Published: Sun, 21 May 2006 10:52:26 -0800

OhmyNews makes it sound like the former brutal dictator of North Korea, Kim Il-sung wasn't such a bad guy after all:

The roots of the current crisis go back to the founding of North Korea in 1945, when Korea was divided along the 38th parallel after World War II. Given its current reputation, the Kim dynasty was one of the milder communist dictatorships, whereas Stalin and Mao both applied collectivist theory to the countryside in short, brutal bursts, leaving desolation in their wake. Kim Il Sung took a more gradual approach.

I guess according to OhmyNews it is better in dictator terms to let the people suffer slowly before perishing. Here is more on the greatness of Kim Il Sung:

Moreover, Kim Il Sung, by contrast, did not slaughter class enemies en masse. Rich landlords were allowed to flee to South Korea in 1946-50, those who stayed beginning new lives as peasants. The right to sell land was abolished, but the right to inherit it was not. Like Stalin and Mao, Kim collectivized rice, paddy, and maize fields, but in proper, manageable units. The peasants were also allowed to trade vegetables and whatever else they were able to grow for themselves in their backyard vegetable plots.

Nonetheless, North Korea under Kim Il Sung was a repressive state, but its people never experienced a peacetime famine. According to CIA estimates, until the early 1980s, North Korean rice fields were actually more productive than those in the capitalist South, which was owing mainly to big subsidies, massive irrigation projects, and a generous use of chemical fertilizers.

How productive would the agricultural system in North Korea had been if it wasn't for the "big subsidies" from their communist allies. Kim Il-sung was not some enlightened leader who created an effective agricultural system; he was a thug who was a master at manipulating people which he was able to successfully do by playing both China and Russia against each other in order to gain aid from both. The fallacy of the North Korean agricultural system was evident when China and Russia cut aid to North Korea and famine ensued shortly there after.

According to OhmyNews, Kim's son, Kim Jong-il must also be a "mild" dictator for his response to the mass famines in the mid-90's:

The government's immediate response to the mayhem, when set against the norms of unreconstructed communist oligarchies, was pretty good. While Mao never admitted that China was facing mass starvation, North Korean leaders, by contrast, confessed their inability to feed their subjects in 1995.

Could it be that Kim Jong-il asked for international aid because he had no other choice because the regime was on verge of collapse and not because of some deep seeded feeling to help his own people?

This article only gets better:

The problem is not that the North Korean administration does not understand where it has gone wrong. The chief obstacle to reform is that Kim Jong-Il cannot admit this publicly without losing the last pretext for not teaming up with the capitalist South. Having seen South Korean judges hand down long-term jail sentences to two of their own former presidents for corruption and political murder, he probably dreads the thought of what they would do to him.

So does the author believe that if Kim Jong-il is issued amnesty than unification should become a reality? Has it ever occurred to the author that Kim Jong-il doesn't want unification? He wants to keep his power and amnesty wouldn't let him keep that.

Here is my favorite part. This was actually predictable because when in doubt, blame the Japanese:

Observers say that the North Korean regime should stop being suspicious of Japan and South Korea, as they are nearby and are best placed to help. Millions of tons of rice are sitting in Japanese warehouses, but with the Japanese press full of stories about North Korean obstructionism against those who would try to feed its hungry masses, the Japanese government is unsure of what to do.

First Dokdo, then history textbooks, and now they are letting the North Koreans starve. Those bad Japanese. I also guess it hasn't occurred to the author that Japan is not eager to offer any aid until all their abducted citizens by North Korea are accounted for. Just because South Korea could care less about their abducted citizens doesn't mean that Japan shouldn't.

Tags: kim il-sung, kim jong-il, north korea, aid

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