Potentially Scary Times

Previously, I had touched on the famine conditions that exist in North Korea, and I would like to do so again.  I recently read an article from The Telegraph that was written last year, before Kim Jong Il died.  The article interviews several North Koreans, helping to shed some light on the dire situation.  Whether it's people traveling to the mountains to simply collect weeds for soup, or eating manure in an attempt to fight starvation, the article only reinforces what I have learned up to this point--many North Koreans are hungry, desperate people. While reading this article, for some reason or another I kept coming back to the fact that it was written in 2011. Is it really still this bad today? Are these interviews enough to accurately represent the people in North Korea? As much as I wish it wasn't true, I can't help but think that it is.

An article I read recently from The New York Times, on the other hand, shows there might be some light at the end of the tunnel after-all.  Kim Jong Un was recently reported as saying “Developing the economy and improving livelihoods, so that the Korean people lead happy and civilized lives, is the goal the Workers’ Party is struggling toward,” in a meeting with the Chinese Communist Party's International Liaison Department.  While it's clear that trust and politics rarely go hand in hand, could this be the beginning of a change in regards to North Korea's “military first” mentality? Or this simply more propaganda being fed to the people by the socialist regime?

Something else to think about is North Korea's nuclear capabilities.  For as many years as North Korea has existed, they have disliked the United States.  While the reasons for these feelings are important, they are not strictly relevant right now, so I will leave those for another time.  What is important, is that even as recently as October of this year, the North Koreans have accused the U.S. of trying to spark a war, validating claims that the North Koreans still hold a severe distrust for Americans.

It's this distrust that worries me.   In my experience in life, distrust breeds more distrust. The United States may not be under a direct threat from North Korean nuclear ordinance, but how many nations throughout the world dislike the U.S.?  Theoretically speaking, what would happen if North Korea decided a good way to end the hunger issues would be to exchange either nuclear resources, or technology (or both), for the food to sustain a dying people?  What if one of these countries that agreed to those terms was say, Iran, for example?  What would happen then?

Until next time....