Not another Kim, please...

Kim Jung Eun (or Kim Jung-un, depending on your dictionary) is the new "extreme leader" of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea now that his father, Kim Jung Il, is dead.


If ever there was an example of why Western states should be able to intervene in the affairs of foreign nations to end repressive, tyrannical regimes... North Korea is it.


Since its founding in 1948, the country (which had been a marginally-developing industrial nation prior to WWII) has fallen into a state of almost constant poverty and isolationism that hasn't been seen since Imperial Japan opened its trade to the West in the mid-1800s.  Tens of millions have died of famine and disease... ten million as recently as 1997!... because of the backwards, non-functioning manner in which its leadership (Grandpa, Daddy and now Junior Kims all) has pushed the country in relentlessly.   Their mutual paranoia towards Western and South Korean "military expansionism" has forced the US and ROK governments to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year to maintain one of the strongest international borders in human history (the 38th Parallel, or the Korean DMZ), and thousands of Koreans and hundreds of Americans have died on that border since 1955.


North Korea has maintained an active WMD program since 1988, detonating as many as four low-yield nuclear devices underground since 1993.  They could possibly maintain the largest stockpile of chemical weapons on the face of the earth right now (but no one knows for sure if that is the case or not).


Compared to other "despotic" regimes that the US and her allies have actively interfered with since the end of the Cold War... North Korea makes such places like Iraq and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan seem like schoolyard bullies.  Tens of millions dead, hundreds of millions kept in abject poverty and ignorance, personal freedom and liberty nonexistent, forced child labor an industry standard... these are the hallmarks of the North Korean leaderships legacy since 1948, and for the vast majority of that time, we (the West) have been content to sit back and watch as it all happened.


The images of hundreds of people (grown and presumably rational adult human beings) weeping uncontrollably at the news of Kim Jung Il's death shows the level of dependence and ignorance that the country has been forced into over the last 50 years.  Could this new generation of leadership bring about change?  Could this man, Kim Jung Eun, educated in Switzerland and more exposed to Western thinking than either his father or grandfather, be the catalyst for growth and development that many seem to think?  Yes, I suppose he could.


I'm not going to hold my breath though...