WHY NORTH KOREA LOVES TO THREATEN NUCLEAR WAR
Allselfsustained.com
Mar. 6, 2016
A few hours after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced he had ordered his country’s military on standby for nuclear strikes, the threats came up at Thursday’s Republican presidential debate, and the candidates repeated one of the most common misconceptions about the hermit kingdom.
“You indeed do have a lunatic in North Korea,” Sen. Marco Rubio said. Sen. Ted Cruz also called Kim a “lunatic,” as did debate moderator Chris Wallace.
The image you get of Kim Jong Un is of an unpredictable wild man, an out of control crazy person, careening around northeast Asia with nuclear weapons. And I don’t mean to pick on Rubio or Cruz; this is a widespread and bipartisan view.
But, in fact, while Kim is indeed a dangerous dictator who poses a real threat and oversees some of the world’s worst human rights abuses, and seems to be personally quite eccentric, there is every reason to believe that, far from an erratic “lunatic,” he is crude and brutal but quite rational dictator. And his behavior, especially including threats like Thursday’s, starts to make a lot more sense when you understand how his regime really works.
There are, broadly speaking, three main reasons for North Korea’s perennial threat-making — and why he never seems to actually follow through. In any given provocation, the motivation is usually some combination of these three; the degree to which one or another is more important varies, but ultimately these three make the country’s behavior what it is.
1) It’s about maintaining the big lie that keeps North Korea running
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