Seems to me it proves Marxism cannot exist in the presence of people, revealing the uselessness of it.

If I win the lottery, I'm going to have a huge statue of me erected in some public area. All the fun of being a dictator without the human rights violations.

Non-sequitur.

Quick pass me the eye dropper...the party boss is coming back around again!

"phone operators in Pyongyang"

They still have phone operators? WOW! They really are pre-modern.

Man, Charles. That is some serious stick up your ass.. You are forgetting that there is one philosopher who has much more influence than Marx or John Maynard Keynes on North Korea or China: Confucius.

well.. if you must laugh..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4eFN8X6o…

@9 Confucius is to blame for those country's problems? He sounds dangerous, I hope his books are outlawed here.

@ Mr. Mudede. Brilliant, thank you.

That video is what Berkley looked like when the Wire ended.

Charles,
I agree with your second to last sentence. But your last one is a bit of a stretch. Jong-Il essentially starved his population. His dictatorship was hardly morally superior.

Marxism leads, inevitably, to lack of democracy. That is its principle flaw. It is non-sensical to believe you can concentrate that much economic power in the state without concentrating political power as well. That has been the inevitable result everywhere Marxism has been tried (Russia, China, Korea, Cuba, most recently Venezuela), no matter how pure the intentions of its founding revolutionaries.

I know a lot of people think they are all faking their grief, but I wonder if those are tears of fear for what will inevitably follow the 'Leaders' death. If there is a struggle between his three sons things can only get worse in that country. I pity those poor people.

The tears are probably genuine. I don't think you all are considering how powerful the personality cult is or how purposefully ignorant the population is.

This is going to be a mess.

I've always found North Korea to be most like a feudal monarchist state - complete with god-king myths, passing of the thrones from father to son to grandson, massive income disparities, terrible farm productivity, peasants not being able to own the land they till (the king owns it aka the dear leader), terrible violence exacted against the populace, and a highly militarized state. Kim the king makes more sense to me than Kim the chairman of the party.

@11 No, Confucius is not to blame for North Korea being a gangster state, but his teachings weigh heavily on administration, bureaucracy and why Koreans put up with a nutball like Kim Jong-Il. Confucius has much more influence probably today on China than Marx. Mao Zedong was never a strong Marxist theologian, as much as he spent many of his days reading about Chinese History, and seemed to be enthralled with Emperor Qin Shi Huang. How obedience, family structure, ancestor worship and some of the government edicts by China and DPRK aren’t that much different than 6th Century BCE.

@ 3:03, why are they on Mars?

first of all, i love normal non crazy koreans.
second of all, koreans are fucking crazy. batshit crazy for jesus or kim jong. wtf???

You'd be crying too if you had lived through the last change-over in 1994. There was mass famine and shortages of even basics such as pots and clothes for years. The North Korean people have been so conditioned to fear the west that they probably expect to be invaded and slaughtered any day now. Uncertainty on that scale is terrifying.

Might be sort of a Princess Diana kind of thing.

Also there's probably a thriving spy-on-your-neighbor culture like there was in the Soviet bloc.... if you don't weep sincerely enough you might find yourself in a labor camp.

Fifth-largest military in the world. Nukes and missiles. Mass starvation, total isolation. Successor is a 20-year-old doughboy who doesn't even know how to open his own pack of cigarettes. There's a reason China and South Korea are terrified. This is going to be awful.

When the best-case scenario is China taking over the entire country, you have a really dangerous world situation. I don't much enjoy reading the comments here and elsewhere along the lines of "huh, huh, their missiles'll prolly blow up on the launching pad". Nukes going off in North Korea even by accident probably mean world war. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

World war?! Really Fnarf? That's pushing it quite a bit.

@25.. Oh come on. “Fifth largest military”, if one looks at numbers on paper. There is a reason why the ROK has about half the number of troops as DPRK. It has more sophisticated weaponry and a better infrastructure to wage war than the DPRK, combine that the US will probably help the ROK in any war against the DPRK, it is really no match. The drawback is that thousands to one hundreds of thousand could be killed in a war on the Korean Peninsula. The DPRK doesn’t have the energy, the parts and the money to upkeep their military, or probably the fuel for pilot training..

On the nuclear weapons issue, both nuclear tests by the North Koreans were kind of pathetic. The US 1945 Trinity tests were more powerful than the DPRK tests. It is doubtful that they can send any sort of nuclear payload longer than short term missiles, (which means Seoul is at serious risk, but not places like Tokyo, and most of the Kwanto Plain. The DPRK probably has some problems with the lenses used to implode the plutonium to make it critical or the lenses make part of the device critical, hence the low yield. If the DPRK can build a dry lithium deuteride device and make it small enough to be put on a missile, (or actually two or three warheads) I would be very, very afraid. However the DPRK is in some ways writing their own death warrant by putting a huge amount of capital into their nuclear weapons program for pretty pathetic results, yes they may have eight nuclear bombs, but spent fuel rods have to have some sophisticated made parts to make a plutonium imploding device that can release kilotons of energy.