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North Korea Threatens South Korea Over Christmas Lights
K7DAN writes "North Korea warned South Korea on Sunday of 'unexpected consequences' if Seoul displays Christmas lights near the tense border, and vowed to retaliate for what it called 'psychological warfare.' From the article: 'The tree-shaped, 30 metre-high steel structure on Aegibong hill - some 3km (2 miles) from the border - was illuminated by thousands of small light bulbs last year. It could be seen from the North's major city of Kaesong across the border, according to media reports. Pyongyang has previously accused Seoul of using the tree to spread the Christian message to people inside the secular state.'"
what it called 'psychological warfare.'
Big words for a country that built an entire town on their side of the border, just for propaganda.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
King Jong Il is the grinch! What a twist!
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For the first time ever, the term "war on Christmas" is actually accurate.
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While the North's reaction sounds predictably paranoid, the article seems to hint that some sort of propaganda is the purpose of the tree, as evidenced by whether it's lit or not being correlated with thawing versus tension of relations. I'm not sure how effective it'd be at spreading a Christian message specifically, but maybe it's intended to spread a sort of generic, "look how awesome it is just across the border" message?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Because of Afghanistan and other places we ignored having a tendency toward biting us in the ass from time to time.
I'm also pretty sure that Japan is quite interested in what North Korea does, given the proximity of the two countries and the cruise missiles that NK has developed...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I know that North Korea is fashionably behind the times, juche and all; but seriously, this is a bit much.
The idea that Christmas trees are a symbol of Christianity, rather than some freaky pagan stuff, stolen for a while by Christians, and now firmly entrenched as a coniferous altar of Mammon for youth of all ages and faiths, is patently absurd.
Now, it is unlikely that pro-consumerist psychological warfare will be any more popular with our fabulously haired friend; but he needn't worry about the spread of any but the worldliest of indulgences...
'Cause they don't HAVE any light when the sun's not shining.
N Korea at night:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.htm
Thats pretty wimpy psychological warfare, as decorating pine trees in the living room and shopping and fighting people on black friday and singing about red nosed reindeer is hard core capitalist worship, its not christian at all. I don't even know how you visually "do" christian christmas worship other than something like a 200 foot tall "nativity scene" which unfortunately makes no sense to someone not already versed in christian theology (my son, when he was very little, called it "the farmers", too little to know any better, yet +1 insightful as it was, after all, in a barn scene...)
Now real christian psychological warfare would be a larger than life Easter scene of the last supper with the table unbiblically piled with tons and tons of yummy food... most of the NK either are currently starving or recently were starving so a big food display is going to rile them all up to no end. Maybe they do that? Waving a bunch of food in front of a starving man with a gun is probably unwise, maybe its going too far?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I have an easy solution. Just put up a giant menorah instead. Then you won't be spreading a Christian message.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It's a country in the grip of a deified leader cult. They worship their tyrant and his father in a manner that would have made L. Ron Hubbard or Jim Jones jealous.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It is not Seoul or the South Korean government that display those Christmas trees.
They're 45% without religion and 23% Buddhist.
Those Christmas trees belong to Roman Catholics (~10%), who are allowed to have them - by the government.
I wish people would also distinguish more between a) Country, b) Population, c) Government (even though some still believe b) is responsible for c)
I have modpoints, but I'm just at a loss to know what to call this. There is no 'bat-shit insane' mod response.
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I'm afraid that S. Korea (and the rest of the world) is between a rock and a hard place on how to del with this despot. I mean forget about the small chance of war between the Koreas; a conflict that while producing a very large number of civilian casualties would be over in a week or two with the modern S. Korea army aided by the U.S. quickly recovering from the initial bombardment and then demolishing the N. Korean army.
No I'm talking about the millions who for two generations have led short stunted lives due to starvation and extreme poverty. They have been deprived of any contact with the outside world and have been controlled to an extent that makes 1984 seem like a liberal's paradise. It's really chilling to watch a documentary such as the one made when western doctors went in to provide free critical surgeries to the populace only to see the ones who lives they've saved turn around and condemn their saviors.
One of the main reasons why I do not invest in China is because of their unbending support of N. Korea. Better (they think) to let millions of Koreans die than to let the Americans have an ally abutting them on their northern border. The other reasons include Tibet, Myanmar, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran and basically all the non-democratic regimes in Africa who they prop up. I fully realize that the West is fully capable of rank hypocrisy but China doesn't even make a pretense of advancing the human condition.
I don't know what to do more than anyone else. Let this horrendous half-century holocaust continue or wage a war which would result on hundreds of thousands of casualties. I think the only way to decide on a firm course of action would be for S. Korea to have a national referendum as to whether or not to save the people who are literally their brothers. This makes planning surprise attack rather difficult though.
(Is "funnier" a legitimate word or not? I'm afraid I'm not a decider).
It would also make us universally-despised by just about everyone on Earth, and the moral equivalent of Genghis Khan. In case you've forgotten, we're supposed to be the good guys. We make occasional mistakes, and occasionally a psychopath slips through the chain of command, but for the most part, we do try to be a force for good. It might be mostly out of enlightened self-interest rather than genuine altruism, but at the end of the day, most of us can go to sleep at night with a fairly clean national conscience.
Team America: World Police is obviously satire, but it's a lot closer to the truth than most of us really like to admit.
Christmas just barfed all over my neighbor's front yard. I run my house like a dictator. Too bad I don't have a proto-nuclear arsenal to threaten them with.
With a highly unpredictable regime, I'm not sure "try to starve their army to death" is the right approach. Sad and selfish as it is to say, the North Korean people suffering may be the lesser of two evils in this circumstance.
Likewise, one thing that the North Korean regime has been exceptionally good at is deflecting blame. A wholly disconcerting number of the North Korean people really do believe that their suffering is because of the United States and a puppet South Korea. Furthering that suffering may well generate the anger you would be hoping to generate, but there is no guarantee that it is directed at the people it should be directed to.
Honestly, just waiting the North out is probably the best approach. I think Kim Jong-Il is regarded as pretty damn psychopathic, and I don't mean that short of its literal sense. There is simply no telling what he will do. He is also 70 years old. Short of him deciding to go out in a big bang, the amount of harm he can do, personally, is coming to a close. His children are western-educated. This is by no means a guarantee that they will be any better, but it is at least an indication that they understand the depth of the lie they are living in North Korea and has to offer at least some hope that, at bare minimum, they will be more reasonable people to deal with.
If not, once more about them and their ruling style and personalities are known, other measures can be considered. Until then, the status quo is good enough I'm afraid.
Oh, God, no.
Yes, I want the North Korean government to get its well-deserved comeuppance as much as the next guy, but take a look at Seoul on Google Earth. Now drag northwards until you come to the North Korean border. Not very far, is it? Forget fancy missiles, it's within artillery range. It won't matter that they get "(at most) a couple of miles into South Korean territory." By the time they've done so, one of Asia's financial and industrial capitals will lie in ruins. The fact that the already mostly empty shell of Pyongyang will be razed to the ground shortly thereafter is cold comfort.
$comment =~ s/($verb)\s+($noun)/IN SOVIET RUSSIA, $2 $1s YOU!/g;
Bin Laden wasn't trained by the CIA. (In fact, very little of the mujaheddin was trained by the CIA, as the CIA mostly provided intelligence, weapons, and funding.) It's been pretty well established that he brought his own funding and later relied on funding from places like Saudi Arabia. With very few exceptions, he neither trusted Western powers nor did he want their assistance, believing that to do so was to accept help from heathens. Interviews with him by those outside of Muslim circles were rare but telling in how they were approached and conducted.
The mujaheddin was a complex network of resistance forces, and bin Laden was but one very small part of it.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The Korean war was certainly on a smaller scale than WW2, but it wasn't just a drop in the bucket. The North and its supplemental Chinese used all kinds of human wave tactics, literally just marching people off to their death and hoping that it would eventually overcome the other side. The UN and US forces were still in the WW2 era of technology -- there were almost 40,000 US deaths, compared to the almost 60,000 US deaths in Vietnam despite lasting for only three years. As an ideological, civil war, there were mass slaughters of the native Korean soldiers and civilians on both sides, with thousands being killed at a time. The bare minimum for civilian deaths is something like 2 million, and upwards of 3 million.
This doesn't include the aftermath, when the country was severed in two and completely impoverished on both sides. South Korea has some glitz and glamour today, but it centers in a few cities, and there are still millions of people living in complete poverty. North Korea is like the post-Roman Dark Ages, except for the complete dictatorship that rules over the population armed with modern weapons. Today the population is much higher than in the 1950s, with one-third or one-fourth of the population of the USA living on a peninsula that's about half the size of California. Almost 1/3 the population of the South, about 20 million people, lives in the greater Seoul area, which is basically inside artillery range which could level huge sections of the city, and the people living there, in a very short amount of time.
Nobody really knows what the North Koreans would do in a war, either. Many of them could fight to the bitter end regardless of what was actually going on. Some of them might believe the propaganda about the South and US being ruthless killers ready to slaughter them all and commit suicide like Japanese civilians and soldiers did even in the waning days of war in the Pacific in WW2. They might try to take as many people with them into death. Even in a quick war where the majority of North Korean soldiers surrendered, the leadership probably would not and would find all of the hardliners they could willing to fight.
Even in the best case scenarios of a short, one-sided war, it would be a total bloodbath. North Koreans wishing to escape the fighting or just wishing to escape the area would pour over the borders both North and South, flooding into areas not able to support that many people so suddenly. There's even a potential of the Chinese invading along the north in order to capture territory, to prevent such a huge refugee crisis, and to guarantee the continued existence of a buffer zone not dominated by American interests so close to their territory. It would be an absolute humanitarian disaster no matter the outcome and would almost certainly be accompanied by millions of deaths even in the best-case scenarios.