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!?
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
The US has invested a lot in its capacity to police the world (just look at how many bases we have around the world). So it’s logical to ask why the US would or wouldn’t police something. And usually before the US polices something with force, they start talking about it publicly.
Benin has no such capacity or intentions and so neither polices anything nor telegraphs its opinions.
You’re saying that no one with empathy has any power to help these people?
It seems as though unfortunately any people with the capacity for empathy never end up in positions of real power… :(
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.
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 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.
no one with political power gets that power through empathy
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?
Nobody wants to do that. North Korea is a shithole-class country that hates SK, is propped up by China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, who basically use them as slave labor and cannon fodder for their illegal war in Ukraine.
While NATO could easily steamroll NK, SK is right there and would get heavily damaged in a war. And then SK would probably have to take care of a ton of starving, brainwashed, uneducated people and a bombed flat country. Nobody wants to fix them, and superpowers like China are actively working against peaceful initiatives like reunification.
It’s an injustice for the world, but there’s much bigger fish to fry on the world stage right now. Existential, extinction-class threats like climate change and nuclear war. Democracies fighting tooth and nail against totalitarianism, like Ukraine. And western countries in various fights against the predictable but extremely annoying rise in fascism.
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.
We live in a sad world, western democracy with high standard regarding human right are the exception, not the norm.
So are we gonna start war against every dictatorship? Look at the results in Afghanistan instead of freeing them, they now rank worse than North Korea in the economist democracy index not only they got a 20 year long war, but in the end stayed one one of the worst dictatorship in the planet, not really a success
western democracy with high standard regarding human right
Oxymoron
The western democracies who support the longest occupation? That organized ton of coups? That support genocide??
They have nukes
The nukes are recent, and probably not tactically functional. It’s purely a cost benefit analysis. As long as NK isn’t in serious motion to cause more damage outside their country, than it’s worth to stop them, no one will.
Yeah true. Like Turkmenistan. That country is like North Korea, but not in conflict with other countries. So no one cares.
Plus, they occasionally release pretty decent music
And don’t forget the former president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov with live performance and rap song
Certified hood classic.
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!
😂😂😂
“Step in?” Well, because the world isn’t run by a mom and dad who step in and make governments do the right things.
Seoul is so close to the border, it’s within artillery range of NK. Kim can cause all kinds of havoc without resorting to nukes. If provoked enough, he could put one (or more) craters in South Korea’s largest city, without even playing his scariest card.
Then there’s the possibility of a military response from China. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of that.
Lastly, NK has been under all kinds of sanctions for years. It might not be the “anything” you have in mind, but many nations seem to be doing about as much as they can without risking all-out war.
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
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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.
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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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but to blame the entire state if the country on the bombing campaign of the 1950s is to…
Nobody said that.
The issue as you see it:
clings on to a pseudo-scientific economic ideology
The prescription you suggest:
pseudo-scientific economic ideology
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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.
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Damn, maybe we should stop doing them then.
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What war? The Korean War from 70 years ago? Because they’ve been at peace since then, but some loonies in this thread want to go over and start trouble with them.
Not peace. Peace treaty never signed just not currently engaged
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North Korea was the one that started the war by invading the South
This is like saying Ukraine started the war by invading Donbas
If Donbas was at the time part of Russia it would be like that. So it’s not really like that. Since North Korea actually went into South Korea with the intention of taking it over.
You can’t really “invade” your own country. North and South Korea were two sides in a civil war, with both sides claiming each other’s territory and aiming towards unification. It’s like saying that George Washington “invaded” Yorktown or that Lincoln “invaded” Virginia.
The South did invade the North though in the US civil war.
The Maryland campaign (or Antietam campaign) occurred September 4–20, 1862, during the American Civil War. The campaign was Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s first invasion of the North.
And if you don’t want to use the word “invaded”, I guess you could just say that North Korea attacked the South, kicking off the war
the Kim regime’s propaganda will make sure they never forget.
It’s the peak of chauvinism to think people would need propaganda to remember you leveling their entire country.
Yes I agree.
If you use context instead of cherry picking a half-sentence then maybe you would understand that is part of the broader point I am trying to get across to a western, chauvinism-brained audience.
Can’t do anything as long as China wants the situation to stay like this.
NK could not defeat the US or China militarily but it could do quite a bit of damage to SK before anyone could stop them. This is a big reason the US doesn’t intervene.
China is concerned about the population of NK suddenly becoming millions of refugees they’ll need to recuse and deal with. So they would rather the regime not collapse.
Nukes. We know they have them and missiles to deliver them. Any situation where a wildcard like North Korea uses nukes in any offensive capacity is terrifying. “Nuclear War: A Scenario” is a great modern book on how things could go to hell if one single North Korean nuclear missile is launched towards the United States.
Artillery. In any case of open war on North Korea anyone within artillery range of the NK border will be bombarded with heavy shelling. Even if it lasted for just an hour or two before the batteries were eliminated the civilian casualties and destruction would be like a large natural disaster. Now imagine if chemical shells were added to the mix, because they have those too.
China has the most leverage to help North Korea on a humanitarian and diplomatic level without risking war, so if it could be done the best chance is through them.
To add to this, N Korea also has a huge conventional army, and is a very mountainous country. Lots of soldiers+mountains=very bloody to invade.
This is also why Iran is fairly safe from ground invasion. It’s like a gigantic Switzerland, which if you’re familiar with WW2 history, even Hitler left Switzerland alone despite kinda wanting to occupy the place. The cost was just too high compared to the benefits, so, y’know, may as well skip it and invade the USSR instead.
Despite what people keep saying, a war in NK would be short and one sided. While they could cause a lot of destruction at the start, after a few salvos their artillery would be taken out by air power. Then their entire command and control structure would be eliminated so they couldn’t communicate with their troops at all. And those troops are conditioned to not do anything without orders. So at best they’d be sitting ducks waiting to be taken out. And I’m pretty sure most of them would cost to surrender once it’s clear that the regime is gone. There’d be a share of diehards that would choose death over surrender but i don’t think that would be a large percentage.
Modern war planners mostly know better than to count on everything going well.
Yes, that’s basically what we did in Iraq. It led to a 20y occupation, thousands of troops killed, hundreds of thousands to millions of civilian deaths, and several new terrorist organizations. It will cost the US alone about 8,000,000,000,000. Basically the entirety of cultural progress and then some was lost in a few months.
And those troops are conditioned to not do anything without orders. So at best they’d be sitting ducks waiting to be taken out.
When you’re so racist you think Koreans are the battle droids from The Phantom Menace.
We saw how that failed in iran
China is the answer. Nobody does anything about North Korea for the same reason China doesn’t invade Taiwan.
And this goes back to the Cold War, which goes back to WWII, and the politics of the president and military commanders, specifically MacArthur, who wanted to continue north and take North Korea decisively to keep the Soviet Union and China from controlling it before it could be reinforced by Chinese soldiers.
At the time, North Korean soldiers were outnumbered by UN forces 3:1, with far more tanks, etc than NK had.
The UN waffled, and by the time they decided Korea should be reunified, China had shipped in nearly 300,000 troops, and an unknown amount of matériel.
Fuck the UN. It’s their fault this is still going on.
Why “fuck the UN” and not “fuck China?”
Sounds like the UN could have made better choices, but the real villain (at least in the part of the history you describe) is China. No?
No
Why should we, as the collective west, spend soldiers lifes and money on “liberating” a population that hates us? Oh, and please mind: “Liberating” a country normally also includes killing a shitton of civilians in this process.
Also there’s a city of 20 million people like 10 miles from the border that could get nuked just by conventional weapons. Adds complications
