posted on May, 27 2010 @ 01:40 AM
It's funny to me that so many people are attempting to analyze the situation without taking North Korea's possible roles and motives into
account.
I highly recommend the book
The Cleanest Race. It is written
by a longtime North Korea expert and watcher who has two big advantages over similar people in the same situation: 1) He is fluent in Korean; and 2)
He has spent hundreds of hours pouring over documents meant for INTERNAL North Korean consumption rather than EXTERNAL propaganda purposes, which is
what most "experts" work with (and usually in poorly translated English).
The conclusions of this book are complex, but one compelling observation -- the traditional North Korean propaganda machine is now falling apart. For
a long time, North Korea maintained control over its citizens by utterly restricting the information they received from the outside world. Now this is
no longer possible...there has been too much cross-border contact with the Chinese. Too many smuggled-in DVDs and cellphone images. The result is the
North Koreans are realizing en masse that their government has lied to them about many things, and that South Korea, China, Japan, and most of the
rest of the world is far more prosperous and far different than North Korean propaganda had them believe for decades.
As a result, the North Korean regime is losing one of its primary means of controlling is impoverished, desperate, and increasingly-fed-up population.
Thus, in order to maintain control, they need to boost the perception of military threat from the outside. Nothing unifies a nation like a threat from
another nation, real or perceived. They have always used this tactic, but as other forms of propaganda become untenable, this is becoming the North
Korean government's only remaing way of controlling its population. Thus, the need to ratchet up the idea of external threat. The threats North Korea
makes are, in essence, not directed fundamentally at ther countries, but at
maintaining control over their own people. This does not make them
any less dangerous -- on the contrary, they may eventually be backed into starting a real war to preserve the crumbling unity.
Think carefully about the roll of all players in this drama -- Especially North Korea itself. Any analysis that pins the whole thing on US motives is
shortsighted in the extreme.