North Korea ( Archived) (74)

China has bought up the debt in the U.S.

If this turns nasty, guess who we will side with.

Yes, you citizens of New Shanghai know which side your rice is buttered on!

Not if it endangers innocent lives they dont

They can save up.....nuclear rocket stamps at the supermarket!

this could lead to an embargo on Kimchi!

Does anyone want to understand just what sort of issues we are dealing with regarding North Korea?

This is totalitarianism with a capital T, the sort of regime that was groomed by the likes of Joseph Stalin, mentor to the dead dictator "Great Leader" himself, Kim Il-sung. In contrast to South Korea, an economic leader in Asia, North Korea is an economically backward and ruthlessly oppressed Communist regime, which has upwards of 200,000 political prisoners locked away in dentention camps. Mere criticism of the regime can mean upwards of 10 years of imprisonment and forced labor.

North Korea, while and industrialized country, spends the overwhelming amount of its GDP on defense, at the expense of its people. In the mid-1990s there was a massive famine (yes, in the 1990's, just over a decade ago) that killed tens of thousands of North Koreans. In typical Marxist fashion, they blamed the starvation, food shortages, electrical blackouts, etc. on the United States. Now I think I know why the libs here blamed George Bush for Hurricane Katrina. They took a page from Kim Jong-Il, apparently).

North Korea isn't just some bombastic anti-capitalist nation with a chip on its shoulder like Cuba. We are talking about a regime which essentially is the same one that attacked South Korea in 1950 (a country it does not recognize as legitimate, yet has an economic and political system far and away more developed) and which will stop at nothing to achieve a forced reunification of Korea. The Communist regime is deeply and defiantly entrenched and the military is absolutely committed to the Party line, even at the risk of witnessing their own extinction if a nuclear war were to occur.

I don't think that the Chicoms would come to North Korea's aid like they did during the Korean War if another brouhaha occurred there. They lost upwards of 2 million troops in that war and won't be likely to attempt to face off against the US again. We lost about 36000 killed in three years, but memories are short nowadays and no one wants to remember that.

South Korea is well prepared militarily compared to 1950 in a conventional sense, but I get the impression that because they are a democratic regime, that they have somewhat of a split personality, between the hard-liners and the accommodators. They need another leader with the sort of backbone of Park Chung-hee or Syngman Rhee to face off against the North and to develop a nuclear deterrent of their own.

I definitely think they should be excluded from the Eurovision song contest until they mend their ways!