21–30 of 57 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea its like nations say Russia cant take Crimea. Yet NK can slaughter and oppress an entire nation and no one flinches.
To be fair, russia can take crimea because nobody can stop them. NK can oppress because nobody gives a shit. (Also IIRC china protects them in order to irritate the west and to use as a bargaining chip.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Someday these people are going to be free of oppression. If only they had some natural resources, then the state of their government would be a massive moral issue for the world. Unfortunately until they strike oil they're just gonna have to rot.
Yea its like nations say Russia cant take Crimea. Yet NK can slaughter and oppress an entire nation and no one flinches.
Look at the women in the center clapping, her face says it all. "Must clap harder or leader will do away with me." Someday these people are going to be free of oppression.
>Someday these people are going to be free of oppression. If only they had some natural resources, then the state of their government would be a massive moral issue for the world. Unfortunately until they strike oil they're just gonna have to rot.
The fact is that the west has been dealing with North Korea for decades. The US, for example, has had huge numbers of military forces staged in South Korea for decades. The US and others have continuously worked toward keeping North Korea in check, also for decades. That's not easy, nor is it cheap. But there are no quick and easy solutions to the problem of the North Korean totalitarian regime, especially not military ones. Starting a war in the Korean peninsula is a recipe for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, in South Korea as well as in the North. And that's just from conventional weapons without getting into chemical weapons (which North Korea is known to have) and nuclear weapons (which they also are known to have).
The problem of North Korea is that it's a hostage crisis that continues to unfold in slow motion. The fact that there are incredibly terrible conditions inside North Korea doesn't make it any easier to decide to pull the trigger and doom perhaps millions of civilians to die just to get rid of the regime.
What sort of mass psychological issues are we looking at here? I can only imagine how the minds of the current citizenship work, would it be nearly impossible for those raised only knowing what they know to recover from the previous trauma?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea its like nations say Russia cant take Crimea. Yet NK can slaughter and oppress an entire nation and no one flinches.
To be fair, russia can take crimea because nobody can stop them. NK can oppress because nobody gives a shit. (Also IIRC china protects them in order to irritate the west and to use as a bargaining chip.)
Am I missing something?
Are you judging people morally for not doing the impossible? Or are you just generally outraged by dirty realpolitik? I just can't see a third alternative to these non-starters:
- China could stop the regime, maybe even without a catastrophe. How would you motivate China to do that, when the West today is as dependent on China as China is on the West?
- The military way to help the NK population would be an economic and humanitarian catastrophe, not only in NK.
Edit: I could agree with that position on e.g. Zimbabwe, but NK seems carefully designed by the junta to keep them safe by using their own population as hostages (as long as China don't sell them down the river).
Edit 2: A third possibility is to offer the junta a better deal than to control the lives of many millions of slaves. But they are obviously happy as it is.
as long as it's free (no pun intended)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Someday these people are going to be free of oppression. If only they had some natural resources, then the state of their government would be a massive moral issue for the world. Unfortunately until they strike oil they're just gonna have to rot.
Such salient wisdom. The fact is that the west has been dealing with North Korea for decades. The US, for example, has had huge numbers of military forces staged in South Korea for decades. The US and others have continuously worked toward keeping North Korea in check, also for decades. That's not easy, nor is it cheap. But there are no quick and easy solutions to the problem of the North Korean totalitarian regime,…
My point is, sometimes, that's not considered a barrier to regime change. Mass civilian deaths were apparently worth it in the cases of iraq and afghanistan. Those deaths were, and are, "justified" by the moral good of the removal of evil dictators.
So no, I don't think we should invade NK, for the obvious reasons you state. I'm saying that the impunity with which NK oppresses its people exposes the nonsense that is the "liberal intervention" narrative of recent geopolitics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Someday these people are going to be free of oppression. If only they had some natural resources, then the state of their government would be a massive moral issue for the world. Unfortunately until they strike oil they're just gonna have to rot.
What do you expect the world to do exactly? Military intervention? They'll lay waste to Seoul. Sanctions? Already there, and, generally they hurt the people rather than the leader. What's your solution?
Similar things apply to zimbabwe etc.
EDIT: "you" used here in a general sense.