Well, I will make this one last comment. I've read a good deal about North Korea.
The fact that the DPRK has been suffered by the world at large to exist is shameful. This is not some downtrodden ethnic group struggling for freedom, it's an entire population held captive by a dictator so off the charts crazy that I think it's hard for many westerners to believe that such a person is actually in power. Just as an example, the current head of state, Kim Jong-un, has executed a number of his own state officials using
fucking anti-aircraft guns like some kind of James Bond villain. For the militarily uneducated, an anti-aircraft gun is an automatic cannon that blasts out a storm of metal in hopes of sending enough into the sky to hit things flying around at hundreds of miles/km per hour. Using one on a human being is ludicrous overkill, the equivalent of dropping an Acme Anvil or a piano on someone's head like in a cartoon, except they explode into a burst of blood and guts in real life. I cite a British source, so no one can blame American "propaganda" for this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...d-five-security-officials-anti-aircraft-guns/
Here's an entire encyclopedia article on the North Korean famine of the 90s; I use the English wiki but you're free to read it in Swedish, Polish, or Vietnamese if you think the English article is biased:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine
Here's another British source, describing life in North Korean prison camps. Spoiler alert: it includes being tortured, raped, worked to death, and maybe set on fire, for the heinous crime of questioning the Kim regime:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-life-like-punishment-execution-a7710696.html
Here's Human Rights Watch's report on North Korea:
https://www.hrw.org/asia/north-korea
From that report, I quote:
"A 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry found that abuses in North Korea were without parallel in the contemporary world. They include extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions, and other sexual violence. North Korea operates secretive prison camps where perceived opponents of the government are sent to face torture and abuse, starvation rations, and forced labor. Fear of collective punishment is used to silence dissent. There is no independent media, functioning civil society, or religious freedom."
And more directly to the topic, here's something on North Korea's military:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People's_Army
"As of 2016, with 5,889,000
paramilitary personnel, it is the
largest paramilitary organization on Earth. This number represents 25% of the North Korean population."
"Most analyses of North Korea’s defense sector, however, estimate that defense spending constitutes between one-quarter and one-third of all government spending."
The article goes on to explain that due to poor economy, lack of technology, and inability to afford new equipment or even training, the KPA has generally shifted to asymmetrical warfare tactics - particularly stockpiling chemical weapons (and now nuclear weapons), digging tunnels under the DMZ, and utilizing what hardware it does have in the most destructive, if suicidal, manner possible.
I also take this opportunity to remind the reader of the famine described above. A country that can't even stay fed spends nearly a third of its GDP on weapons, now to include nuclear weapons.
Finally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_border_incidents_involving_North_Korea
Ample evidence that North Korea has a LONG history of bellicose behavior, in particular towards its neighbors South Korea and Japan, both of which are allies of the US. Further reading would reveal that North Korea has long used such threats as bargaining chips; it makes insanely overstated threats, and in order to essentially shut them up, the US, UN, and others, have sent massive amounts of humanitarian aid, allowing the Kim regime to continue to prop itself up in spite of constantly imminent collapse.
Yes, the US sends humanitarian aid:
https://www.voanews.com/a/united-states-humanitarian-aid-goes-to-north-korea/3692811.html
Because believe it or not, Americans actually want people to be free and happy. The image of us as a bunch of oil hungry warmongers is a bullshit European stereotype. Don't listen to everything the news tells you, chief.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/north-korea-food-aid-fund
Not that good turns aren't repaid with evil. I leave you to chew on that: just how long are you prepared to sit on your thumbs while the innocent people of North Korea suffer under a hereditary dictatorship that uses 1984 as a user's manual?
Things got this bad because nobody was willing to do shit about it. We've been afraid of the consequences of action for so long that we've forgotten the horrible price Koreans pay for our inaction, and the fact that
this ain't going away. Wishing we'd all just get along in a hippie-dippy utopia won't accomplish anything, and in fact it's what got us here, with a nuclear gun to our head and a psychotic little fat man who thinks he's a god with his finger on the trigger.
It will be even worse tomorrow, and the day after that. People will continue dying, and eventually a human catastrophe on the Korean peninsula is inevitable. DPRK is not a sustainable government, and it's offensively ignorant to wish for it to continue to exist - it's in the exact same class as wishing ISIS would form its own state and keep right on wiping out the people and monuments it doesn't agree with. I don't wish for this, but sooner or later, the shit will hit the fan, and the longer we wait, the further it's going to get flung.
). Peace !
