Korea, Asia's Great Cultural And Political Conundrum

North Korea and its petty, murderous, emotionally stunted and gravitationally challenged tyrant has been busy of late playing the old family game. Threatening everyone around in hopes of securing tribute in the form of free food from the West and cut rate oil and coal from China to keep the neighborhood bully from acting even crazier.

Unfortunately this third generation egomaniacal fool is not content with digging tunnels under the DMZ, blasting propaganda over loudspeakers, assassinating troublesome relatives or executing military officers with anti-aircraft artillery.

He has chosen instead escalate into the madness of combining a total absence of morality with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles thinking the world will simply respond with more tribute.

Adding to the general nervousness is the exchange of technology between North Korea and the some only marginally less insane Islamist regimes.

Beyond the cynicism of Hillary Clinton telling Goldman Sachs that "We don't want to see a unified Korea" because she and her ilk profit from the status quo of human suffering and political instability, lays a truth that neither China and Russia nor the US, South Korea and Japan want or need the cost that would be associated with bringing 25 million starving and brainwashed souls into the 21st century. It would prove to be a multi generational task that would make German re-unification and the movement of central Europe from nearly half a century of Soviet (Russian) occupation and back into Western society, look like child's play.

After the bombings of Japan, Emperor Hirohito realized that the importance of the preservation of Japan's thousand year old culture outweighed her xenophobic sense of racial superiority which had clearly set them onto a path of destruction.

A war in North Korea would contain no such recognition of inevitability or desire for cultural preservation as Hirohito found. It would be more Hitlerian in that Kim would see his people as not deserving survival beyond his own. Inspite of the 13 years of Nazism the German people still had as sense of their past cultural achievements and Western Civilization in general.

After over 70 years of the Kim's own brand of fascism, advertised as communism, I suspect the saturation of propaganda and the desire for basic human survival has all but extinguished any real psycological links to their more distant history and cultural structures. The sudden exposure to a modern society that doesn't want to starve, imprison, murder or enslave them, could well produce not just a cognitive dissonance but mass insanity that could manifest as a very difficult guerrilla war and or segments of the military and population fleeing into the mountains as occured with Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender or even believe that Japan had been or could be defeated.

What then is the West to do with such a deranged, nuclear armed fascist regime with a combined military force of 1.9 million? Given the established facts that they can and have secretly tunneled under the DMZ, they already have produced nuclear bombs, however crude compared to modern designs, and that Kim is just plain bat shit crazy, can the western powers, really wait for the overt act before striking?

At first glance it would seen to be incumbent upon the Chinese to rein in if not remove Kim and his regime. After all it is they who have propped up North Korea as a cat's paw against the West for decades. They certainly don't want to see any expansion of their existing refugee problem along the Yalu river and are openly addressing it with large troop deployments. On the other hand having South Korea, Japan and the US handle the problem and having South Korean troops across the Y'all might be an acceptable price to pay to see a major economic competitor burdened with chaos and a vast economic drain.

Should Kim go completely paranoid nutso and deploy his nukes or his Special Ops teams to use dirty bombs, things could spin out of control very quickly and the Chinese could be faced with both refugees and nuclear waste clouds coming across both the Yalu river and the Yellow Sea.

If someone can come up with a truly viable solution to this mess I'll be glad to hear it. It may come to a secret agreement between Washington and Beijing to J St go ahead and decapitate the North Korean regime as quickly and decisively as possible. I doubt it can be done without any collateral damage. But nuclear blackmail must be taken seriously and appeasing tyrants never works out for the better.