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Dec. 3, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:12
3919 World War North Korea | Michael Malice and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing very well here.
Back with our good friend Michael Malice.
He's a writer, television commentator, and the author of many books, including Dear Reader, the Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong-il and the host of Your Welcome, that's Y-O-U-R, Welcome with Michael Malice on Compound Media.
You can find him on the web at michaelmalice.com and Compound Media is the appropriately named compoundmedia.com.
Mike, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thank you. So, death seems to be raining from above, emanating from North Korea at the moment.
And I guess I'd like to chat about it in ways that both illuminate and allow us to sleep at night.
So, what the hell is going on at the moment?
Well, I mean, I've been saying for months that we are involved in a game of chicken with North Korea, where both President Trump and Kim Jong-un are racing at each other as fast as they can.
And the question is going to be, who's going to blink first?
And neither of us are in a position, really, neither us nor them, Are in a position to back down.
They're both kind of all in on the fact that we're going to be saber rattling and it's make or break.
So this is uncharted territory.
However, neither President Trump nor Kim Jong-un are suicidal.
So that bodes hope that this is going to have some sort of resolution, although we don't know what that would look like.
Ah, communism, the gift that just keeps on giving.
And because he is here, so it's known as the hermit kingdom, of course, and there is a certain amount of isolation and paranoia regarding the outside world.
And so it seems to me, you know, much though I have compassion for the largest open air human prison in the world and the most evil regime at the moment, it seems to me that if a similar sort of policy were pursued as with regards to Russia, because the Russia policy that the West pursued was kind of complicated.
There was always this containment.
There was this whole domino theory.
But at the same time, it's like, oh, are you hungry?
Here's 12 billion bushels of grain to feed your people with.
Here's some foreign aid.
Here's there was a kind of weird schizo approach to dealing with another communist dangerous country, Russia.
And that ended up collapsing because of the weight of its own internal contradictions and the fact that they can't seem to produce, you know, with 10,000 guys, they can't produce one pin because of the price problem, the problem of price allocation and all of the mess of the world.
So why can't the world just say, okay, sorry this is all going on.
At least South Korea, at least it's not happening in South Korea.
Let's do something to not have it spread, but let's not escalate in this kind of way, because don't they just want to be crazy and left alone in their own nightmarish kingdom?
Well, it's kind of a mix.
First of all, North Korea no longer, I mean, to get transnational, North Korea no longer identifies as So, according to the great leader Kim Il-sung, who's the founder of North Korea, he had what they call the Juche idea, which is basically by us and for us and from Koreans for Koreans.
It's this ultra, ultra extreme sense of nationalism.
It's this ultra sense of racism.
They claim very frequently that Korea is the only racially pure country on Earth.
It is the most homogenous nation on Earth.
And Kim Jong-il, his son and the father of the current leader Kim Jong-un, refined that to the sun gun idea, which means military first, which also means the military eats first.
So, it would be perfectly fine to—it is analogous to the Soviet Union in many ways.
However, the Soviet Union was much more aggressive internationally.
There was much more of a battle of ideas between the USSR and the West.
There is not such a battle of ideas between the Jewish idea and other countries, especially because the Jewish idea would not apply to non-Korean countries, according to their own words.
The US and China and South Korea and Japan certainly are not comfortable with a nuclear North Korea.
North Korea very frequently and publicly proclaims that, look, the United States is the largest arms dealer in the world, and we are a sovereign nation, and we have a right to be arms dealers as well.
So if you have a nuclear nation that is insistent on its right to be selling those weapons, this is very much an international problem.
Now, I'm not saying that that means this needs military action to solve it, But this certainly is an issue that understandably many countries are uncomfortable with.
But I think it's fair to say that North Korea is not funding terrorism worldwide.
So it seems to me a little bit odd that America would be selling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of arms to a country like Saudi Arabia, while at the same time saying it is absolutely, completely and totally wrong, which has a specific expansionist Doctrine at its core and has been suspected of and I think in some ways proven to have funded terrorists around the world.
So it seems like there's a little bit of a double standard and this does nothing to justify either regime, but it does kind of bother me that these contradictions are not really very well examined or explored in the media.
Sure. Well, North Korea was put as one of the countries that restrict state sanctions of terrorism because in the 80s when South Korea was given the Olympics, Kim Jong-un said, hey, why don't we share the Olympics?
And the South Korean response is, well, the Olympics are given to a city, not a country, which was Seoul.
It's not up to us to share, and you don't have the capacity as a nation to put up all these athletes and have all the stadiums and so on and so forth.
So Kim Jong-il had two of his agents board a plane that was headed for South Korea, and they blew it up, killing everyone on board.
And what's amazing is that the South Korean president Later pardoned the woman who blew up the plane, and now she's walking around Seoul to this day.
And the premise was she was brainwashed by the dear leader Kim Jong-il.
So they do have a history of terrorism.
I don't know in terms of sponsoring terrorism internationally per se, but they have been kicked out of many countries, their diplomats, because it's basically a gangster regime.
So they will exploit their diplomatic immunity for smuggling.
They're accused of being the world's largest counterfeiter of US dollars.
Besides, obviously, the U.S. government, haha.
And there's all sorts of, you know, when Kim Jong-il's son, Kim Jong-nam, who was recently murdered, was caught in Japan, and they asked him what you were doing in Japan, he said, I was here to visit Disneyland, and the Western press credulously reported this.
He was actually there to get money for an illegal arms shipment, and this was the Japanese way of saying we're on to you.
So they have their fingers in very many international pies, so to speak, and I don't know about terrorism per se, but they're certainly not someone who are law-abiding neighbors.
Oh, no, absolutely.
But compared to what is always my question regarding this.
Now, this missile, right?
We got Hawaii dusting off their World War II sirens and so on.
So this missile that was recently, what, dropped near Japan or in Japan airspace, which they say can reach parts of the United States.
Let's talk a little bit about what the strategy might be behind that.
Well, what happened and then what the strategy is behind that.
Well, I gotta tell you, I think this is a non-issue.
Because I've always said, Seoul is It's very close to North Korea.
It's directly south of the DMZ, which separates the two Koreas.
Even if they didn't have nukes, if they're firing missiles at Seoul, which is, you know, we saw 9-11, that was two buildings, three buildings actually, that got taken down in the horror that that looked like.
All you need are a few missiles and Seoul would make 9-11 look like a picnic.
It would be visually horrific.
The loss of life and property would be catastrophic and unprecedented.
Other than perhaps Hiroshima and Nagasaki and World War II bombings.
So, I mean, yeah, they might be able to hit us, but I think this is more, first of all, it's a commercial for them because they are demonstrating, look, we are a nation the size of Pennsylvania.
We have the whole world united against us, and yet we're secure in our power.
So if you're some tin pot dictator from some other country, you want to buy our product.
And you can see for yourself that the proof is in the pudding.
So that's a big aspect of it.
And again, I mean, two years ago, there was this photo of Kim Jong-un in front of his Apple laptop.
And the back of him, there was a map of the United States.
And there was a target on Austin.
My friend called me up. He's like, oh, they're going to nuke Austin.
And I'm like, why would you nuke Austin?
So they're not stupid people.
They say explicitly in their literature.
And they're very boastful in their literature.
We know we can't win a war with the U.S. imperialists, which is what they refer to us.
So again, this is just also them.
They're very big on defiance.
So they are being told by bigger countries, they call themselves a shrimp among whales.
China, you know, to a lesser extent Russia, the United States, Japan telling them, you can't do this.
And Kim Jong-un can say proudly and boastfully, look, they're telling us we can't.
Yes, we can. Well, there is, of course, this history that America says to dictatorships, well, disarm and we'll leave you alone.
And then they regularly disarm and get invaded or overthrown or undermined by the United States.
So I don't think that particular disarm and everything will be fine mantra is really working at all anymore because this is a smart group of people.
As you point out, they're not crazy.
They're evil. And people conflate the two, which is very dangerous.
Because if you think that evil people are all crazy, then you can't have any rational negotiations with evil people.
And so this idea of what they're doing in terms of a demonstration of strength could be argued, I think you could argue, it's a demonstration of strength in order to be left alone, because those who surrendered their weapons got destroyed.
Well, it's not in order to be left alone, because they're very big on shaking down other countries for money.
So before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kim Il-sung, the founder, would play China and Russia in their famous rivalry against each other.
And North Korea was quite literally a welfare state.
They would be living on welfare from the Chinese and the Russians.
Now, they don't have, you know, no country's a state sponsor of North Korea.
They have to get revenue somewhere.
And what better way to be like, hey, we have 100 nukes.
And if the US says, give us 90 of them, fine.
Pay us for giving you these nukes.
It's effectively a sale of weapons, even though those weapons have no intention of being used.
You know, like when you give in the guns and you get toys for Christmas in the States or some program like that.
So this is a very smart way of saying, we have something you want.
If you want that which we have, pay us.
And it's a shakedown.
Simple as that. Right, right.
So let's talk a little bit about this supposed he's crazy and so on, because you point out, I'll give you a quote and then we'll talk about it some more.
You recently said, they're not crazy in the slightest, they are pure evil, and as I described in my book, this has been a decades-long process to maintain their hold on power.
They've outlasted.
Everyone except for Cuba.
So clearly, if they're irrational, they're doing something wrong about being irrational because they're logical.
Now, let's start to pull that thread apart because I do, again, find it very dangerous when people just assume that evil people are just playing crazy because then there's no possible way to come to any kind of accommodation even in the short run.
Well, when people say such and such is crazy, that's just them saying, I don't understand their thinking.
That is basically a reflection on the person speaking rather than the other person.
The fact is they've been very consistent and crazy people are not consistent.
Crazy people are over the place and unpredictable.
So North Korea was founded in post-World War II. They are around in 2017 as strong as ever, not as strong as ever in terms of feeding their people, but certainly as powerful as ever on the world stage.
Despite not having sponsorship, as I said earlier, from the Soviet Union and China.
So again, the fact is that every president has, you know, regarded them as belligerent.
In 1968, they captured USS Pueblo and the crew.
They still have it. It's the only U.S. ship that's under U.S. possession.
So they've been having these, in the 70s, they chopped up a couple of American soldiers, the DMZ, with an axe.
That axe is proudly displayed in the north at the museum, which I saw with my own eyes.
So they've been playing these shenanigans for For decades, and to say that they're crazy, that term really does not have a meaning here because they know what they want.
They're getting what they want.
They are telling people explicitly this is what they want.
So I don't even see the slightest.
It's just crazy.
You know, sociopaths back in the day, the old term for it was morally depraved.
So yeah, if you want to call them morally depraved, sure, by that definition, they're crazy.
But I can't think of one thing they do that is crazy per se.
Well, there used to be a phrase when I was a kid, I don't know if it's still around, crazy like a fox, you know, like slow and hunting and patient and so on, and there's a very high IQ population, as I've sort of mentioned before, so just throwing them in the big bag of crazy is, well, it's kind of crazy.
Sorry, go ahead. Let me make one point.
This is the metaphor I always use to explain how they're perfectly sane.
There are two types of bank robbers.
There's the bank robber who comes in, shoots up the ceiling, gets the loot and leaves, and there's the bank robber who comes in, shoots up everybody, That takes the loot and leaves.
The first one is saying he's a thief.
He wants money. He's threatening people.
But he doesn't actually want to engage with the police because he knows the consequences would be very, very dire if there's blood in his hands as opposed to just some money.
The second one, that person is not thinking rationally.
They're thinking very short term.
They're thinking and has disastrous consequences for them and for others.
When North Korea is firing these missiles, they're firing them into the ocean.
They're not firing them at Tokyo.
They're not firing them at Seoul. So very clearly, they're acting like that first one and not the second bank robber.
Well, it's interesting, yeah, of course, that the third bank robber sets up the Federal Reserve.
If you really want to rob a bank, have a bank.
And I think that's a good point.
And just the thought popped into my mind, Mike, that when we look at murder, the more rational person gets the higher punishment.
Because first-degree murder is when you sort of plot it, and you plan it, and you know the consequences.
So it is not to say that just because they're rational doesn't mean that they're less evil.
In fact, rational can mean more evil, as we see in sort of murder.
The more you plan, the more you plot, and the more you try and evade, capture, the worse your punishment is.
So I just really wanted to try and separate that, because the media is pumping there this crazy thing, which doesn't give you any options.
So what is the story?
Let's sort of walk in the...
Can I just take one point to what you just said, which is what I wrote in my book.
This was a decades-long process, piece by piece, as they closed in the North Korean population, took away their freedoms, instituted mechanisms of mind control and police control of food and all sorts of other things.
So it's very methodical, very logical, very thought out.
I mean, as I was researching the history and reading about it, it was almost Perfect in its depravity and how evil it was.
And it was not random at all.
They very much had an agenda, and that agenda has been largely executed, no pun intended, unfortunately.
But now it's largely falling away because it's hard to maintain that hold of power when information is becoming increasingly free.
Yeah, I mean, you think of a pedophile and how they identify and isolate and groom.
And, you know, this is evil beyond words, but it's not crazy in its execution.
So I find it always quite interesting to step into the shoes of people I enormously disagree with.
So you can go over to the radical Islamists and you can say, okay, well, what are your complaints?
What's happening? And it's really instructive and important.
You can look at what bin Laden wrote.
About America and the Middle East and all of that.
You can look at what Hitler wrote.
And this doesn't sanction stuff, but it's really, really important to understand where people are coming from.
I mean, you don't have to if there's some huge military option you're about to do, but if you are in some sort of situation, negotiation, which the world is, what would the North Korean leadership say are their beats?
What are their perspectives that they use, of course, to justify their own actions?
They would say that they don't need justifications, per se.
North Korea was attacked by the UN for human rights violations, and they say, well, according to the Duce Idea, our definition of human rights is national sovereignty.
So when you criticize us, you are violating our human rights.
So they, you know, have this very sense of no one's going to tell us what to do.
We are kind of this hermetically sealed country, which is not going to take any kind of guff from anyone.
It's an outrage that other countries would try to push us around.
And this has been their mantra for decades, and they've been very successful at their defiance, and you have to give them credit.
Again, when you're a tiny country, which produces nothing of value, and the people in rags, and you have, you know, Daily UN meetings with people wringing their hands, what are we going to do about the North Korean problem?
That is an accomplishment. It's not an accomplishment of decency, it's not an accomplishment of humanity, but they are certainly doing something correctly.
I sort of wish to some degree that there was some culture, some country that North Korea could look at and say, well, man, we really want to be like them.
I mean, so to me, maybe they look at America and they say, well, kind of imperialistic tens of millions of people killed as a result directly or indirectly of some American foreign policy of all of that.
And, you know, what is it?
$200 trillion plus of unfunded liabilities and so on.
You say, well, that's not really...
Look at Japan! Japan, what is their GDP to debt ratio is like well north of 200% and they've had this zombie economy.
They've got no birth rate.
There's sort of a population implosion that's happening where there's going to be like one guy with his eyes fixated on anime porn.
At the end of Japan in 100 years.
And so, or they look at Europe, which is committing a kind of democracy through population replacement and massive debt and bureaucracy and infighting and so on.
It would be really nice to sort of hold up some society where you'd say, they'd say, well, you know, that we can admire.
That's something to emulate.
That's something that would be really great.
But it seems like Those kinds of countries are becoming increasingly rare in the world stage, because it would be nice to lay the breadcrumbs and say, you could be here, but it's hard, I think, to say, well, all of these, I mean, not to say that all the countries are equal, but it's really hard to find some country that's really worth emulating in its current state these days.
They don't believe in emulation.
Kim Jong-nam, who was killed, was the eldest son of Kim Jong-il.
And he reminded Kim Jong-il that, look, when we went to China, to Beijing, and we saw how things had changed there, this is a model we can follow.
And Kim Jong-il said, if you want openness, open a window.
That won't work for us because we are Korean and they are Chinese.
So they take this Marxist relativism to an absolute, to the point where you can't look at other countries as a model in any way.
You can only look to Korean solutions for Korean problems.
And since we have implemented these Korean solutions under the brilliant guidance of the great leader Kim Il-sung, we are the country that others should emulate in the sense that they should find their own The equivalent of Koreanness, which they won't be able to because they are racially mixed and we are racially pure.
The guy, I'm sure you saw the video, it was an officer, the guy who was sprinting to get away, and man, the guy looked so skinny, I'm sure it looks like his body was eating his bone marrow to supply calories to his muscles or something like that.
And he was treated, of course, not just for hunger, but didn't they find indications of a true starvation diet in the man's belly?
And of course, this is the Feed the Soldiers First country.
I mean, where the hell is it economically at this point?
I talk about this at length in my book because, you know, during the 90s, they refused to allow the UN to help them with food.
And as all these totalitarian dictatorships know perfectly well, if we're superfluous and people are being fed otherwise, then that's going to have problems for us personally and certainly for our hold on power.
So during the 90s, they went from eating food to eating grass to eating bark to eating weeds.
And at the end, people are eating saccharin and having their faces bloated just to have something in their stomachs.
I recently saw a video, which is superb, Where all these North Korean defectors were given different types of American barbecue to try and compare.
And frankly, and I'm sure you agree, watching formerly starved people who were starved by their own government gorge themselves is perhaps the acme of what humanity should be like.
Please eat as much as possible.
We'll make more. And one of them, the thing when you talk to these refugees that's so disturbing, they're so matter-of-fact about these atrocities and abominations that they've seen in their own lives.
They're not hand-wringing and hysterical, like maybe a college student here in the West.
And one guy just matter-of-factly said one of the most horrific sentences I've ever heard, which is, when people are about to die, the flies are the first to know.
And he'd see someone with a baby, and he'd know when the flies are landing on their mouth and on their anus that that person has minutes to live.
And that's not information that a layman should have.
Yeah, that barbecue story makes me think of Marxist indoctrinated college students finding our shows.
Look, something finally I can eat intellectually.
So this deja vu sort of popped into my mind when I was reading and listening to some of the Japanese comments about what's going on regarding trade.
Of course, the big goal of a lot of the Western countries is to isolate North Korea from its trading partners.
And as far as I understand it, the only one left supplying oil in any capacity to North Korea is China.
Now, the deja vu that I had, Mike, is okay.
Let's take an East Asian country.
Let's prevent it from getting natural resources, as in the surrounding of Japan in the 1930s and the early 1940s by the US Navy, with the goal, of course, of stopping oil from getting into the country, which was one of the things that led to the dominoes, that led to Pearl Harbor, that led to, of course, the Pacific War and the American involvement in the Second World War as a whole.
So this idea that you're going to have this very isolating, no-trade barrier that's going to go up around the country, I'm not sure that that's had very positive effects in the past.
Because, of course, the people who suffer are not the leadership.
The people who suffer are the people.
And they have no practical or functional capacity to mount any kind of revolution.
Like, they keep trying this thing where they tried this with Iraq.
As well, in the 90s, right?
I mean, after they invaded Iraq and then said, hey, why don't you all overthrow your government?
And then they betrayed the people who tried to overthrow the government.
Then they tried this whole starvation regime where they're like, well, we're going to starve Iraqis into rebelling against their own government.
It's like, they can't do that.
So punishing the people who are already enslaved enough with the fantasy that somehow they're going to be able to overthrow when they can barely even make it up the stairs, they're going to overthrow some well-armed regime.
Doesn't it seem kind of deja vu with regards to Japan in the 30s and in the 40s?
Well, let me speak a bit because there's a lot to unpack here.
First of all, North Korea over the summer had a press release basically that said, hey, we have this new bigger bomb.
I think it was a hydrogen bomb or something like that.
And they said, oh, it was all built with North Korean ingredients, right?
And people read it at face value, like this is their Juche propaganda, you know, North Koreans built it.
What they actually meant is, you can block us off from the rest of the world.
We're still going to be continuing to build these missiles, and we don't need your ingredients.
We have them all here.
So that's number one. Number two is, Kim Jong-un, earlier this year, stockpiled a huge amount of oil, so that won't be in anticipation of these massive sanctions.
And third of all, yeah, North Korea has something, which they took from the Chinese, I believe, where they have weekly We're going to have criticism and self-criticism sessions where everyone in North Korea, everyone is slotted in some group, your school, your neighborhood, your office.
And once a week, you have to stand up and say what you did wrong.
And then you have to say, you know, what you saw other people doing wrong.
I would get up and say, you know, Stefan thinks that Aquaman can beat Superman and things like that.
And everyone would point at you and mock you correctly.
The point is, you can't have a rebellion.
Where everyone by law is spying on each other and publicly denouncing each other weekly.
It's an absolute impossibility.
And that would be the first thing to point out.
It's like, look, they're conspiring against the government.
And as you know, North Korea, the great leader Kim Il-sung said, class enemies must be exterminated three generations.
So if you're in trouble, you've got three generations of your family in trouble.
So this is a very evil, very brilliant mechanism to make sure no one's going to be a hero.
Because if you're going to be a hero, your mom's going to pay the price and your kids.
Well, and it seems to me somewhat hypocritical for people in the West who sometimes self-censor for fear of political incorrectness and who have trouble mouthing certain scientifically basic syllables for fear of negative repercussions on social media to say, well, these half-starved people should storm the barricades of some well-armed, well-oiled military machine and take back their country.
It's like, oh, I'll believe that a little bit more when you can post about controversial things on Twitter.
Right, and that's been waiting 60 years for the U.S. imperialists to return and finish them off like we started during the Korean War, supposedly.
So let's talk about what your perception is, and I think I agree with it, but the perception that there are no military solutions that can be deployed with any degree of reliability, safety, or security.
So let's talk a little bit about some of the military options and how they would play out.
Well, I mean, here's the point I make.
I've made this on Fox and people just turn white.
It's like there's 100,000 to 200,000 people in concentration camps.
They are told explicitly and repeatedly, should the U.S. imperialists invade, we are going to kill you all and burn these camps down, just like the Nazis did in World War II. So if you're some kind of military thing that's actually serious, you're looking at genocide on day one.
And this is a price that...
Listen, the Trump administration, Bannon, Tillerson, others, have publicly and explicitly said military is not an option.
It would be absolutely catastrophic.
But at the same time, there are no good options.
I mean, if Kim Jong-un and his coterie of leaders at the top have to choose between themselves and their hold on power and the populace, they did that in the 90s, and they chose themselves.
You know, you had one to two million people starving to death.
You know, they didn't care.
They were still there, and Kim Jong-il lasted until he died in 2011.
So when you have a government that is comfortable killing millions of his own citizens to maintain his hold on power, what are you going to say?
We're going to kill doubly millions of your citizens?
I mean, that's some kind of auction that no one's going to win.
Would you have played out the original Korean War in the 50s?
Would you have played it out differently if you had sort of magic wand of history and omnipotence and omniscience and so on?
Because it seems tragic. I mean, this is one of the great – it's like the East and West Berlin experiment in the post-Second World War period where you get to see a relatively free market with – You know, you say, well, it's not communist now.
And it's like, yeah, yeah, well, but it started communist.
That was the original... It's totalitarian.
It's totalitarian. And so, to me, communism, like, well, this is what it always decays into.
So, I mean, it seems like, man, if they just...
I hate to be the guy talking about military force and all of that, but thinking of the agonies of, you know, the decade after decade of what's going on in North Korea, it's kind of tempting to sort of look at the rewind button and say...
Man, if they'd kept going or done something else, maybe they could have turned all of Korea into South Korea, which would have been a huge boon to the local population and the world economy and culture as a whole.
Yeah, but I mean, again, as you know, it wasn't just the Norths that they were fighting.
They were fighting Russia and China. So these were no lightweights whatsoever.
And we were exhausted after World War II. I know MacArthur wanted to use nukes, I think, on the border between North Korea and China.
And make it unhappy for such a reason.
This was a no-go. So, I mean, again, I don't think America took that stalemate lightly.
We were riding high after World War II, so the idea that we were even taking a stalemate, this was not something that they chose and were happy with.
So, yeah, it would have been great.
South Korea had their own totalitarian strong band for decades.
It was a very dark place, not as bad as the North, but certainly no United States by any means.
So, yeah. And North Korea correctly points out that, like, look, why are the only two countries that were divided after World War II, us and Germany, we weren't combatants?
And that there is an inherent unfairness in that.
And I think they do have a valid point.
And it's something that we're living, you know, just how during the New Deal, FDR made it illegal to have raises so that businesses started offering health insurance to people.
And we're dealing with the consequences of that market aberration to this day.
This is the same thing in a much more darker and larger scale.
And so the barrels of problems roll downhill through the generations, crushing everything in their wake, it seems.
All right, so let's close off with this, Mike.
Let's say that you have the ear of world leadership.
Hey, maybe you do. Who knows who listens and watches to what it is that we do?
I'm on Fox, Trump watches.
Okay, so what would you say, but not just to Trump himself, but what would you say to the world about best practices moving forward in North Korea?
I would say...
I'm sure they're doing this.
You have to talk to them behind the scenes so that publicly they can continue saber-rattling and putting up a strong front.
Ask them what it would take to get X, Y, and Z. And it's going to have to be some kind of haggling business negotiation.
If we have to turn them over, if it has to be like, okay, China will guarantee that you, in some sense, stay in power.
You guarantee to liberate and denuclearize.
I mean, that is the best scenario we're going to see.
That said, I think if North Korea was going to end, this is what the end would look like.
The population is increasingly cynical.
The population is increasingly informed.
And at a certain point, when you can't feed your goons to beat up the population, that is a very tenuous hold on power.
No matter how many nukes you have.
Nukes are very ineffective against a mob who is hungry and wants to lose.
And there was recently a report, and if this is true, this is beyond unprecedented, where statues in the Northeast, which is the poorest part, where the people who are politically undesirable are forced to live, were defacing statues of the leaders.
Now, North Korea is a country where you are told, and it's in the newspapers, If you have a fire in your house, you have to save those portraits of the great leader Kim Sung and the great leader Kim Jong Il, even at a cost of your life.
These are just pictures on the wall, but this is the iconography and how it's treated with reverence.
So if there is the slightest attack on the leadership, this is a whole new era.
It would be fascinating to see some kind of transition wherein, at some point, there's no economic productivity left.
There's not enough food.
I mean, this guy who fled with raw food and his gut and bacteria that indicates a starvation diet, even for relatively senior members of the army.
To me, it would be fascinating to see the kind of transition that happened even after the 1917 revolution in Russia, when Economic output collapsed, food productivity collapsed, and therefore even Lenin, the hardcore communist that he was, introduced some Private free market reforms.
They're called the new economic policy.
There was this whole bourgeois group called the NEP men.
And so there was that possibility that happened.
There has, of course, in a heavily socialist India, moved more towards the free market in the 80s and the 90s.
You see communist China moving more towards.
I was in China in the year 2000, haggling using a calculator for a leather jacket.
It was a fascinating experience, completely unimaginable even 10 years prior.
You saw the emergence, of course, after the collapse of communism.
In Russia of relatively free markets, in some ways even freer than the West at the moment.
So when they do completely run out of options, there does seem to be some capacity to introduce some free market reform, some private property, some profit motive.
That would be a fantastic opportunity.
That's already started. They have, because the government can't provide food, you have these black markets in these little towns and they're illegal, but you have to bribe the police because the police are hungry.
So basically it works like a tax and then people get food that way.
So this has already been increasing and it's been escalating and the North Korean government doesn't like it, but the North Korean government doesn't have an alternative.
So already what they refer to as the toxic yellow winds of capitalism have started sweeping over that most depraved and evil country.
Let's hope that that continues to spread because out of economic freedom, I think they will gain political freedom, not the other way around.
So thanks, Mike. Appreciate your thoughts, of course.
And please check out michaelmalis.com and compoundmedia.com for the show.
You're welcome.
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