North Korean Future

One of the world's worst dictators, Kim Jong Il, is dead. When this happens usually one of the thug dictator's sons takes his place and things continue to go bad for the poor souls who are under the thumb of the dictator. Kim Jong Unn is supposed to be the new guy, groomed by daddy Kim for the past few years and already on record as being as miserable a human being as dad was (as responsible for the deaths of perhaps millions of North Koreans through widespread preventable starvation, terrible prisons, forced labor camps and public executions) .

But will Unn ever take control? These days dictators are in bad fashion as the mass communication system have shown their subjects that democracy or some semblance of it, is afar far better system than being run by a "Dear One" like daddy Kim. South Korea probably just wants someone to take over before a flood of refugees from North Korea would damage its economy. And if a war breaks out between North and South Korea it would be a disaster for the whole region.

North Korea is the anomaly of the Internet age: a country with a population shut off from the world. It has no middle class just the favored few and the fearful masses. It has no churches, no democratic movement or intelligentsia and little information from the rest of the world or information about it apart from the lies of the state radio and Tv networks. And..North Korea has nuclear capability. This makes North Korea's future a different and more problematic one than what has been happening in the Mid East to its dictatorships.

Given all of that, I am grateful to both not be North Korean and to live far enough away from the mess to have some insulation from the future that awaits that region.