The normally cowed North Korean populace is finally daring to speak out against the communist regime, after being pushed to the wall by the latest currency devaluation - or at least, so claims a certain Claudia Rosett in this Forbes article.
I am skeptical that this popular protest is as large-scale a phenomenon as is suggested here, and I wouldn't bet much on the protest lasting very long in the face of the North Korean security apparatus*, but to the extent that paying Kim Jong Il's ransom demands helps to prop up his regime, I think the drift of Ms. Rosett's article is completely correct. If the poisonous dwarf must find the money to pay his goons, let the paymaster this time be someone other than the usual parties, i.e. Japan, South Korea and the United States. It is not as if bribing Kim Jong Il has ever worked to hold his wayward ambitions in check ...
*History teaches that mass terror can be astonishingly effective when applied freely enough: Stalin butchered 30 million in decades of terror while leaving behind a state immune to challenge for the next three decades. It is precisely when autocracies start to soften their ways by becoming more "open" that they become vulnerable, as Mikhail Gorbachev learned the hard way. Even a state as corrupt, inefficient and penniless as Mugabe's Zimbabwe has managed to keep its heel on the neck of the general populace, so why not the DPRK?
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