As an armchair historian, I often wonder how our times will be looked upon in fifty or sixty years. Our society has gotten pretty good at second-guessing the leaders of previous generations. Of course, we have the advantage of seeing the results of bad decisions. But some of the decisions made in the first half of the twentieth century and before had to seem pretty bad even when they were taken; time has only made them seem worse.
The Holocaust is a good example of what I'm talking about. We now know that the Allies knew about the concentration camps fairly early in the war and even had aerial photographs of most of them. Jewish leaders now wonder why they were not bombed. This seems like a brutal choice, but it may have slowed the brutality going on inside the camps. Even severed rail lines going to these areas would've made a difference. But nothing was done, mainly because the camps were full of civilians. Had the war gone badly for the Allies, Germany could've gotten great mileage from stories of innocent Jews killed by American and British pilots.
Fifty years from now, our generation will be asked why we did nothing about North Korea. For most Americans and Europeans, North Korea is the last dim Stalinist dictatorship run by a small group hardcore elites who may or may not have a few nuclear weapons. If it were only that simple. When North Korea collapses under the weight of famine and corruption or is liberated, the world will have on its hands the worst humanitarian crisis in living memory.
You don't know more about North Korea because it's almost impossible to find accurate information about the place. An extensive Google search will return two types of information: dry summaries of the country, gleaned from information that is a decade old, or personal journals from the few European and Asian tourists who visit there each year (Americans are universally denied access). The official summaries are vague; the personal journals are anecdotal. But three things are clear: North Korea is starving, her leadership is growing increasingly desperate and things are not going to get any better without a radical change.
As I mentioned above, I believe that one of two things will happen in the country. First, it might just fold up on itself. If the leadership in Pyongyang lost control, for whatever reason, of the centrally-controlled mess they have created, the entire country would quickly cease to function. Streams of refugees into China and Russia (there are refugees now, but they are small in number and normally sent back to face life in one of the nation's many Gulags) would tell the outside world that a total collapse had taken place; it would take the help of many nations to feed and clothe 22 million people.
Second, the country might find itself on the wrong end of American military might. I believe this would only occur if the North attempted an invasion of the South (a remote possibility, in my opinion) or if the North sold a nuclear weapon to someone who used it on American soil. There will be not a first strike against North Korea as there was against Iraq; there are too many lives at stake, both Korean and American.
No matter what happens, it will happen sooner rather than later. Our response will echo through the ages and reflect upon us as surely as the Second World War reflected upon the Greatest Generation. There will be no room for half-measures; timidity is what divided the Korean peninsula in the first place. It just goes to demonstrate that peace is not the absence of war; peace is the absence of fear and the presence of justice.
Posted by Matthew at February 5, 2004 12:52 AM