Sunday 7 February 2016

Don't Korea Off

I remain unperturbed by any "threat" from North Korea.

Either it is the country that satellite photographs show to have almost no electricity. Or it is poised to obliterate us all from space. It cannot be both.

As for spending money on giant vanity weapons systems while allowing people to starve to death, imagine living in a country like that.

The intense loyalty exhibited when, for example, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il died, is neither fake nor forced.

The participants' point of reference is not South Korea, about which they know nothing beyond what they have been told by people whom it is more than reasonable to assume believe exactly what they are saying.

Rather, North Koreans' point of reference is Korea as it existed before and, heaven help them, during the Second World War.

From the day-to-day, bread-and-butter perspective of most people, and especially of those who are now living in Pyongyang, the DPRK really is an almost unspeakable improvement on that.

The conquerors were not welcomed as liberators on the streets of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And that was an almost incomparably more open and outward-looking society than North Korea.

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