We all see and hear what goes on over there. Kim will execute kids if they don’t cheer hard enough at his birthday party or something? He’s always threatening to nuke countries and is probably has the highest domestic kill count out of any world leader today.
So I ask? Why don’t any other countries step in to help those people. I saw a survey asking Americans and Escaped North Koreans would they migrate to North Korea and to the US if given the chance (hypothetical for the refugees). And it was like <0.1% to 95%. Obviously those people live in terror.
Why do we just allow this to happen in modern civilization? Nukes on South Korea? Is just not lucrative to step in? SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME PLEASE!?
Because China.
China sees NK as a buffer to the US, sort of a little brother that’s a bit too crazy so they have to tug on the leash to get them to chill every now and then.
We’ve already got bases in SK, but the Yellow sea separates us from China. NK is the land barrier.
china is the only reason why NK doesnt collapse right away, the ccp uses NK as a buffer against SK and the west. NK is a true vassal state of china, and ccp has recently begun making headways into russias natural resources.
I never thought about it like that
yea thats why ccp is so friendly with NK, its a good buffer against South korea and the asian neighbors and eu and usa. i think they are the only ones that have major trade with them, russia is probably only convenient right now.
We all see and hear what goes on over there.
Do we? We only get a little bit of news from there, and I wouldn’t be sure how reliable it is.
Why don’t any other countries step in to help those people.
Help how? Go to war and slaughter most of their population? They are already heavily mobilized, and no doubt they’d conscript a lot more in case of a conflict. Not to mention they have nukes.
Why do we just allow this to happen in modern civilization?
Who is ‘we’? No offence, but this sounds like some oblivious American patriot asking why America hasn’t saved the world yet.
Is just not lucrative to step in?
Most countries don’t have their own nukes, so they will never even consider getting into a conflict with a country that does have them. Most countries don’t have even a fraction of the resources needed for any sort of operation.
Plus, North Korea has powerful allies (like China) and is technically a member of the UN, so you can’t just disregard everything and conquer it.
The short answer is that they have nukes.
NK could not defeat the US or China militarily but it could do quite a bit of damage to SK before anyone could stop them. This is a big reason the US doesn’t intervene.
China is concerned about the population of NK suddenly becoming millions of refugees they’ll need to recuse and deal with. So they would rather the regime not collapse.
Can’t do anything as long as China wants the situation to stay like this.
Generally countries in the west only get involved in conflicts if they get something out of it, be it directly via getting wealth from the country, or indirectly like curbing successful non-capitalistic economies before they catch on and their own people start questioning the billionaires. The “we’re there to liberate people” is just marketing speech.
I wonder why you say “countries in the west” and not just “countries”. It’s not like, I don’t know, Banín is shouting about North Korea every day and nobody listens.
I don’t know enough about how the rest of the world runs to generalise further
The US has invested a lot in its capacity to police the world (just look at how many bases we have around the world). So it’s logical to ask why the US would or wouldn’t police something. And usually before the US polices something with force, they start talking about it publicly.
Benin has no such capacity or intentions and so neither polices anything nor telegraphs its opinions.
You’re saying that no one with empathy has any power to help these people?
People in power in the west are barely moving the needle for their own people sadly.
Also even if they did, they’d still need a valid cause to start an international conflict I think, it’s why Russia tried the “it’s actually russians in Ukraine that are being oppressed and we’re liberating them” excuse
It’s more that there’s little that can be done that doesn’t also risk making the situation much worse.
Something like going to war to depose Kim would lead to mass death and risk spilling over into a much wider conflict since North Korea has the backing of China.
It seems as though unfortunately any people with the capacity for empathy never end up in positions of real power… :(
It’s not a lack of empathy as much as a kind of educated empathy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. We historically have a notorious and awful track record of nation building, and I think a lot of people believe this boils down to the fact that it’s very difficult to impose a national identity on people from outside, even with direct, physical intervention. We have tried to get around this at times by only supporting what we believe are legitimate independence movements which clearly already possess a strong national identity. Unfortunately even those tend to devolve into ethnic cleansing campaigns and dictatorship as soon as we leave. And if we don’t leave, then we have to stay there forever and we have to keep interfering every time things threaten to go off the rails and then it becomes paternalistic colonialism.
Keep in mind too that a lot of people living under oppressive regimes are genuinely damaged people and there is nothing but time that can heal those wounds. They are traumatized, they are angry, they have lost loved ones, they have been subjected to horrors we can only imagine and clinically document, without feeling the fear and emotional scars those things inflicted on millions of people. If you suddenly give them back power again, even small amounts of power, it is in human nature for many to seek revenge for what they’ve gone through (and not always against the right people). They’ve learned how to operate within the context of a deeply flawed and dangerous regime, and it is natural to adopt some of the same tools and practices. As resilient as the human spirit is it still is difficult to teach new ways.
At some point, people have got to learn to stand on their own two feet and find a way to build an equal, fair and just nation for all of themselves, by all the people and for all the people. While we certainly can do a better job of supporting this, we can’t do it for them and our attempts to do so have typically ranged from highly questionable to disastrous and extremely counterproductive. We fought for our own freedom, and it is not out of selfishness that we tell them they must fight for their own too. It’s not that we enjoy the fighting, it’s that as awful as it is, it appears necessary to get that hostility out into the open and understood to be as awful as it is, for a successful outcome to be possible.
On the other hand, even that hasn’t helped in Israel/Palestine where it seems like we’ve tried almost everything and failed. The fact is, nobody has the answers. We don’t know the way to fix this. We are always trying, even when it doesn’t seem like it, but we have to be abundantly cautious that we’re not making it worse, because we often are. For that matter, we have our own problems, and we haven’t figured those out either. Just because we’re doing much better than the worst countries in the world or even much better than average doesn’t mean we’ve got it all figured out or even that we’re doing anything right at all.
no one with political power gets that power through empathy
It’s one of the most heavily fortified countries with an extreme nuclear power regime out in the mountains. How could a country like the United States help North Koreans without threatening intense military conflict?
I think the answer is simple: end the sanctions.
McDonalds and Starbucks can take down the Kim regime much more effectively than B-2 bombers and Hellfire missiles.
Is that hard to believe?
Why should we, as the collective west, spend soldiers lifes and money on “liberating” a population that hates us? Oh, and please mind: “Liberating” a country normally also includes killing a shitton of civilians in this process.
Oh absolutely the west would love to effect regime change in North Korea. Morale win, keep the military industrial complex going, grow the economy, get rid of some pesky poors in combat, maybe hoover up some natural resources.
The problem is China, NK is strategically important to them as a source of said natural resources and as a buffer zone against South Korea. Plus lots of slave labour, global economies can never have enough of that.
So yeah, messing with North Korea means messing with China. Despite some real grade A morons in power nobody has been that stupid yet.
Those pesky poors! Always getting in the way of some good imperialism 😤
Don’t worry! There’s this new little number called ‘Iran’ coming up. Plenty of opportunity to get rid of them there.
America was never about helping the people of the world. Many who believe that are mostly victims of propaganda. It’s all about American interests. If it’s in their interest they will give some reason like liberating a people as a pretence to enable military action.
Also to directly answer the question, they have nukes trained on Seoul, have the backing of China which considers it a buffer against western influenced south kr
World powers typically let countries do whatever they want to their own citizens, it’s only when they do stuff to people of other countries that they get involved.
Simple and to the point. WW2 didn’t happen just because the Nazis were killing Jews, it happened because Hitler decided to barge into other countries.
More like when it threatens some status quo or be inconvenient for them to deal with or might cause a shift to some power dynamics.
I mean nobody(western leaders) gives a fuck about whatever is going on in Africa and Asia. And it’s quite literally mindboggling how the shit in Urkaine and Palestine is still ongoing without any major consequences for the aggressors other than mayyyybe harsh words or hurrdurr sanctions. Soo…as long as it does negatively not impact then, world leaders don’t give a shit about what other countries do.
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iirc one of the issues is that even if things go perfectly on a military front no one is quite sure how to handle and de-program/rehabilitate 25.5 million people a large quantity of which likely lack any skills that would be useful in western economies.
a large quantity of which likely lack any skills that would be useful in western economies.
What an alarming thing to say…
I’m not saying its a good reason, just a reason. We could easily afford it if we took some of that magic money that goes into military funding blackholes or magical infastructure projects that never get built yet somehow break records on cost. Sadly the decision is being made by people with no sense of empathy or value for human life.
No, the alarming part is that you view North Koreans as subhuman animals with no skills.
Generally frowned upon to invade countries.
Ludicrously costly. Your tax payers will want to know why it’s more important than everything else you do with their money.
Immense suffering. Mostly by the people you’re trying to liberate but also your own troops and their families.
They have nukes and could probably blow up at least a few regional cities. If the regime is threatened they will most likely use them.
South Korea or China or Russia are the only countries with land borders. China and Russia find NK useful to have arround to annoy US. Seoul is within artillerty range of the border.
Building up a new state in it’s place is very difficult. Remember how the Taliban took back power about 15 minutes after the US left Afghanistan?
That’s not how it would play out or herw, but even in the best case scenario, you’d end up with a huge area with rampant poverty and discontent that would take generations to develop. We’ve had something similar in Germany. Even after thirty years and vast amounts of money spent, East Germany is still way behind and there are areas that have no perspective at all.
Short answer is that NK is pretty much self-contained. Occasional Kim might rattle his sabre but no one is too worried about it. Until they start making serious threats to the stability of other countries it’s just a case of leave well enough alone.
Sure it sucks what the people of NK have to endure but it’s not for other countries to tell them how they should live unless they directly ask for help or start threatening the sovereignty of other countries.
As someone else in the comments mentioned, WW2 wasn’t an intervention to protect the German citizens that were being persecuted, it was a reaction to German invasion of other nations.
America already tried to save the North Koreans once. It was called the “Korean War”.
We bombed them back to the stone age, then permanently isolated them from most of the world. Despite having good reasons for the start of the war, America treated NK like Israel currently treats Gaza.
Even if North Koreans tried to forget that America bombed every hospital, every water purification plant, all the electricity production, etc; the Kim regime’s propaganda will make sure they never forget.
If we actually wanted to help those people, the first step would be removal of economic sanctions. There is no clean way to remove dictatorship, but the “Arab Spring” model is much more effective and humane than the “Afghanistan War” model.
Til that I don’t know enough about the Korean War. Jfc
Ohhhhh it’s so much worse. Here’s the intro to the BlowBack podcast S3, which is all about the Korean War https://open.spotify.com/episode/4ZX1YIvtHhxuoOTaH41VNC
Very informative listen so far. Thanks for sharing
the Kim regime’s propaganda will make sure they never forget.
It’s the peak of chauvinism to think people would need propaganda to remember you leveling their entire country.
Yes I agree.
If you use context instead of cherry picking a half-sentence then maybe you would understand that is part of the broader point I am trying to get across to a western, chauvinism-brained audience.
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If you read the previous comment more closely you’ll realize that the commentor wasn’t comparing today’s NK to Gaza, but Korea during the Korean War to Gaza. That is a reasonable comparison, as nearly every standing structure was bombed.
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Damn, maybe we should stop doing them then.
North Korea was the one that started the war by invading the South
You can’t really “invade” your own country. North and South Korea were two sides in a civil war, with both sides claiming each other’s territory and aiming towards unification. It’s like saying that George Washington “invaded” Yorktown or that Lincoln “invaded” Virginia.
The South did invade the North though in the US civil war.
The Maryland campaign (or Antietam campaign) occurred September 4–20, 1862, during the American Civil War. The campaign was Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s first invasion of the North.
And if you don’t want to use the word “invaded”, I guess you could just say that North Korea attacked the South, kicking off the war
This is like saying Ukraine started the war by invading Donbas
If Donbas was at the time part of Russia it would be like that. So it’s not really like that. Since North Korea actually went into South Korea with the intention of taking it over.
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What war? The Korean War from 70 years ago? Because they’ve been at peace since then, but some loonies in this thread want to go over and start trouble with them.
Not peace. Peace treaty never signed just not currently engaged
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You have obviously misunderstood me.
I was comparing the United States actions in the Korean War(1950s) to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The mass civilian bombing campaigns, complete destruction of civilian infrastructure, manmade famine, widespread preventable disease, and imposed economic isolation are very similar between the two cases.
I am not comparing current-day North Korea to current-day Gaza, and I agree with you that would not be a good analogy.
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The issue as you see it:
clings on to a pseudo-scientific economic ideology
The prescription you suggest:
pseudo-scientific economic ideology
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So your thesis is that the 1950s war was inconsequential, and then you lay the entire blame on the Kim regime and their policies?
My dude, how do you think the Kim regime became a dictatorship?
Before the 1950s war, Kim was a weak puppet leader propped up by the Soviet Union. By the end of the war, the Kim regime had dictatorial power, which persists to this day.
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but to blame the entire state if the country on the bombing campaign of the 1950s is to…
Nobody said that.
