Saturday, December 15, 2012

New face at the top but the same North Korea


Again, another good analysis of why Kim Jong-un is not changing or reforming north Korea and although he does not use the phrase, it is clear that Kim is executing "Image First Politics."

As noted Blaine Harden wrote a very important book chronicling the life of Shin Dong-hyuk who was the first north Korean who was born in a prison camp to have escaped.  Below is an except from that book that illustrates the horror of the Kim Family Regime.

Excerpt from page 120-121 describing his experience and feelings just after he escaped.

“In the months and years ahead, Shin would discover all things modern: streaming video, blogs, and international air travel.  Therapists and career counselors would advise him.  Preachers would show him how to pray to Jesus Christ.  Friends would teach him how to brush his teeth, use a debit card, and fool around with a smartphone.  From obsessive reading online, the politics, history, and geography of the two Koreas, China, Southeast Asia, and the United States would all become familiar.

None of this, though, did more to change his understanding of how the world works – and how human beings interact with each other – than his first few days outside the camp.

It shocked him to see North Koreans going about their daily lives without having to take orders from guards.  When they had the temerity to laugh together in the streets or wear brightly colored clothes or haggle over prices in an open-air market, he expected armed men to step in, knock heads, and stop the nonsense.

The word Shin uses again and again to describe those first days is “shock.”

It was not meaningful to him that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty, and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a hole it is viewed by human rights groups as the world’s largest prison.
 
His context had been 23 years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family, and tortured him over a fire.
He felt wonderfully fee – and, as best as he could determine, no one was looking for him.
V/R
Dave
New face at the top but the same North Korea
By Blaine Harden, Published: December 14

Blaine Harden, a former Post reporter, is the author of “Escape From Camp 14.”

As a rule, nothing greases reform like the death of a dictator. After Stalin, the gulag faded away. After Mao, policies that starved millions were abandoned. So when North Korean leader Kim Jong Il died a year ago, there was reason to expect meaningful change.

Yet North Korea, the world’s longest-lived totalitarian state, never seems to follow the rules. When its founding dictator, Kim Il Sung, died in 1994, the state stumbled, but it did not collapse and it did not reform. For the first time in history, power in a communist state shifted from father to son, from Great Leader to Dear Leader. And Kim Jong Il was no reformer. He turned out to be even more repressive than his father was.

Now, the third generation of the Kim family dynasty, in the person of Kim Jong Eun, who is not yet 30, has cemented his absolute control by doing what daddy and granddaddy could not do: His engineers sent the payload of a three-stage rocket into orbit, defying U.N. Security Council resolutions and unnerving the world.

His government is believed to be trying to develop a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop a missile capable of striking the United States. To that end, Kim Jong Eun’s government completed a new tunnel this year for the test detonation of what would be the North’s third plutonium device and possibly for a bomb made from highly enriched uranium, according to an August report in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The young leader has also spent lavishly this year on the family cult, funding $40 million worth of statues and paintings of his father and grandfather, according to a recent South Korean government report. Notably, imports of liquor, luxury cars and foreign appliances have spiked since 2009, when it became clear Kim Jong Eun was his father’s favored son, according to a South Korean parliamentary report in October.

In the months after his father died of a heart attack, there were tantalizing hints that Kim Jong Eun might move in a more moderate direction. Unlike his father and grandfather, he had lived in the West. He reportedly spent a few teenage years in a private Swiss school, where he played basketball, wore expensive sneakers and admired Michael Jordan. He was untested and seemed callow to outsiders looking in, but after his father died, he proved with surprising speed that he was not a puppet of scheming relatives and headstrong generals. As surprising, he emerged in the first half of this year as a chubbily charismatic agent of change.

He sacked generals, sent bureaucrats to China to study capitalism and talked openly of using economic reform to improve the lives of ordinary North Koreans. His father had never talked this way. Indeed, his father had never delivered a speech in public.
(Continued at the link below)

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