The Right Angle asks where our moral obligation begins:
Notice their comparison between what the Fat Boy is doing and how the Soviet Union got rid of supposed troublemakers. Instead of bothering with show trials for the big shots, though, North Korea’s dictator just kills ’em out of hand:
A number of high-profile North Korean officials are known to have been executed in recent years, including Hang Song-thaek, Mr Kim’s uncle.
Mr Jang, who was vice-chairman of the Workers’ Party’s Central Commission, was arrested in November 2013 and found guilty at a special military tribunal of “anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts in a bid to overthrow the leadership of the party and state and the socialist system”. He was killed by a firing squad in December that year.
Some of the executions are grisly indeed but you can hunt those up on your own. They are certainly being documented.
The speakers’ refusal to liken North Korea to the Nazi regims is historically correct. The same goes for all the other Communist/socialist tyrannies, including the one only ninety miles or so south of the U.S. mainland.
Now the question remains: what is a moral nation to do in the face of well-documented abuse by another country of all its citizens? Or is the West waiting for an attack on Japan or South Korea?
The west will do nothing against a communist nation. Only Nazi-countries are attacked – if they are not useful or surrender to the West (like Spain under Franco or Argentina under Peron. And lets not forget Pinochet. “Yes, he is a monster, but he is OUR monster” US-Foreign Secretary Kissinger))
The U.S. will not sit by if an ally is bombed or nuked by this crazy man. Or at least that’s what Trump says, and his most powerful subordinate, the Chief of Staff, is a thoroughly military fellow. That’s a reliable indicator – Kelly, I mean.
I disagree to a Point.
He is not crazy because he has seen that every dictator that followed US demands of getting rid of WMD was followed by said dictators demise (Saddam and Ghaddafi anybody?).
He knows that he needs WMD to survive.
I look at comments by William S. Lind on http://www.traditionalright.com or Pat Buchanan. And he wrote something that is astonishing:
“We face allies and antagonists who are more willing than are we to take risks, endure pain, persevere and fight to prevail.”
http://buchanan.org/blog/what-should-we-fight-for-128200
and
http://buchanan.org/blog/little-rocket-mans-risky-game-127917
The question is: Are we willing to go to war? Are we willing to die, to see untold destruction rained upon us?
War is NOT mathematics. Even if Kim has only a few Missiles capable of reaching the US or Europe, are we willing to risk the 1 in a million chance that the missile fired by Kim will not hit our hometown?
What if Kim fires such a missile at a financial centre like Frankfurt or London?
Besides thousands of casualties there will be massive panic, looting etc.
And we were very lucky during the war about Yugoslavia because the Serbs played by the rules of not offending Europe. Just think they would have send their Special Forces hiding as refugees to various european countries with the order to raise hell.
I once read that if you shut down a certain number of powerstations (coal, nuclear) in a short time then you have a backlash that will lead to shutdown of all the powerstations in a Country. Or think they would have tried to start a war between the europeans and the muslims. Paris, Bruxelles, London and the Ruhr area would be burning.
Lets face it: If something bad happens, we cry and thats it. Have you forgotten the people that were abducted by North Korea and never returned.
Have you forgotten the missing US soldiers from WWI till today? In a german documentary it was said that at the end of WWII about 5.000 US soldiers were on the russian side of the border and Stalin said that they could be repatriated only through a black sea port. About 3.000 were sent back.
Or Vietnam: About 70 Electronic Warfare planes of a certain type were shot down. Only one crew was repatriated. One Crew was killed with enough evidence. The rest???
I always remember the scene from STARSHIP TROOPERS: If we go to war for 5.000 POWs, why not for 4.500? Where do we draw the line?
(Sorry for rambling but once I start to argue I want to show that I have thought of a lot of possibilities and outcomes and reasons for my decisions.)
And lets not forget: (I long ago read it but unfortunately I do not possess an eidetic memory to quote it correctly): If we go to war and lose ten people then we already lost the war because we have no youth bulge. We have only one child per family, maybe two (and with three or more you are considered to be a low class human, what in the US is called a redneck.
North Korea and the Islamic countries have a youth bulge. They can send an entire generation into death and still have enough people to continue.
Gates of Vienna provides a very valuable service in analyzing and reporting on engineered mass migration and ensuing problems in Europe and even North America. Please keep up the good work there!
The Korean peninsula is another matter – a “world away”, and the serious problems there are complex. All problems are not due to the North Korean leadership. Getting carried away by (engineered) propaganda or hate is not wise. There is no guarantee that the proferred remedy would be better than the illness – to try to “liberate” the North Korean people from oppression by destroying their country and genociding the same people. Moreover, going to war with North Korea risks war between the US and its allies on the one hand, and China, Russia and their allies on the other – in effect World War III and the destruction of modern civilisation and death directly or indirectly of most of planet earth’s population.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/05/08/why-do-north-koreans-hate-us/
Veterans Today
Why Do North Koreans Hate Us?
By Ian Greenhalgh
You Tube
KillEm.All.American.Warcrimes.in.Korea.SWESUB.PDTV.XviD-APB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybUQNT-yuY4
48:42
Gates of Vienna looks at the world, not just migration problems, though the latter is our focus. If we hit a subject you don’t want to read, just pass on by.
The North Korean problem is growing, and average North Koreans are in poor health, riddled with parasites. See this report about the latest defector, a soldier (in the military, he ought to be in somewhat better health than the average citizen and certainly better than those in the camps).
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/11/17/enormous-number-parasites-in-north-korean-defectors-body-doctors-say.html
The moral question arises because of its predecessor totalitarian states and our inaction – e.g., it’s been established the Allies knew about the Nazi concentration camps but made no move against them. The political prisoners in Cuba are another case in point, though some public pushback has been possible there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_in_White
The possibility I didn’t mention is Western arm-twisting of China. The People’s Republic is desperate to keep up its exports to the West and that could be an advantage in addressing the NoKo craziness and suffering. Some Chinese companies have satellite branches in North Korea and use their slave labor to reduce prices further…
At any rate, as they mention in the video, The International Court of Justice now wants to get involved in this…probably most political leaders want to wait until Kim Jong Un kills people outside his own country. It’s not only a moral dilemma, it’s a political hot potato.
I’ll make a deal with you: you watch the video I posted and I’ll read *your* links.
I hope you’re right, Dymphna. The whole problem with dealing with NorK, though, is the risk of war with China. I doubt that China would be willing to see one of its last fellow Marxist-Leninist states go under.
China has no such qualms about its crazy little brother. He is currently useful for drama, but otherwise of negligible importance. OTOH, Japan is of far greater concern. As is Australia, against which China is beginning to make noises about trade.
North Korea is a way to distract the
WestUnited States.In my opinion, the US government should not get involved in foreign affairs, including humanitarian issues like governments brutalizing their own citizens, unless there is a real security issue for the US.
We know the population of Sub-Saharan Africa is exploding. We know that any resources sent their way will be used to produce more children. We know the only way to keep them from the West is through military force to protect our borders. We can pretty reliably project that anyone will be able to show starving, sick, or brutalized people in that region whenever the occasion demands.
So, are we going to fix the problem? Are we going to send troops to over a hundred countries to help the government keep a lid on the pressure-cooker situation for a few years? In doing so, we are creating millions of people who can with some justification claim they were fighting in US interests, and have a claim to immigrate to the US.
The North Koreans are indeed brutalized, starved, and riddled with parasites. They also are in an extreme Darwinian environment, and are likely highly intelligent, persistent and will not give up in the face of military conquest. They will see any military action by the US as an invasion and will react accordingly. They are parasite-ridden, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stop when engaged in combat.
So, if we invade North Korea for “humanitarian” purposes, chance are we’ll have the same result as the first Korean War: massive North Korean casualties, and large numbers of US casualties. Plus, massive costs to the US government. With humanitarian actions like that, give me nationalist dictators any day.
There is a consideration in North Korea. I suppose the logic is, once North Korea acquires the means to deliver the nuclear weapons it has with missiles, it can threaten Western countries. At that point, North Korea will be invulnerable to military invasion. It can then engage in local aggression and blackmail. If the leader is sufficiently nuts, North Korea might even demand ransom from the West, as he is willing to kill his people and the West aren’t. Using this scenario, invading North Korea before it acquires the means to deliver nuclear weapons is a necessary security measure.
The big problem I have with this scenario is that the countries closest to North Korea, and who would be subject to local aggression, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, are all complacent about North Korea’s nuclear developments. So, an invasion of North Korea by the US would be a guarantee that the US could invade North Korea in the future without worrying about a nuclear retaliation. Otherwise, North Korea’s neighbors don’t seem all that concerned with North Korean developments.
So, are we willing to invade North Korea so that we can deal with them at will like, for instance, we dealt with Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the past: just eliminate the government for whatever reason we choose?
North Korea can neither feed itself nor fuel itself. The county would collapse in 24 hours if Rocket Man were to go bye-bye.
John Quincy Adams’s take on this is the wisest one: “But she [the United States] does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
@Dymphna
firstly I agree utterly with Observer.
Second, re your statement:
e.g.,” it’s been established the Allies knew about the Nazi concentration camps but made no move against them.” What move? Aerial bombing well behind German lines
I am surprised that you have not weighed the considerable US-based historical debate by US university historians on “why the USAF did not bomb the railway to Auschwitz” against your apparent Netanyahu/Likud meme,
“all the goyim have always been anti-semitic: that’s why they never bombed the tracks to the death camps, so that’s why Israel needs nuclear weapons ,” etc.
Among other things, hindsight is always 20-20 vision; bombing railways is not the effective tactic that amateurs imagine it is, cf. the rapid Nazi repair of tracks destroyed in France after D-Day in 1944, when USAF and RAF controlled the skies.
Generally, Alt Right contributors to GoV would do well to recall that notwithstanding the iniquity of Islam as ideology, the USA is not and never has been a moral arbiter or light on the hill, although many a deluded Eastern European 1945-1991 thought it was.
A nasty perspective from someone claiming to be from Switzerland and having military experience there:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-16/debunking-myths-about-attack-north-korea
The article seemed pretty persuasive to me. It generally argued that the topography of North Korea and the tactics available to the North Korean Army, particularly the special force branches, negated many of the advantages of modern technology. So, anything less than a massive attack on much of North Korea would likely not only bring massive death and destruction to South Korea and Japan, but might not bring us anywhere close to victory. And of course, at best, a massive attack on North Korea would leave massive North Korean casualties, which kind of eliminates any humanitarian reason for attacking them.
The US is still bogged down in an endless and fruitless war in Afghanistan, also a mountainous terrain with stubborn people. Do we really want to get bogged down in North Korea, whose people are far, far more intelligent than the Afghans could ever hope to be?
The article makes a critical error with its schoolyard analogy.
If Kid C is totally dependent on Kid A for yard work that buys his school lunches, you’d better believe that he’ll consider pummeling the crap out of Kid B to keep on the gravy train.
While the USSR was an initial contributor to this (North Korean) problem, Communist China has almost single-handedly perpetuated this freak show for the past several decades.
It’s time for Trump to tell China, “Hey, pop a cap in Jong Un’s ample glutes and then get back us about selling America any more cell phones, laptops, wide screen televisions or, for that matter, a lousy can of shrimp.”
China would have six weeks (six months at best) before their economic house-of-cards folded flat.
The Soviet Union may not have had apartheid, but Stalin did massive ethnic cleansing in the post-War period. Any group that was not Slavic was moved out of Western USSR and sent to Kazakhstan – the Gobi desert where they did atomic bomb testing. Only when Kruschev came to power were they allowed back. I dare say similar things happened in China and Vietnam.
I am sure this GoV article, the little pundit video and most of the comments today would find the approval of Hillary Clinton and all the other warmongers in DC. Do you really want eternal war? What is it going to be after North Korea? Iran? China? Russia?
What I find disturbing here today is the complete sync with the MSM and the manipulated public opinion of the day. I don’t like to see people suffer but what is it with this savior complex of the US? When will we stop pandering to the MIC and expending blood and treasury for the profit of a few elitists? And more importantly – when will we take care of our own instead of policing the world.
Besides that, the US isn’t that good at winning wars lately, have you noticed? Bombing a country to hell, declaring victory and leaving that country to descend into political and humanitarian chaos hasn’t worked that well when you look at Iraq of Libya.
If the US really goes to war against NK the probability of Seoul and at least one big Japanese city getting annihilated is extremely high. Which in turn will probably produce a worldwide economic crisis of major proportions.
Make this country a fortress and withdraw all American and NATO troops from the rest of the world!
With written words, tone is often hard to decipher. Only one of those speakers was for going in. The other two were not.
The point was that historically we tend to compare totalitarian regimes with Hitler’s reign when in reality they are closer to the gulag system in the USSR. And it was exactly that point which made me consider this video.
America won’t do anything about NoKo unless we, or one of our allies, is attacked. Meanwhile, the Fat Boy will continue to swagger and to kill North Koreans by the thousands. And watching him do that presents most people with a level of discomfort that is difficult to manage at times, especially when we see the actual results of living there – i.e., the defector who managed to escape, riddled with parasites, starving and stunted in growth. And he was in the Army so probably had better food compared to civilians, never mind the concentration camp inmates.
Nowhere do I suggest any military solution; I simply said that it’s a moral dilemma to know about the millions suffering and not be able to give any assistance. If that makes me Hillary Clinton, so be it.