generalspeaking

The Power of Madness

Three generations of madmen governing a country. A legacy of belligerent megalomaniacs enabled by a military-led regime coupled with a pathology of paranoia has resulted in a hermit-country that oppresses its population allowing it to undergo systemic malnutrition resulting in stunted physical and mental maturation among the young, using all its resources in a single-minded effort to produce weapons of mass destruction.

While it destroys the future of the mass of its population through deliberate neglect of the provision of basic human needs, it forges ahead, through the background of condemnation from neighbouring countries in alarm at its thunderous threats at initiating conflict and conflagration, and the sanctions imposed upon it by the international community through the United Nations-led declarations of alarm over the country's malicious threats.

From "Eternal Leader" Kim Il Sung, on through to Kim Jong-il in their relentless pursuit of power and their manipulation of world leaders to trade on the fear of their unknown radical moves, to extract from them humanitarian aid in exchange for promises never meant to be kept, to the current "Dear Leader", baby-faced Kim Jong-un, proving to his military that he is every bit a war-monger that his antecedents were.

Lunacy requires sequestration, and this is how most societies contain the aberrant behaviour of their mad citizens who cannot be trusted to behave in civil ways toward others. North Korea has willingly sequestered itself, the administration convincing its effectively-imprisoned population that they live well, and not in a giant Gulag, that they have access to better living conditions than others in the world who are eager to treat them ill, and invade their country to despoil it of its assets.

Those assets, now including powerful ballistic missiles and the explosive potential of miniaturized atomic bombs, have raised pride in the feebly-beating hearts of North Koreans. Taught from birth that they must be courageous in supporting their beloved leaders in spurning the malevolent interference of the outside world, and their obligation to venerate their succession of leaders, they have absorbed the indoctrination that makes them compliant and uncomplaining.

Self-reliance and adoration of the Kims as semi-divine beings assuring them a good life is a given among North Koreans who have no idea what the world outside their country is like, for comparison to their own meagre existence. The delusions of grandeur that their leaders suffer from appear to them as just respect for their shining stars.

What, though, explains the delusionary response of the world outside North Korea when even its patron China has begun to be concerned over the inexplicably irrational behaviour and threats emanating from Kim Jong-un, going out of his way to prove himself as much a flaming lunatic as his forbears? A world that sits, breath bated, counting on having 'more time' before becoming truly alarmed over the fact that a country ruled by a bloodless despot can explode into military action at any time.

How much more time? The steady perfection of ever further-reaching ballistic missiles with the creation of a miniaturized nuclear bomb needs no huge amount of time before the two are successfully wed. And if the brilliant and well-fed nuclear scientists of North Korea find a problem too deep in the solving for their intellectual means, they can always turn to collaboration with their closest allies in Iran. And they do.

The very real threat that the marriage between megalomaniacal lunacy and weapons of mass destruction pose are not exactly ignored by the still-most-powerful nation on Earth. As a result of the looming threat that North Korea's egotistical madman represents, the U.S. has busied itself planning to put a new array of anti-ballistic missiles in place - not in Europe where it has long promised to do, to fend off a very similar threat from an equally-belligerent Iran, but on America's own West Coast.

In this response-sclerotic, insane world we now inhabit where dysfunctional dictatorships who have always posed a threat to the well-being of neighbours, and now present as a near-on-the-horizon existential threat to those same neighbours, and look beyond their neighbours toward far-reaching countries with whom they have axes to grind, the future looks very close to explosive madness.

Labels: Conflict, Controversy, Crisis Politics, Iran, Middle East, Munitions, North Korea, Nuclear Technology, United States

posted by Pieface @ Monday, March 18, 2013