North Korea.
Do you think they would change their decisions made during the war? Do you think they'd fight against Communism? I think a lot of them would. They had a chance to do something. They had a chance to battle their leaders and those external forces before the door shut on their ability to do much of anything. Now it's mostly too late. A system has been set up that takes all choice from them.
North Korea is the nation most like Oceania in 1984 than any other on Earth. People are hungry and brainwashed from birth to love their leader and the state. That's basically why no one is trying to overthrow their government. US military intervention is sort of out of the question as well due to the immense lose of life involved (mostly in South Korea).
Maybe you're underestimating the pressure society can put on individuals. And overestimating the "freedom of choice" individuals really have.
If you look at it from the outside it's easy to fall in the conclusion that very few people people benefit from the regime (let's say ~0.1%). But that's only looking from a very global perspective. From each individual's perspective, some people have more privileges than others. In that sense, the people on DPRK are really not that different from you and i. We also try to live better in the the way we know and we believe that we can live better. For example, maybe if i lived in a society where the people are used to raise against corrupt governors then i'd believe that that would be the way to live better, and i'd act accordingly; but i don't, so i look for other ways to live better... ways that might not be the best for society as a whole (e.g. try to raise enough money to pay for privileged private education; even though it would be better for the whole t have a good public education system). The circumstances around us and the people at DPRK can vary a lot, but that essence, i think, still holds. We can't choose to do what we don't believe in.
To put things into perspective, imagine what a non-imprisoned person at DPRK knows and what could she believe in. She knows that she is not as bad as the people in the concentration camps, that's for sure. She probably also knows that outside NK people live better, but how could she believe that she could escape, or change the society she lives in? She knows that the government would put her in those concentration camps if she tried to do anything suspicious. Not revealing attempts of escape/treason is considered enough to put you in those concentration camps, and she knows that. So she will act according to her knowledge and what she believes she can do. If she sees someone trying to escape, the best thing to do, for her life, is to tell the authorities about it. And let's go a bit higher in order of thought: she knows that the people around her will probably think the same way, so she knows she has little chances of escaping/changing something without getting caught.
That is, i think, in a very simplified way, the thought process behind those dysfunctional societies. And, sadly, it's, in essence, the same thought process that prevents other (maybe less dysfunctional) societies from doing something to really help.
North Korea is at the end state of socialism. Hayek wrote a famous book called "The road to serfdom", and this prison camp, and the way the rest of NK citizens live is the serfdom he's talking about.
Once you accept that you're owned by "society", and that everyone is "responsible for the greater good" this is inevitably what you end up with.
You ask if they lack critical thinking or a critical mass. Both of these are true, they've been indoctrinated to believe in this system, except maybe the ones like the writer of this story who were born in a camp and got less indoctrination.
The sad thing is, you can see this very same thing play out repeatedly in history. The way the germans let the nazis take over, even after it was clear they were up to no good. The way there was no revolution to overthrow the soviet state in the USSR.
You see these same mechanisms happening here in america today-- people claiming that "health care is a right" which is essentially saying they have the right to enslave everyone else for their own benefit.
And there's the error- they think "the rich" or "everyone else" is going to be forced to pay for their wellbeing, never realizing that they are calling for their own enslavement.
Pair the idea that you have a "right" to make others pay for healthcare (and other things) with the claim by these same people that you don't have a right to self defense (eg: own guns.) The latter is even in the constituttion.
You'd think this would cause a dissonance in their head, but the party ideology is so strong they never connect the two.
And when americans are being herded into camps, long disarmed, and forced to work "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs".... they will wish they still had guns.
Schools teach people to be compliant little sheep and have done so for over a century, there's a distinct connection between government control over schools and lack of critical thinking in the populace.
Unless things turn around soon, the US will end up in some sort of terrible state. Not likely like North Korea or Nazi germany or the USSR, but we already are suffering from the economic destruction of these kinds of policies (and like NK citizens told to blame the US for their poverty, we're told to blame wall street, germans were told to blame jews, russians were told to blame "hoarders", etc. etc. etc.)
> people claiming that "health care is a right" which is essentially saying they have the right to enslave everyone else for their own benefit.
No, it's saying that as a society we're not going to let people suffer and die in the street when we have the technology and resources to help them. Probably you'll believe in society a bit more if you're ever in a position where you can't solve your problems yourself.
we're not going to let people suffer and die in the street
It's funny how people are going to die in the street when they're arguing for nationalized healthcare, but the healthcare laws somehow need to cover free contraception, abortions, and breast pumps.
When taxes need to be raised, it's because children are starving in poverty, cops are being fired, and single mothers are being turned out into the streets. Yet, we're wasting billions in foreign aid, sponsoring an Indian reality show for hundreds of millions[1], and wasting billions on obvious avoidable failures like Solyndra.
How can we have an honest dialogue about where we've been, where we are, and how we should proceed when this kind of extreme rhetoric/propaganda is so commonplace?
> It's funny how people are going to die in the street when they're arguing for nationalized healthcare, but the healthcare laws somehow need to cover free contraception, abortions, and breast pumps.
Giving birth can be deadly, but more importantly providing those things helps to reduce the suffering and negative impact on society when people have children, planned or not.
> When taxes need to be raised, it's because children are starving in poverty, cops are being fired, and single mothers are being turned out into the streets.
Taxes aren't raised for any of those things in particular. They are raised increase gov't revenue and that revenue may or may not be allocated to programs to tackle those issues.
> Yet, we're wasting billions in foreign aid, sponsoring an Indian reality show for hundreds of millions[1], and wasting billions on obvious avoidable failures like Solyndra.
The TV show you refer to didn't receive hundreds of millions of dollars. Rather, the Dept. of Agriculture runs a program at a cost of $200 million, part of which went to that show. Note that the heritage foundation (yuck) link you posted makes no mention of the actual amount of money allocated to that TV show and what it was actually for.
As for Solyndra, they received a loan of $535 million from the Dept. of Energy, of which the govt can recoup up to 19% of $142.8 million of that loan (the rest is a loss). To claims billions in losses, you will have to prove that other companies that took loans under that DoE program have all failed and will not repay any part of their loans.
There is waste in gov't spending, for sure, but specifics are needed if we are going be even close to accurate about what is a loss and what is a gain, both in the short and long term.
If the whole contraceptive/abortion debate were about saving lives, then I wouldn't even be arguing with you... but it's not is it?
but more importantly providing those things helps to reduce the suffering and negative impact on society when people have children, planned or not.
Okay, now you're a lot more in line with the truth -- the masterminds in charge feel they have license to prevent "negative impact on society". Doesn't that scare you? The people in charge are no better than you or I... in fact I'd say they're mostly worse. They're mostly power hungry and good enough liars to get elected.
Taxes aren't raised for any of those things in particular.
I've heard both Biden and Obama use those EXACT reasons for why we need to raise revenues/taxes.
makes no mention of the actual amount of money allocated to that TV show and what it was actually for.
You're going to split hairs and worry about exactly how much of our tax dollars were spent on an Indian reality show? Who cares? Those people are abusing their trust to reduce "negative impact on society" and should be booted.
As for Solyndra
I didn't say Solyndra was the only loss. Once again, though, you're splitting hairs on how many million it was when the real answer should have been: No, we don't use BORROWED money to fund corporations for industries that are pet projects.
If you doubt that billions have been wasted, you haven't been paying attention. You must not have noticed TARP, large portions of which went to save the money and jobs of wealthy bankers. yay.
> If the whole contraceptive/abortion debate were about saving lives, then I wouldn't even be arguing with you... but it's not is it?
I know this is getting a bit off topic from what you originally were talking about, but abortion and contraception absolutely are about saving lives just as much as giving people control over there lives. In particular, when abortion is not available, people will seek out services from those who know nothing about actually performing an abortion or will attempt to self induce an abortion, which can be devastating in an environment where information is not available.
> Okay, now you're a lot more in line with the truth -- the masterminds in charge feel they have license to prevent "negative impact on society". Doesn't that scare you? The people in charge are no better than you or I... in fact I'd say they're mostly worse. They're mostly power hungry and good enough liars to get elected.
The purpose of organizing via a government in the first place is to prevent negative impact on society, so it really comes down to specifics. Providing health care access is a net gain for everybody and can be done reasonably, but policies like wars of aggression and police militarization are a huge drain on our society and others around the world. Again, it comes down to specifics.
> I've heard both Biden and Obama use those EXACT reasons for why we need to raise revenues/taxes.
They would like to use tax revenue increases to be spent on domestic social programs, but they really can't say it will be used that way, it will all come down to actually passing some kind of legislation to raise revenue and then legislation to spend it. In the current political climate in the US, that's a tall order.
> You're going to split hairs and worry about exactly how much of our tax dollars were spent on an Indian reality show? Who cares? Those people are abusing their trust to reduce "negative impact on society" and should be booted.
I think it matters because its not really clear if the Dept. of Agriculture's program is useful without specific information and details about it.
> I didn't say Solyndra was the only loss. Once again, though, you're splitting hairs on how many million it was when the real answer should have been: No, we don't use BORROWED money to fund corporations for industries that are pet projects.
Solyndra was supposed to be making an improved form of photo volatic solar panels for use in residential construction. While Solyndra was a bust, government spending to advance practical applications of alternative energy technology is definitely a good idea, as we will require better technology of that kind in the future as fossil fuel extraction gets more expensive. To that end, I wouldn't call this a pet project.
Also, the money was a loan that was to be repaid. The bankruptcy restructuring going on now means that the loan originator (the Dept. of Energy) will lose out on some amount of that loan, but the DoE felt is was worth the risk.
As for using tax money (borrowed or not) to spend on corporations through loan or subsidy programs, whether or not it is a waste really depends on the specifics of what that spending seeks to accomplish and what actual results occur. Funding alternative energy research has a strong value, even if it means that sometimes the programs will lose out. Also, the DoE's loan program is not a major source of financial pressure on gov't revenues: military spending and the increasing cost of medicare/medicaid due to lack of health care reform are the two biggest pressures right now.
> If you doubt that billions have been wasted, you haven't been paying attention. You must not have noticed TARP, large portions of which went to save the money and jobs of wealthy bankers. yay.
While I don't agree with the TARP program, billions were not wasted, as the vast majority of TARP funds have been completely repaid[1]:
As of December 31, 2012, the Treasury had received over $405 billion in total cash back on TARP investments, equaling nearly 97 percent of the $418 billion disbursed under the program.
I don't think that we can classify government programs as being charities. Many of us believe in helping those who are in need, but for this was can give our money and time freely to organizations that address certain issues. Governments take your money by force, and spend it on things for which you have no say. It isn't "society" doing it.
Yes you do, you have a vote. Each party standing for election presents a set of policies some of which include spending policy. The elected party then has a mandate to spend as per the policies outlined. That's how democracy works (well, how it's supposed to work).
If you really had "no say" then that would be a dictatorship?
And let's think about this a little further. Let's say the government doesn't take any money off you and everyone has to fend for themselves. Now, some people with more money are in a position to manipulate those with less money, and we are suddenly ruled by unelected corporations etc. Some argue it's like that already.
>Yes you do, you have a vote. Each party standing for election presents a set of policies some of which include spending policy. The elected party then has a mandate to spend as per the policies outlined. That's how democracy works (well, how it's supposed to work).
The latter part of your statement is what I agree with. We all know the theory, but we live the practice of democracy. And some of us have gradually quit buying into it.
>And let's think about this a little further. Let's say the government doesn't take any money off you and everyone has to fend for themselves. Now, some people with more money are in a position to manipulate those with less money, and we are suddenly ruled by unelected corporations etc. Some argue it's like that already.
I'd agree that it is essentially how things are already. The state-corporate partnership is quite a beast. Political influence is bought and sold as easily as stocks are.
>This is all pretty standard left vs. right stuff.
The left/right thing breaks down pretty quickly if you find that you loathe all of the major political parties our time. If you're a classical libertarian (or anarchist, depending on the term one prefers), for instance, there isn't a major party for you almost by definition.
> Many of us believe in helping those who are in need, but for this was can give our money and time freely to organizations that address certain issues.
The whole reason gov't programs targeting social issues is because private charity failed to address them adequately or at all.
> Governments take your money by force, and spend it on things for which you have no say.
Governments do not take your money by force. People are not born in a vacuum and the services and programs you and your family take advantage of shape the experience of your life. That you yourself will pay into that system and its programs does not mean your money is taken by force, but rather you are contributing in the same way as others before you.
This of course doesn't mean that governments cannot spend money wrongly or enact policies that are destructive towards people, but you are not being unfairly deprived just because you have to pay into services that you yourself will have benefited from, either directly or indirectly.
So everyone pays taxes voluntarily? Glad to hear we can get rid of the threatening language used in tax forms... clearly superfluous.
Back to reality, with a thought experiment: imagine that government subsisted exclusively on voluntary contributions. No threats of fines, interest charges, or arrest and jail time. In other words, like an actual charity. That is the difference between force/coercion, and voluntary action.
> So everyone pays taxes voluntarily? Glad to hear we can get rid of the threatening language used in tax forms... clearly superfluous.
I'll retract what I said earlier, governments do employ force to collect various taxes (for those governments that collect taxes at all).
> Back to reality, with a thought experiment: imagine that government subsisted exclusively on voluntary contributions. No threats of fines, interest charges, or arrest and jail time. In other words, like an actual charity.
I'm not really sure that this is even possible. This implies that there is already material wealth or skills available to be contributed, but it sounds as though that kind of organization isn't collectivist and control is routed through some subset of a population. That social structure sounds really unstable, as its unlikely that the most established and wealthy will continue to ignore other members of society (as they do now).
North Korea isn't even close to socialist. Workers in NK do not have control over their output and the gov't is controlled by a core group of insiders.
> Once you accept that you're owned by "society", and that everyone is "responsible for the greater good" this is inevitably what you end up with.
Socialism doesn't say that you are owned by society at large and stating there is a responsibility for individuals to their society does not mean that you end up with a totalitarian police state.
> You see these same mechanisms happening here in america today-- people claiming that "health care is a right" which is essentially saying they have the right to enslave everyone else for their own benefit.
This makes no sense, no advocate for health care reform, even universal health care advocates, are saying that people should be enslaved.
> Pair the idea that you have a "right" to make others pay for healthcare (and other things) with the claim by these same people that you don't have a right to self defense (eg: own guns.) The latter is even in the constituttion.
Gun control advocates do not argue that you do not have a right to self defense or even gun ownership, but rather that there can be reasonable regulation on gun ownership.
> And when americans are being herded into camps, long disarmed, and forced to work "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs".... they will wish they still had guns.
I'm assuming the americans you are referring to are white americans, considering the history of herding people of other races into camps and removing their rights to self determination.
> Schools teach people to be compliant little sheep and have done so for over a century, there's a distinct connection between government control over schools and lack of critical thinking in the populace.
While I agree that public school systems in the US have issues with being politicized and propagandist, some people from the school system do learn critical thinking skills or have those skills enhanced from going to school, so you'll need to offer more argument/evidence to say there is a direct link.
> Unless things turn around soon, the US will end up in some sort of terrible state. Not likely like North Korea or Nazi germany or the USSR, but we already are suffering from the economic destruction of these kinds of policies (and like NK citizens told to blame the US for their poverty, we're told to blame wall street, germans were told to blame jews, russians were told to blame "hoarders", etc. etc. etc.)
The US is suffering economic destruction not from socialist policies, but rather capitalistic policies that seek to dismantle social safety nets and increase wealth disparity. That those policies are now affecting the (mostly) white middle class more compared to people of color (who have been affected by these policies for decades, if not centuries) doesn't mean that we've taken the same path to ruin as NK or the USSR.
Those who escaped from North Korea to China will be sent back by the Chinese government if found and possibly executed. They are literally the most miserable people on this planet. China could have become some west "North Korea" (China is at the west of North Korea) if American hadn't killed Chairman Mao's son during Korean War. For that I am really grateful to the US. Life is not easy but it could have been much worse.
“In writing this book, I have sometimes struggled to trust him,” Mr. Harden writes understandably in “Escape From Camp 14.” Mr. Harden tries to fathom a cryptic, troubled and not entirely sympathetic young man whose circumstances lend themselves to exaggeration.
What’s more, the new book uses dialogue borrowed from Mr. Shin’s disingenuous 2007 version. “Escape From Camp 14” also includes simple line drawings (as Mr. Shin’s book had) that give the most traumatic parts of his story — torture, imprisonment, maiming, executions — the look of action comics. The most benign of these pictures carries this caption: “Children in the camps scavenged constantly for food, eating rats, insects and undigested kernels of corn they found in cow dung.”
(...)
Mr. Shin did not spend his imprisonment missing love, joy, civilization or comfort, because he had never experienced such things. As the spawn of a “reward marriage” — considered “the ultimate bonus for hard work and reliable snitching” — he had no real family ties.
The book says that he regarded his mother as a rival for food and was right to do so; she once beat him with a hoe for eating her lunch. As a young child, he saw schoolmates maimed or even killed for minor transgressions and he learned to obey the camp’s totalitarian rules.
(...)
But “Shin’s misery never skidded into complete hopelessness,” Mr. Harden writes in typically plain, forthright style. “He had no hope to lose, no past to mourn, no pride to defend. He did not find it degrading to lick soup off the floor. He was not ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. It didn’t trouble his conscience to betray a friend for food. These were merely survival skills, not motives for suicide.”
The world did! 36,000 Americans died trying. The UN, led by the US, fought a brutal war in Korea from 1950-53 that nearly liberated North Korea...until Mao's Chinese army crossed into North Korea in overwhelming numbers in a surprise attack that resulted in the current stalemate. It was a global effort, over 1,000 Brits also died and hundreds from many other random countries gave their lives trying to free North Korea.
Another, more correct way, would be to state North Korea invaded South Korea and the US (and its allies) stepped in to stop them. They did this not to "free North Korea" but to prevent "communism" from overrunning one of its allies.
(They were also so succesful at it they pushed back North Korea almost all the way up to the Chinese border, which got China very nervous, leading to them getting involved as well).
It would seem the UN/US's previous attempt to invade is what keeps us from trying it again. That is, fear of a reprisal from China once again. From watching documentaries on the Korean War from the point of China crossing the Yalu River into North Korea onward, it seemed like not one GI would want to face the seemingly endless waves of Chinese Infantry again. We definitely underestimated the motives and preparedness of the Chinese at the time.
Any future action on North Korea without China's approval would definitely not be a good outcome for the UN or the nations involved.
More people would die if we did than if we don't. Seoul is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and it's extremely close to the border.
Yes. Only the South Koreans can make that call, as they have the most to lose. If they decided to invade, and asked for US assistance, I for one would support that, to the extent of volunteering to fight.
Alas, from an historical standpoint, North Korea is a relatively small aberration as long as it remains isolated and weak. The thing that I don't understand is how such a repressive regime could possibly have developed nuclear weapons. It seems somehow unfair, not to mention dangerous for the rest of us, that advanced science can be done in such an environment. I've always assumed that anyone smart enough to do such work would be smart enough to refuse to do it. But I guess I am wrong.
Hmm. I hear what you're saying, but I think you may be underestimating the cultural undercurrent present here. Intelligence does not automatically correlate to respecting freedom of thought or other Western ethical ideals.
>>The thing that I don't understand is how such a repressive regime could possibly have developed nuclear weapons.
One Answer: Through Nuclear proliferation. And of course they work hard. You can't build something like without working hard.
>>It seems somehow unfair, not to mention dangerous for the rest of us, that advanced science can be done in such an environment.
Who is 'us'?
Is it unfair to the rest of the world that technology to develop something like a F-16/drones etc lies in the hands of one country which fights/has fought many wars in the past and present, undoubtedly killing several hundreds of thousands innocent people.
>>I've always assumed that anyone smart enough to do such work would be smart enough to refuse to do it. But I guess I am wrong.
Like? What about employees at Lockheed Martin? Or say some other defense company.
> Like? What about employees at Lockheed Martin? Or say some other defense company.
You're drawing parallels between a defense contractor motivated mostly by profits and a nation that very literally holds a gun to the heads of its people in the name of progress. I don't believe that's fair.
The US for all its faults is nothing like North Korea.
I've always assumed that anyone smart enough to do such work would be smart enough to refuse to do it. But I guess I am wrong.
Smart doesn't come into it. These guys - to the extent that they think about it at all, having been raised from birth to think that the Kim dynasty are living gods - are doing it so their families can eat. And so would most of us I'll wager.
I guess the technology was a handout from the Soviet Union. I can't fathom that a country like North Korea would be capable of developing nuclear weapons on their own, when a highly advanced country like Iran can't do it in this day and age.
NK bought their nuclear technology from a Pakistani, who is currently living comfortably in a house in Pakistan, protected by the Pakistani state (because he also gave them nuclear capabilities). He stole a lot of the technology from European companies where he worked. This guy (AQ Khan) provided resources to Iran as well (directly and indirectly via NK).
The science isn't actually that hard (I'd feel comfortable I could design/build a gun-type fission weapon myself, given budget and resources, from open sources, with basic engineering education). The hard part is the smuggling, front companies, etc. to get the equipment and materials.
I'm pretty sure by the time NK was looking at going nuclear, the SU wasn't particularly happy with NK. NK was closer to China, and SU didn't really support Chinese proliferation (there were substantial divisions on the SU-China border, after all...)
China didn't really want NK to go nuclear, either.
> More people would die if we did than if we don't.
Over what time scale? I'm not advocating military action--I don't know nearly enough to have an informed opinion--but it seems to me that military action could cost lives now, but save countless innocent North Koreans in the generations to come. One can think back to the Second World War and consider what the cost of inaction would have been there. Concentration camps should not exist and if all other avenues have been exhausted, at what point does one have to accept the risk of dying to end them?
I don't live in South Korea, nor do I have family there, so I understand that words like this are easy for me and I don't pretend otherwise. This isn't our decision to make in the West. But there's something about standing by and doing nothing that just seems unconscionable to me. Are sanctions really going to stop this? And now they have nuclear weapons too? Can this ever get better without getting worse first?
That's true if you believe the DPRK can survive over the long term. But the conventional wisdom is that it cannot; that it will inevitably disintegrate, especially if it can be prevented the use of allegiances and commercial relationships with other countries.
You reach a certain point where the weight of the evidence suggests that the received wisdom of imminent collapse isn't correct. With North Korea, we (should have) reached that vantage point in about the mid-90s.
The NK regime has survived, to date: two major power transitions, the financial collapse of its protecting superpower state, the worst famine in modern history, a full-scale ground and air invasion by a world superpower, a widely-known and well-documented human rights record that would shame Nazi Germany, openly kidnapping foreign citizens to be trained as spies and other major diplomatic kerfuffles in the same league that have previously started wars, and I think the longest and most severe economic isolation in the history of the United Nations.
We're told breathlessly with each new development for the past 50 years that collapse is surely just around the corner. But I can think of very little that would seriously test the regime beyond what they have faced so far.
On a very short time scale. DPRK has a colossal amount of heavy artillery sitting just 35 miles from Seoul. To put that in perspective its as if Connecticut had the 4th largest army in the world poised to attack New York City at any time. Its a hostage situation, where DPRK has been holding one of the worlds largest, most prosperous cities with a gun to its head for decades...
By "over what time scale?" I think Osmium meant "yes, more people would die in the short term, but would more people die in the long term?" It's a valid and important question. For how many decades should the rest of the world allow a regime to torture and kill innocent children before we decide that it's worth the (heavy) short-term losses to put a stop to it?
In any attack, South Korea is doomed, not just militarily. There is more than one way DPRK can attack. DPRK also has nuclear weapons. They have a built a dam called Imnam dam and wired it with explosives, they can simply detonate the explosives and flood Seoul(There are ways to stop this, but still there will be considerable damage).
Their army is pretty strong, and can fight until they cause significant damage. And beyond all they have a huge cache all kinds biological, chemical weapons.
Also don't forget, China gets a buffer zone due to North Korea. Speaking from a Geo political stand point North Korea is very important to China.
All this means war is impossible in that area. The best way is to exert economic pressure and have the regime collapse. But I'm believing that isn't possible either, China won't let that happen mostly because they don't want a refugee problem.
Its a stalemate. Hardened more by Nuclear weapons.
Their army is pretty strong, and can fight until they cause significant damage. And beyond all they have a huge cache all kinds biological, chemical weapons.
I don't think the Nork Army is a significant factor, really. The Western (or First World, or whatever you prefer to call it) way of war has moved on a lot since the 1950s. Communications and logistics are the key. In the first minutes of any stand-up fight, any modern military[1] would have absolute air supremacy, and from then on no Nork forces can communicate or move - it doesn't matter how many millions of men they have. They stop being an army and become just a bunch of guys in the same clothes.
The problem is what do you do with them once you've "won"? It would be Irag or Afghanistan x100.
[1] As an example, the UK defends the Falklands with just 4 modern fighters (Typhoons). That's enough for total superiority over the entire Argentine air force.
It's OK to feel your emotions and make decisions based on them. Life isn't a business where everything comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. There are real people living in these conditions and I bet they're wondering why nobody is helping them. If you were in their shoes, how would you feel about our inaction?
What if Nazi Germany stopped short of trying to invade western Europe and Russia yet still had it's concentration camps? Would you have argued that it's not worth the cost of war to put an end to them?
That's what they've been saying for 60 years with no end in sight. The other consideration is that neither South Korea or China wants a flood of refugees. But I tend to think that if China wanted it could be done and over quickly and the rebuilding could be assisted by the whole world through the UN.
Conventional wisdom is that China prefers to maintain the status quo in North Korea as a buffer against American power. Xi Jinping hasn't really signaled yet whether he will change direction on that. Yesterday the White House specifically referred to America's "nuclear umbrella" over South Korea, which is unusually explicit wording, so hopefully they are raising the pressure on China to do more to intervene. I don't think the DPRK could persist if China withdrew its support. I try to imagine a scenario for the incoming administrations in China and South Korea, working in cooperation with the U.S., to convince the DPRK to peacefully transition to a normalized and open country.
> I don't think the DPRK could persist if China withdrew its support.
I believe this is correct. I've read reports that China provides the North with about half (or more) of its food. I'd imagine a substantial portion of that goes to feed NK's military.
The only solution will very likely involve China, and I can't imagine that they'll go willingly. They may change their mind if NK lobs an atomic weapon at the South or at US interests (continental if they can reach; elsewhere if not), but I'm dubious even that might work.
Assuming the North's military leadership doesn't completely lose its few remaining marbles, they might believe that nuclear proliferation within (in the form of many functional, working weapons) gains them sufficient bargaining power that they can do whatever they want. In that circumstance, it's plausible that they might wind up stepping on China's toes. Although, I highly doubt this would happen either.
It's depressing because there's very little that we can do, and China is unlikely to help for reasons bfe cited. They've literally starved out the population that could potentially overthrow the regime from within, so save convincing some segment of their army to stage a coup, all we can do is wait.
It also doesn't hurt to spread stories like this one far and wide. The only problem is that the majority of people outside the Koreas (particularly those within the US) just don't care. It doesn't affect them, so why bother?
I agree, although I'm probably no better informed than you are, that a China resolved to the elimination of the DPRK would result in the elimination of the DPRK.
I personally have no moral problem with overthrowing corrupt states -- it is individuals who have rights, not states. I don't believe humans born in North Korea are less deserving of freedom than humans born in Norway.
From a purely practical perspective, it would be difficult for an external power (other than perhaps China) to force regime change in North Korea. "If you strike a king, you must kill him" -- attempting to change the NK government through force and failing is worse than doing nothing at all, since it puts Seoul at risk, and would also make life worse for North Koreans, including innocent conscripts to their military.
About the only places I could see raising enough private force to successfully execute regime change against a corrupt government are in Africa: Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, etc. But it's also immoral to force private citizens in a place like the US to support a state effort to regime change (and, it's proven to be politically and militarily inefficient or ineffective in Iraq and Afghanistan...)
Maybe anonymous currency will give us kickstarter for coups ("Assassination Politics"), someday soon. Combine that with drones and private special operations forces and things can change.
What is not moral is that there are still people willing to destroy the economical system of countries where people are, as of now, still free to talk and move. Once a state defaults it's typically followed by a more authoritarian regime.
I cannot begin to understand how there are so many people asking for "more state" when you see what too much state leads too. It first invariably leads to default. Then to a more authoritarian regime. Then a planned economy and from there it's the infernal spiral down to mediocrity and tyranny.
But of course people asking for more state will tell you that North Korea is not a good example of communism and that Argentina is not a good example of socialism.
How convenient.
The answer to our problems is not more state, but less.
The answer to our problems is not more state, but less.
No, the answer is better state. In practice, that's seemed to correlate somewhat positively with less state, but it's by no means axiomatically so. Any assertion to the contrary is ideology.
For existence proofs, plural, consider the Nordic states. They're more state than many, if not most, yet they're widely regarded as among the "best", even by objective measurements. Contrariwise, consider Somalia. That's about as least-state as you can get, and yet it's somehow not the very model of civilization...
> For existence proofs, plural, consider the Nordic states. They're more state than many, if not most, yet they're widely regarded as among the "best", even by objective measurements.
That's also what I had always heard, but surprisingly, it's precisely backwards. [1]
> Contrariwise, consider Somalia. That's about as least-state as you can get, and yet it's somehow not the very model of civilization...
That's a straw man. Small government people are not calling for anarchism. Anarchists are calling for anarchism. (Some self-styled anarchists claim to be in favor of small government; they should just be dismissed.)
> but it's by no means axiomatically so. Any assertion to the contrary is ideology.
All scientific progress is attacked in this way at the beginning.
These GDP data appear frequently in this kind of discussions, but percent of GDP is a meaningless metric in practice. I have been to Sweden and to the US often and it's pretty obvious in day-to-day life that the state is much more involved in people's lives (for good and/or bad, I'm not discussing ideology) in the former than in the latter.
The problem is that the State (in the USA) is unwilling to be accountable. The current trend of just adding more of it in hopes that it will become better is sickeningly naive.
Regarding Nordic states and Somalia...
Nordic cultures are fairly homogenous. For thousands of years, if you weren't a cooperative with your neighbor and planning for the cold months; your genes left the pool. Nordic people are culturally and genetically predisposed to thrive in a collective. Great. Works for them.
Somalia is a fairly anything goes state under loose Shari'a law. Not too long ago, it was communist, and that was no picnic either. Really, Somalia lacks the basic Civil Society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_society) framework needed for any political/economic system to do well.
> But of course people asking for more state will tell you that North Korea is not a good example of communism and that Argentina is not a good example of socialism.
The Workers' Party of Korea attends the International Meeting of Communist and Workers parties along with the ruling parties of China, Laos, Vietnam, Nepal, Cuba and many other international communist parties. The DPRK definitely is affiliated with communists but its ideology isn't communism it is a combination of Korean nationalism, Juche, and self-reliance.
Since you equate communism with statism you don't know what it really means. Communism is a broad category of societies that do not have classes of social relations to the means of production. Three of the most important types of communism are primitive communisms which existed before the development of means of production, collectivist communism which is based upon common ownership of the means of production, and individualist communism which is based upon personal ownership of the means of production such as 3D printers and distribution on a free market.
This is a cool version. If the simple English was changed a little and the illustrations swapped for watercolor, this bone chilling tale could be packaged as a sort of pseudo-childrens book.
This version was posted a month ago, and discussed at length: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5091962 It contains some important details that are missing from the version above, although any version of the events is unverified.
No apology required; it's clearly a story of interest, or it wouldn't have made the front-page again. I posted the link to the other version of the story more for people to make a comparison of the two versions of events, and see the related commentary.
Horrific story with what happens when you cross slavery and the holocost. That said, don't be so sure we're much better. Here's North Korea's perspective of what we're like.
Absolutely nothing I've read in the last decade exacerbates a feeling of complete helplessness as much as this article (and 60 minutes video mentioned) does.
I wanna say "too sad; don't read". I can't read it right now. It was bad enough scanning through the torture and executions.
One day, these people will be free. And we may develop the technology to do it sooner than you think. I see the first wave of robots disabling their nukes. And the second wave disabling every fence and gun.
Usually tyrannies have a way of collapsing in on themselves. They weaken social fabric, breeding dissent and allowing other states/factor to jump in and conquer them.
The first time I took the DMZ tour from the South, and on some tours since, the US soldier leading the tour would tell everyone we weren't looking at a real building. Instead the North's building was "a facade designed to look large and impressive, but is in reality only a frame a few feet (one meter) thick."[1]
...followed by a photo of the author sitting inside the very real, functional building during his trip to the North Korean side of the border.
It woke me up to the reality that North Korea is so opaque, that there is really no way of knowing the truth of what you read or hear about the country; the official line from both "our" and "their" sides is not much other than a steady stream of propaganda.
That being said, I believe Shin's experience (I originally wrote story, but felt that it was disrespectful) is authentic, and the continuing existence of concentration camps in this 21st century is yet another black mark on Humanity's record.
[1] Highly recommended: http://1stopkorea.com/index.htm?nk-trip6-dmz.htm~mainframe