Last autumn a couple of DPRK diplomats visited Helsinki as guests of a research institute, and I also got invited to a lunch with them. So one of them said, as if to point out the good relations between the countries, that the paper mill that was delivered to them sometime in the 70s is working well. Perhaps it is, or perhaps it isn’t. But I didn’t have the heart or guts to ask them why don’t they pay for it then if it works.
Yes, talk about more credit to DPRK.

I like the following “Bingo” statement:

“I also need not point out that this focus on “external factors” comes from people who condemned the way in which South Korean military dictators used the very real North Korean threat to justify the curtailing of freedom south of the DMZ for much of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

You know, they’d sound a lot more convincing if they’d just come out and say something like, hey, even if the UN and the U.S. Congress take measures, it probably won’t help the human rights situation any, and we don’t want to risk pissing North Korea off, so let’s hold off on the resolutions and/or acts.”

Ain’t it funny how stuff like that never happens? Even in the US too…

Also, I don’t think the world talks much any more about how one of the key elements of the North’s current shithole situation has been the loss of the blank check it was getting from the Soviet Union and China until the early 1990s.

This is important to recognize now, because it seems the apologists for NK (both in the US and SK who either want to prentend NK isn’t so bad or who want to undermine a “hard-line” US policy as part of a tendancy to want to undermine US (republican) foreign policy in general) are better able to make it seem that NK simply had a string of bad luck in the 1990s that led them to the situation —- that the floods coupled with the antagonistic relationship with the US brought them to their present condition.

On the other side, you have more of a contemporary look at what NK is actually doing which faces off with the opposition’s short sighted view of why things got that way.

The anti-NK side should do more to point out how NK’s claims of self-reliance have always been one big huge fraud —- that they had been sucking the tit of Russia and China dry, and when the flow was severely cut down, they started to starve.

I think that helps us get to the heart of the pitiful nature of the North Korean state as a whole……which we should recognize.

I wish they would understand that we don’t care if they have a different way of living, as long as they don’t try to starve people, invade others, sell missiles and drugs, or encourage illegal activities worldwide. If they would submit to democratic scrutiny by their own people, we would be even more reassured.

(Imperial) Japan must be faulted for not killing Kim Il-sung before he was able to start a family, let alone a country.

1. The Nork Army to be reduced to the size necessary for a National Police Force.

2. All Communist literature to be “retired” (ok, incinerated).

3. All current leaders in the DPRK to be exiled to LA and break off all ties with TBD future leaders.

4. No Kimchi to be served at dinner.