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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (306140)	10/13/2006 1:30:47 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576601

The northern regime has so far restricted its racial propaganda to the home audience, because it wants the world to go on misperceiving it as a Stalinist state. This way we continue to pin our hopes on the kind of trust-building dialogue that worked so well with Communists in the 1980’s — and failed so disastrously with the pure-race crowd a half-century earlier. Interesting article but I think the author misuses the term "Stalinist state". Nothing in the article contradicts the idea that North Korean is a stalist state other than the direct assertion that people who see it that way are misperceiving North Korea. "Stalinist state", doesn't mean it has to be a clone of the USSR under Stalin. Such a state would be a communist totalitarian state and rigidly authoritarian. Stalin himself used Russian nationalism as a theme. Using Korean nationalism and belief in Korean racial superiority wouldn't be enough to make Kim Jong Il's regime something other than stalinist. Dialogue with Stalin wasn't particularly successful either. FDR and Churchill could work with him in the effort against the Nazis, but Stalin wasn't likely to change his plans if his allies didn't like them. Perhaps Myers is correct and trust building dialogue with the North Korean regime is impossible or near impossible. It wouldn't surprise me although it would be unfortunate. Certainly such attempts haven't been very successful so far. I also agree with Myers that North Korea is unlikely to form as much of a threat to the world as Imperial Japan did. NK has nukes, but in almost every other way Japan was a more serious threat. It had the most powerful fleet in the world and while its economy might have been only about a tenth the size of America's, North Korea's economy is a fraction of a percent of the US economy. Japan had to be wildly optimistic to think it could win a full scale war. NK would have to be totally delusional. Hopefully Kim isn't delusional to that extent. Crazy people with nuclear weapons is a scary idea. It appears that Myers doesn't have any advice as to how we should deal with North Korea, other than telling us that we shouldn't count on trust building dialogue to be very successful and that we shouldn't assume NK won't use a nuke. But perhaps I'm asking to much to expect some proposed solution. I don't have any good ones to propose myself. There isn't any simple, easy, good answer here.