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The evil one who shall not be named decided Uncle Jang (Jang Song-thaek), his mentor, was a threat to solidifying his power in this oppressive, dark, and paranoid country.  Exit Uncle Jang.  Hanging…poison…ten thousand lashes…does it matter?  While some people in Washington might think this is just a distraction from their negotiations with the Persian nutniks in Iran, I call on them to remember that, in contrast to Allah’s warriors, he who shall not be named already has nukes and missiles to carry them—if not to the U.S., at least to South Korea, Japan, Vladivostok, and Beijing.  Any of his neighbors that pisses him off and sends him into a spoiled brat’s tantrum better be prepared for a nuclear attack.  And, as the case of Uncle Jang shows, it doesn’t take much to piss him off.  Talk about dysfunctional families.

Like Grandpa and Daddy, the North Korean leader doesn’t give a rat’s ass that his people are starving, that North Korean children are turning into low IQ zombies from malnutrition, that his prisons are just thinly disguised torture camps, and that his economy is the laughing stock of the Asian world.  He’s a sociopathic psychopath so much into establishing his own cult of personality—he wants to become God—that psychiatrists wouldn’t know what to do with him, except put him in a strait jacket and lock him up in a padded cell.  He makes Kaddafi, Pinochet, Amin, and even Hitler look like angels.  Given the state of his economy, he probably smoke-cured Uncle Jang and is slicing ham from the carcass for his breakfast.

Yet there are idiots in the West who love this evil one—Dennis Rodman, for example.  I suppose nutcases tend to commiserate.  Given the North Korean fuehrer’s love for Western pop culture (but is NBA basketball even pop culture?), it’s hard to understand why he hates the West so much.  I don’t envy the State Department or CIA who somehow have to try to make sense out of this madman.  Maybe the key here is that the whole family was abducted by aliens and had brain transplants performed.  No, probably not—that would be unfair to the ETs, because this guy’s just too crazy to be one of them.  The North Korean dictator must be using Orwell’s 1984 as a textbook on how to rape and pillage his own country.

It’s inevitable that the North Korean regime will fail.  Either the people will starve and die so much that the country implodes, or someone stronger than Uncle Jang kills the supreme leader.  In the latter case, perhaps repeated, nothing will change until the country implodes.  It might take fifty years, but let’s face it—North Korea has nothing the Western world needs.  Their only chance to participate in the onward march of Asian capitalism is to forget their differences and join with South Korea.  East Germany did this with West Germany.  Even though the East is still in recovery mode, things have changed there.  Of course, East Germany, as oppressive as it was, can’t compare with North Korea.

In the sci-fi thriller No Amber Waves of Grain, I consider some vestigial sour grapes left over from such a union.  The North has joined the South, but certain elements from the old North have embraced the darker parts of Asia’s fascistic capitalism with emphasis on the f-word.  While fiction, one can well imagine that such economic battles, buoyed by greed, desire for control, and a lack of respect for logical restrictions, will continue after the union.  (That’s a justification after the fact for the theme of the novel, of course.  As I explained at the end of that novel, it grew from yet another item from my extensive what-if list.)

Asia often seems mysterious to readers in the Western world.  There are many reasons, but my fascination generally comes from the realization that we’re upstarts.  Of course, the U.S. is an upstart even relative to Europe, but you have to consider that Europe is also an upstart relative to Asia.  When Queen Elizabeth was playing around with the Spanish Armada, a much larger Chinese fleet was sent out to explore the world, for example (hmm, I might have my dates mixed up there—please check).  The banquets and parties of the Chinese dynasties made the ones in the courts of Europe seem like trips to soup kitchens.  The dikes in Holland are impressive, but they’re nothing compared to the Great Wall of China.

Of course, I’m talking about China instead of Korea.  Yet other Asian countries enjoyed stable governments, bustling economies, and intricate cultures long before Europe.  Today, both South Korea and Japan’s economies outperform China’s on a per capita basis.  And, taken together, the Asian economies along with their achievements in education, science, and technology, are doing well.  China just put a rover on the moon—how long has it been since the U.S. landed anything there?  Other space programs are improving; ours is in a shambles.  We need to reconsider our national priorities.

I can see the rest of Asia leaving North Korea so far behind that this dark kingdom becomes irrelevant.  The only thing left to the supreme leader will be the pathetic and feeble ability to rattle the nuclear saber.  When he does it too much, bad things might happen.  It reminds me of what happened to a friend of mine in high school.  She walked her German shepherd most days (I grew up in California) and a nasty, yippy dachshund would often follow behind, nipping at the big dog’s heels.  The shepherd showed patience, but it wasn’t infinite.  After several months of this, he turned around and bit the dachshund’s head off.  (True story, not fiction.)  North Korea’s supreme leader will try everyone else’s patience, including the Chinese, until one day someone turns his capital into nuclear slag.

Do I want that to happen?  Of course not!  The repercussions are too unpredictable, for one thing, unless China or Russia performs the North Korean lobotomy.  But everyone should make every effort to warn North Korea’s leader of an important fact of nature: a nasty, yippy little dog is only cute for a little while.  And there are plenty of German shepherds around that are bigger and tougher than he is, no matter how much the dyslexic little dachshund thinks dog means god.

And so it goes….

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 19th, 2013 at 4:00 am and is filed under Capitalism Without Control, Nuclear Proliferation, Science, Technology, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.