North Korea actively threatens the use of nuclear weapons, offensively, against its neighbors and enemies. There should be no sympathy for this regime or anyone who collaborates with it.
No sympathy for users of nuclear weapons or any country who threatens its use!
Clearly, you are qualified to comment on world affair. /sarcasm
But, please do soldier on.
Also, the sarcasm is unnecessary.
Also, the one time when they used their nukes offensively that was actually to save lives.
Needless to say only a small number of countries fit that criteria.
United States will not be a “good guy” forever.
That's contradicted by the historical record. US intelligence believed that Japan was ready to surrender. The goal of using the nukes was to intimidate the Soviet Union.
That kind of reductionism doesn't really forward the discussion. The USA is a complex system of interconnected organizations run by constantly churning groups of people. It's a topic that needs to be approached with some level of nuance.
My parents and grandparents would sit and listen to Radio Free Europe at night, at low volume, so the neighbors couldn't hear and turn them in (years later we found out which neighbors told on them, it was.. interesting). That's how people in communist countries heard the truth and why they eventually overthrew their governments.
If you listen to defectors what made a huge difference for them is just seeing normal life in smuggled tv shows and soap operas. Seeing hard evidence for the fact that other people live far better than they do. The government of North Korea tells people they live a great life and everywhere else is miserable.
The problem is that today, the West has a huge disinformation problem. News networks like Fox routinely lie, politicians like Trump convince their people of things that are obviously false, etc. The truth simply doesn't play as much of a role.
Russia learned this lesson too. There are fervent pro-Putin supporters out there now. This wasn't the case under communism. People generally understood that the system was garbage.
Citation needed. NK nuclear policy is No Preemption understood to be borderline No First Use. Until last month when Japan and South Korea were threatening base strike capabilities in which case NK turned into only retaliation strikes against military targets if attacked first.
If those citizens are no longer beholden to the regime for their economic livelihood and that encourages internal organisation as well as more people seeing they have other options, sooner or later that's going to have a corrosive effect on state control of the economic affairs of North Korean citizens.
Frankly the US should be all over encouraging this activity, but given how stupid they have been for all modern history I can't say I'm surprised they're not.
Time and again we do business with evil regimes and pretend it might result in some good. It doesn't. It won't. Let's not keep repeating the same failed experiment.
I absolutely agree with you that trade with dystopian hellholes that provide economic resources the rulers of those dystopian hellholes can use to continue with their strategies is counter-productive and that all trade of that kind should to the maximum degree possible, be stopped.
The kind of trade however that is enabled by peer to peer participants all over the world being directly able to trade with each other for goods and services to the extent the rulers of those dystopian hellholes cannot profit from is another thing entirely, and that is the kind of trade that blockchains can enable. That black market trade sets up competitive and progressively independent organisational units not beholden to the dystopian rulers they would otherwise be and directly compromises their economic power.
Ask a soldier in the Venezuelan army what he thinks of the regime, and then ask a Venezuelan software engineer with the skills and experience in demand that would enable him to work remotely for dozens of well paid jobs transacting in crypto all over the world the same question. I guarantee the responses you get will illustrate my point very clearly.
So far, the track record of “cut off all interactions with the country until they instate the government we want” doesn’t have a good track record. Iran, Cuba, and North Korea are still doing the same thing they were doing 50 years ago. Thinking another 50 years will change things is insanity. Let’s stop continuing this obviously failed experiment.
Sanctions are potentially effective in the short term. Once they reach the scale of entire human lifespans, you’re just making the people suffer for your own moral superiority.
Look at Ukraine today. People are fighting for their lives while Russians slaughter women and children and throw their dead bodies into wells. That's what the Merkel-Steinmeier approach gives you.
Giving a regime like this money makes the regime more powerful, not less.
> Frankly the US should be all over encouraging this activity, but given how stupid they have been for all modern history I can't say I'm surprised they're not.
The US had been warning Germany to stop its dependence on Russian gas for a decade.
The idea that we should trade with these kinds of regimes is very clearly refuted at this point.
If they can't police it effectively all the more reason for more people to do it.
At the same time the US encircled Russia with bases, weapons and nukes. At the same time the US bombed Russian allied states.
Bitcoin can’t stop anyone from knocking down your door and taking your belongings. It doesn’t work without access to communication technology. It doesn’t do anything to circumvent barriers to trade in the physical world. Trade requires two transfers. And, you can’t eat a bitcoin.
The only people in NK who have the ability to use bitcoin in trade are the political elite.
This is getting to be a real problem as 21st-century history continues to unfold.
We would invade and topple the government if they didn't have those pesky nukes.
The government needs to be toppled because they are developing nukes and we don't want them to.
The Korean War saw about 1.5 million civlian deaths, according to [1]. It's impossible to say how many died in the 1994-1998 famine alone, but [2] puts it at "240,000 to 3.5 million" and [3] cites figures of "up to 3 million."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine
[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/how-kim...
So, no. There are worse things than war. For allowing this situation to fester for multiple generations, history will judge us the way we talk about the "good Germans" who didn't lay a hand on anyone but who also did nothing to stop Hitler.
You're correct, though, in that the North Korean nuclear program is now an ideal excuse for continuing to do what we did before, which was nothing.