North Korean soldiers attend festivities to congratulate North Korean leader Kim Jong-il on his re-election as general secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea at the Jeonseung (Victory) Plaza in central Pyongyang, September 29, 2010. REUTERS/KCNA
Those of us lucky enough to live in the wealthy western countries enjoy an unparalleled amount of freedom compared with some other places around the world. I think we could use some more since there are a lot of things going on in the western countries that come across as unfair and against freedom, but at the same time I recognize I do have it good and I won one form of lottery by being born here. There are places on this planet where the dichotomy between free and unfree couldn’t be more obvious.
People in South Korea, today, enjoy nearly the same freedoms and level of wealth that people in the western countries do, and for them this difference is very apparent since a bit less than 60 years ago the country was emerging from a deadly civil war that had killed millions and had completely destroyed the country’s infrastructure. South Korea was under a dictatorship for the next few decades while the country was rebuilding and then eventually transitioned over into a democracy. I visited the country for three months back in 2007, and from what I saw and experienced this is definitely no backwards country — things there are on par with here in Canada, and in some ways they are ahead of us. I also felt extremely safe in this country, and the people I dealt with were honest and respectful. The society might place a bit too much emphasis on education and work, but these are people who are going somewhere and have the ambition and drive to get there.
Compare this to the experience of the other half of the country; the northern half. Over there, many mountains are bare, having been stripped of wood, the air is cold, and the landscape is desolate. The place is a fanatical dictatorship with disloyalty to “the great leader” punishable by death or worse. There is no future for these people, and to make things worse, China is no friend of those that try to escape. Those that do are liable to get sold into slavery or deported back to North Korea where a horrible life awaits them; very few actually make it to South Korea. North Korea is a place where Orwell’s chilling future has come closest to realization: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
How do places like this still exist in the world? Nowhere can the dichotomy between the free market and socialism, trade and force, and freedom and slavery be seen more clearly than in the difference between South and North Korea: one people, one culture, yet two vastly different systems. Has the rest of the world made a huge mistake in allowing these atrocities to go on for so long? Is providing aid to the country actually helping to prop up the regime? What could we do to make things better?
It’s really hard to say. Unfortunately, the head of the country is a lunatic, and if other countries annoy him too much then he just might pull the trigger. Maybe this is why China treats escapees from North Korea so badly and why there is a miles-wide no man’s land between the north and south. I don’t know. There is a huge human cost to this, though, which is easy for people who have it good to shrug off since it doesn’t affect them, but hard to ignore if you’re one of the unlucky few trapped in that situation.
Every regime cracks over time, though. Is it possible to see a peaceful breakup of the NK regime with the death of Kim Jong-il, or will others simply take his place? I’m sure the people in South Korea would love to do more, but they’re in a little bit of a tough situation with tens of millions of people living close to the border and therefore in range of artillery, and then there’s that nuke…
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, readers.
Weekend Reading
News and other interesting items
- $6.5 Trillion Lost, One House at a Time (Financial Sense)
- Costata’s Silver Open Forum (FOFOA)
- Farmed Seafood: What’s Safe and Nutritious (Mark’s Daily Apple)
- How to tell when someone’s lying (KurzweilAI)
- The People’s Romance (Overcoming Bias)
- Will Greece Exit the Eurozone? (Let A Thousand Nations Bloom)
Personal Finance Bloggers
- Portfolio Update: HELOC Snapshot Post 400 Point Drop (Beating The Index)
Carnivals
- Canadian Finance Carnival #35 (Canadian Finance Carnival)
- This Week in Money Management: Are the Days of Easy Money From Commodities Over? (Credit Sesame)
- Yakezie Carnival – The Berkshire Hathaway 2011 Edition (Narrow Bridge Finance)
Investing
- BlackRock 2010 Periodic Table of Returns (DIY Investor)
- Learning to Invest – Lesson 1 (Invest in the Markets)
- When To Take Profits? or Losses? (The Passive Income Earner)
Money
- 100 Words On: When Financial Perfection Is the Enemy of Good (Len Penzo)
- 5 Bible Verses John Wesley Used For His Money Decisions (Personal Finance By The Book)
- A 50% Service Fee!? (In Search of Salt)
- Babci and Talking about Money (First Gen American)
- Car Longevity: How Far Will You Go to Save Money? (Squirrelers)
- HOW I MADE $500.00 IN TEN MINUTES-and you can too! (Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance)
- In China, Women Control the Budgets (MoneyMamba)
- Money and Relationships: Agreeing on the Price of Your First Big Purchase (MomVesting)
- Should You Give Your Kids An Allowance? (KNSFinancial)
- What Exactly Is A Side Hustle? (Personal Finance Firewall)
- Why pay someone when I can do it myself? (Control Your Cash)
Miscellaneous
- 100 Most Value Global Brands 2011 (Yes I am Cheap)
- 5 Overused Negotiation Strategies (Car Negotiation Coach)
- Burnout Prevention: Secret Revealed (Dr. Dean)
- Can You Tell a Story or a Joke? (krantcents)
- Free Cars in The Future and High Gas Prices (Money Reasons)
- How The Closure Of The Last Typewriter Factory May Relate To You (Everyday Tips and Thoughts)
- My Top Stress Busters (My Own Advisor)
- Opportunity Cost and Opportunity Lost (Balance Junkie)
- Preparing for a Test at the Last Minute (The Amateur Financier)
- Relationship Drama via Social Networks (20 and Engaged)
- The Government Passes A Renters Tax! (Financial Samurai)
- Thoughts from the silent partner (The Financial Blogger)
- Weekly Stats and Money Update #18 for 2011 (Budgeting in the Fun Stuff)
- What Makes a Good Negotiator (101 Centavos)
- What to Expect From the Conservatives? (Canadian Capitalist)
- Why I Don’t Need a SmartPhone (Out of Debt Again)
Motivation
- Charisma is not a gift. It’s a choice (Get Happy Life)
- My Story of How I have Lost 100+ Pounds, and Have Kept It Off For More Than Three Years: Part 1 (Prairie EcoThrifter)
- Navy SEALs: Surviving Through Difficult Situations (Yakezie)
- The Power of Words (The Biz of Life)
Retirement
- A New Reality: Planning for your precious retirement years with gold (Beating Broke)
- My Retirement Investing Today Strategy Works – And I’m Still Yet to Retire (Retirement Investing Today)
Although there is evil in the world, there is a lot of good, too. We should just never forget that the evil exists and always fight against it. Have a great weekend, everyone!
After just returning from a month in Asia, this story hit home. There are so many in the world with such little freedoms that it brings me to tears how much we take advantage of. If I only had enough money I would feed everyone in the world and ensure their safety. Of course I can ‘t do this but what I can do is provide awareness to others about how they can help even in small ways.
PS: Thanks for the link back too.
True, we can all do our part, as small as it may be, it can add up if enough of us believe it can.
I too have often felt that I must have won some sort of lottery by being born in a free country. Thanks for the reminder of how much of the world suffers under evil dictatorial rulers. It causes me to feel for their plight and be grateful for my freedom.
Thanks too for the mention.
This is a great country. Unfortunately, we take for granted our freedom here. Growing up overseas and seeing poverty first hand showed me how blessed we Americans are. A day will come when things will not be able to be bought with credit, when freedom will not be lauded, and people will be oppressed in this country. We are headed down that slippery path. (Isaiah 45:23)
More Americans can definitely benefit from exploring the world and seeing other countries, and really seeing them, not just staying at the Club Med. 🙂 More Canadians could too, for that matter.
At least there is one less evil on earth!
Indeed! Still, are we playing a game of hit the hedgehog?
Watching what’s been happening the last few months in the Arab League revolts has made me realize more than ever how lucky I am to be born here.
And as far as China, the troubles brewing there are daily gaining momentum, with more and more activists and artists and their supporters and employees and neighbors disappearing without a word from the so-called authorities. The government can’t hold the lid down on their country’s simmering problems forever and when that country blows — Wow!
China is doing well because the people there are very motivated to improve their lives — you would too if you had suffered under the yoke of communism for decades and you lived in abject poverty. However, the human rights abuses are flagrant, and the country is simmering with the dissent of various ethnic groups that will remain content so long as there are jobs and growth for everyone. I believe this is one reason why China is not quick to simply dump their US holdings even as they depreciate, and why they continue to export goods in return for more IOUs — a disruption would throw many Chinese out of work and could lead to severe social unrest. Then again, how far will the game go?
Whether it is North Korea or the Middle East, it makes me thankful I live here in the United States. As we are seeing in some of the countries in the Middle East, the people want freedom and are willing to die for it. It is coming, however slowly.
Thanks for the inclusion, I am in good company.
I visited Seoul when I got stuck in a 10 hours lay over. It was really clean and orderly, very similar to Japan and Taiwan.
From what I understand, China needs to prop up the North Korean regime because they don’t want a US proxy on their border. If South Korea took over, the US can set up bases right on the Chinese border. Yeah, it’s political and North Koreans are paying the price for this craziness. I hope someday the US – China relation will improve to the point that China will quit support the nut jobs in North Korea. It’s going to a long road though.
I guess you can look at it in that way and understand it from that point of view, and it can make sense. I wonder how things would be different if the U.S. had less of a presence in that part of the world.
It is quite a privilege to be born in a country with a democracy and a degree of economic mobility. I have to say from my experience no middle eastern country is as bad as North Korea sounds. I’ve read that North Koreans are shorter than their southern peers due to malnutrition. This isn’t common in the middle east but does occur in some African countries. The fact that kind of low standard of living, where you can’t even feed your children, still exists when there is currently enough resources to meet demand is truly evil.
I agree, and what I also find evil is that the places where you see these sort of problems are just the sort of places where the rulers claim to be imposing measures for the “common good”. Whenever any politician makes a scapegoat out of a group, whether it be the “rich bankers”, “bourgeoisie”, or what have you, and claims to be doing things for the common good, watch out!
We are truly blessed. Thanks for including me in your thoughtful weekly review!
We are blessed indeed. However even as blessed people we shouldn’t shut up simply because we are blessed, but instead recognize our moral duty to keep fighting to make things better, in the ways that we can. Thanks for stopping by!
Wow, huge roundup, thanks for including me Kevin.
And yeah, it’s just too easy to take for granted all the freedom we have.
The one thing we should never do is take freedom for granted. People had to suffer and die so that we could get to where we are today. It would be unfortunate if things were to get so bad that they died in vain.
Thanks for the mention.
North Korea seems to be a useful proxy for China’s government. For the sake of the long-suffering N. Korean people, I hope that change for the better will one day come.
I just hope we don’t inadvertently prop up the regime. If there was a way to help the people without consolidating the regime’s power, I would be all for it… heck, can’t we hire some flag-less privateers to come in? I guess not… you never know what a crazy guy with a nuke and tons of artillery pointed at SK may do.
Thanks for the mention Kevin!
Your post reminds me how very lucky some of us really are…
Long-term, the dichotomies between the cultures in the East, I believe, will eventually change. Folks in one nation will wonder why things are the way they are in contrast to another and change will ensue. I predict it may be a very painful transition; one that will likely happen in my lifetime and one I hope that civil war will not rise from.
At this time, I really don’t have an answer for what we, in the West, can do to make things better. I can only suggest that lives filled and actioned with respect, understanding and listening is always a start for a better mankind.
Cheers,
Mark
Hey Mark,
Your last quote really says it all. As for change, that’s why I’m a big proponent of the “many nations” approach and allowing people the freedom to choose, as only with choice and differentiation can we learn what works and what doesn’t work. People will see where things are better and we can learn from that.
I also feel badly for the people of North Korea and have always thaought reunification would be good for the region. Unfortunately, China is using them as a pawn and they are responsible for the North Korean’s suffering.
It’s gotten to the point where many South Koreans feel rather ambivalent about reunification due to the huge costs both economic and social that that would entail. In a sense I can understand their point of view. The first step in any case is to get rid of the psychopathic regime in place, as so long as that regime is in power there’s not that much that can be done.
Thanks for the link, Kevin.
Of course, the history of Korean trouble goes back much further than the 50s. Japan annexed Korea in 1910, causing a great deal of famine. Problems escalated in the 40s when the Japanese forcefully brought many Koreans to Japan to work for the war effort.
The South’s bounce-back is remarkable. Unfortunately, reunification would be very problematic, and would be much more costly than the German reunification. I’m not sure the South could support it.
The most probable future outcome would be an interim military government, that could be allowed to rebuild on their own. Reunification could only be plausible once a certain standard is achieved.
Just my take, but…
Hey Myke,
That’s very true about the earlier years with the Japanese occupation and the hardships endured in those times. Even now I believe that some people are upset, and that the Japanese government has not apologized for its wrongdoings to the same degree as say, the German government.
I feel sorry for North Korea because they don’t have allies, aside from China. Reunification among the two countries (North and South Korea) would probably take years and years of negotiation.
This is one good way of letting people know how lucky we are to be living in a free country.
It’s human slavery on a mass scale, because when you don’t have the freedom to leave your country and you have to live under such oppression then what are you? In a novel I read, North Korea was finally defeated by a combined strike where the leadership was wiped out, the nuclear bombs disarmed and destroyed, and the artillery cannons knocked out. Sounds thrilling, but would take perfect execution in practice.
Thanks for including my article in your roundup. Great job, many interesting articles linked here.
As for the main topic, I’ve been to China, albeit a while ago. I know we traded comments/dialogue on this before, but I’ll say that we’re each lucky to be living in the country that we do (U.S and Canada). I thoroughly enjoyed my trip there as an educational and cultural experience, as I was a high school kid and got to see China for 3 weeks.
That said, I felt so lucky to be at home in the U.S. when I got back. For all of our developmental areas, we’re a much better place, however, when it comes to human rights.
Yes, this is for the most part true, but then you see things like this and have to go WTF: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riboisae0JY
Some say that Bin Laden’s real mission was to watch us destroy each other, and sometimes I fear that we may be proving him right. I’m sure that’s the last thing that anyone would want to do, so we must always be on guard against the wolves that would deprive us of our freedom.