Death from starvation generally abates the need for a person to eat. If a country allows enough of its people to starve to death, being careful to preserve the infrastructure (such as the few productive farms) that keeps the majority of the population alive, then eventually you end up with a sort of equilibrium where you can generally meet the basic vital needs of the larer portion of your population, and maybe even produce enough to allow a few of the population to become as disgustingly fat as Kim Jong-il. Since you’ve diminished the demand of those million unproductive mouths, you have more food to go around. Of course, stretched so thin, your population is still abnormally vulnerable to further starvation, but when times get tough, some efficient spot management can allow you to isolate the starvation in one place, and then when fortunes are returned to their previous levels, take credit with the party faithful for acting to abate the famine (since the extra deaths have freed up extra resources).

Of course, it helps if you have some lackey down south to help divert attention away from you. Even better if you make him complicit through offering an incentive to come over to your country and exploit some people, himself. Fun times are had by all.

We hail a cab back to Todong just as this really long line of cars, limos, police vehicles shows up. My friend asks the taxi driver who it is, and he says it’s none other than “old folks shouldn’t vote” Chung Dong Young.

The driver then goes on to say how most on the island really dislike him and were forced to put on the welcoming ceremony. Then he went on to explain that because it was May 1st, Chung wanted to kick off the election campaign with a bit of Dokdo rhetoric.

He also said the entire island knows that the Uri Party is using the issue and don’t really care much about the issues facing the island.

Anyhow, Ulleung-Do is truly spectacular- for me it kicks Jeju’s bum-seok any old day.

—but then how he quickly nixed the idea of a group of international monitors going for their own fact finding mission…..

Exactly. It’s also like, to use AA terminology, the alkie and his enabler, with the U.S. as the enforcer. But worse, the S.K. gov’t is also abusing the relationship by exploiting N. Korean workers at Kaesong as it props up KJI’s regime. I’m hoping that once Roh is out of office someone who works with the int’l community for the N. Korean people’s benefit will replace him.

He implicitly criticizes the US for not acting on its principles regarding human rights in NORKland by not providing food aid; but until relatively recently the US in fact was a major food donor to North Korea and specifically did not seek to use food aid as a political weapon. US aid, like most other int’l aid, ended when even the woefully inadequate prior monitoring systems were rendered completely meaningless by NORK restrictions on the inspectors access and freedom of movement.

One could claim that the US thus now is using food aid as a political weapon; similarly, that it is so using the currency counterfeting and other soprano state activities of the Nork regime. to highlight the point, I would say that’s correct and entrirely justifiable in the same way that it is correct to say prosecuting counterfeiting by organized crime as criminal acitivity is political. Both are justifiable insofar as the proscribed acitivty is altogether outside the bounds of acceptable conduct within the domestic political order or the international political order, as the case may be. Similarly, if the NORKS want the benefits of participating in the int’l political order, such as it is, they need to play by the rules of that order, which include independent monitoring of aid to ensure that it reaches the intended recipients. In other words, the food and criminal enforcement have not become weaponized by the intent or manner of implementation of those alleged to be wielding them as such, but by the truculence of the NORK regime.

The position of the NORKS and their apologists is like that of a drug addict who whines that a would be benefactor is imposing unacceptable moral conditions on a handout if the benefactor insists on paying for a meal instead of giving the skell cash.

Lee also implicitly criticizes the US for not moving quickly to accept NORK refugees, but as noted the major roadblock here seems to be ROK sensitivity about US offers of asylum to people whom the ROK (at least formally) considers its own citizens. So using a alliance partner’s deference to your own policies as a basis for criticism is the height of folly and puts this knucklehad squarely in the same dunce’s corner as Chung. (I don’t doubt that Homeland Security also has raised issues - quite justifiably, but I very much doubt that has been even a significanrt let alone the principal problem).

More generally, he skirts the underlying issue - which is precisely how one responds strategically to the plight of the North Korean people considering that the sorts of aid provided by the ROK clearly constitute a lifeline to the regime (which is precisely what they are intended by the ROK to be), without demonstrably aiding the North Korean people, either in terms of nutirion or human rights generally, even in the short run - let alone the long sun, where in fact they may (and very likley are ) counterproductive in that they simply delay the day of liberation.