We all see and hear what goes on over there. Kim will execute kids if they don’t cheer hard enough at his birthday party or something? He’s always threatening to nuke countries and is probably has the highest domestic kill count out of any world leader today.
So I ask? Why don’t any other countries step in to help those people. I saw a survey asking Americans and Escaped North Koreans would they migrate to North Korea and to the US if given the chance (hypothetical for the refugees). And it was like <0.1% to 95%. Obviously those people live in terror.
Why do we just allow this to happen in modern civilization? Nukes on South Korea? Is just not lucrative to step in? SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME PLEASE!?
Generally countries in the west only get involved in conflicts if they get something out of it, be it directly via getting wealth from the country, or indirectly like curbing successful non-capitalistic economies before they catch on and their own people start questioning the billionaires. The “we’re there to liberate people” is just marketing speech.
I wonder why you say “countries in the west” and not just “countries”. It’s not like, I don’t know, Banín is shouting about North Korea every day and nobody listens.
I don’t know enough about how the rest of the world runs to generalise further
The US has invested a lot in its capacity to police the world (just look at how many bases we have around the world). So it’s logical to ask why the US would or wouldn’t police something. And usually before the US polices something with force, they start talking about it publicly.
Benin has no such capacity or intentions and so neither polices anything nor telegraphs its opinions.
You’re saying that no one with empathy has any power to help these people?
People in power in the west are barely moving the needle for their own people sadly.
Also even if they did, they’d still need a valid cause to start an international conflict I think, it’s why Russia tried the “it’s actually russians in Ukraine that are being oppressed and we’re liberating them” excuse
It’s more that there’s little that can be done that doesn’t also risk making the situation much worse.
Something like going to war to depose Kim would lead to mass death and risk spilling over into a much wider conflict since North Korea has the backing of China.
It’s not a lack of empathy as much as a kind of educated empathy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. We historically have a notorious and awful track record of nation building, and I think a lot of people believe this boils down to the fact that it’s very difficult to impose a national identity on people from outside, even with direct, physical intervention. We have tried to get around this at times by only supporting what we believe are legitimate independence movements which clearly already possess a strong national identity. Unfortunately even those tend to devolve into ethnic cleansing campaigns and dictatorship as soon as we leave. And if we don’t leave, then we have to stay there forever and we have to keep interfering every time things threaten to go off the rails and then it becomes paternalistic colonialism.
Keep in mind too that a lot of people living under oppressive regimes are genuinely damaged people and there is nothing but time that can heal those wounds. They are traumatized, they are angry, they have lost loved ones, they have been subjected to horrors we can only imagine and clinically document, without feeling the fear and emotional scars those things inflicted on millions of people. If you suddenly give them back power again, even small amounts of power, it is in human nature for many to seek revenge for what they’ve gone through (and not always against the right people). They’ve learned how to operate within the context of a deeply flawed and dangerous regime, and it is natural to adopt some of the same tools and practices. As resilient as the human spirit is it still is difficult to teach new ways.
At some point, people have got to learn to stand on their own two feet and find a way to build an equal, fair and just nation for all of themselves, by all the people and for all the people. While we certainly can do a better job of supporting this, we can’t do it for them and our attempts to do so have typically ranged from highly questionable to disastrous and extremely counterproductive. We fought for our own freedom, and it is not out of selfishness that we tell them they must fight for their own too. It’s not that we enjoy the fighting, it’s that as awful as it is, it appears necessary to get that hostility out into the open and understood to be as awful as it is, for a successful outcome to be possible.
On the other hand, even that hasn’t helped in Israel/Palestine where it seems like we’ve tried almost everything and failed. The fact is, nobody has the answers. We don’t know the way to fix this. We are always trying, even when it doesn’t seem like it, but we have to be abundantly cautious that we’re not making it worse, because we often are. For that matter, we have our own problems, and we haven’t figured those out either. Just because we’re doing much better than the worst countries in the world or even much better than average doesn’t mean we’ve got it all figured out or even that we’re doing anything right at all.
china is the only reason why NK doesnt collapse right away, the ccp uses NK as a buffer against SK and the west. NK is a true vassal state of china, and ccp has recently begun making headways into russias natural resources.
Generally frowned upon to invade countries.
Ludicrously costly. Your tax payers will want to know why it’s more important than everything else you do with their money.
Immense suffering. Mostly by the people you’re trying to liberate but also your own troops and their families.
They have nukes and could probably blow up at least a few regional cities. If the regime is threatened they will most likely use them.
South Korea or China or Russia are the only countries with land borders. China and Russia find NK useful to have arround to annoy US. Seoul is within artillerty range of the border.
Building up a new state in it’s place is very difficult. Remember how the Taliban took back power about 15 minutes after the US left Afghanistan?
NK could not defeat the US or China militarily but it could do quite a bit of damage to SK before anyone could stop them. This is a big reason the US doesn’t intervene.
China is concerned about the population of NK suddenly becoming millions of refugees they’ll need to recuse and deal with. So they would rather the regime not collapse.
Oh absolutely the west would love to effect regime change in North Korea. Morale win, keep the military industrial complex going, grow the economy, get rid of some pesky poors in combat, maybe hoover up some natural resources.
The problem is China, NK is strategically important to them as a source of said natural resources and as a buffer zone against South Korea. Plus lots of slave labour, global economies can never have enough of that.
So yeah, messing with North Korea means messing with China. Despite some real grade A morons in power nobody has been that stupid yet.
Those pesky poors! Always getting in the way of some good imperialism 😤
Don’t worry! There’s this new little number called ‘Iran’ coming up. Plenty of opportunity to get rid of them there.
We all see and hear what goes on over there.
Bullshit.
Yeah all the terrible shit we see is just a tip of the iceberg.
Why would you believe your media regarding a country they admit is “closed off”?
Do you seriously believe they execute ppl for having the same haircut as Kim? And then execute ppl for having a different haircut from him?
They execute generals all the time, then the generals appear alive a few months later. That’s that mystical Juche necromancy for ya.
I fully agree that a lot of the shittalk about them is exaggerated and ill-informed. They don’t execute people for having wrong haircut (dyeing can get you into some trouble), no, I do not believe that.
People live there. It’s certainly not nationwide Auschwitz as you might think.
But they also execute/punish people(and their family members) for trying to leave the country for good or talk shit about their supreme leader. I don’t know you but if that’s not a red flag I seriously don’t know what is.
They execute generals all the time, then the generals appear alive a few months later. That’s that mystical Juche necromancy for ya.
Can’t get all the shit right, yes. That doesn’t make their countless crimes-against-humanity testimonies and proof any less valid. And since they are so closed off that even the whereabouts of high-ranking generals are often hard to know, it really is just the tip of the iceberg.
But I’m very sure that you are going to say all the defectors and reporters are liars and parrot all the wild cringe tankie shit that no less than 14 should you have outgrown and that’s fine. You do you. I hope someday you can make a personal visit to North Korea and leave the horrific, capitalistic hellhole of a society the West is.
If you are an American, eat what’s on your plate before you worry about NK.
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I’m Korean.
It’s not a tu quoque when NK isn’t hurting anyone but themselves and the Americans are burning down the fucking planet. One is an urgent situation, the other is political theatre that most of us are unqualified to even analyze due to the embargoes, censorship and pervasive propaganda.
Being worried about rumors that:
they also execute/punish people(and their family members) for trying to leave the country for good or talk shit about their supreme leader
from a tiny, insignificant backwater nation when the so called leader of the free world is disappearing people from potentially every country on Earth, when the most powerful trading nation is intentionally destabilizing the global economy, well it reeks of looking for a distraction. The US government has as much to do with what is happening to NK people right now as the NK government does.
NK is one of the most exceptionally successful aggressors in cyber crime. They perform heists in the 10s or 100s of millions of USD at a time, about 2 billion in the past two years. Their targets are global and indiscriminate, and their scope and skill set is growing at an alarming pace.
If it helps you sleep better at night that they’re only physically terrible to their local neighborhood, then whatever - I would argue that their reach is only limited by their lack of wealth, but that still has a radius that can reach nations as far away as Japan and they constantly threaten them, and would do so to others if they had the means, but again, if that doesn’t bother you then ok I guess.
But to say that they don’t affect anyone outside their borders is at best ignorance and at worst willful misinformation.
Calling it a distraction when they literally harm our people and bomb our land. Thanks.
To us, it’s at least as urgent and as the U.S. crap and it has been that way for quite a long time.
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Why do .ml’s get so triggered with this topic? And y’all invariably paint NK as these absolute saints when we know what totalitarian regimes do and have done throughout the ages.
When you recognize the amount of bullshit propoganda that is consumed daily and realize how false it all is it’s very easy to switch to “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” mode.
Additionally it’s harder to break others (and oneself) out of the propoganda soup without an extremely sharp distinction between the lies being spoonfed and the material reality. The material reality often ends up getting distorted as a result and the cycle continues.
I fully support the idea that we have a problem with bias in the news and people profiting from scandals, and we also don’t need to downplay what the government does. We can push back against misinformation without accidentally bootlicking.
We can push back against misinformation without accidentally bootlicking.
It depends entirely on how you define “accidentally bootlicking” because I think [email protected] has done an excellent job of calling out how you have been making that distinction.
Taking a step back and decontextualizing how do you think one should make that distinction?
I’m sorry, but Objection has taken the wrong idea and run with it. If you think they’re making a great point, I’d suggest you reread with what I’ve said in mind. I do own that I’m a little hasty to judge .ml accounts from experience, but that’s about it. The rest is Objection assuming things with extra dressing to frame the conversation.
Tbh, I don’t even know what the fuck they’re arguing about now, and I can’t be bothered. Seriously, go take a look a that word salad and the embedded quiz of them just being an extra little argumentative gremlin.
Let’s just review this conversation, shall we? What the other person said was:
Do you seriously believe they execute ppl for having the same haircut as Kim? And then execute ppl for having a different haircut from him?
They execute generals all the time, then the generals appear alive a few months later. That’s that mystical Juche necromancy for ya.
So, that’s two examples of egregious misinformation that they pushed back on. How did you respond?
And y’all invariably paint NK as these absolute saints
We can push back against misinformation without accidentally bootlicking.
The reason we “”“bootlick”“” and “”“treat them as absolute saints”“” is that you chatacterize any attempt to push back on blatant misinformation as “”“bootlicking.”“” So no, it is impossible push back on misinformation without “bootlocking,” because, by your standards, anything short of uncritically accepting every bad thing said about a US rival (that is, anything short of actual bootlicking towards the US) counts as “bootlicking.”
If I’m wrong, then show me what in their comment led you to conclude that they were bootlicking, aside from refuting misinformation.
I think you’re connecting two things in my mind that were completely separate, and are using that as a springboard to jump to conclusions about my supposed standards based on one flawed premise, then about me uncritically accepting things, and also that I’m explicitly against US enemies. Brother, I’m not even American. Can I not talk about a pitfall that I often see with people defending NK, as an “inb4” if you will? Because I hope you reread the sentence that way.
If anything, my only direct comment about the person I’m replying to was the first question: Why so eager to jump in like that about a known violator of human rights that has voiced unconditional support for Russia, a country actively picking a fight with the entire West side of the world? A tyrannic, totalitarian regime is everybody’s enemy as far as I’m concerned.
But sure, maybe I’m reading the other person wrong too, and I’m unnecessarily assigning blame because of my previous experience with this exact same topic with other .ml accounts behaving that way and swarming the person commenting.
America already tried to save the North Koreans once. It was called the “Korean War”.
We bombed them back to the stone age, then permanently isolated them from most of the world. Despite having good reasons for the start of the war, America treated NK like Israel currently treats Gaza.
Even if North Koreans tried to forget that America bombed every hospital, every water purification plant, all the electricity production, etc; the Kim regime’s propaganda will make sure they never forget.
If we actually wanted to help those people, the first step would be removal of economic sanctions. There is no clean way to remove dictatorship, but the “Arab Spring” model is much more effective and humane than the “Afghanistan War” model.
Til that I don’t know enough about the Korean War. Jfc
Ohhhhh it’s so much worse. Here’s the intro to the BlowBack podcast S3, which is all about the Korean War https://open.spotify.com/episode/4ZX1YIvtHhxuoOTaH41VNC
We see and hear what the US state dept wants us to hear. And nothing more.
As to the core of your question. The answer is nukes. Nukes are the only way to fend off the imperial aggression of the United States and its imperialist partners.
Can’t do anything as long as China wants the situation to stay like this.
Why should we, as the collective west, spend soldiers lifes and money on “liberating” a population that hates us? Oh, and please mind: “Liberating” a country normally also includes killing a shitton of civilians in this process.
America was never about helping the people of the world. Many who believe that are mostly victims of propaganda. It’s all about American interests. If it’s in their interest they will give some reason like liberating a people as a pretence to enable military action.
Also to directly answer the question, they have nukes trained on Seoul, have the backing of China which considers it a buffer against western influenced south kr
Loads of reasons. It has (or at least had) protection from China who doesn’t want a Western nation at it’s border. It can wreck havoc on SK if invaded. It would cause loads and loads of casualties to invade.
In any case: The way SK is going now, all NK has to do is wait another 30-50 years and they can just walk in empty land, there.
Because China.
China sees NK as a buffer to the US, sort of a little brother that’s a bit too crazy so they have to tug on the leash to get them to chill every now and then.
We’ve already got bases in SK, but the Yellow sea separates us from China. NK is the land barrier.
China is the answer. Nobody does anything about North Korea for the same reason China doesn’t invade Taiwan.
And this goes back to the Cold War, which goes back to WWII, and the politics of the president and military commanders, specifically MacArthur, who wanted to continue north and take North Korea decisively to keep the Soviet Union and China from controlling it before it could be reinforced by Chinese soldiers.
At the time, North Korean soldiers were outnumbered by UN forces 3:1, with far more tanks, etc than NK had.
The UN waffled, and by the time they decided Korea should be reunified, China had shipped in nearly 300,000 troops, and an unknown amount of matériel.
Fuck the UN. It’s their fault this is still going on.
Why “fuck the UN” and not “fuck China?”
Sounds like the UN could have made better choices, but the real villain (at least in the part of the history you describe) is China. No?
It’s the same reason why the world is leting Israel commit genocide, or not get involved in the Yemen Civil War, or ongoing genocide in Maynamer, or the dozens of current active war zones.
The world simply doesn’t care. The wold only cares when the global economy is being threatened.
It’s not that people “don’t care”. We’ve tried intervening with force in e.g. Afghanistan, where the oppressive regime was forcibly removed, and military power was used to ensure that elections were held and the results were respected.
We have observed, several times, that everything goes to shit when we leave. Not only that, but people generally don’t seem like it when outsiders take over and tell them how to run their country, who should be allowed an education, and that <insert group> cannot be oppressed. So a side effect of the armed intervention is that a lot more people hate you now.
Western countries “aren’t doing anything” because we’ve both learned from experience that military intervention doesn’t really work, and been repeatedly told by the rest of the world to mind our own business.
Kinda shocking to me how anyone can present such a whitewashed take on the Afghanistan War in 2025. It didn’t go to shit when we left, it was shit from the beginning.
We shortsightedly allied with brutal local warlords, and the failure at local politics blew up in our faces. We bombed 100s of villages, losing the hearts and minds of the people. We sent innocent people to be tortured in Pakistani black sites, creating a fanatical resistance willing to martyr themselves. We forcefully changed the main agricultural output from wheat to opium poppy, leading to widespread drug abuse and addiction. I could go on and on…
I’m not sure if there is a military intervention model that works, but American-style military intervention with mass civilian deaths and warcrimes from beginning to end is a proven failure.
It didn’t go to shit when we left, it was shit from the beginning.
It seems like you didn’t observe the thousands of people swarming the airport in Kabul trying to get out with the last planes. It also seems like you haven’t picked up on the people crying about how people are being brutally punished for getting an education or listening to music now.
I’m not denying that shit was really bad while coalition forces were there, but acting like it didn’t get worse for a lot of people when the left is just closing your eyes.
Regardless, it’s ludicrous to claim that western countries “aren’t doing anything because they don’t care”. It’s not like we’ve spent truckloads of money and thousands of lives over 20 years of trying to get a functioning system in place while preventing a humanitarian crisis because we “didn’t care”. People saw it as immoral to just turn our backs on Afghanistan and let them solve their own problems. The result was largely that we learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights onto someone else, as proven by the almost complete absence of people willing to fight for just that once the coalition left.
I did not close my eyes when America turned it’s back on the thousands of Afghans who helped the American regime during the war. The people who helped America were left resourceless and with giant targets on their back. We betrayed them.
I did not close my eyes when the flimsy and deeply flawed education system America propped up instantly failed the moment we left.
The abandonment of Afghan allies and the destruction of girl’s education in Afghanistan are just two more data points showing the deep failures of the American model of foreign intervention.
We did not spend truckloads of money trying to get a functioning system in place. A lasting functioning system was never the goal. I urge you to read into our military’s functions and objectives in Afghanistan, because you are deeply misinformed. Anyone who suggests our goals were “democracy and human rights” is obviously infected with US propaganda.
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here?
My point is that, while flimsy and flawed, there was in fact an education system and a humanitarian system in place that was propped up by coalition forces. This system did fall apart, leaving no system at all when the forces left. And yes, a bunch of Afghanis have every right to feel betrayed. I never said otherwise.
It’s not like Afghanistan is the only place where schools, hospitals and infrastructure has been financed by western countries. By and large, we spend a lot of money on these things because a significant portion of the population sees it as the right thing to do. Because we care, and want to help people.
What became very clear in Afghanistan was that you can’t force a population to be a liberal democracy. They have to be willing to fight for it themselves. The Afghan army (on paper) had several hundred thousand men, loads of heavy equipment, and several years to train and prepare for coalition forces leaving. There was a government structure in place. These things instantly folded when the coalition left because, clearly, enough people preferred Taliban to what the outsiders had forced upon them.
I guess I’m saying it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. If you stay, you’re an oppressive occupier. If you leave, you’re a traitor that permits a humanitarian crisis to occur.
The OP here asked “why doesn’t anybody do anything about NK”, and my answer is that we (seem to) have learned that you can’t force democracy and human rights on a country. Chalking it up to “we don’t care” is reductionist.
