A North Korean Breakthrough? Shame On Me For Even Considering It
You know, most people, no matter how bad things get, retain a spark of optimism, and that’s the only excuse I can offer as to why I even thought there was a remote possibility that North Korea might consider doing the right thing. As the behavior of the rogue regime has shown in the immediate aftermath of the ‘breakthrough’, there is no way we can ever trust a single word said by Pyongyang. Indeed, I question the need to even continue the six-party talks, in light of statements like these:
The North Korean government said the U.S. wants to use nuclear weapons to “crush us to death” after the regime removes its arms under a six-nation agreement signed this week.
“It’s easy to see the true intention of the U.S. in the six- party talks. In one word it wants to disarm us and crush us to death with its nuclear weapons,” the official Korea Central News Agency reported, citing a commentary in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper. “We won’t be affected by any nuclear threat.”
Sounds like a country we can reason with, doesn’t it?…
I recently talked to someone, who lives in South Korea. He said that
once you leave the North Korean capital there are no cars on the highways at all. Not just no civilians cars but no motored transportation of any kind. He said that someone he knew drove for 6 hours on North Korean highways in connection with an aid program and did not spot a single vehicle on the roads the whole time.
Shame on me, too. My last post was on this, my reaction was very similar to yours. I maintain my optimisim here.
This is a breakthrough, but its very sobering to think of some of the things that the North Korean regime has done in the past, besides lie.
If they screw this up bigtime, at least the ball has been moved forward and this can go to the Security Council. I think other countries have to start pulling their own weight here, at some point.
Sometimes the wind blows in the right direction, and I hope that’s what’s happening with that despicable “government” right now, a sort of Glasnost in the works.
Fred, incredible…and Sirc_Valence, let’s hope you’re right…my initial optimism has severely faded…
Sirc_Valence-
I wouldn’t put too much faith in getting anything from North Korea referred to the Security Council.
The President of Iran recently announced that his country was restarting its nuclear program, and intended to offer the results of that program to other Islamic nations in the region in defiance of nonproliferation treaties.
The results has been a big debate about whether or not to refer the matter to the Security Council. Iran is promising all sorts of dire results (mostly oil threats) if the matter is referred to the Security Council, and our staunch “allies” are hemming and hawing.
Primarily, resistance to taking this matter up in the S.C. (among great allies like France and Russia) is their response to our invasion of Iraq. They are worried that letting this matter be taken up by the Security Council would give the U.S. justification to invade Iran. And that would be bad, of course, because the U.S. is as powerful as they wish they still were, not because of any consideration of what the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran might be.
Don’t count on the U.N. to do anything productive or helpful, ever.
Fred’s comment is substantiated by more than one source. North Korea resembles “The Twilight Zone” in many ways. Wide, yet bare of traffic streets of Pyongyang and, as books and rumors have it, steam- and ox-powered transportation in the rural areas are but a few. I suspect that, between the carefully manicured environment of Pyongyang and the reportedly Stygian wasteland of North Hamgyong province, nobody has a good, well-rounded idea of what North Korea is really like. Books like Kang Chol-Hwan’s “Aquariums Of Pyongyang” and “Under The Loving Care Of The Fatherly Leader” by Bradley K. Martin seem like a good start, though. I cannot vouch for their veracity, although the picture that emerges is more or less consistent between different books. It is a picture of a society where things that in the West are considered to be conventional wisdom simply do not apply. It is a little difficult to decide whether North Korea is more like a dysfunctional artifact of the Cold War where it is just barely easier to muddle along in the established way than to reform anything and a cult where brain-washed obedience truly is the norm.
I often find myself hoping for the reunification of North Korea and South Korea in my lifetime, whatever the consequences, just to satisfy my own curiosity about how weird things truly are there. When I was a child growing up in Cold War-era Soviet Union, we were often told that American children were given books to read that depicted Soviet cities as snowbound shantytowns where bears roamed the streets. Having spent a decade and a half in the United States, I have yet to find any such even in the most obscure and esoteric bookstores. Nonetheless, there is that nagging awareness that our body of knowledge about North Korea may, in fact, be distorted. Of course, they are not helping…
E.K., indeed, we probably won’t have a decent picture of the real truth in North Korea for decades…I suspect some things are better than we think, and many are much, much worse…