April 25, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:13
3663 The Horrible Truth About North Korea | Michael Malice and Stefan Molyneux
The possibility of a United States led conflict with North Korea has put a spotlight on the shocking history of the “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong-un and the DPRK: Democratic People's Republic of Korea. With hundreds of thousands estimated to be held in concentration camps, rampant starvation, endless threats of violence and cradle to grave propaganda, the North Korean people are living the equivalent of hell on earth. Michael Malice is a writer, television commentator, and the author of “Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il.” Website:: http://www.michaelmalice.comBook: http://www.kimjongilbook.comFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/michaelmaliceTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/michaelmaliceYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
We are very, very pleased to get post-doctor Carlson, Michael Malice, who is a writer, television commentator, and the author of Dear Reader, the Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong-il.
Please check out his website at michaelmalice.com.
You can get this great book, kimjongilbook.com.
Follow him on facebook.com slash michaelmalice and the appropriately named twitter.com also michaelmalice.
We'll put links to all of those below, Mike.
Thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thank you, Stefan.
So, in checking out the news today, three things stood out as being unique.
Number one, of course, there is class divisions in Europe.
Number two, there appears to be unrest in the Middle East.
And number three, well, China and America seem to be having some problems with North Korea.
Absolutely unprecedented.
It's great to see that the news isn't just photocopied with updated fonts.
But now that You have sort of emerged and come forward as, I think, a reasonable expert on the North Korean situation.
Let's ignore the present day completely and let's go deep into the history of North Korea.
Okay, so let's start.
The hermit kingdom, its isolation from the world, until it wasn't isolated from the world, at which point it seems to desperately want to become isolated from the world again.
Let's start from the earliest stuff that we can get our hands on.
Well, according to them, North Korea was the first country on Earth, the first government on Earth, and was the first language spoken.
So they have a very strong mythology going back to the beginning of time.
So they have their own creation myth.
North Korea was a Japanese colony before World War II. And again, this isn't the present-day Japanese.
These are the people who sat down with Hitler and said, I like what you're saying, and I like how you're saying it.
Let's be best friends.
So they desperately tried to wipe out Korean-ness as a culture.
They made everyone take Japanese names.
They tried to ban the speaking of the Korean language.
And Korea is very nationalist, something that very much continues to this day.
And this rubbed them the wrong way.
Now, after World War II, of course, Korea was divided by the USSR to the north, America to the south.
But according to their mythology, it was the great leader Kim Il-sung who liberated Korea from the, quote-unquote, Jap bastards.
By driving them out and freeing the country pretty much single-handedly.
And then, of course, you had two competing governments.
You had Kim Il-sung in the North and U.S.-installed kind of strongmen, Sigmund Rhee in the South, each claiming that they were the official government of the whole Korean Peninsula.
Kim Il-sung launched the Korean War.
But they are told, and this is the title of one of their books in North Korea, the U.S. imperialists started the Korean War.
And they always refer to us as the U.S. imperialists.
So...
When refugees discover that Kim Il-sung started the Korean War, it's been described as akin to discovering that FDR bombed the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.
It's basically the basis of all their ideology.
So let's talk a little bit about this Japanese conquest and running 1910, if I remember rightly, through to the end of the Second World War.
Right.
It was a brutal, brutal, brutal occupation.
You know, I mean, yours actually is the first book I've read with the most oft-repeated phrase, Jap Bastards, outside of my guest childhood World War II comics.
But it was brutal.
And so some of the sort of stuff that's in your book, that millions of young Koreans, the young labor force, was taken away.
What was actually physically removed, there was a sort of cultural genocide in place, a destruction of the language, the history, the religion, Shinto from Japan was imported, and the comfort wives.
I wonder if you could just help people get a sense of what it was like in Korea between 1910 and the post-Second World War period, and just how much, what a brutal occupation it really was.
Yeah, it's funny because when people in America and the West complain about colonialism, this is colonialism at its absolute worst.
I mean, the Japanese boasted that you have to have women to rape in order to keep your soldiers strong and things like this.
And they really had all this propaganda that basically said Korea is Japan's little brother.
And the idea that you're just basically an appendage to us.
And they treated them accordingly.
Now, the one thing they did, as happens with colonialism, is that they built infrastructure, which has been maintained to this day.
The North Korean government hasn't been able to really improve on the railways and so on and so forth.
But by all accounts, I mean, there were several series of unrests, you know, where the people tried to revolt.
And they were put down with absolute barbaric cruelty.
And according to, you know, the propaganda, that's because they didn't have a good leader.
And it's only when the great leader Kim Il-sung emerged A revolution without a leader is like a body without a head.
It was Kim Il-sung who carried the revolution through to fruition.
People forget just how loath the Japanese were and often remain to this day in Asia.
And in fact, when I went to North Korea, the way I kind of gained currency with my guides is I took every racist joke I knew and replaced the punchline with Japanese.
Like, how do you keep a Japanese man from drowning?
Take your foot off his neck, right?
What do you call 100 Japanese at the bottom of the ocean?
A good start, right.
I actually told that one, right.
So they were in hysterics.
And the reason the phrase Jap bastards recurs so frequently in my book, I adapted my book from their propaganda.
They will never say Japanese.
So it'll be a matter of fact accounting of history.
And they'll be like, in 1945, the Jap bastards.
And it's very jarring because the tone is scholarly.
But since it's a translation, the words that they use to refer to us in the Japanese are always slurs to the point where they don't even realize they're slurs.
Now, going back 151 years, and this is where we need to get to the roots.
Yes.
American assault on Korea took place in 1866.
And for those who, you know, it was kind of funny because when I was reading your book, I, of course, I was aware of a lot of the propagandistic elements.
And then I remembered back to my own childhood being raised up and I was like, okay, so this is the picture they're getting.
I wonder how much of, and this has been a whole journey of sort of my life.
I wonder how much of this, like if they read our history, they'd be like, oh, I can see that propaganda clear as day.
So let's start with 1866.
What the hell was America doing in Korea 151 years ago?
Please explain this to me.
That's what also is so fascinating.
Like a lot of times when they had a story in their literature, I'm like, all right, let me understand what the real truth is.
And a lot of times it was verbatim the truth.
And it's just mind boggling.
They claim, and this is true.
In 1866, we sent USS General Sherman, who were the first, I believe, Western country to make contact with Korea, and visited Pyongyang.
And Pyongyang and Korea, even then, was extremely xenophobic.
The term hermit came in precedes, you know, the Kim dynasty.
They killed everyone on board and sank the ship to the bottom of the Taedong River.
And they claim, of course, that the people who do this were the direct ancestors of the great leader Kim Il-sung, which has no historical basis.
And so their point is, we've been biding our time since the 1860s to come there and conquer Korea since it's a peninsula.
It's the perfect place to have a beachhead for our attempt to conquer Asia.
So we go forward a couple of decades.
We got the Spanish-American War in 1898.
And then after winning, the U.S. got Spain's control of the Philippines.
And then, you know, according to the North Koreans, the U.S. imperialists finally got their long-sought foothold into Asia.
And in 1905, the Americans secretly met with the aforementioned Jap bastards.
Oh, I can't wait for people to meme this and take this out of context.
And they produced this Taft-Katsura agreement.
So let's help people understand how far back skepticism towards American foreign policy benevolence goes in Japan.
What was the deal with this agreement?
Yeah, I mean, there's this whole thing how America does this very frequently that we will – well, not very frequently, to be fair, but any country.
You'll have an agreement that we'll have your defense if someone comes along.
But as soon as that someone comes along and that person is more important to your national interest – That agreement gets thrown into the garbage.
And how are you going to enforce it?
You're not really going to have the power.
So Korea very much back then was a powerless province of Japan.
They recognized themselves as such.
And this is something that they resent.
And this is something that feeds into their contemporary aggression.
Because now they can say, look, in 1905 we were treated like crap.
And now we're forcing all these major superpowers to dance to our tune.
And they're right.
They have a point.
They do have...
The leverage that they punch very much above their own weight in a contemporary scene.
And this is another, to me, fascinating perspective, so immersed as I was while doing my graduate degree in history, in European history.
And a parallel that you point out in the book is the question of Nazi Germany and its treatment of the Jews versus the Japanese occupation of Korea and how brutal that was.
I mean, the mass enslavement and murder and rape and attempted cultural genocide upon the Koreans.
And this is something I didn't even, until I started reading for this interview, I didn't even really know that much about it.
I had this vague, you know, rape of Nanking, Japanese were cruel occupiers and so on.
But I really associated that most with China.
So give me a sense of the scope and brutality of this occupation and how it seems to have just vanished from world history.
or at least Western history. - This is something that they resent.
South Koreans as well very much regard themselves as This powerful, influential minority, and they're proud of that, and they're entrepreneurial.
And it drives them crazy.
I mean, they really have a lot of resentment about World War II, because jumping ahead a little bit, one of the points they make, which is fair, is like, look, Korea was not a combatant in World War II. The only two countries that were separated were Germany and Korea.
And why is that?
That makes, from their perspective, that's completely unfair and makes no sense.
And there's something to that as well.
So their whole point is like, look, the West is obsessed with I mean, it's absurd.
Well, I mean, clearly the solution is to get more Koreans into Hollywood.
I think that would really help the whole situation.
So let's jump forward a little bit, and I'll give you sort of my former understanding of the Korean War, which is, of course, one of the things that sets the stage for the truly brutal division.
Of the country on the 48th parallel.
And my sort of standard understanding of it was, okay, well, you had these crazy expansionist, nasty totalitarian communists who wanted to take over the world and impose class divisions and brutal dictatorships on the entire planet.
And one of the places that they did try and make this occur was in North Korea.
And so what happened was North Korea invaded South Korea.
They got 90% of the land mass, and then they were pushed back because the Allies were I took off the supply route, and then there were also this crazy bombing, which, you know, killed millions of people in North Korea.
And then it kind of settled down to this World War I trench-style skirmishing, and eventually everyone just kind of petered out with interest and energy.
There was never a peace treaty, and America, in order to protect against any communist infiltrations into the South, has like, what, 50,000 troops?
Massive, massive regular guns.
Like, there's not a huge nuclear presence there, except in North Korea, apparently, but there are these huge armaments along the South that are designed to keep the North Koreans back.
So it was part of the domino theory.
It was a pushback.
It was one of the proxy wars against the expansionistic nature of I'm just going to make a little edit.
We actually introduced Korean nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula.
I think it was in the 50s and we removed them in the 90s.
So that's something that they take problem with.
From their perspective, we had our beachhead and it was basically what really happens obviously the US and the Soviet Union divide the spoils of war and the Russians got certain areas and we got certain areas and Korea was the one to split the difference.
And from what is told historically, this might be apocryphal, that the Americans basically took a map of the Korean Peninsula, they wanted Seoul, which was the capital, and they drew a line directly north of it.
They said, okay, Russia, you get this, just as long as we get Seoul.
And I'm sorry to interrupt, but why was Korea as a non-combatant in the Second World War?
I mean, why was it even involved in the spoils of war?
Because it was a...
Property of Japan.
So as Russia and the US are dividing up the German properties, so-called, and the Japanese properties, you know, we get their empire and they get part of the empire and it's, you know, just basically looting.
From their perspective, Sigmund Rhee, who we install, they make this criticism and it's fair, that we have a habit of whenever we liberate a country of installing an American kind of strongman who's going to be It's a little tougher to justify a war,
as we can see with the long-term effects of Iraq, when what replaces whoever you took out is much worse than whoever was there before.
It becomes a little tougher to sell the next one.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So, from their perspective, we launched an attack, and the poor, innocent North Koreans, you know, were taken by surprise, but because the great leader Kim Il-sung is so strong, they drove us back, and then we lied to the UN, supposedly, and we got in all these UN forces, and they're so nationalist.
You know, they basically, at a certain point, Stalin and Mao ended up helping them, but they're saying, no, It was Korean weapons and Korean strategy, what they call Juche strategy and Juche tactics, that's their ideology.
The Juche idea is what won the war and liberated, they call it the fatherland liberation war, liberated the northern half of the republic from the US imperialists.
And they always have lowercase n and lowercase s because Korea is indivisible.
The south is a region under occupation.
So whenever you look at a map in North Korea, it's always a one Korea unified.
Except at the DMZ where they show the border between the two countries.
But they regard it as one country indivisible.
And, of course, I assume that South Korea wishes to absorb North Korea, and vice versa is true as well.
America, at some point, was actually holding back some material from the Southern Army to keep it from being able to invade the North.
In other words, trying to get a sort of stasis within the region seems to have been the goal of the United States.
Its territorial ambitions were not enormous, but at the same time, it did not want to have...
All of its troops and its influence in the South overrun by the North.
Is it fair to say that the stasis is kind of the goal for a lot of the superpowers in the region?
It's hard to...
I mean, it's kind of dynamic, right?
I think they'll take what they can get, and if they have to settle on a stalemate, they will.
One other thing is, when I was in Pyongyang and they took us to...
That this armistice they signed was such a humiliating defeat for the US imperialists, who had just, you know, defeated the Germans, that they left behind their dossiers and maps.
And those dossiers and maps are actually still on display in North Korea as proof of what cowards we are.
And, of course, once the Korean War had started, I mean, one of the...
Stalemate theories of retaliation would have been to, you know, drive the northern armies back over the 30th parallel and just say, woohoo, we won, you know, we rejected the communist imperialist flood into the south, and especially because the Chinese, who have a pretty significant vested interest in a crazy nuclear dictator on their borders.
The Chinese communists said, we're going to intervene if you go north of the 38th.
And of course, they did.
They were heading towards the Yalu River, towards the Chinese border.
And this seemed to me an extraordinarily risky timing.
You know, I was here about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
But when the American troops were sort of flooding towards the Chinese border, that seemed to be a pretty tense time in world history.
Oh, yes.
And MacArthur's been quoted as saying he wanted to have all these nukes so that certain areas would be uninhabitable, just nuke them to oblivion.
And the other thing is, the Americans had a lot on the line, Truman and so on, because we had just had this resounding moral victory of World War II. Within five to eight years, we're going to have this humiliating stalemate.
It doesn't bode well for the narrative, doesn't tell a good story.
He didn't want to be the guy who won World War II and then lost to Korea.
That's not how you want to end that story.
Now let's talk about this American addiction to air power, which has a lot to do with wanting to draw, I think, the American population into armchair conflicts where there's not a lot of body parts being shipped back in Ziploc bags.
The bombing campaign against North Korea was...
Astonishing.
Truly, the amount of ordnance dropped was almost beyond imagination.
We've got incendiary bombs that are used to turn cities into ash, you know, Dresden-style, Tokyo-style.
You've got napalm being widely used against the population.
Entire cities wiped out.
And then towards the end of the conflict, or at least the end of the open part of the conflict, you've got two irrigation dams.
the main irrigation dams in the north being bombed, you know, flooding, loss of life.
And then, of course, there were floods of refugees coming from the north down into the south that were often treated as enemies, as potential spies, as infiltrators and so on.
And the experience of the north where, you know, we've got the U.S. with 35,000 dead in the Korean War, 3 million dead in North Korea.
That is, again, in a vastly smaller population than the United States.
It's...
What kind of effect do you think that kind of bombing campaign, that kind of napalming citizens, I mean, that literally burns itself into your memory?
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, this is their foundation for what they believe now, and you can't blame them.
Look, the leaders tell them and the propaganda tells them that we did this once, we're going to come back and finish the job.
And this was not that long ago.
So when your country is bombed into oblivion, even if the bombing is defensible, the idea, fool me once, you know, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you kind of thing, or I got that backwards.
They remember the time.
One of the things that they talk about is that the cities were reduced until there were only fireplaces left.
You'd have the chimney stacks.
It was just absolutely horrible because that was the plan.
It's like, look, we can't win.
And at one point, they say that there was nothing left to bomb.
The devastation was that extreme.
So a lot of times when people in the West are like, war is great, and we're going to go in and show them who's the boss, they don't really take two seconds to think of what that actually means in practice.
And what that actually means in practice is vast homelessness, vast death, orphans.
You know, children starving.
It's just a horror show.
Imagine the fear.
What we regard as our strength is the most terrifying thing possible.
That's the goal.
The goal is that these people are sitting there watching these American planes coming in and raiding death and destruction.
Well, those people and their grandchildren aren't going to be looking at us with open arms.
Right.
And, of course, this constant thing that happens throughout history, which is the mistaking of the government for the people, which is occurring now.
Sanctions!
Oh, we'll get to the current affairs in a sec.
But the Koreans, as I'll just talk about the North Koreans, they did not choose...
The Japanese occupation.
They did not choose, in the South, the American occupation.
They did not choose the communist sort of focused and directed government.
They're sort of like leaves in a storm, being blown back and forth by these geopolitical powers, but they're the ones who get disintegrated and burnt en masse.
Yes, and that's the thing.
You know, I was on the Tom Woods Show talking about this, and I said, if I had one wish, it would be that the North Korean government would vanish from the face of the earth and the people would be liberated.
And everyone's like, oh my God, you're advocating war.
I'm like, I'm not advocating war.
I'm an anarchist.
If there's any government you should be opposed to, it's this government which has made its people suffer monstrously for decades.
And the thing is, when you meet refugees and you meet people there, they are desperately trying to live normal lives.
This isn't some kind of weird, you know, Islamist thing where they're covert agents.
They just want to have food.
You know, it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
They want to have education for their kids, a roof over their heads, and food.
This is not something...
These are people who should have our empathy and our sympathy and not be regarded as some kind of villains.
It's terrifying what's been done to them.
Now, when I have talked about North Korea as a sort of communist state, I've heard a bunch of perspectives on it.
They were certainly heavily influenced by Marxism and Leninism, the sort of classic, hate the successful peasants, take over the land of the successful peasants, give it to the unsuccessful peasants, and then wonder why everyone is starving to death.
But it seems to have devolved or evolved.
And it's funny because people say, well, it's not communism anymore.
But there is this habit, tasty little habit that communism has of going from sort of this abstract class conflict and a supposed state that is benevolent to the proletariat to a giant cult of personality nightmare of totalitarianism.
What is the status of the ideology that drives the regime?
How has it evolved from the very beginning when I think it very clearly did have communist elements?
Right.
So the great leader, Kim Il-sung, the first person to be called great leader was Stalin.
So it was very much set up as a Soviet satellite state in every way.
Now, fast forwarding to today, they don't call themselves communists any longer, and their whole premise is, well, Juche, the idea of the great leader, Kim Il-sung, was an improvement on Marxist-Leninism, which was appropriate for its time, but now it's outdated, so we don't have to read those books anymore.
However, they very much have elements that are strongly influenced from Fascism and monarchism.
Mussolini was called the leader, of course, and had that personality cult.
And they are the most homogenous country on Earth, and they are the most xenophobic country on Earth.
I think it's something that, I mean, the number of people who are...
And if women go into China to trade and they're sold in sexual slavery or something like that, and they return back to Korea, they're forced to have abortions because you're not going to mix your blood with Chinese people.
So the other thing is, since communism is not In one sense, you know, to be pedantic, you could say nothing's really communist, right?
But they are actually increasingly accepting the use of markets because in the 90s when there was a famine, which I'm sure we're going to get to in a moment, they had to have black markets to get people food because the government was not providing food any longer.
And that is increasingly a case people are getting fed through trade as opposed to the public distribution center, which has very little rice to provide to the people.
Oh, it's funny.
I mean, just to dip into personal anecdote time, I was in China for business back in the days when I was an entrepreneur.
I was in China for business right after Y2K in 2000.
And I got to tell you, Mike, it was just this incredible thing to go to a market and to haggle, you know, like Byzantine style with a calculator so that we could figure out the price for whatever we wanted.
No tax.
It seemed like no regulations.
I mean, it really did seem like they had embraced and engaged a market in the way that hasn't been seen in the West for like 150 years.
And that to me was an astounding experience.
It was one of my real tastes of a relatively free market.
And the idea growing up as I did with the Cold War that I would first experience this in a communist country.
It was like up is down.
Black is white.
What's happening?
And this is one of the healthiest things that happen in North Korea now, since they are having problems paying for the police and the goons to enforce the law.
Basically, at these black markets, as long as the cop gets a cut, the people are allowed to operate.
So effectively, it works like a tax, and it's this microcosm of capitalism.
And this is what, as you know very well, this is what brought down the Soviet Union as much as other things, where you had housewives who did not have to read Objectivism and And they're watching American television, and they're seeing maids wearing fur coats, and then they're wondering why they're wiping their ass with toilet paper, with newspaper, excuse me.
And it's like, this is not adding up.
And North Korea is seeing the same thing.
They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is all great.
The leader's wonderful.
Why do they have electricity in China and we don't?
Give me a reason.
And there's no reason.
This is why you have to abandon communism and go to the cult of personality, because communism makes all of these promises, you know, these five-year plans and so on.
And first of all, the only way these promises can be achieved is what happened under Lenin, like the NAP men, the new economic policy, where when facing imminent starvation because of so many deaths in collectivized farm scenarios, they have to allow some free market.
And then they have all of these grandiose plans, which always fail to materialize.
So then they have to evolve beyond communism because...
That way they can abandon the promises as well.
You know, this stuff never works.
It's real communism.
This time we're going to get genuine, authentic, real communism.
Like that Dory and the fish in Finding Nemo.
Let's try it again.
I'm sure it'll work this time.
It's going to be great.
Their whole trick was something that they called friendship crisis.
So Kim Il-sung was a genius as a manipulator.
So he was playing China and the Soviet Union against each other.
And instead of getting just flat-out subsidies, what he would do is they would send him, let's suppose, tankers full of oil, and he would send them back socks, which were unwearable.
But because of this barter system, it's like an accounting trick.
You're getting all this money in exchange for nothing, and that propped up their economy very heavily for decades until the early 90s.
Right.
So, let's talk about what happened in the 90s.
You know, one of the things that people need to understand is when the government takes over a particular industry or a configuration that has developed at least according to some market forces – It's sort of like my eyes in my 40s, you know, like I had vision sharp as a hawk and then slowly in my 40s it's like, oh no, I'm slowly going underwater and I have to get my reading glasses and all that now.
When the government takes over a formerly free market influenced environment, it kind of works for a little bit unless, you know, there's this Khmer Rouge style complete force transfer stuff.
And then what happens slowly begins to go out of focus.
You can see this with the healthcare system that gets socialized in Canada.
You know, it worked pretty well for a generation like NASA. You know, they get all these engineers from the free market and then after a while the bureaucratic rot sets in and then you end up with a whole bunch of employees who never tasted the free market and things just get worse and worse.
What was it that provoked one of the, you know, the great ghastly tragedies of the modern world, which was this famine in North Korea?
How did it start and how did it spread to be so terrible?
Well, I tell this story extensively in my book, and it is, as you say very well, it's one of the great tragedies of our time.
So according to their mythology, back during the colonial period, the great leader Kim Il-sung and his guerrilla army were under attack by the Japanese, and they went through something called the Arduous March, which was this long period of time when they're under sniper fire or whatever, and they broke through to where they needed to go, and this was the turning point in liberating Korea from the Jap Bastards.
So in the early 90s, both China and Russia, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, were like, we're not bribing you anymore.
We're not subsidizing you anymore.
If you want trade, you have to have trade.
Well, North Korea was producing nothing of value.
And North Korea is a heavily mountainous region, right?
So if you want to farm in North Korea, you have to have fertilizer.
Well, if you want to have fertilizer...
The factories have to run, and if you want the factories to run, you have to have oil, but they don't really have oil, right?
So this was a perfect inversion of the Lawrence Reed essay, iPencil, where the idea that to create a pencil, you need all these different aspects of the market to work together to produce something of value cheaply.
Well, it was a domino effect, and basically, they could not farm, so they could not produce food.
And if you noticed as a North Korean citizen that there wasn't food, well, that's complaining because the government's providing the food.
So this was illegal and would have had severe consequences for you.
The North Korean government, in their brilliance, launched a campaign that was called Let's Eat Two Meals a Day Instead of Three.
So the argument was, you're better off having less food because having three meals a day is unhealthy.
And things got worse and worse and worse.
And eventually, the UN started to come in for help.
And what they did is, they made it, you were not allowed to visit if you spoke Korean, or, you know, had any kind of Korean background.
So the UN would come to one town, and they would show them the healthy people.
And then the next day, they take them to another town.
The third day, they would take them back to the first town.
And they'd go, we were just here Monday.
They go, no, you weren't.
What are you going to argue with them?
So Kim Jong-il, who took over in 1994, specifically said, if we allow outside food in, then the government will be superfluous.
So he chose to starve his people to maintain his hold on power.
That is a very common scenario and goes back to the oft-quoted Stalin phrase that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.
And it's kind of struck me that crony capitalism leads to obesity, but full-on socialism and communism leads to this kind of starvation.
We see this in Venezuela, where recently it's been revealed the average Venezuelan has lost 17 pounds on the diet called central planning.
And the amount of malnutrition that's going on in North Korea is, again, hard to understand, despite being genetically the same as the South Koreans.
They're four inches shorter.
Four inches shorter in North Korea.
Not the tallest population to begin with.
It's not like the towering giraffe Danes.
And they've lost four inches just as a result of malnutrition.
What this has done to the general cognitive abilities or other capacities for them to basically survive is hard to guess, but not good.
Well, not only that, with the lack of electricity due to the lack of gasoline, they had all sorts of septic issues.
You had backflowing from the sewers and that spread disease.
They even had polio come back at one point.
So this was Atlas Shrugged.
In reality, you have the complete collapse of the government and yet the complete control of the government at the same time.
And people are trapped between the law and their needs for survival.
And It was like being put in a meat grinder.
The stories you hear of these refugees and what they have to win.
The thing is, also, North Korea, you can't acknowledge anything's wrong.
So everyone's starving around you, but you're not going to call 911.
You can't email someone in Canada or the U.S. saying, hey, send food.
Your entire world is a bubble, and you have to watch everyone around you slowly die.
It's mind-boggling, and thankfully, you and I will never be able to understand what that's really like.
Let's keep our fingers crossed.
And this understanding that the North Koreans are hostages to a power-mad dictator is something really important to understand.
Let's talk about sanctions as the sort of knee-jerk response to a perceived compliance, a lack of compliance with international sanctions.
Norms, we're going to slap on sanctions because we don't want to do war, but we've got to be seen to be doing something because we're the world's policeman or whatever.
Let's talk about sanctions.
And I've been making this case since South Africa in the 1980s, so I'm a bit of a broken record.
You take it away, brother.
Tell me about sanctions and what effect it has on the local population.
Who is helpless to affect change within their society?
Right.
So let's talk a little bit about how – Ayn Rand, and I'm going to misquote her – There's a line in Atlas Shrug that says, mistakes of this kind are not made innocently.
It takes a lot of conniving and strategy to have this effect of total control of the North Korean population.
And everyone always says, like, why don't they just revolt?
Why don't they just revolt?
You know, like, well, why don't Americans just revolt, right?
Here's one of the things that they have in North Korea.
Everyone is slotted into some group.
Your neighborhood, your school, your office, something like that.
Once a week, your group has to get together, and you have to get up and say, this is what I did wrong this week.
And then your colleagues or neighbors or schoolmates have to say, I saw Stefan doing, he came in late or he broke a pencil.
Now, how are you supposed to plot a revolution if everyone around you, your closest associates, are watching you at all times and they better have something to report that meeting?
So the idea that you could have some kind of mass communication, there's a saying in North Korea that even the walls have ears, you know, that it's...
It's a complete—and Kim Jong-il, you know, as I talk about in my book, regarded spare time as a problem because it led to selfishness and all sorts of decadence.
So the idea of revolution, like, yeah, the army has guns, you want to fight them and you're starving— You're really going to get any progress there?
It's absurd.
And the thing also with North Korea is they have family punishment.
So if you do something wrong, three generations of your family are punished for it.
So everyone is a hostage to each other as well.
So the idea that we can have a revolution is crazy.
Having sanctions just means less resources in the country to distribute.
And of course, the first people who are going to get a bite of that apple is going to be the regime.
I mean, of course they're going to be...
And Kim Jong-il's improvement on the great leader Kim Il-sung's jutsu idea is something called sangban, which means military first, which means the military eats first.
So, you know, if you have any sanctions, it's like cigarette taxes.
The people who are getting hurt are going to be the poorest.
Right.
Right.
Although basic nutrition is slightly more important to people's survival than nicotine.
But yeah, the point is very well made.
And this is something that people really need to understand that North Korea, I think, can be fairly characterized as an open-air prison with, what, $25 million?
Yes.
That it is a giant open-air prison.
There's more explicit prison, which is the ever-growing series of concentration camps and gulags that infest the neighborhood, but everybody's born into a prison, and it is virtually impossible for legally unarmed citizens to take on a modern military.
You know, it's one thing that the American revolutionaries hiding in the woods with the British, and muskets were muskets, and there was no air power, and there were no weapons of mass destruction, no bioweapons, 3,000 miles away was where the king was and the lines of communication were really slow and the level of commitment to control the colonies was not very high and there was resistance in England to having all of these colonies.
It's a very, very different situation now when you're facing down a guy who's got nukes and you've got a stick.
I mean, come on.
This is not something that people would be willing to take on in North Korea with any chance of survival.
And again, people who fled the country, they will go and find distant relatives who don't even know they're related to the guy.
They don't even know they're related to the guy.
They drag them and throw them in a concentration camp.
Why?
Because your third cousin twice removed left the country.
You didn't even know he existed, but you're going to get punished anyway.
That is astonishing.
How many people would pay their taxes if every time they didn't, how many more people would pay their taxes if every time they didn't, three generations were all dragged off to prison?
That is not something we can expect.
And there's two more points, one of which is if you're a diplomat or somehow represent the North Korean government and are allowed to lead the country, you have to have family members back there who are going to be kept as hostages to make sure you don't defect.
And I'm going to tell a story of, I'm sure you and I agree that academics are probably the lowest form of life in many senses.
And this is probably the worst of all of them.
There was an academic in South Korea.
He was an economist.
And North Korea, at some point, was very much trying to get him to defect.
And his wife is saying, this is not a good idea.
These are not good people.
It's not some worker's paradise.
You don't know what you're talking about.
I'm an economics professor.
I'm a genius, right?
They go to North Korea.
As soon as they arrive, they say, wait a minute, this is disgusting and dirty, and this is hardly some kind of galt's gulch.
They put him to work in the countryside.
As a farmer, his wife and kid love that, of course.
He works his way up the hierarchy, and he's eventually given a respectful position.
When he's abroad, he defects.
And he was asked in an interview, what happened to your family back home?
He's like, I don't know.
Bullshit.
You know exactly what happened to them, and they are suffering because of you and your dim-witted arrogance.
And if I saw this man, I don't know what I would do to him myself.
Right.
Okay, so what was the death count?
I know it's always tough to know with any degree of real accuracy, Mike, but what was the death count of the starvation in the 90s in North Korea?
It's considered to be one to two million.
It's mind-boggling.
Astonishing.
And I mean, that is a very, very unpleasant way to die.
And unnecessary.
This is what people don't understand about North Korea.
It's not like some country where everyone has this ideology and they're like, blah, blah, blah.
The government refused to allow food to these people.
The UN left because, like, the UN! You know, that crazy right-wing organization.
They're like, we can't work with these people.
We can't help them.
So, this knife edge that it seems sometimes world peace is balanced on regarding North Korea.
I mean, I'm like yourself.
Stateless society is the way to go in the long run.
But I'm telling you, I have this Boromir-like fascination with regime change in North Korea.
My heart goes out to this 25 million people stuck with 140th the productivity of South Korea.
I mean, this is another one of these experiments in economic systems, right?
South Korea, relatively free market.
North Korea, communist or post-communist totalitarian cult of personality dictatorship.
Yes.
And South Korea has 40 times the productivity.
I'm sure it's even higher because there's official statistics you're relying on in North Korea.
But many, many times.
And there's that famous picture, I've heard it argued both ways, that famous picture from space of North Korea, dark and medieval in certain ways.
So like East and West Berlin, like East and West Germany, there's this microcosm of a variety of economic systems and how different the outcomes can be.
Yes.
So for me, if there was a way to, as you point out, if you could snap your fingers and have your wish that one government could be at least repealed, replaced by something more free or something completely free, that is my great temptation.
But, of course, I understand that once you release those devils from Pantora's box, they tend to do a huge amount of harm and massive negative outcomes can come from even the very best intentions.
So let's talk about some of the challenges of either regime change or military action against North Korea, which seems to be gathering like the storm clouds in the south described in your book by the young King, King Jong Il.
Well, they've been taught since birth that we are coming together.
You know, there's this one story I read in this refugee's memoir.
Where this fat party official went to the elementary school and all the kids started beating him up because fat people are Americans.
So even though he was Korean, they just assumed he was.
They're not wrong entirely.
So, they have been taught since kindergarten that the U.S. Imperials are going to come here.
We're going to kill you all.
They have to, you know, kids have jobs where they have to go to school at night and look under desks for American spies.
Which they did.
I just want to remind people, they did kill millions of North Koreans with bombing raids.
So, this is not like some paranoid fantasy.
This is within living memory.
70 years plus, I mean, this is within living memory that millions of North Koreans were wiped out by American bombing.
So, I just wanted to point that out.
And in the 90s, when the famine hit, that's supposedly our fault too.
That's not that long ago.
You were hungry because we weren't letting food into the country.
And how would they know differently?
So the kids have to stand outside the grand people's study hall at night in thin winter coats waiting for spies, all this other stuff.
I'm sure the North Korean news media right now is 24-7.
Well, they don't have the news 24-7 because they have electricity, but as close to that as they can, showing the footage of the planes and the carriers coming there, showing the clips of us saying the time for talk is over, that this is going to change.
I mean, no matter what country you're in, if you have the U.S. president and vice president saying all options are on the table and we're done talking, that is personally scary.
And it is meant to be personally scary.
So the dangers are this.
They have spent, you know, Pyongyang has the deepest natural in the world.
A huge part of their infrastructure is subterranean.
They have been waiting for 60 years and, you know, having bunkers and backing things up in anticipation of a U.S. attack.
Kim Jong Il boasted that he turned North Korea into a hedgehog, by which he means something with spines in every direction that can't be attacked by a larger animal.
So, these people have been taught to live with the spirit of the bullet and the bomb, to lay down their lives to the leader.
Maybe they don't believe that they're God increasingly cynical.
That said, if you have an invading force of any kind, the idea that you're going to be like, just shoot me and this is going to be fine, is not psychologically valid.
Well, and you have Seoul within a few minutes of nuclear-tipped missiles, right?
You have an incredible potential carnage if it's not some surgical...
Please, I'm not recommending anything.
We're just sort of exploring options here because that's certainly not my wheelhouse, but...
If it's not some instant headshot, some instant decapitation scenario where you have removed the powers that be, if somebody can get to the missiles, I'm certain that if the leadership in North Korea is facing its imminent demise, and it would be, of course.
I mean, they would be tried for war crimes and all that.
Then they would, I think, that they would try and go out in a truly hellish and radioactive blaze of glory, which could cause the deaths of millions.
And I think that's, of course, one of the reasons why the stalemate has endured for so long.
And it's another reason why, of course, they refuse to disarm, right?
I mean, Kim Jong-un.
The leader there has, of course, seen what happened to Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein and other US, quote, allies.
This is how the US treats its former friends when they disarm, is to just go in and take them out.
Of course, that's what Americans feel like when the government says, don't worry, give up your guns, we'll take care of you.
They're like, no, no, no.
So they do want to, of course, get more and more weaponry, because I think it's fairly safe to say that this mutually assured destruction in the region is one of the main reasons why this uneasy peace has been kept so long.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the big one for them is, by the way, anyone who's a libertarian of any kind or a lover of liberty, look this up online.
One of the worst of the communist leaders was Ceausescu of Romania, and he was very heavily inspired by the great leader Kim Il-sung.
And there's footage of him giving a speech, and for the first time in his decades-long despotism, the crowd starts to boo.
And you see the look on his face where he turns and he realizes, wait a minute, something's wrong.
And he was shot, put on trial and shot days later.
Kim Jong Il took that footage.
He showed it to all the leading party cadres every single day.
And he said, look, this is what will happen to you personally.
And he did this.
If the masses revolt, you will all be personally killed.
And he's right.
And these people should be shot with good reason.
In fact, the reason Kim Jong-un is in charge, instead of his eldest brother, Kim Jong-nam, who was just recently killed, was because Kim Jong-nam was anti-nukes and was an environmentalist.
And he told this to his father, Kim Jong-il.
And Kim Jong-il thought, you are a crazy person.
If you denuclearize, we're done for.
And your youngest brother is going to stay the course.
And that's exactly what happened.
This idea that this can all somehow be dumped in China's lap is also very, very tempting.
But my read on it, I'm sort of curious what you say, but my read on it is that China has for decades paid this kind of obsequious lip service.
Oh, we're going to cooperate with the US? We're going to cooperate with the international community?
But it really is more words than actions.
They don't actually do much to apply any significant pressure on North Korea.
I'm guessing, again, having a crazy Pillsbury Doughboy lunatic guy with the Elvis hair with nuclear-tipped missiles right on your border is kind of like, okay, we'll let sleeping dogs lie.
Nothing's happening right now.
Because the escalation and death count that could occur, and again, this is like...
Generations of radiation and it flows forward into the future, as we can see with Vietnamese, with the people who've still got massive birth defects in Vietnam as a result of Agent Orange still continue to this day, elevated risks of cancer.
I mean, it is a huge spear forward into the future destruction.
I mean, it's not like, well, we finished World War II, let's just clean up and build up.
I mean, this stuff sticks around like syphilis.
And so, you know, I don't think that China is going to have any particular incentive to go and poke this crazy bear because the positive outcomes are, well, okay, you're going to liberate a bunch of other people.
Your cell phones will probably improve more quickly.
But on the downside, the death count could be well north of the millions.
And this kind of shock to world peace would be very, very hard for the powers to recover from.
Well, there's a couple of points there, because it's a little bit more nuanced than that.
In the 1970s, in Pyongyang, they pulled up a seven-story gold-plated statue of the great leader Kim Il-sung, and the Chinese president at the time said, you know, we're communists, maybe seven-story gold-plated idols of our leaders is not what we're about, so they changed it to bronze.
That's what we call compromise in the commie world.
Right.
But the other thing where they did turn their backs on North Korea is North Korea was fighting for a very long time to not allow North and South Korea to be entered into the UN as separate countries.
And China had their back.
And then at one point, China's like, forget this.
We're going to trade with South Korea.
And both countries, North Korea grudgingly, entered the UN as their own entities because this was a big step towards permanent disunity.
However, I think the thing with China is they are trying to be a world power that rivals the U.S., And you have to have the appearance of dignity and decorum.
And it's very hard to be that person on the world stage and to be defending these antics.
I don't even mean the concentration camps.
I just mean threatening people with nukes.
China is not about that nowadays.
They're trying to be dignified and our peer, if not our superior.
So this is something like, why do they want to carry the baggage for this kind of insane backwards regime?
But at the same time, China doesn't want 24 million people who are completely uneducated, who don't speak Chinese, crossing the Tumen River and setting up camp in Manchuria.
And you can't blame them either.
Well, this is an important point as well, of course, that as you've pointed out, the boundary between North and South Korea is like the most heavily militarized and defended border in the world.
Quick question.
Does it work to actually militarize your border?
Does it work in terms of keeping people from going from one place to another?
I just want to – that seems like that could be relevant to some other context that slips my mind at the moment.
But does it actually work?
Let me make a point.
It's actually a funny story.
When we were in North Korea, they claimed that we built a wall separating the two countries north of the DMZ or south of it.
I remember which one it was.
And they have this little look at a telescope to look at it.
And you couldn't see anything.
You see like, is that a road?
And their point is it's only visible from the north, and this is part of our plan to keep the Korea separate forever.
And I got the brochure about the invisible wall.
Wait a minute.
Hang on a sec.
Let me see if I understand this correctly.
Are they claiming that the South has this, like, Wile E. Coyote Roadrunner invisibility paint that they're able to coat so that you run and think you're straight into...
Really?
This is like...
That's old folks' territory.
We built it, like, I think the argument is that we built it flush with the mountainside, so it's only visible from one side, but yes, it's only visible from the north, and it's this secret wall that we built, that we and South Korea deny exists, whereas we don't deny that DMZ is, you know, is absolutely, they're going to have landmines there for generations to uncover, it's just absolutely crazy.
Right.
But it does work in terms of preventing the flow.
But of course, relative to China, I mean, it's a river and a city walks across on leaves.
Anyway, that was from your book.
But the flow of people who are willing, of course, to sacrifice relatives who remain in this mafia-style hostage situation in North Korea, they can get across into China relatively easily.
What is the flow like of people going across?
Well, here's what people need to understand is that they think that the North Korean leadership is like stupid or crazy.
These people are brilliant.
It takes a lot to stay in power, to face off all these other countries for many years.
So what it used to be, maybe four or five years ago, if you were going to China, you cut the border guard, he gets a cut, you bribe him, maybe you do trade and come back or something like that, or maybe you just don't come back, right?
Now, the North Korean government changed the policy so you are allowed to keep the bribes.
So you bribe them, Then you get arrested.
So you keep the bribe and you get rewarded for arresting the person.
So they are constantly changing their techniques.
So they do understand market incentives, just not for good, only for evil.
Right.
So one of the points I really want to stress and I do is my media appearance is these are rational actors and rational in the sense of having a logic that has no sense of decency or humanity.
So if you want to think about Skynet, you know what I mean?
If you had this evil AI that wanted to maximize its control and regard human beings as just variables to be disposed of, this is how they operate.
And it's with ruthless, reprehensible efficiency, the likes of which we have not seen for a very long time.
Even Stalin had show trials.
They don't have trials.
If you are committed to a crime, they show up at your door and they take your way.
Right.
Right.
Well, actually, that was the...
I mean, that is one of the most powerful ways of controlling a population because there's not even the propaganda opportunities of show trials.
I mean, that's what George Orwell writes about in 1984, that they have to turn you as much as possible and using people's caring for each other as this methodology of doing that makes it a very sticky web to escape indeed.
And, of course, it's a monstrously high IQ population.
I mean, and ruling over a monstrously high IQ population, I mean, outside of the Ashkenazi Jews...
It's about the highest population, the highest IQ population around, and ruling over them is not a simple matter.
And this idea that evil always equals crazy is wrong and fundamentally misunderstands the sort of predatory nature of this thirst for the unearned that drives evil so often.
I mean, this guy, who would he be in a free market?
I mean, he would be, I don't know, he'd be running, he'd be a mean owner of a pizza store who couldn't keep employees around.
The fact that they get this amount of money and power and reproductive success and access to all the freedoms they deny their followers, you're right.
Evil is not the same as crazy.
And if we understand that evil has its own matrix of motivations and causes and effect, then we will no longer expect random behavior.
On the part of evil people.
Because as soon as you say, well, they're evil, they've got nukes, and they're totally crazy and random, that escalates the rhetoric to the point where slips can really happen in a very important context.
And here's the metaphor I always used to understand.
There's two different kinds of bank robbers.
There's the guy who runs in the bank, shoots up the ceiling, takes the money and runs.
And there's the guy who runs into the bank, shoots up everybody and gets the money.
The first one is infinitely preferable.
I mean, this is night and day.
When they were firing their missiles, they launched them into the ocean, into the city of Japan.
They didn't launch their missiles at Seoul.
They didn't launch them at China or Tokyo.
This is proof that they're the first one to go, hey, we're showing our guns, but we don't actually want to provoke a conflict.
We just want people to do what we want.
Right, right.
Now, regarding the American presence there.
Oh, another one of these Taf Barmere style glimpses of the ring for me, because there is every libertarian or voluntarist or anarchist case to be made.
It's like, come on, what is America doing over there and so on, right?
I got to tell you, if I'm living in South Korea, I'm really, really happy that America intervened at some point.
Because to me, there's no doubt.
And this is the whole question of the domino theory.
I mean, there's a way of looking at the domino theory, which for those who don't know, is this idea.
I mean, it's not an idea.
It was an argument clearly put forward in the Communist International.
Part of the Communist goal was to take over the entire world.
It was not a nationalistic movement like Nazism.
It was...
Not a race movement like Nazism.
It was an internet.
There are classes everywhere and it needs to.
The argument was, of course, that communism is inherently violently expansionist.
And if they take one country, then they gather more resources.
It allows them to take another country.
It's the domino theory.
It got knocked down.
The domino theory was to a large degree not accepted in East Asian countries because they were subject to this – we're being blown to smithereens because of some geopolitical theory of expansionism.
Another argument is to say, sure, give the communists the biggest empire they can possibly get a hold of because that way they'll collapse sooner because they turn countries from relatively productive into sewers of corruption and laziness and so on.
And so, yeah, just let them take over countries.
That's the best way to take down communism.
But of course the people who are subject to communist dictatorship may feel differently about that.
So it's a big complicated thing around why is America there?
Why are these, you know, huge artillery, 45,000 troops or so all lining the border and have been there decades after decades after decades after the war supposedly kind of petered out or diminished?
But to understand the motives of North Korea, they want South Korea.
They view this sundering of the country as, you know, like your arm got cut off, but don't worry.
It's on ice somewhere.
You can get it reattached and you can applaud your culture again.
They want to take it back.
And even the America being there has not been enough to stop these low-level skirmishes from constantly erupting along the border.
So what are your thoughts about U.S. presence there?
And what might happen if the U.S. decided to not have a presence there?
Well, South Korea, you know, a lot of times, like in our press, they make it seem like if something's a U.S. ally, they're basically like another version of America just wearing different clothes.
South Korea was a very not good place for a long time.
The first lady was assassinated, the head of the CIA assassinated the president, like all this kind of crazy stuff.
And they had their own version of the Tiananmen Square in 79 or 80, where there was a student protest that was put down very violently.
In fact, only recently did they have democratic elections.
And actually they're kind of a step ahead of us because they had the first female president and she was just impeached or removed from office.
So maybe they're a parallel universe U.S. in another sense.
I don't know how necessary our troops are to that extent.
I know South Korea, they have mandatory military service.
I don't think North Korea would necessarily provoke a fight.
Certainly there was much more excuse for us being there previously.
Now, however, North Korea doesn't really have any strong allies.
They have people who are putting up with their craft.
But the idea that China and them are best friends in the same sense like the US and Canada is simply false.
So it is a tricky situation.
However, if we leave, then that's their telling their people, look, they're running scared.
Let's reunite the Koreas.
So you don't know how any sign of weakness in that country is going to be taken as proof of their strength and their success.
It's a very, very tricky situation.
And the South has had it with the North.
I mean, I met kids who were on vacation.
They didn't really know anything about the North, and they don't even think of them.
And the other thing is, the North very frequently sends agents to the South to kill people.
So, I mean, if you had this kind of reunification, I mean, we don't know what it would look like anyway.
Right.
I mean, we do have some examples of how it might go based on East and West Germany, but...
Certainly, I think it's a more brutal dictatorship than East Germany was, even at its worst.
My concern as well is that in the past, when America wavered in its commitment to South Korea, I'm thinking about the sort of the 60s, the early 1970s, what happened was the South Korean government said, oh, wait a minute, Americans might be bugging out, they might be reducing their commitment.
Okay, we're going to start a clandestine nuclear program.
And then when the U.S. said, okay, we're staying, we're staying, they're like, okay, we'll shut it down.
So given that experience and that history, one of the things that is a challenge is that America's involvement in, what, 100 countries, 700-plus military bases around the world is partly because of the fear of nuclear proliferation.
And if America pulls back, then a lot of these conflicts are only going to be further stalemated rather than by a U.S. presence on the ground but by mutually assured destruction, right?
That's the only way that a lot of this stuff is going to be prevented from erupting into a war.
So if America does withdraw from its commitments around the world, which...
Again, you know, I completely understand and there's really great arguments to be made for that.
The one thing that does need to be understood is the nuclear genius out of the bottle and has been, of course, for many decades, that there will be a drive to get nuclear weapons from the countries that formerly were able to avoid that necessity by being under the shield of US protection.
And I would imagine South Korea would be one of the first among those.
Of course.
And then we also have to wonder what would happen if North Korea has an incentive to start selling their nuclear weapons to other countries.
Mm-hmm.
Which they claim is their sovereign right.
North Korea, I mean, they're so good at being Orwellian, it's kind of chilling.
The UN recently attacked them for human rights violations and said, you know, attack their concentration camps, and they explicitly said, this was their response, we don't use the term concentration camps, so we don't have any.
Oh, that's like the New York Times not using the phrase female genital mutilation.
Right, got it.
They also say that we have...
We have philosophy in our way and art in our way and politics in our way.
And we have human rights in our way.
And our definition of human rights is national sovereignty.
So when you criticize us, you are violating our human rights.
And one of the rights that they are very strong on insisting is theirs, which they do have a point, they go, why does the US get to be the arms deal of the world?
Why don't we have the right to trade arms with other countries?
So if they got nukes and they started to try to sell them to other countries, I'm sure they could get a pretty penny for them.
I mean, I don't even know how that would play it either.
Right.
The formulation that North Korea seems to have with regards to these kinds of escalations, So there is a spiral escalation theory, right?
That, you know, you bring your fists and I bring a club.
You bring a knife and gun, right?
This sort of escalation that occurs.
It hasn't gone that way.
I think it's important to recognize that, you know, the saber rattling, you know, low-level violence, massive amounts of provocations, and threats of retaliation if attacked, a lot of saber rattling, that is not quite this.
It's the big talker, right?
The guy who, yeah, I toured with Bowie in the 70s.
It's the big talker.
I think understanding the difference between this sort of face-saving obsession, which is fairly big in East Asian culture, and also that it is not necessarily an indication of imminent war for there to be significant threats flying across borders.
That is sort of a cultural difference that I think is important.
And if we understand that the verbal threats...
inevitable escalation to violence, but rather a way of negotiating, then they don't necessarily have to get sucked into that spiral escalation that a lot of people fear, myself included.
Well, one of the things that I was surprised when I was doing my research for the book is that they are open about their strategies and boastful about it.
I I don't know if you saw the film The Incredibles, but one of the premises of that movie is that supervillains like to go on monologues and talk about how brilliant they are, right?
And they do that.
I was reading the literature and they say, whenever you read one of our proclamations, there's always a back door.
So we will say, this is unprecedented.
We will never allow this attack on our reputation and impunity to stand with impunity.
But if you want to give us some oil, I guess we can be magnanimous and let it go.
And that's literally how they always formulate everything.
And, of course, people at home are like, oh, but there was a photo that they released a couple years back where Kim Jong-un is in front of his MacBook, and there's a map behind him of where he's going to nuke, and one of the targets is Austin.
And my friend calls and goes, are they going to nuke Austin?
I go, if you were going to nuke Austin, why are you releasing a press release?
I mean, are you serious?
Let me just go on a slight tangent here.
You know, it's just not a show for me if we don't.
But let me sort of drag you on a slight tangent here, because this is something that's bothered me for many years, and I haven't had a chance to talk about it.
So very, very briefly, because it reminded me of The Incredibles thing.
Oh, Lord.
Okay, so why do we need spies?
Why do we need the CIA? Why do we need all of this stuff?
Because bad guys are always telling everyone exactly what they're going to do.
It's this long Bonneville monologue telling you exactly where the lasers are going to cut your balls off.
I mean, it's completely ridiculous.
Hitler, what's he going to do?
Is it a secret?
No!
He wrote the entire thing down ahead of time.
It's completely insane to think that this is hard to figure out.
What does Al-Qaeda want to do?
Oh, you taught us how to take down the Russians by asymmetric warfare against an economic superpower.
That's exactly what we're going to do to America.
Thanks for the instructions, CIA. Great knowing you in Afghanistan.
We'll see you on 9-11.
Same thing with ISIS. What are they trying to do?
They're trying to provoke a gap in the middle of the Islamic community so that only extremists can be provoked and there's going to be this war.
They know exactly what they're doing and they keep saying exactly what they're doing.
Same thing with the North Koreas.
It's published.
It's printed.
You don't need any spies.
It's right there in front of you.
They might have to write their manifesto in lasers on the moon.
And yet we still think we need all of these security agencies and spies.
Why is to try and figure out what our enemies are doing?
It's like, turn up your hearing aid, guys.
It's being broadcast everywhere.
But to be fair, to understand what they want to do, you have to go to Pyongyang, which is why I wrote my book.
Doing the jobs that other people just don't want to do.
Yeah, so this is all in my book.
But again, I got it from Dell Literature, which is in North Korea, which is pretty hard to get your hands up.
But yeah, everything you just said is absolute.
And here's something else which I find creepy, I think.
Especially a neocon philosophy, where they're like, well, if you're trying to understand how they think you're validating their point of view, it's like, you're telling me Eisenhower didn't sit down and try to think what Hitler and his general point of view was?
And generally, Lee and Grant weren't trying to think what the other person thought.
How are you going to stop an enemy unless you try to anticipate his thinking?
That is psychotic.
There's nothing to validate if you're just understanding their thought process.
Oh, I completely agree.
I mean, like profilers are never supposed to try and figure out what a serial murderer might want to do because they're going to become a serial murderer.
It's like, no, no, no.
Empathy, even towards evil, is not this giant gate of infection by which blackness rushes into your soul and turns into a puppet of the macabre.
Anyway, that's just the old Aristotelian argument.
I'm referencing it twice in two days.
But, you know, it is the mark of an educated and intelligent person to be able to entertain an idea without succumbing to it.
And we really do need to understand what is the motive that is driving these kinds of things.
So do you think, let's close off, I really appreciate your time, but let's close off now that we've given it a long tail with lots of general principles, let's go to the immediate.
It does seem to me, Mike, like something's going to happen relatively soon.
I mean, there seems to be a little bit more than the usual posturing that is going on, so what is your take on what's coming up?
This is unprecedented, what we're seeing now, because no US president has ever worked closely with China vis-a-vis North Korea.
The Chinese president made a...
It was a very public show that he went to Mar-a-Lago with President Trump.
It was very public that they talked about North Korea.
North Korea will always primarily be China's problem just due to physical proximity and due to their cultural history working together.
My theory is that this is some kind of good cop, bad cop thing where Trump is acting like the crazy person.
Because think about it.
When he hit Syria, there was no forewarning.
And then he just hit Syria.
Here it's...
The administration, we're done talking, so on and so forth.
He's like, this is going to change.
So China gets to be the ones with back channels behind the scenes being like, look, let's cut some kind of a deal.
But the problem is, as you pointed out earlier today, when they liberalize, I mean, when the population finds out that the great leader Kim Il-sung can't walk on water, but he actually launched the Korean War...
I mean, what happens to the regime then?
There's an increasing sense of cynicism.
So it's a tricky situation just on a personal level for the regime.
But yeah, the fact that President Trump called all 100 senators to the White House for a briefing about this, I can't remember any time the entire Senate went to the White House or even any time where the president secretly briefed the entire Senate in my living memory.
So again, the fact that this is so public It gives me hope that this is something that's being done behind the scenes to bring this regime to its knees in a non-militaristic way.
You know, I always am very skeptical of government programs, regime change being one of the first ones.
But again, I have to be honest with the listeners and the watchers to this.
It is one of my – it could be a big weak spot of mine, Mike, but it's a great temptation for me because – let's close off.
There's one other thing I wanted to ask you because we've talked to sort of the abstract geopolitical – I would get one of the flip-flops.
How dare you?
I'm from Brooklyn.
Who are you talking to?
This interview is over.
Sorry, sandals.
I just assume everyone who's touring around the world has poor footwear.
But anyway, it could be my own prejudice.
So what was it like for you actually being there?
What are the sort of images or the experiences that you'd like to sort of transfer to the Borg brain of this listenership so that they could get a sense of it's more than an abstract.
You know, there are, of course, these brutal concentration camps, this terrible terror of just about every waking breath.
What is it like to have spent some real time talking to people in this open-air prison?
I've told this story before, and this is really the one that gets to me.
And I was born in the Soviet Union, so this is why this country is kind of so close to me, in my experience.
They take you to a school, and the school is fake, and you know it's fake, because if you go to a school anywhere, you're going to hear a lot of noise.
You're going to hear teachers in other classrooms, but it's a fake school.
And these are the children in Pyongyang, which is the best of best.
You have to be very loyal to the regime to even be allowed to step foot in the capital city of Pyongyang.
And the kids are adorable.
They're dressed like little generals.
The girls are in dresses.
They're really, really cute.
And, you know, they put on shows for you and so on and so forth.
I will never until the day I die, get the sound of their chest colds out of my head.
And you hear the kids who are like in first grade coughing.
And you know that sound.
And if you see a kid in your neighborhood, whatever, you're like, you don't think twice about it, because he's going to get better.
These kids have no medicine, they will never have medicine, they will never have warm clothes.
And there's no reason for this, other than the fact that this dictatorship keeps their hold on power.
So that is the image when you think of North Korea, you think of children being sick for no reason whatsoever.
And that to me is as evil as it gets.
Right, right.
Well, I really do appreciate your time today.
I wanted to remind people, you know, check out the book and check out Mike's work, Michael Malice, michaelmalice.com.
Again, we'll put the links below.
Kim Jong Il book.com and Michael Malice, Michael Malice on Facebook and Twitter.
I really appreciate your time.
Hope we can chat again and have yourself a great day.
