Reddit reviews The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

they weren't necessarily lucky, at least in the short term. post war, the north was extremely prosperous, (due to the USSR's backing), whilst the south went through military dictatorships, food shortages, police states and constant political unrest. the south only began to economically eclipse the north in (I think) the 1980s. This is a bad source but it's the best I can find on short notice, (the section on the Korean Rivalry). This book gives a much better breakdown of the two countries' differing fortunes if anyone is interested. edit: grammar

"To the contrary," of what? Please repeat your question in a full sentence so that I know what you are asking about. There is no logical 'contrary' position to my statement.

I expressed that I understood why Warner didn't call POTUS an idiot. I went on to express that Warner made himself look like a putz by indicating that any part of POTUS' actions before, during, or after those meetings was 'the right thing'. Nothing about any of the recent photo-op meetings with the DPRK was anything but theater for morons.

Go read The Impossible State. It's impossible in a few sentences, paragraphs, or even pages to plumb the depths of just how bad POTUS fucked up his approach to the DPRK. The evidence speaks for itself.

If anyone is interested in how messed up the entire NK situation is, I highly recommend this book.

The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

I'd also like to reccomend The Impossible State. It's a great primer on North Korea.

If you don't get an AMA, then this book was quite an interesting read.

It's by Victor Cha, Wikipedia describes him as follows:

>He is a former Director for Asian Affairs in the White House's National Security Council, with responsibility for Japan, North and South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.[1] He was President Bush's top advisor on North Korean affairs.[2] He currently holds the D. S. Song-Korea Foundation Chair in Asian Studies and is the Director of the Asian Studies program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Cha is also senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

What world do you live in? Seriously, I would really like to know what deluded fantasy that you live in where this kind of money goes back to the people. It doesn't. You think this tourism helps people, think its help them open their eyes? Well what happens then if their eyes are somehow magically opened by the tourists who they have little to no contact with. Its not like you can walk up to someone and start talking to them, or does somehow the sight of a foreigner open their eyes to over 60 years of continuous brainwashing? But say they are somehow magically opened, what then? They are stuck in a country where their neighbors would rat them out for a hint of dissent, and they and their entire family would be shipped off to concentration camps that would make the Nazis proud.

Are you so fucking naive to believe this actually helps the citizens? Every time we try to give aid to the North, we can't even get the simplest guarantee from them that they would go to the people. They can't even finish their own infrastructures without foreign help, and even if they finish the outside they don't even bother to work on the inside. The vast majority of their spending goes to the military, we know this for a fact, that's why they invest so heavily into nuclear weapons and they actually have been able to accomplish some things (albeit poorly).

Economic liberalization would be helpful to the North for a variety of reasons but this is all tightly controlled, regulated and run by the state. This is not some private enterprise of North Koreans, they are carefully, screened, chosen and watched by a state, whose only purpose is to keep itself afloat and to keep its top people rich off the backs of its own citizens. But this tourism is stupid, especially when people come back with these misguided ideas of "Oh it doesn't look so bad". To think that this benefits anyone other than the state is a complete delusion. If you actually want to learn something about North Korea I would reccomend those books.

You pretend Obama is sympathetic towards the South Koreans, but he really isn't. A republican - not a democrat - G.W.Bush is actually generally respected as the president in living memory who has done the most for US-Korean relations^1 . South Koreans advocate a Korea First mentality, North Korea has Juche. Frankly, these 3 countries would get along a lot better if the USA admitted to itself and eachother that they're OK with prioritizing themselves. It's natural; and nationalism doesn't preclude allies...

Also, the Kim regime is built upon the principle that they are the rightful protectors of the Korean peninsula. Their [completely insane] origin story has Kim Jong Il being born on a sacred mountaintop, while Kim Il Sung was the leader of the Korean independence movement (independence from Japan). Supposedly, even Kim Il Sung's grandfather was the mastermind behind the General Sherman Incident.

Kim Jong Un might be ridiculous, but pretty much his only mandate is to create a united, independent Korea.

^1 Cha, Victor. The Impossible State (2013).