Ailing Axis

Is North Korea on the cusp of collapse? Depends who you ask. What would be a gain for global freedom would be a loss for Weird News sections the world over. Kim Jong Il, having tightly regulated every aspect of North Korean life, has increasingly resorted to the random and bizarre, from constructing hamburger plants to issuing edicts on permissible hair lengths (2 inches at most, with exceptions for combovers).
If you're eager to meet Dear Leader before chaos descends (or doesn't), you're probably out of luck, especially if you're American and definitely if you're a journalist. But the best account I've read of a visit to this particular part of the axis is Pico Iyer's Falling off the Map, with "I Made Pizza for Kim Jong Il" a close second.

Comments

[NoStar]

Last night, David Letterman said that North Korea is planning for the day that Kim Kong Il is replaced by his son, Mental Lee Il.

(See, I learned my lesson. No more uncredited jokes.)

[Shannon Love]

Gotta think that South Korea is ambivalent about the prospect of reunification. On one hand, they want their country reunited and on the other the economic cost and political difficulty will be immense. I hope somebody over there has been thinking about it.

[fyodor]

No wonder he's so ronery.

[smacky]

(See, I learned my lesson. No more uncredited jokes.)

Good for you! (pats NoStar on head): Have a toffee.

[David Moynihan]

Bah, guy could never stand up to our acting.

Fuck yeah.

[Yaron]

That pizza article was fascinating, but it was only the first part in a series! A web search reveals that this page has links to all three.

[Ted B.]

Yikes, the South Koreans must be lighting incense and praying for a slow-motion devolution. A East German-style collapse gives them nightmares, they can't hand the influx of people, nor the massive expense of absorbing the North's non-existant economy.

I doubt the Generals could pull-off a Burmese-model of control to replace the Kim-family, the Kim system operated on both a military strangle-hold and a popular cult-of-personality. A group of Generals standing on the balcony is not going to cut-it.

A best case would be a Romanian-solition were the State manages to maintain some internal coherence, though I don't see how they'll keep the people from heading South on their own. Especially as many have relatives somewhere in the South. Hopefully the the Group of Five have enough contacts and ready cash to provide some security over the NK Army's ordnance and NK's nuclear facilities.

[Achilles]

According to rumor, sometime in the mid-90s the South Korean government conducted a study of the real costs of German reunification. It concluded that judging by the German experience, any real unification of the Koreas was fiscally impossible. Ever since then the real policy of the South Korean government has been to avoid anything in the direction of reunification.

Just what one hears. I believe I got it from Don Orberdorfer's "The Two Koreas."

[pigwiggle]

If the N. Koreans are ingrained with the national work ethic and hardiness as is often claimed, I don?t see reunification as that great a liability to S. Korea. Imagine the cheap labor, 500g of staples buys a days work. What?s that, like a large baked potato with sour cream?

[pigwiggle]

If the N. Koreans are ingrained with the national work ethic and hardiness as is often claimed, I don?t see reunification as that great a liability to S. Korea. Imagine the cheap labor, 500g of staples buys a days work. What?s that, like a large baked potato with sour cream?

[isildur]

The pizza articles were disturbing. Reading the account of someone who seemed a total political novice being fed state propaganda on a daily basis...

It seems to have never occurred to him to ask why, exactly, no request to see or do anything was ever granted immediately. It seems to have never occurred to him to ask why, exactly, 30,000 residents of Pyongyang were willing to put on an elaborate dance for him. He never questions the carefully managed presentation being staged around him, and he never takes the obvious next intellectual step from the realization that under the facade, the people are miserable: this is the outcome of communism.

I can imagine that being treated like a rock star by the entire government apparatus of a totalitarian nation would be overwhelming... but I'd like to think that I'd be able to maintain at least enough perspective to realize that my luxurious treatment came at the expense of an army of the oppressed, the starving, and the hopeless.

Instead the author expresses sympathy with the difficulties of Communism, and blames human nature for the problems of North Korea. He suggests that CNN is exaggerating the scope of the famine because 'we never saw any of that' -- not bothering to ask, 'Would our military keepers permit us to see things like that, and return to the West with stories of famine?'

Reading between the lines of his account, I got a sense of the utter horror of life in North Korea. I wish I could believe that the author had that same sense.

[pigwiggle]

What's up with the new posting policy? Sorry for the double post.

[Franklin Harris]

This is crazy. Obviously, you let men grow out their hair as to long as they desire, but you outlaw combovers. Think, people!

[Gary Gunnels]

Shannon Love,

Folks in South Korea have been discussing the problems, etc. of re-unification virtually since the time of Korea's division.

[Gary Gunnels]

Back in 2003 when a North Korean football team visited South Korea the crowd incessently chanted "Unification! Unification! Unification!"

[John]

China has several hundred thousand troops on the border with North Korea. They are not going to invade, as far as we know, and its more than are needed to stop the refugee flow. The reason they have them there is the North Korean Army started making armed exursions into China to rob banks and steal whatever they could get their hands on stay alive. That is how desparate things are there. The whole place is going to implode at some point in what promises to be one of the strangest, tragic, comic events of the century. rumor is that North Korean agents in China are selling everything they have and trying to stockpile cash. The secret police know that trouble is coming before anyone else. So, God willing it will be soon.

[J_M]

Isildur,

One must take the writer's comments within the context of his experience. North Korea is an overwhelmingly scary and beautiful place, and comments must be reserved or ironically expressed with an unspoken truthfulness.

The Great Leader spares no expense to find the best pizza makers in the world. Do you understand? There is a fine line between blissful ignorance and the instinct for self-preservation. I shall say no more.

[Douglas Fletcher]

I'd like to see an article titled "I Killed Kim Jong-Il."

Okay, so maybe I do need to stop watching so many "Cold Case Files" on A&E.

[CTD]

Hey, Jackson, no link to the Pico Iyer piece?

[Brett]

I was in Seoul 3 years ago and virtually everybody I spoke with favored unification. They even frowned upon our (i.e. westerners) out-of-habit use of referring to the two countries as separate, North and South. It was just Korea.

Praying for a quiet NK regime death...

[smacky]

What's up with the new posting policy? Sorry for the double post.

Pigwiggle, did you use the pointy parentheses (HTML-style parentheses) in whatever it was you were trying to post? I've had a few posts edited, too...I wasn't sure if it was due to content (which some error-page led me to believe), or if had some correlation with me using those pointy parentheses. Does anyone else here know? I would be shocked and dismayed to learn that Reason had a posting policy for content....

I'd like to see an article titled "I Killed Kim Jong-Il."

Douglas Flecher - LMAO!

[pigwiggle]

"Pigwiggle, did you use the pointy parentheses (HTML-style parentheses) in whatever it was you were trying to post? I've had a few posts edited, too...I wasn't sure if it was due to content ... "

No, I thought it was my indecent email address, [e-mail] . Perhaps H&R is getting spammed by someone with a similar dislike for the email requirement.

[Wazoo]

the North Korean Army started making armed exursions into China to rob banks and steal whatever they could get their hands on stay alive.
Um, really, John? Do you have any links for more info on this?

[Wazoo]

The NKorean government now has some advice for
women's hair styles too .