Posted by
Steve on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 3:00:47 AM
On the way home from work I was listening to the Dennis Prager show. He was talking about the problem with North Korea. He was pointing out that China and South Korea have not signed on to sanctions for North Korea. He said the reason is that they do not want the government in North Korea to fall. The reason they do not want the government to fail is that they cannot handle the problem of the 22 million starving people that would be left.
Feeding the people would be relatively easy. There is enough food and we could get it there fast enough to feed them. We could even get crops in the ground and allow them to feed themselves within a year.
The problem is that the people have been held in captivity for over 60 years. They have been brain washed. They can only get North Korean propaganda for news. If they were suddenly presented with alternatives, they would not know what do do. There was a similar problem when East Germany collapsed and West Germany had to assimilate the East Germans into their economy. It took 10+ years before they were really one country. There are still some vestages of that today, almost 25 years later. East Germany was a garden compared to North Korea.
North Korea is a barren wasteland. They have nothing. They produce nothing. They believe everything they are told. To put these people onto the economies of South Korea and China would cause major problems for both. To give them the vote like in South Korea would be to invite disaster. Promise them anything and they will give their vote. No, there would have to be a transition period where there was education. The people would have to have a massive education program before being allowed into the world. The young would learn fast. The old may never learn.
The thoughts that Dennis Prager laid out were chilling. He basically said that we will never be able to change the government in North Korea. That scares me. There are crazy people running that country. What would they be willing to do? It might take a war to get rid of them and that was not easy the last time. It was difficult in the extreme. In fact, we almost did not win.