Pundit: It’s brinksmanship. It’s like the Cold War. You make threats, you rattle your saber, and then you say , “Okay, I’ll stop rattling my saber is you give me $10 million’.” So it’s all posturing and show business.
Host: I have the feeling this Kim Jong-Eun wants to put the money in his own pocketbook, rather than feed his own people. What do you think?
Pundit: I don’t know what he can buy. There’s not a lot of Wal-Marts in North Korea. [Chuckles]
[From Coast to Coast AM with George Noory]
One of the hardest things in the world to get a true sense of is how many South Koreans sympathize with the North. The outright pro-North-Korean candidate in last year’s election polled at only 1%. But then, consider that only 3% of Americans voted for Nader in 2000 (including my cousin B., he told me), but far more support environmentalism.
I once heard a Korean, with whom I was close at the time, express a respect for the North in the following terms: “Everything they have, they’ve built themselves“. By implication, he was saying, South Korea had gotten a lot of outside help, mostly from the USA, and that was less admirable than autarkic North Korea.
There is something appealing to the Korean psyche (I think) about this “No Wal-Mart” attitude. Looking back to late 2011 and early 2012, this attitude may also be the well from which the fiery opposition here to the U.S./South-Korea Free Trade Agreement drew its water.
My caveat to these observations is that in fact, although through the ideal of “Juche” (주체 = self-reliance) is of great ideological import in the North, it really comes down to little more than lip-service. North Korea relies on gifted and extorted goods for most of its essentials: food comes from the South, basic consumer goods come from China, etc.
In fact, despite its export-driven economic model, South Korea is, right now, arguably more “self-reliant” – even on Kim Il-seong’s definition of self-reliance – than the North is. The South is a net exporter of food, basic consumer goods, and really almost everything imaginable except petroleum products and mineral resources – yet even in these latter fields the South has substitution regimes in place (e.g. nuclear and hydroelectric power) that go quite a bit further than what the North has achieved, despite higher base levels of consumption.
That South Korea could be a net-exporter of food is astonishing.