Should western nations send aid to North Korea to help them recover from natural disasters?

No

1 of 5

by James Coles

Write now Print Invite a writer™ Add to Favorites RSS Feed Contact this writer

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is anything but democratic...nor is it a republic...the DPRK is a failed, vile, feudal fiefdom wholly created by Joseph Stalin; nurtured by Mao Tse Tung (old spelling) and dominated by the Kim Ruling Clique. Neither Stalin, nor Mao nor the patriarch of the Kim clan; Kim Il Sung, cared a whit about the people in that unfortunate area of Northeast Asia. Their concerns were spreading radical international socialism along with building and perpetuating their personal power.

While sending aid to the people of north Korea feels good on a personal level, and looks good at the national political level sending aid is the worst thing individuals and nations can do for the people imprisoned in "Gulag Koryo." (Koryo is the official DPRK name for the northern portion of the Korean Peninsula...and would have been extended to include the entire peninsula had the elder Kim's dream of conquest been completed.)

I write from personal experience, from personal knowledge of the Koreas and from many interactions with north Korean officials during nearly a decade of working with US Forces in Korea and the UN's Korean Armistice Agreement organization. I've traveled, as much as a foreign government official may travel, in the north. I've seen this terror state up close and what I saw is not pretty.

Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader, took frequent trips around his fiefdom; each heralded by the state propaganda organ Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) as a great and popular success. The Great Leader's coming to any town or province was a big deal. Grimy, rundown villages would get a fresh coat of paint, gaping holes in the roads would be filled, the Korean People's Army (KPA) would truck in more food for the visit than the villagers would normally see in a year. And then the Great Leader would arrive, inspect a collective farm or pig production facility or some other state-owned operation...and he would give 'on the spot correction' instructions which KCNA would hail as 'the thoughts of the great genius, Comrade Kim il Sung, the Great Leader."

But in truth, north Korea was the last place on Earth where radical socialism should ever have existed. The Northern part of Korea is mostly semi-arid mountains with little viable agricultural land. Pyongyang, even during the brutal decades of Japanese colonial occupation, was a thriving industrial center; fed by grains and other food products grown in the agricultural South. The few successful farming operations in the North were privately owned and because arable land was scarce and the southern model of the micro-farm didn't work well there, those farms were generally large by Korean standards - up to about 20 acres in size. The people who owned and worked those farms invested all of their energies in making the farm profitable.

Soviet-st yle collective farming was inherently inefficient, and since pride of ownership did not exist on those collectives, farm production was low...Workers assigned to collective farms soon learned that to do more than was required was futile - and often rewarded by the farm overseers with suspicion of the worker's motives, punishments and even 're-education' in some desperate prison. Such was the case in north Korea. After the peninsula's division into a Soviet satellite state in the North and the American-backed capitalist South, the Soviets sent thousands of advisers into the North where all private lands, businesses and industries were confiscated by the state and turned into collectives.

But far from making life better for the 20-plus million captives of the then-burgeoning Soviet Empire, life became harder...food more scarce...health care, which was already primitive, became simply unavailable to the common person. Only active members of the Communist Party who were personally loyal to the Kim Ruling Clique ate regularly, had amenities or were able to see a doctor when ill or injured. Only the heavy industries and KPA sectors prospered; and eventually, even those sectors failed.

Misery, shared misery, sacrifices made for the state, were and are the rule.

Meanwhile, the South, broken and blown to rubble during the Korean War, began to rebuild...the people worked hard because they saw that life for them - and especially their children - would get better...and it has: today, South Korea's economy is more than 20 times that of the North. The north Korean subject today is on-average, four inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter than his Korean War grandparent while South Koreans are now the tallest, strongest and healthiest people in Asia.

But was it 'natural disasters' that led to the abject failure of north Korean Communism?

No. Absolutely not. It was the excesses of the Kim Ruling Clique that led to the failure of the state and of Korean Communism. The emphasis on developing heavy industries that produced barter goods for trade within the Soviet Empire at the expense of such elemental infrastructure as farm roads, water control systems, dikes, roads, container ports, a national electrical grid and sufficient power generating facilities; such as hospitals and community clinics and efficient food production-processin g-distribution systems led to the disasters of the mid-90s for which the ruling clique was totally unprepared and from which the state has not - and cannot - recovered.

The rains and storms of 1994-95 that wiped out north Korea's grain harvests also hit the South but the South had no such calamitous outcome from the storms because private land owners in the South had built and maintained water control infrastructures that contained most of the flood waters; and while people died and property was lost to the floods, the South was able to recover and home-grown foods were never in short supply. The North was devastated due to the sloth and avarice of the Kim Ruling Clique...the South prospered because South Korean capitalist system has moved that nation from a devastated and impoverished back-water corner of the world to the planet's seventh-largest economy - in just over 50 years.

I have also personally seen that food and medical products provided gratis to the DPRK by the US, the UN, international charitable agencies, and private groups is often diverted from its intended recipients and used to supplement the KPA's meager rations - or worse, stolen en-mass by feudal provincial officials and sold in the DPRK's many unofficial 'private' markets...for the private gain of corrupt, brutal officials who have demonstrated continuing willingness to use the people's misery for political and personal gain.

Life in north Korea is hard...and harsh and it will remain so as long as kind-hearted individuals, groups and nations inadvertently support and enable the tyrants who who daily terrorize and enslave the 20-million victims of the Kims' nightmare state.

Learn more about this author, James Coles.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.