Bogpill me on pre-division Korea

Literally the only reason North Korea hasn't be squashed by NATO yet is because they are essentially holding all of South Korea hostage. Any war breaks out, and its SK that will suffer the worst. Kim's armies will zerg every major southern city in a suicide offensive even as NATO bombs Pyongyang into the stone age, there's no outcome where the south is not badly mauled. Hence the stalemate for the last 60+ years.

The fact that SK has managed to become such an economic power house with a blade at their necks for the better part of the last century is impressive, but I guess knowing your entire civilization could descend into chaos and death at the whim of a single madman makes concentrating on work a nice distraction.

That, and the fact that a NATO/US victory in a potential second Korean War means that China concedes any influence there and accepts that it now has a land border with a US client state. For a country like China that relies heavily on projecting power to create a buffer zone that insulates its population centers, that would be unacceptable.

>The fact that SK has managed to become such an economic power house with a blade at their necks for the better part of the last century is impressive

That's largely the reason WHY they've been able to become such a powerhouse. The US saw it as a priority to help build up South Korea and make them prosperous, and so South Korea was able to shift its economy away from agriculture and towards industry, and then even to advanced industry, intellectual property, and R&D. But these gains are built not on a solid domestic foundation, but on the goodwill of the US acting as their protector and the ability for them to import things like food from the global market.

In other words, South Korea cannot sustain its own advanced economy and needs outside help just to keep it going. It just so happens that that help is there, but for how long no one can say. In that regard, the meteoric gains they've made toward being a "developed" economy look less impressive.

>Kim's armies will zerg every major southern city in a suicide offensive
Yeah, because a bunch of starving soldiers with Soviet-era weapons can win against well-fed soldiers with modern weapons just cuz they are higher in numbers.

Daily reminder that NK still uses T-34

It's not about winning, it's about causing damage. Suicide bombing campaigns would cause hundreds of deaths. And then there's the question of what happens to the thousands of starving, illiterate refugees from the North that will flood the rich South once the war is over.

KIM stop fucking shitposting and fix yer missiles

>And then there's the question of what happens to the thousands of starving, illiterate refugees from the North that will flood the rich South once the war is over.
There are already NK people coming to SK right now, and they can read/write. The important part is adapting to society.

The solution to the Kim jong il problem is actually very simple; Another UN mission with China on board militarily.

Massive and rapid amphibious and aerial assault on Pyongyang from Qingdao/Dalian, more chinese forces from the northern theatre command streaming south, and US forces heading northwards.

The problem is the political will and capital necessary to make this a reality

Did you not read "suicide" in "suicide offensive?" They'd lose, but they'd take every major southern city with them. They'd maul the south so bad that the entire goal of liberating the north from the Kims would be set back by like 20 years at least because SK would first have to rebuild itself before it could rebuild the north.

It's not like the south was ever a major autonomous power though. They've always been subservient. At least now they're subservient and rich.

>In other words, the division has made both Koreas weak. If the two weren't split apart, Korea could have been something much more.
QFT

Korea would be far more economically powerful if it was united. The north has a fuckton of mineral resources and hydroelectric potential. Korea could easily be up to Japan's level if not more.

a majority of developed countries are like that, except the USA, can't produce enough food for themselves. Those that can can't match the tremendous variety that comes from international trade in food products. i don't necessarily like global capitalism but i think south korea's reliance on food abroad is the least of their problems. Japan has the same problem too I think and they're fine.

As you pointed out, though, the real problem is when a nation's fate is tied to the success of a handful of multinational corporations based in their country. Finland is similar in that regard. But I don't necessarily think there's any advantage to having a wider hand in foreign policy. Japan and Korea rely on America for their protection mostly and that frees up funds to be spent elsewhere in the economy. If you treat states as sovereign individuals, then i suppose NK's freedom of action looks good compared to SK. But sovereign states are no individuals, and I don't agree that it is the be all and end all of a country (though I don't like the opposite where a state is at the whims of international markets and can be cucked by the IMF or World Bank when something goes wrong, as happened in Korea 1998). I suppose though it comes down to a matter of quality of life.

SK's ultra competitive school system, while delivery more material wealth, is absolutely miserable from what I've heard and read. It's mandatory military service is also supposed to be cruel too. As a sluggish person myself I'm not sure I could survive in such a society without having a breakdown desu.

>illiterate

>self reported

You forget the part about China wanting a buffer state between it and a western-friendly country that could station troops right on its borders. The only reason NK survives if because of China, not NATO.

>North Korea has a higher literacy rate than Nigger filled America
Really makes you think

Yes, also their leader never poops because he is completely pure in mind and body. Did I also mention that their military is the most powerful in the world, and that they posses nuclear weapons capable of striking any target on Earth instantaneously? Of course this is all backed up by their booming self-sufficient economy, a true miracle all thanks to our glorious leader and eternal marshal.

>anything which is even slightly pro-North Korean is haram in the minds of Liberal Western shitskins

corruption makes money

>but you can't eat Hyundai sedans and you can't shelter yourself with Galaxy Notes. South Korea is completely dependent on other countries
MUH AGRARIAN AUTARKY

Lenin/Stalin/Mao called, they want their land reform back

>muh bullshot sources allow me 2 shitpost at da niggers XDDDDDD

Is this really the best your brain can produce?

>being able to actually support your population with your own economy in case of emergency is a bad thing
cmon now, even the United States, the antithesis of commie, strives for this goal. It's not just food either, it's energy, natural resources, etc.

There isn't a single nation in the 1st world which isn't reliant on foreign trade for x or y resource. Every economy specialise themselves in specific types of goods or services and use the resulting surplus to obtain the other resources they naturally lack. Not even a neoliberal shill but that's LITERALLY how macroeconomics work.

What makes you think this is incorrect? Most socialist states have high literacy rates.

this guy is right, its called comparative advantage. states produce what they are best at producing and little else in the modern day. for example, in australia the car industry collapsed because it could not compete with the cheaper and more efficient industries of east asia. furthermore, look around your house and find every item not made in your home country. now throw it out. id imagine the vast majority of your electronics and furniture have now disappeared. to say that SK is incapable of of living as an isolated state is moot, as that applies to nearly all states on earth bar i believe 3 who can comfortably produce their own food supplies (i think it was australia, the US and canada).

Retarded western thinking. China props up North Korea because the alternative is 24.9 million refugees heading north and south, the possibility of North Korea going "Samson" and launching warheads at everyone, and general chaos in a post war situation.

The biggest concern for China post NK would not be US troops stationed on the border, because it has enough economic leverage to dissuade SK from doing so, but a redrawing of the border which might encroach into Chinese territory which currently has something like a million ethnic koreans living there.

As a follow up to this, you have to remember that SK, China and Japan are all within the ranges of North Korean missiles.

>"The south is as bad as the north because it imports food"

>Retarded western thinking.
why so hostile?

> but a redrawing of the border which might encroach into Chinese territory which currently has something like a million ethnic koreans living there.
If China has so much economic power this would also be a nonissue. Other countries have have this situation and don't make irredentist claims.

Anyway, as it is NK refugees continue to migrate into China without any collapse coming. If a crash were to come, though, I think most of the burden would fall on the western powers and the south koreans. The past few years has shown us that the Chinese are capable of moving huge amounts of people anywhere they want; whether to newly built cities or shifting other ethnic groups to new farming lands. If NK were to collapse right now, China literally has tons of ghost cities that could harbor the refugees. It'd still probably be a shitshow I suppose, and

Because its oversimplistic to think that China is concerned about the possibility of US bases when the fallout from a NK dissolution would be FAR worse.

>If China has so much economic power this would also be a nonissue. Other countries have have this situation and don't make irredentist claims.

Look at Europe, but replace all the african economic refugees with military trained starving peasants who have it far worse. It would be a massive social strain on Northern China imo. And I could see chinese nationals being incredibly xenophobic to north korean refugees, seeing how current refugees are treated.

nuclear weapons
before the 1980s there North Korea was more militarized and technologically comparable, now the South has a better defense force but the North has nuclear weapons and tons of surface to surface rockets etc.

The US literacy rate is 99.9%
unless you apply reading level

...

I don't know the sitaution on the border now, but if the NKs are so hostile we would have heard about it by now. If were talking an army invasion, then i suppose so, but I doubt that the whole population of NK will just up and leave, when I'm sure plenty would take the opportunity to look after what lands they have, and subsist of the land and better their property (though I can be totally off base here about how NK agriculture is). The best bet in case of a collapse is to keep the NK people exactly where they are, sending in convoys of food and setting up an efficient system as soon as possible to ward off mass starvation. You'd also can bring in armies to help with this. It may sound unrealistic but Post-War Western Europe was on the verge of starvation but they were get over it. After WWI, the League of Nations was very successful aiding refugees from the Russian Revolution. Anyway, once you have a distribution system you then use such a system to establish rudimentary government services, and maybe things like mobile hospitals, and ways of distributing information so as to explain the situation to the populace.

>other thoughts
I agree that NK refugees would be treated like shit, North China over 120 million people in it so the strain might be felt but it may not be so dramatic. Plus, we're talking a huge pool of extremely cheap labor that industrialists wouldn't mind exploiting (though I can imagine some resentment from competing chinese workers being bad). Then again, in such a gigantic crisis as the collapse of NK ALL EYES would be glued to the situation, and China would 1) not want to fuck up and see their international reputation sink, and 2) would want to do a good job handling the problem so as to raise their prestige and use it as propaganda against america.

>Thread specifically on pre-division Korea
>Devolve into usual uninformed posturing on No/SoKo
rly makes you think

Gg

omg btfo

Kim Jong-un is such a disappointment.

I figured him being young and having lived outside of Nuts Korea for a time, would have resulted in reunification but he’s just as much of a retard as his dad and grandpa.

>Yes, Samsung and Hyundai are successful, but you can't eat Hyundai sedans and you can't shelter yourself with Galaxy Notes. South Korea is completely dependent on other countries (esp. the United States and China) in order to not starve to death, the economic growth they've experienced is only possible because the global market props them up. If that teat was ever pulled away and they couldn't suckle anymore, they'd fall into chaos and starvation.
If things ever got so dire that Koreans couldn't afford to import food it would mean the whole world was in deep shit.

NK has enough artillery trained on Seoul to flatten it before the inevitable counter attack

It's really not that far at all from the DMZ.

I just think its fascinating because its the closest thing we have in the modern day to what it must have been like to live under a medieval monarchy.

>you have absolutely nothing are ruled by a ruthless corrupt asshole who pointlessly squanders your nation's limited resources and does not give one solitary fuck about you
>one day he dies
>his son takes over and literally nothing changes, in fact things might even get a little worse

Most of their artillery can only reach the suburbs, the the South Koreans are very good at disaster drills.

This being said, you have to expect them to toss around Tabun and tularemia like flower girls at a wedding throw petals.

Adding several millions of people to population in an instant and doubling the size of country with a completely underdeveloped shithole is not exactly a recipe for economic prosperity. Hell, Geramny is STILL paying for trying get East Germany back on its feet and to a comparable standard to the west and they still lag behind and cause a drain on resources, and East Germany was light years more developed than North Korea.

South Africa after apartheid is a good example as well, since a massively outsized proportion of the budget was spent on the white south africans, and when that ended in favor of a more equitable distribution of public money they suffered greatly for it.

Honestly the best bet would be to preemptively strike the North's artillery so hard they'd only be able to cause minimal damage before the ground attack, kinda like how Israel preemptively destroyed the Egyptian Airforce in the Six Day War. It'd be a fucking bitch massing enough ground artillery/aerial support to do it without alerting people though

you need extremely good intelligence to make an attack like that though, we'd need to not only knock out all the artillery but hit all of the nuclear facilities. All without tipping off the North Koreans so they can move things.

peasants didn't necessarily have it so bad. it depended on the region, fertility of the soil, your lord, obligations, taxes etc. etc.

I should hope US intelligence has been smart enough to keep tabs on artillery positions near the DMZ, and I'm sure they probably know the location of every Nuclear Facility but we've been unwilling to risk war over hitting them. Agree on not tipping of the North though, I think the main question would be how thoroughly the North has penetrated the South's political and military structure with sleeper cells

Overall it's just not worth it to start shit. Too many unknowns, and what we do know would still result in tons of civilian deaths and collateral damage. I think the strategy during the truce has been "wait to see if eventually the Kims produce an heir who is less of a batshit insane dictator" and it hasn't worked out so far.

The status quo is the only option that keeps North Koreans from leaving North Korea.

If they were allowed to leave, they'd destroy South Korea and probably annoy the shit out of the Chinese.

Also, there'd probably be a whole lot of people dying and shit.

Yeah that's the real bitch. Even if the war finally ends and Korea is made whole again it's just going to plunge the country into economic chaos for decades. Though I'm sure Korea will be able to recover, it's not some shitty African backwater taking over a colonial project, but it's gonna knock them well behind their peers for a while.

That strategy was ok up until now, but I think it's going to be untenable that we'd allow the fucking Kim dynasty nuclear weapons that could vaporize multiple allies in minutes and threaten the US homeland. I don't see any other options frankly as Kim Jong Un is the captain of the Norktanic and he's spent the last few years cutting away the life boats. When he's willing to piss of the Chinese who are the sole reason his shithole is still independent you know he's getting an inflating ego and is on one hell of a power trip

Whyy doesn't China just assassinate Kimset up a puppet state that's not just an imcompotent child with a hand grenade?

They'd be doing everyone a huge favor.

I'm presuming that South Korea and China will simply refuse to demilitarize their borders with the North, even if communism falls.

From there, you're talking like 20 years of occupation government, minimum.

>NK has enough artillery

Airpower trumps artillery and N.Korea ain't got any.

They need a buffer state to absorb southern armies as human shields by the time it takes them to mobilize. China actually has a very tiny military relative to its population.

Fun fact: China has a draft, but they have such a huge number of recruits that they've never actually had to use it.

Because Kim Jon Un's bro that they considered a potential back up was just assassinated by his brother in Malaysia. It's why China is fucking pissed at the moment.
Any unification of the Korean peninsula would realistically require some sort of deal on deployment of US forces and such in the North. I think the most realistic option would be a US/SK led occupation with many Chinese observers and a timetable of say 5 years for withdrawal of all US troops, could involve a Findlandization of the peninsula too and I could see the South agreeing to that

I'm thinking the Chinese would settle for a ban on US military installations in the North and a South Korean led occupation authority.

Definitely withdrawal of all THAAD systems from Korea as well. With the North conquered I could see a liberal/leftists Korean government (which seems very likely the next few years) agreeing to cozy up to China in general as well

Why does it have to be so bad though? I'd say they should during this hypothetical occupation they set up a passport system so movement of North Koreans is restricted to South Korea. Meanwhile, SK would have access to a giant reserve of cheap labor and which can buy their goods with the money they earn from working for South Korean firms/businesses or whatever.

Get of Veeky Forums Kim

NK artillery capacity is heavily exaggerated (although it's not like they wouldn't be able to cause any damage, not by a long shot)
nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/mind-the-gap-between-rhetoric-and-reality/

The North probably watch all the South's military movements so a mass of artillery pieces and planes would be under a microscope.

>ruled by military juntas propping up a promise of democracy
Is this actually true?

It used to literally be a military state with only a pretense of democracy. Now it's less that it's ruled by the military and more that the democracy itself is so unstable that they can't keep a leader in power, and often the security forces have to intervene to fix things. Let me explain it like this.

List of Korean Presidents:

>1st President - led the Korean government in exile during Japanese occupation. Impeached and escaped to Hawaii. Took power after WW2 and forced to resign because of rigged election
>2nd President - resigns due to military coup, sentenced 3 years imprisonment in court-martial
>3rd President - wife shot by guy trying to kill him, soon after killed by head of Korean Intelligence Agency
>4th President - couldn't control demonstrations, resigns due to Gwangju Massacre after just 8 months in office
>5th President - sentenced to death for his role in the Gwangju Massacre, later pardoned
>6th President - arrested for bribery after term, imprisoned 17 years for mutiny and treason during Gwangju Massacre, later pardoned
>7th President - economic crisis forcing IMF to step in during term, second son arrested for bribery of intercession and tax evasion
>8th President - 5 family members including his 3 sons guilty of bribery
>9th President - "slips and dies" while climbing a mountain during investigations for bribery (official story is that it was a suicide, but you can never be certain of anything in South Korea)
>10th President - brother arrested, wife's cousin arrested, accused of violating real estate laws
>11th President - daughter of 3rd president, puppet of a cult leader, impeached

In other words, all of their presidents ever, have all either been arrested by Korean police/military, killed or "suicided" by Korean military/intelligence, been impeached, or resigned before those things could happen. It's hardly a paragon of democracy and the military still holds a lot of sway.

Wtf why we don't consider south korea as a third world dictatorship?

Because they're our ally and that means we can't think of them in a bad light. Thus they aren't autocrats, just temporarily embarrassed democrats.

The problem is the corrupting power of the Korean chaebol. Chaebols are family-controlled enterprises with close ties to the government, the largest of them holding groups with a large portfolio of diversified enterprises. Imagine the Rockefellers, the du Ponts, or the Waltons on steroids. Originally, the government encouraged these oligopolies because they needed to quickly industrialize and create an export-based economy to build their cash reserves and rebuild from the ruin of the Korean War. The government would provide cheap credit, guarantee domestic markets by imposing steep tariffs on foreign products, and establish markets in allied countries like the United States. In some regards, this worked too well. Korea went through the too big to fail with Daewoo Group, but they eventually let it collapse. They run roughshod over laws and regulations, bully and bribe the political apparatus, and ruthlessly crush competition in ways that would trigger ten federal anti-trusts suits in the US. It's disgusting how much the political establishment fellate the chaebol families. They can literally get convicted in a court of law with incontrovertible evidence for tax and get fucking pardoned by the President. A bunch of dumb country kids went to go work in their plants and they all got cancer and Samsung basically said go fuck yourselves and manipulated the court to dismiss the case. Some mall developer built a shitty mall that collapsed and killed 500 people. This wasn't just negligence... this was like blatant disregard for human life. He got 7 years and his family was stripped of all their assets. For killing 500 people and injuring 900 more. Really goes to show you where their values are. Crony capitalism and nepotism is fucking real over there. Trump selling cabinet positions to his campaign contributors is old hat compared to this.

The South Korean political system is a dystopian fusion of hypercapitalism and fascism.

>Chaebols

Why do they exist? The Yanks dismantled the Zaibatsu system in Japan, why didn't they do the same in Korea?

The zaibatsus weren't ever completely dismantled because the Americans quickly realized communism was the bigger threat in East Asia and dismantling efficient capital structures isn't the way to go. Korea's chaebol structure emerged in the 1960s under Park Chunghee and his economic mobilization programs. Park took a lot of cues and working models from the Japanese and applied them to Korea. In summary, it was capitalist pragmatism.

This picture

Unironically correct

Say what you want about the absolute JUST shithole in the north, but North Korea is truly KOREAN and truly INDEPENDENT and truly FREE for the first time in history.

>innovation
>copying Japan and USA

>Korea late 1980's
>liberal democracy
Pick one

Why did the US and South Korea give North Korea tons of aid 1992-2008 then?

Don't tell me you don't remember the US doing that because of the 1994-1995 collapse in NK? Or because of the Six Party talks?

Also
>NATO
what?

Because South Koreans see North Koreans as their brothers. They are still a single ethnic group and blood nationalism is a potent ideology in both Koreas.

America thought it could buy over North Korea with supplies and aid but it fails to understand that the Kims will never relinquish power willingly and as long as South Korea is an American satellite state, the Chinese will stand behind North Korea until Mt. Baekdu crumbles to into sand.

The US is actually self sufficient in nearly every resource, and only isn't in a few because of international trade making it cheaper (rare earth, uranium, iphones).

The US is the least trade intensive economy in the world. Until 1980 our trade as % of GDP was 1-2%. Now it's only 11%.

Because that's much more difficult than you think.

Why didn't the US kill Saddam for 30 years? Why can they still not kill Baghdadi? Why did it take 20 to kill Osama?

Add in the fact North Korea is literally a 100% Korean police state that isn't incompetent.

The Chinese aid for NK completely ended and trade is down 80%.

NK is literally going full rogue autarchy state.

My point is that the US and SK are partly to blame for NK today. It's not just China.

In 1994-1995 the US was literally the world superpower, and they decided to save NK from collapse. (They also signed Iran Deal 1.0, but don't let Obama know that).

Anyone able to run a country and eliminate his opposition so proficiently isn't an "incompetent child with hand grenade" but sadly realism is dead and people are so high off theoretical ideology they can't comprehend this.

It's because NK embarrassed the fuck out of China during the Talks by reneging on the agreement. As NK's big daddy, China can't afford to look bad like that. But if American and South Korean tanks rolled over the DMZ, you can bet your ass the Chinese would go into damage control mode immediately.

How is this relevant to what I wrote?

China didn't give a fuck about NK in 1994-1995. It was a US/SK operation to provide aid and keep NK from collapsing. Furthermore, Korean leftists helped NK economically and with aid 1992-2008. Only in 2016 did it truly stop

Hence the "China is to blame" meme is tiring for me to hear.

The Six Party talks are a US creation. It was literally Bush's plan.

What are you talking about?