So basically, NK was the adopted child of USSR and China. During the divorce, the parents fought to keep their son, while spoiling him to maintain their trust at the cost of the parent's withering relationship. At this point NK was so spoiled that he has a hard time of taking care of himself needing mommy China to conitue to support him.
It more looks like an "adopted child" of two gay brothers, the elder was USSR and the smaller was China. There are only two air flight companies are flying to North Korea. One is Russian and the other one is Chinese. It is just the same shit as was pro-Russian DDR in Germany.
The USSR are hardly involved in the development of the KWP, The US however was heavily involved in installing Rhee, the fascist mass murder that ran the south.🤔🤔
@@Mighty-Man yes, compared to the south especially. Kim il sung bravely fought off japanese imperialism for a decade before being part of the Red army to defeat japan. Ignorant people as though the Communist movement that existed throughout all of Korea was externally imposed. Soviets during their brief occupation allowed the Korean people to organize themselves politically. In comparison , in the south US helped rig the election for a fascist dictator collaborated in mass murder.
@@CasualScholar As BR Myers, an excellent researcher of NK, has argued, _"All militarist states of limited means have to impose austerity on their subjects, and they usually do so under the more inspiring banner of autarchy or self-reliance. North Korea is a typical case."_ Basically, whenever a regime starts promoting "self-reliance," it's usually a propaganda ploy to mentally prepare and acclimate their citizens to the economic deprivation and hardship that comes in wartime. Putin started pumping self-reliance with his talk of a "sanctions-proof economy" _before_ he started the war in Ukraine. Hitler and Mussolini pumped up the ideas of self-reliance _before (as they were planning)_ World War 2. It's an extremely bad sign when a country starts promoting self-reliance; it means that country's government is planning to do something that they _know_ will get them cut off from the global economy.
My father worked for a humanitarian organization in NK in the 00s. They attempted to solve the famine problem through food processing. The two staple foods were rice and sweet potatoes. Supposedly there should have been enough but the sweet potatoes would freeze and spoil during the harsh winters, leading to huge waste. So the plan was this: Build processing machines that would turn the potatoes into starch which then can be stored and will not spoil easily. Foreigners who had spent some time in the country warned the organization this plan wouldn't work because there is no electricity to run the machines. All the electricity goes to the rice threshing machines during harvest season. The North Korean officals assured everyone that *of course* there will be electricity and then plan went ahead. My father was the head engineer for that project and with the help of the organization and local workers they started build these machines. It was a logistical nightmare because literally *everything* you needed right down to the tiniest screw had to be imported from China. You couldn't buy a thing locally. The North Korean government put no effort into helping the project but instead spied on anyone and everyone involved. Against all odds, the project was completed, all machines installed and hooked up to the electrical grid. They were never used. You see, there was no electricity to run them... This isn't just a story about communist mismanagement, but also of humanitarian aid mismanagement and the waste of kind-hearted people's money.
i'm not a Korean, so i may miss some intricacies of the situation, but based on what i know on the subject, i can't imagine reunification though. it would be orders of magnitude harder (and more costly) than reunification of Germany. the regime is so much tighter than East Germany, the mentality must be completely incompatible by now. (from what i've read, don't know how true this is: even the language itself has diverged substantially - this never happened in Germany). North Koreans wouldn't really be able to function in a market-run society. not to mention where would you fit all those that thrived on serving the regime, and actively persecuted their compatriots? will they just live next door to their victims? do they get to vote? and you can't really imprison thousands and thousands of people. this was a problem in every post-communist country (like my native Poland), but given the rather extreme nature of North Korea, it could become outright terrible. i think the most feasible scenario is that in a few decades the regime begins to thaw, heading towards something similar to the Chinese model (authoritarian, but not orthodox, with a form of state-controlled capitalism), and "reluctanctly neutral" rather than hostile towards South Korea. i wonder what you think about this as a Korean
@@vibovitold You are correct, reunification as it is now would come with some harsh consequences. I don't know the solution, and definitely don't claim to know a lot about the intricacies of the politics. (I don't live in South Korea, for one). The people who escaped from North Korea are often incapable of functioning properly in the south, and need months of training to be able to do basic things. Not to mention the economic differences and the burden on the south by just adding an entire population of what is essentially dead weight to a modern economy, and the burden on having to build that up. There's many south koreans who do not want this. Unifying under North Korea (the NK propaganda units claim to want this) would not be possible at all because the people of the south would obviously not cooperate. I wish there was some sort of way to unify, but if so, it would have to be after NK has 'cooled down' and become much more normal, even if it's in a weird chinese way. That being said, I am scared that China wants to 'claim' NK - if the regieme falls, it isn't unlikely for China to want to annex it like Tibet or Mongolia or any of the countless times that Korea in general has been under Chinese rule. Us Koreans have been subject to Chinese and Japanese conquest many times, and I would hate to see that happen again. But, honestly, it's all speculation. I am not sure where the future will go, and I'm not sure where it should go. All I really know is that the common people are victims, and I wish there was some way to help.
Kim Il Sung's entire strategy for his countries economy was playing Soviet and Chinese governments off of each other. He lucked out dying right after the Soviet Union fell so he never had to lead North Korea without the massive support nets propping it up.
There is this misconception that North Korea was rich in 1960, but they were NOT rich. North Korea was doing slightly better in 1960, compare to South Korea, but both of them were piss poor compare to other countries. Even with China and Soviet Russia's aid, North Korea was bottom tier economy.
@@davidjacobs8558 NorthEast of China and N Korea was the richest place around WW2 in Asia. they have very good industries and sell industrial products to be rich. it is easy to be poor, after collapse of Soviet Union, nobody will help N Korea. With the sanction from the West, nobody will buy their products, and they used to exchange food with industrial products. Also with collapse of Soviet Union, Japan is not that important any more, it is time for the US to surpress Japan, thus suffering lost decades for Japan. After WW2, Mac Athur wanted to make Japan a poor country relying on agriculture, and he wanted to destroy all industries in Japan. But after Korea war, Americans realised that they need to help Japan to be an advanced industrial country, rich enough to mess up with Communist countries. For small countries, their fate is not in their hands but in other superpowers' hands. they can be either rich or poor immediately by the manipulation of superpowers.
@@redyellow4699 Manchuria was NOT rich, North Korea under Japanese rule was NOT rich. and North Korea was NEVER rich from 1945 onward. North Korea was doing slightly better than South Korea back in the 50's and 60's. However, both Korea were still piss poor Countries compare to the rest of the world.
@@davidjacobs8558 Manchuria had the highest GDP per capital in Asia 70 years ago, N Korea was also industrial area. I have no idea why you consider Manchuria as not being rich. Also how is it possible for S Korea doing slight worse than N Korea while North Korea was industrial area that can produce industrial products and South was agriculture region. Industrialization needs huge market, for small country like either N or S korea. as long as there is a superpower wanna help it or surpress it by sanction, it will rise or fall immediately. North Korea and Machuria at that time had iron minerals and coals which are the most important resources for industrialization, thus becoming industrial area. North Korea can be poor because of sanction that they can not exchange food and goods with their industrial products. in 10 years, when e-car become popular, Japan will lose its car market to China as China pioneer in e-car, Japan will lose most of its GDP, and become a poor country. countries relying on industrialization, without demostric huge population, they have to rely on the world market to be rich. if there is sanction or their products are not competitive, they become poor immediately. back in 2010, Japan's GDP per capital was 10 times than China, now it is only more than 2 times than China. It is because China has made huge progress on electronics, cars, and take the market from Japan. Japan becomes poor because of the collapse of soviet union that the US needed to surpress its development, also because of the rise of China that it takes market from Japan.
@@davidjacobs8558 for N Korea, it is very easy to be rich, its population is very small, it can be good at just one industry to be rich. Taiwan is good at semiconductor, and it simply gets rich by semiconductor. For big country China, it is harder to be rich, it needs to be good at almost everything to be rich. it needs to take market from all other countries. from computer, car, to big plane. but it is also hard to surpress a big country as it has complete supply chain. Also, to surpress a small country is easy, a little sanction, forbidding other countries to import their products, the small country gets fucked up immediately as it does not have complete supply chain that has to rely on cooperation with other countries.
What is extremely sad about North Korea, is that this country actually has a huge potential in many aspects, one being tourism: the place is beautiful and could bring so many foreigners. But it is also a perfect example of how incompetence can ruin a place. Really sad for the people there.
are you high? North Korea is not beautiful. There is NOTHING special about North Korea's nature. what you can see in North Korea, you can see in most other countries of temperate climate. So, why would anybody pay money to see something that you can pretty much see any where on earth?
I haven't watched the video but do they talk about how America dropped more bombs on north Korea than all of the Pacific theater during WW2? Or the fire bombing campaigns that targeted civilians? Don't get me wrong north Korea is bad, monarchies are inherently evil, but it isn't surprising that they aren't super developed.
@@MrThatguy333 I saw a Korean War documentary, where they interviewed a US bomber pilot. He said, on their first mission, they bombed any big buildings. the next mission, they searched for targets, but there weren't anything remaining that's worth bombing. Korea was piss poor country.
Basically to sum it all up when the Soviet Union collapsed North Korea’s main economic and political ally was gone and things went very downhill from there
It's actually incredible and fascinating how North and South Korea basically switched places in terms of wealth and economic prowess. Nowadays South Korea is one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world (and widely known as such), while North Korea is known for its extremely poor and primitive living conditions. Hard to believe that 50 years ago it was pretty much the reverse.
South Korea has one of world's lowest birth rates. That is a sign of moral degeneracy. That is nothing to be proud of. You need to include human possibility among your values. I presume, Mr WarpRulez4, that you are still young and far from achieving maturity. Never mind, there is still plenty of time to think about these matters.
It's so funny how time changes things. I have a great friend that I worked with for several years who was originally from the People's Republic of China. He and I were born only a couple months apart from one another. It turned out that his Dad was a 'Chinese volunteer' in the Korean War, while my Dad was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Here we were, friends while our Fathers were both enemies so long ago.
@@ayochill9716 You can resist being trained as an enemy, can't You? There's no excuse for not thinking and not deciding for Your own. They can maybe kill You, and then they would have Your body, but not Your dignity and willpower.
I remember my late Dad talking about the NK workers in Iraq during the late 70s early 80s. They would work hard, and long hours, without holidays. I believe their salaries and overtime were all probably collected and remitted to NK, while these guys would be given just basic sustenance- food, clothing and shelter. They all wore similar work apparel or uniform, and walked from their accommodations to site in a formation, which other workers found unique. They never mixed with others and kept to themselves.
in my country (italy) the situation is very similar with chinese immigrants, they don't walk in formation or anything that extreme but they work their asses off only to probably have part of their earnings taken and they very rarely mix or engage with the locals
Nothing says oppressor like invading and sanctioning a country that did absolutely nothing to you just because you want to be a White man and rule nonwhite peoplike a batshit crazy psychopath for centuries now...👀🤦🏾♂️
Socialism just means factories are owned by the workers. That's it. That isn't the case in NK. Companies that do work like that are often very successful, but the greed and power gluttony of the rich won't make them common.
So what I gather from this is that a unified Korea would be a force to be reconned with, given the raw material wealth of the north, the technological know how and farm land of the south. Overall, Korea was an incredible-balanced country with one half being able to feed the other, while the other could produce all the materials the other needed to build stuff, and they got seriously fucked over by the Cold War and split. I really hope they can unify when the north collapses.
I fear what will happen when the North collapses, because the Kim dynasty heirs might be so demented that they'd nuke their own people, the South and the Japanese, out of spite. Half of my family lives in Seoul and that's still in range of North Korean artillery. One of the main reasons that poor excuse of a nation still exists is because they could and would wipe out more than 100 000 people within the first hour of combat. I see no way for the North to collapse without a massive popular uprising and that will never happen.
At this point I highly doubt the South would be interested in reunification like Germany, and if so it would be a decades long very slow process The economic difference between the north and the south is far greater than that of west and east Germany, and they’ve been separated a lot longer. Beyond the south being astronomically wealthier, it’s also better educated, better fed, far healthier, far more liberal, and far more industrialized. This creates the issue of the south essentially facing economic collapse trying to quickly raise the norther standard of living, while being faced with a wave of millions of North Koreans flooding into the south as soon as the border is no longer militarized. And even then you’re looking at a century or longer until the North is even as close to as prosperous as the south (east Germany is still significantly poorer 30 years later). I think at this point it would be better to turn North Korea into a democracy and try to build it up as it’s own nation rather than unify with the south
It has been concluded in some studies that if Korea stayed unified it could have had the 3rd largest economy of today, surpassing Japan and only falling behind China and the USA. But history did these Koreans dirty.
@@MacTac141 Yes and No, Germany seems like a good example at first, but if you look closer there are some key differences. East Germany is still lagging behind the West, because it had nothing going for it. The only companies that work there are some that like the cheaper workforce and workspaces, but apart from some coal, there is no reason for any company to actually set up shop in the East. From what I gathered in the video, the opposite is true for North Korea, they actually have rare materials, but lack the know how to use those, but that know how is existent in the South, so if they unified and one would do it carefully the North could get lifted up far easier than East Germany. Basically, the materials in the area are reversed, while West Germany had both, the democratic system and the material wealth, while the East was rather blank, in Korea the opposite is true. Unification is obviously always a fickle process, but if done right and the end of the North happens under optimal conditions (like Kim decides he is just tired and wants to unify, as an example) it could work quite well I imagine.
You forgot to mention the "Sunshine Policy" of the 90s. South Korea did try and help North Korea during their famine, and it eased tensions between the two side considerably. South Korea's President Dae-jung Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize for this policy and was hailed as the Nelson Mandela of the East.
@@bkm1104 If that's your understanding, you should feel bad. They propped up a tyrannical state with food which allows them to focus on developing weapons to suppress the population and hold onto power. So yeah, rice turned into nuclear weapons (if that's really your level of understanding).
For me, as a South Korean, it's so sad that ethnically entirely same people in NK are the poorest on Earth. Because of Division of Korean peninsula, the dream of Korean co-prosperity had been ruined. Korean peninsula is small, and even it's divided...
That should very clearly illustrate the complete insanity that is racism & Xenophobia in South Korea. If people ethnically similar to you are so different, how can you explain your attitudes towards black people & generally any non-white or Korean people without sounding like a hypocrite…
And you have China to thank. I'm ethnically Han Chinese myself, but China's government is pure evil. China would still be like North Korea if Deng Xiaoping hadn't realized the folly of Mao's ways and begun to embrace capitalism.
That's really sad. I'm honestly ashamed of my country for allowing yours to be split in half and giving the North to the Soviets. As much as I tell other people that they don't have to apologize for their countries' faults, I find myself doing exactly that to you, because the fact is, America sold out millions of innocent people in Korea and in Eastern Europe to our Communist enemies just so we could be at peace. I'm sorry.
@@briangasser973 , Please let me correct the figures of USA soldiers died 36,574 in Korean War. Injured 103,000 soldiers. DPAA archive. (However, the death figures are slightly different which carved as 36,595 in Memorial Wall in National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington DC. Maybe 21 added later but not sure, only my guess) SKorea hugely owes its democracy and freedom, prosperity to America and Americans. Thanks for USA always. Then when USA asked SKorea to join Vietnam War to defend free SVietnam in 1960's~mid 1970's, SKorea joined and fight together with USA side by side against communist North Vietcong. 5,000 SKorea soldiers died in Vietnam War and many more had injured. SKorea has remained blood ally with USA and want to Go Together with America. God bless America.
North Koreans: please, we have no food or medicine! Kim family: you will make up for these shortcomings by doubling your steel output this week and every week forward
North Korea managed to do so well for a couple of decades specifically because it was receiving tons of aid from China and the USSR, on top of sitting on plenty of valuable natural resources and existing heavy industry. Once that aid dried up, North Korea promptly fell into ruin, because any state can be prosperous when being propped up by enormous amounts of continuous foreign aid.
Literally the story of South Korea, they are only prosperous because of the western world. North Korea wasn’t being given any aid, just the know-how and trading.
@@nope7389 south korea barely receives any western funding now. North korea is a example of how foreign aid can fail,while south korea shows how foreign aid is beneficial
North Korea was NEVER RICH. There is this misconception that North Korea was rich in 1960, but they were NOT rich. North Korea was doing slightly better in 1960, compare to South Korea, but both of them were piss poor compare to other countries.
It's strange that North Korea and North VietNam were in the exact same situation in 1960 but they turn out very differently now. Dictatorship can really ruin a country
@@alexxu3004 no the difference is Vietnam was not isolationist nor did their leadership have a cult of personality. The Kim family in Korea was very much in the Stalin model. While the leadership in Vietnam reflects the lessons learned from the horrors of the cultural revolution
@@voss0749 look, if your nation is seperated in two by soviet and usa, and still not unified in 21st century, you will end up in the same never ending cold war and no chance of developing.
As most of my fellow South Koreans do, I support the reunification of the Koreas, no matter the financial cost. Not only have we grown from one of the poorest countries in the world to a prospering state in just a few decades, we soldiered through an economic crisis that almost bankrupted the country in '97; I like to believe that our resolve for a common cause will continue to hold solid in the face of another economic hardship. We will suffer in short-term, but prevail in the long run just like the case of Germany. It is also important to note that countless families had been torn apart against their will during the war; mothers separated from children, fathers from wives, brothers and sisters from their siblings. Displaced from their hometowns amidst the war, now unreachable. It is only right to grant the families the way overdue reunions and put an end to this tragedy. Although, I do not have high hopes that a reunification will actually happen in the foreseeable future. North Korea has been acting pretty much as a buffer state between the two ideologies, and China will never want to share direct borders with the US-backed South; much like how Russia could not bear Ukraine leaning towards the West. In the event of the collapse of the Kim regime, China will most likely find an excuse to intervene, send "peacekeeping" troops across the border, and fortify their positions way before any other actor could respond. It'll probably end up as de facto Chinese territory. The South and the US would probably refrain from taking action so as to avoid military conflict with China. Not to mention Japan would probably not whole-heartedly endorse the unification, since it would mean the emergence of a formidable rival, now rich with underground resources and manpower. It'd also mean that many of the Right Wing's claims and justifications for rearmament would be undermined. Japan would prefer the status quo over a reunified Korea. But yeah, no harm in dreaming.
Might want to consider china's perspective in this. Its not just a case of ideological conflict but also the fact that if the north fell, there would be a large refugee crisis as many from the north flee into the chinese province of manchuria.
North Korea basically has become the very sort of dystopian existence that writers, like George Orwell, warned about in novels like "1984" and "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury.
There is a tragic irony that NKs ideal of self reliance caused them to miss their one chance at it. As the soviet union waned and south korea grew, this was the perfect tine to pivot towards normalizing relationships and reunification. The resulting unified korea would have the balanced economy needed for independence, and the transition could probably have been achieved without a revolution. Kim may even have been seen positively by history, as a leader who did what was needed to weather a turbulent time. But instead, pride went before a fall, and NK lost everything.
As someone who grew up in South Korea in the 80s, I agree with you. When East and West Germany reunited, I thought Korea would be next. Sadly, well, you know how that turned out...
"Instead, pride came before the fall, and NK lost everything." By "NK" I assume you meant the Kim Regime and North Korean government/state. They did not lose everything; they retained their power. Had they agreed to reunify with SK, every single NK elite would have been driven out of power by their SK counterparts. Countless North Korean citizens would then start asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about their former regime's history and eventually discover the crimes of their former rulers. The North Korean people would then start to demand justice, and their former leaders would be hunted down and hauled before a judge. The entire Kim family, and all of their cronies/collaborators, would likely be put on trial for crimes against humanity; those that didn't would probably have to spend the rest of their lives on the run, in hiding or in exile. If you don't believe me, look at _South_ Korea. SK _also_ used to be a poor, isolated, corrupt military dictatorship (and also had a secret and illegal nuclear weapons program). But the SK military junta voluntarily dissolved and allowed democracy to take hold in the 1980s. They _still_ were put on trial and put into prison. If it can happen to SK, why not NK?
This is a problem with all government, it's just harder to say no to a murderous dictator. I wish there were some political parties made up of scientists and engineers.
@@brians7181 Okay? Are you trying to say if a party made up of engineers existed they would be nazis? Or is this a non-sequitur just for interests sake?
@@odizzido No, what I'm saying is, if a party is made up of scientists and engineers, that is no guarantee it will have a good outcome. However, if a party is made up of occultists or atheists, that is almost a guarantee for a bad outcome.
FunFact, during the big leap forward in China many Chinese migrated to North Korea mainly because that way they were able to feed themself and their familys, even so later many left North Korea again as Chinas economy hit the gas and got its economical wonder
Just a little more detail on the Korean War. American bombing sorties didn't just destroy North Korea's industrial capabilities, it pretty much sent them back to the stone age. We leveled virtually every building bigger than a shack in that nation. The level of destruction was unparalleled: 16 of the 20 largest cities in NK were leveled beyond 50%. The only reason we stopped bombing Pyongyang was because there were no acceptable targets left. William F Dean reported the cities of the north were nothing but snow-covered wastelands which had been scraped clean of buildings. Dean Rusk reported that they had bombed "everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another". Fire bombing campaigns were also used indsicrimnately against civilian centers. As USAF General LeMay said: "We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too......Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure?"
@@garfieldandfriends1 Although two tragedies can never truly be compared due to the nature of them, I would say that the Korean War was a beast of its own category. It was the meticulously horrifying removal of every single structure in the North. They bent the UN rules severely by classifying pretty much every building in the region as a military installation because most of the time they had no idea where the North Korean and Chinese troops were, so they chose instead to scrape every house, shack, and structure off the face of the Earth.
@@yds6268 Well in the regard of total socialist dictatorship, the UN rules can easily be bent in the sense of every building is owned by the same military power as there is not exactly personal property. Which sucks in many ways... Every nationality has frustrations in their past, as an American, I will say this is equally true for me. Also as an American, I would also like to say that although my government and the people running it are capable of making bad decisions, I wish only the best for everyone and I love you all.
@@reathyork It would be cruel for us to justify war crimes based solely on whether or not they were executed against a "dictatorship". Civilians are civilians, and the destruction of their homes, farms, and their own lives is never justifiable. At this time, North Korea was more technologically advanced, better fed, and stronger economically than the poorer south. Beyond this, if we're going to argue who was more "dictator-ey" keep in mind that at this time the South Korean government under Syngman Rhee had summarily executed over 200,000 civilians.
The goat thing sounds similar to how the Chinese Government had the masses killing sparrows not realizing those pesky sparrows that eat a small percentage of the seeds also killed tons of locust which wipe out huge swathes of farm land, causing a massive famine that killed millions.
There's really something about authoritarians fucking it up with ecological disasters. Imelda Marcos, then first lady of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, introduced apple snails to our country as source of protein to fight malnutrition. Thing was the poor still had their human decency and did not touch said snails. Now those snails are the most pervasive pests Philippine rice farmers contend with.
Absolutely fascinating history, I had no idea it was this complex, even though I should have imagined so, it just didn't cross my mind. Thanks for a great video!
The story behind the Ryogyong Hotel in Pyongyang is DARK. Squandering a starving nation's gross domestic product (GDP) on a vanity project hotel apparently lead to mass cannibalism inside the capital. Many people moved from rural areas into the city in an effort to find work opportunities and food supplies; naturally many people ended up sleeping rough and, so the rumours go, families would abduct destitute people and well, you know, cannibalism would ensue. Meanwhile Kim Jong Il (who was arguably the most evil, ruthless, and simply too indulged in his life of luxury to manage a country) was throwing parties and having world-class chefs flown in from all over the world. Driving your citizens to cannibalistic levels of desperation for the sake of a poxy hotel that STILL hasn't been finished is next level evil.
@@stuartberesford3585 In North Korea, people don't decide where to live. Like we were in Covid time, they need a written permit form the Government even to move to the nearby village, to visit their dying parents. So, NO FREE MOVEMENT inside the Nation. ESPECIALLY THE CAPITAL CITY, which is EXCLUVELY inhabitated by the top elite class. There were NEVER "many people moving from the countryside to the Capital City" in North Korea, simply because it's strictly forbidden. All the tourist who went to North Korea said, and documented, that there were soldiers, barriers and even tank in all the streets who lead people in the Capital City; they're highly guarded; any "poor people from the countryside" who would TRY to come in the Capital City would be shoot down. So your story is not believable, sorry.
In Socialist Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu applied many things that he saw in his visit to North Korea in 1971. I remember how he decided to industrialize the country by forcing the farmers to work in the industry, and so agriculture was left for the children in school, the army and the workers in the factories, who were taken to the fields in their free day, the Sunday. I knew kids who lived in the country and only went to school Dec. 1st to Feb 28th (with a 3 weeks winter holidays), because they'd spend the rest of the school year working in the fields.
Thank you for telling the story of North Korea so objectively and concisely. I feel like it’s so hard to truly understand the entire context of this enigma sometimes
Although, as far as I can tell, the story in this video is true, it is not told objectively. The anti-North-Korean bias of the author is made very clear.
@@SimpleAmadeus To be fair its pretty hard to get a decent north korean perspective as a westerner, theyre not too keen on honestly sharing with the west in general
The army of North-Korea is the largest in the world by far. It's over twice the size of China's army. Which is still really weird to consider. Of course over 70% of that is light infantry that are more so glorified police officers.
The only reason is that NK was blocked and sanctioned by the Western world since the Korean War. There is no global trade or investment for them. The US and many European countries do not recognize NK until now. The Western world did this to China, Cuba, and Iran as well. The US will be poor if it was blocked by the world.
Having read a good many of the comments here, I must say, that, as a Westerner, I have learned a great deal about the area. Thank you every commentator.
I asked a US soldier who had been stationed in South Korea if there was any way to tell a South Korean from a disguised North Korean. He told me that overall North Koreans are 6" shorter than South Koreans because of malnutrition. North Korea spends about 30% of their national wealth on their military, a higher percentage than any country on earth.
I don’t think you read what he said, your so focused on defending dogmatic beliefs about communism. The United States spends 10 percent of its overhaul economy on military. He’s not talking about entire blocs or spheres, he’s talking about individual nations states.
I think any country that had literally every city in the country bombed to dust and 4 million of their people killed would be concerned with national defense.
Great video. I'd only like to add one point about the dangers of reform for North Korea (which you mentioned at the end) which actually relates to what you said about the lack of experienced/educated leadership that Korea suffered after liberation from Japan (which you mentioned in the beginning). North Korea, similarly, suffers from a lack of leadership which is educated and experienced in modern economics (how to manage trade imbalances, attract investment, build positive and mutually beneficial relations with foreign trade partners, etc.) If North Korea is to prosper, it NEEDS to allow foreign experts, investors and executives in to guide and manage these efforts. No one is going to invest their own money if the North Koreans are in charge of it. Unfortunately for North Korea, these foreign experts are most likely to be _South_ Korean (since they would be the ones who are most familiar with the region, language and culture). 1) North Korea considers South Korea to be their ultimate enemy; North Korea has never accepted the division of the Korean Peninsula nor recognized South Korea's right to exist as a sovereign and independent state. To allow the "False Koreans" in to rebuild their entire economy would be considered the ultimate capitulation and humiliation. 2) Ordinary North Koreans would soon start to ask themselves _"If we're going to work FOR South Koreans... then shouldn't we have the same rights AS South Koreans?"_ Or even more dangerously, _"If we're going to work FOR South Koreans... then why don't we just BECOME South Koreans?"_ If North Korea reforms and opens up, then Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo, LG and all the South Korean _chaebol_ megacorporations would rush in an buy up everything, and North Korea will simply become the "northern provinces" of South Korea soon afterward. They will not do this.
Well, when you've achieved final stage communism and have to eat people to survive, i'm pretty sure you'd be fine with dumping what you've got for all the thing going on in the south. If you listen to NK defectors like Yeonmi Park they know their lives suck and it's because of the Kim. They'd change it if they could, but they can't. I really don't think reunifying Korea would be as big of a deal as people make it out to be.
At the end of the day, it is not the ordinary citizens of North Korea who have to be ashamed of themselves. they didn't have the power. Heck, they can't even get their hands on enough food. At the end, the video does say something about dictators: Reforms will lead to their deaths. Once the people realize they had been suffering needlessly because of the whims of those in power... well, we all know how Ghaddafi met his fate.
They know "modern economy" quite well, they teach it at university, attracting foreign investments is not what they choose to do, opening up to foreigners would either be like giving the economy for free or making trade agreements that would bind their own hands and slowly transform north also to capitalist economy. Joint ventures and special economic zones are what they can do.
@@alfredkwaak _"Joint ventures and special economic zones are what they can do."_ That's been tried before. The Kaesong Industrial Zone (KIZ) was an industrial park and SEZ that South Korea had established in North Korea as an experiment in peaceful economic cooperation in the early 2000s. In practice, the Kaesong Industrial Zone was everything EXCEPT a venue for peaceful economic cooperation. More often than not, the KIZ was just another major fault line and flashpoint in the Inter Korean Conflict; just something else for the 2 sides to fight over. Every time NK had a dispute with SK, the North Korean authorities would barge in, shut down operations, seize all of the property of the South Korean firms operating there and sometimes even detain the South Korean workers (essentially holding them hostage until SK gave in to NK's demands). The KIZ never even became profitable, despite the enormous cost savings from dirt-cheap NK resources and labor. The frequent harassment, seizures and detentions by the NK authorities were so disruptive and costly that it often completely erased the earnings of the companies operating there. The only thing that kept the KIZ open as long as it was were subsidies and frequent bailouts by the South Korean government. The South Koreans shut down the Kaesong Industrial Zone themselves in 2015. North Korea was demanding an ever-higher cut for the "privilege" of setting up shop on their territory, and SK was tired of having their stuff/people frequently being held hostage by them. On top of that, the UN sanctions were starting to get so strict that they even targeted third-party countries that did business with NK, so South Korea actually started to face the risk of getting sanctioned themselves if they kept the KIZ open. You'll be extremely hard-pressed to find someone who would be as generous and patient with North Korea as South Korea was with the Kaesong Industrial Zone.
This sounds an awful lot like the situation with my country and our neighbors. Down to our allies, political tensions, economies and their investments in the military to the point where they can’t afford food. We’re kinda going through a cold war right now but it’s heating up so rapidly. If they don’t attack us now, we’ll have way too much influence to be stopped (we’re allied with every country in the west and we’re expanding to Asian allies). Their population is extremely brainwashed, to the point where they think that every imagery of our country is fake because we can’t possibly be more developed than them. I feel like if a war starts, they will definitely fall into a totalitarian dictatorship.
@@lifeofabronovich7792 No. I’m not from Asia but I’d like to refrain myself from saying where specifically in public because I’d 100% get bombarded by insults from them (for instance, someone from that country just raided our chatroom to call us slurs)
In addition to the mismanagement in North Korea, the economic decline began when the Eastern Bloc governments fell. The main suppliers to North Korea had been the USSR and Romania. China was going through hard times because of Mao's disastrous economic policies. During the 1960s to the 1970s, North Koreans lived a better life than the mainland Chinese did. Some of the communist countries had a policy to supply other communist countries. China (which is now wealthier than North Korea) still does this for North Korea. During the Vietnam War, the USSR, China and North Korea heavily supplied North Vietnam. The South Koreans got aid from West Germany, Japan and the US later than the North Koreans got theirs from the Eastern Bloc countries. Japan gave money as compensation from when Japan had occupied South Korea. Later on, the US gave money after the South Korean president agreed to send troops to help protect South Vietnam. South Korea's industrialization began during the 1960s, and the development began to speed up during the 1970s. I heard that the Philippines and Japan were the wealthiest Asian countries during the 1960s. Japan's economic recovery began during the 1950s. It's true that North Korea was wealthier than South Korea was at that time, (South Korea is now many times wealthier than North Korea was during the 1960s), but it doesn't mean that North Korea was wealthy when compared to the First World countries. The entirety of Asia at that time wasn't wealthy. This was a time when very few North Koreans owned a car, and this is still the case for North Korea now. Even by the 1960s when North Korea is said to have been wealthier than South Korea, more of the South Koreans owned cars than the North Koreans did. (This was probably because of North Korea's restrictive nature. Today, people in North Korea still need special permission to travel far. According to the defectors, most of the North Koreans never got the permission to visit Pyongyang). And even before the supplies got cut off after the Eastern Bloc fell, ethnic Koreans from Japan who moved to North Korea used to send letters to their relatives asking for medicine. (North Korea doesn't allow its citizens to send letters abroad now). The North Korean defectors confirmed that there always has been a lack of medicine in North Korea.
USSR barely helped North Vietnamese💀, they only helped north Vietnamese with military training, instructions and Anti-air missiles etc. USSR was not able to help North Vietnamese much because of the sino-soviet split and the Americans naval in south China sea.
@@notvergingai1053 From 1968 on, the Soviet Union provided the vast majority of the military and economic aid that North Vietnam received. They supplied their communist allies with food, petroleum, transport vehicles, iron, steel, fertilizer, arms, and ammunition.
yes, North Korea being rich during the 50's and 60's is leftist propaganda lies. North Korea was slightly better off compare to South KOrea at the time, but both nations were piss poor compare to the world average at the time.
@@notvergingai1053 barely helped?? USSR risked starting a war with the US by not only supplying fighter jets and training to north Vietnamese forces, they also supplied their own fighter pilots in secret. Granted, it wasn’t nearly as much during the Korean War, but still. Definitely much more help than “barely”…
The Philippines 🇵🇭 was the WEALTHIEST country in Asia back in the 1960's. Because of Presidents like Elpidio Quirino and Ramon Magsaysay, Ferdinand Marcos was also a GOOD President but then he became a Dictator. Which became the Philippines 🇵🇭 DOWNFALL in the 1970's and 80's.
"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant." - Maximilien de Robespierre... I hope I would see N. Korea liberated in my lifetime...
I'm starting to see a pattern of rulers in the 30s-50s overprioritizing heavy industries over anything else. Maybe a result of the ideas of late Victorian era those people most likely grew with that pinned down the success of the European colonial power in industrialization exclusively.
Heavy Industry was the backbone of the economy at that time though, and it was essential to win any military conflict. If the USSR hadn't managed to get it's factories past the Urals in ww2 they wouldn't have been able to beat the germans superior weapons with increased quantity. But after the 50's heavy industry become much less important, and whilst heavy industry might have been the backbone of the economy, if there's no food, there's no food.
In 1930 Stalin said in one of his speeches that "If we don't build heavy industry in 10 years then others will crush us". If USSR tried developing civilian economy this early we would all live under 3rd reich.
As the previous commenters said, heavy industries were the result of communist nations generally being surrounded by hostile powers; the real problem was the post-WW2 arms race, which played a massive role in bankrupting them. North Korea wasn't really an exception, living in a state of a perpetual shaky ceasefire with the South. I'd guess that's why the nuke is so important to them to day - securing a deterrent also carries with it the opportunity to ease off a little bit on conventional weapon costs, allocating more money and resources to revitalizing the civilian economy.
@@georgeousthegorgeous Unlikely. The 3rd Reich was powerful but nowhere near the economic engine of the likes of the US alone and guerilla warfare was rampant across the Nazi occupied zones. More to the point, without a hyper militaristic USSR to deal with, it's unlikely so many nations west of the USSR would have aligned against them by using Nazi Germany. Instead the Germans would have been seen as the great threat to align against. Basically; we have no idea. Don't act like the thousands that died due to mass industrialization was some Godsend for the world.
@@stephenjenkins7971 not only that, the us was still working on the atom bomb, Germany was barley doing that, as they saw it as a Jewish tech, which to be honest they ain’t entirely wrong considering so many of the people working on the bomb were German Jews. So in the end Berlin and Germany as a whole would of been nukes to death, and even if they weren’t, they would of died due to instability anyways. Especially considering how fucked they would be when Hitler died(which would be soon due to his shit health)the power struggle would likely lead to civil war.
All that destruction and level of death and that was just 600,000 tons of bombs that the US dropped in Korea. It is therefore unfathomable that the US dropped 6 MILLION tons on Vietnam and Laos a little over 10 years later.
@@trickydickie1988 I can't leave this video without leaving a comment - Now I feel no need to... Thank you for cutting right to the jugular - Your comment sounds harsh, but it's what I would be thinking if I thought it all the way through... Now I can go back to watching kitten-vids (and cars and engineering and other stuff), safe in the knowledge that I'm not the only one thinking fuck them... (It's not their fault but there's no option but 'fuck them'). I think I will watch the rest of the Vid first.
split wasn't painful, it was Communist North Korea which made the situation extremely bad. there are plenty of countries in the world which were split, but doing fine.
Another factor to consider is that the caliber of industry the DPRK tried to develop was unsuited to the type of nation that it was. They were a nation of mostly agrarian peasants and ex-soldiers, but they were also, as stated in the video, the pet project of larger competing powers. So, while basic, shitty equipment that required no skill or training to use would have been more beneficial, what they received was high-end prestige stuff. Neither China nor Russia wanted to be seen providing the inferior aid, and thus implicitly having the worse form of socialism. And the Kims fancied themselves technocrats, and wanted the newest, highest tech stuff to run their country with. And because it was a top-down, command economy, the problems with doing this weren't apparent until everything failed catastrophically all at once. The regime can't fail, and the regime controls everything, so nothing can be allowed to fail, ever, because it ALL reflects on them. So they double and triple-down to enforce success until that becomes literally impossible. Contrast that with south Korea. You provide aid, but it flows more organically. Give money to a thing, and it works, so it gets more money to keep working better. Give money to a different thing and it goes bankrupt. Great, that was clearly a bad idea; pivot to something else. If anything going bankrupt and failing is a personal failing of The Leader, you never see that things are bad. An example of what I mean about better stuff being worse: So, you've got a bunch of tractors. They are very fancy, amazing tractors that can do the work of 100 people each. That means you can pull 98 guys off a farm, leave a supervisor and a worker there with the tractor, and send the rest to a factory. Until the tractor breaks. You can't just take a couple bits off a bicycle and cobble something together to fix it, it needs custom stuff. Good news! You've got a factory that makes tractor parts. Bad news: those workers need food. And the farms don't work until they finish manufacturing, but they'll all starve if they don't abandon manufacturing to go back and farm. Neither side has any redundancy, and neither works without the other also working. That's why you shoot for small, incremental changes that improve things gradually, instead of redesigning the entire economy into a utopia all at once. Why bother spending 20 billion dollars on electrifying the entire country and building a massive road network if nobody owns a car or any appliances? And you don't build cars, which means all cars are imported. So the only place that needs roads is near the port, because that's the only place cars will be, at first. And the only place that needs electricity is also near the port, because that's where all the factories will be, because it is close to all the shipping (I guess stuff could come in by rail from Siberia, but you don't really want to design a big industrial center in Siberia, unless you have to). And then you build out as you need to and as capacity allows, instead of as a big prestige thing. Otherwise you're wasting money and effort on unusable stuff and designing failure into your system.
What are your thoughts on Ambassador Rodman and his inability to normalize relations between North Korea and the US? I'd love to read a two thousand word comment about that. Thank you.
So in a nutshell, North Korea declined due to...: *the fall of the Soviet Union *stubborn mindsets regarding trade and politics ("self reliance" and making all the commoners suffer) *poor spending decisions (especially with Kim Jong Il) *bad terrain (really cold and mountainous) *lopsided growth (industrialized with little to no room for agriculture)
In South Korea in the 60s and 70s, black market was big. I remember housewives, grannies, soldiers, policeman, doctors, storekeepers all were a part of it. I wonder if there is an analyses of how Seoul and the rest of the country built the economy so quickly
@@haolejohn Well, it was a black market. What else do you want me to call it? I think you're equating what I said to criminal activity. This was a huge part of the economy of South Korea in that time. OK with you?
You should probably study Korean economics, specifically the time frame we're talking about. Maybe ask a friend or parent (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or other) who lived there in those times, and then comment. Seems you just want to express yourself as a pious ass, not having any knowledge of the time and place
@@jcl5345 That's what I'm saying the term black market sounds criminal but it's absolutely not unless it's something nefarious and illegal being sold. Selling our own goods to me is not illegal but they call it black market because they own the world with their corporations and are threatened by independent thought.
@@haolejohn What are you talking about? You snicker that people who call it black market are wrong. I'm telling you that black markets abound in Korea, and many other nations. And it is illegal generally in most countries but not enforced as a crime. What you are saying is that you are a college age kid who wants to be special. Learn more
@@yourhandsomestep-dad2669 Aren't all countries resource-based? I mean I know you mean they export resources and nothing else but the resources for more complex economies have to come from somewhere.
Remember when you were young trying to play SimCity's scenario mode where you start out with a developed and prosperous city? A city that only has a few minor economical problems and you have until the year XXXX to solve them to win the scenario? Remember how you failed each and every single time? yea, north korea is Kim Il-Sung's first attempt at that.
You should talk about the India-Pakistan situation. It's actually pretty similar. After independence in 1947, Pakistan was more better-off economically, politically and militarily. Nowadays, however, India has a bigger economy than them (in fact, one state of India which isn't even the richest one, produces more income than the entirity of Pakistan's GDP), and they hold military and political superiority.
You should compare gdp per capita (in which india is better still) because comparing only the gdp isn't a good metric for example Israel's GDP is only 1.5 bigger than the Pakistan's GDP but have a GDP per capita 40 times larger only comparing gdp doesn't really show the nation's success. India has an economy 10 times larger than Pakistan but per capita is only 1.5 times better. While Bangladesh actually have higher per capita GDP than both
@@trashyraccoon2615 except ones with oil. Soon enough we'll have a smaller need for oil, then they'll jack up the prices so they can continue their Islamic Monarchies, but then we'll have a bigger need to get rid of oil dependency. Oil is too temporary to rely on. Soon enough they will come crashing down by a wind like a house of cards.
This was absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for the hard work and research putting this together. I feel I learned a great deal about N.Korea and the region.
The only reason is that NK was blocked and sanctioned by the Western world since the Korean War. There is no global trade or investment for them. The US and many European countries do not recognize NK until now. The Western world did this to China, Cuba, and Iran as well. The US will be poor if it was blocked by the world.
Sounds strange to say in this context, but before WW2, North Korea (or that area) was one of the most diverse in the world in some animal groups. The different initiatives (the goats etc) and the wars, and the hunger. has likely destroyed much of that. We need peace and restoration there.
@@davidjacobs8558 Not at all. I am a biology professor and I have worked with biodiversity in South East Asia. Your rough and unpolite language is not appreciated. I have no idea what group you refer to but take for instance Symphyta with a huge number of species that have not been found since the 1930-ties in Korea.
Great work on the video! Their Military definitely eats up a lot of the economy, especially the nuclear weapon maintenance, for a country with no impressive exports.
@@MutualistSoc To be fair, a lot of those sanctions are their own fault (I mean, they are technically still at war with the USA, after all, and refuse peace talks, for the most part). It's all because of the ego of the Kims.
@@MutualistSoc no, the U.S. would be much better off than North Korea. We have the population and natural resources required to sustain an industrial society. We were rich and industrialized long before the current era of containerized global trade. Would we have *everything* ? No. But we would have an economy far better than North Korea.
@@456t23That's about what I expect from a commie. No compassion whatsoever. Ironic considering the root word of "communism" is "commune." Y'all are selfish as hell and don't seem to care about anybody but yourselves.
As harsh and terrible as it sounds, it seems like the better thing might have been for the world to entirely withhold aid in the 1990s, because that allowed the regime to linger on. Better would have been the total collapse of the state and the society, since that might have led to the downfall of the regime. I hope that something better lies in the future for the poor people of North Korea.
The USA is the cause of all North Korea's problems. The same as the problems, with Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, the Caribbean , and Latin America, to name a few. The USA is the reason why many countries, have to spend billions in the preparation for war. They have seen the overthrow, murder and destruction, of other nations. What would happen, if the USA would use the billions spent on undermining other nations, and the stupid''' war on drugs''', to provide prevention programs, for their own citizens, sleeping and shitting on all the pavements of every USA city? and low income housing for the especially working homeless. Chances are these undermined countries would end up like Vietnam today, a prosperous communist, socialist? country. So that war and loss of lives, were all for NOTHING. If a country wants any type of govt.,, let them fight and die for it. Left alone to fight, tens of thousands might die. With the intervention, of the USA etc., millions will die. democracy is not for every country, the homeless people on the USA pavement? that's democracy for you
@@ShubhamMishrabro China's willingness to let 26 million North Koreans suffer purely for geopolitical strategic reasons is arguably even more heinous than its treatment of its own Uyghur, Tibetan, and dissident citizens.
It's funny how North Korea went against all logic which would be using your advantages to export and trade to get other things you can't get but I guess nepotism kills logic.
@@xd-hc8cc You would be dumb to think that these sanctions just exist for no reason. Threatening Nuclear War is why they have been sanctioned by the world and not just the West. They could have done a Turkmenistan and avoided headline news but no, to keep the self-reliance, they just had to develop nukes instead of being rational.
@@lostonearth7856 wow western propoganda really got to you. If not nuclear bombs north korea wouldnt exist, they wouldve gotten invaded by nato after ussr collapsed. Why would theh do that? So western companies could get the hold off nks natural resources. Turkmenistan doesnt claim to be communist, they dont care about them. U dont understand how the world works and u probably think that the west is the good guy. Delusional but not surprising for a westerner.
Yea I lowkey thought Soviet said attack them in take bck your lane n so they fought lol buh yk different ai n shi Buh yea if south Vietnam never failed n had a stall mate might be trouble for north Vietnam since just like south backing up by us they would have better economy buh when they still fuse bck they was still doing bad
"Everything" is about teamwork. The idea of "self-reliance", at the purest level, is essentially to be a "god". From birth until death, there is teamwork. Even "self-study", "independent-study", "self-learning", whatever, one learns from someone that knew prior first, then passed on the wisdom and knowledge to the one that studies, applies, and advances in personal growth. Ergo, from birth until death, "everything" is teamwork.
Excellent documentary! The pace is perfect, at least for me. It is so clear, crisp and concise that I watched it three times in a row! An outstanding video!
Thank you for the video. I am descendant of the Soviet Union and cannot be happy enough that such a monster ceased to exist. I hope that one day I will see the same day to come for North Koreans, though it would mean a very tough time for the world to deal with them as it takes a few decades to adjusts to new world without dictatorship.
I am sorry to say people idolise the USSR and are blinkered to the suffering, destruction and death that it caused. Please keep spreading the word of its atrocities
@@tommylmao_ that's ussr narrative why don't you ask the natives who wanted to get out of ussr? When did communist started parroting elite pov instead of civilians
70 times! 70 _times_ the economic output!! I thought it was 70 _percent._ and THAT would've been quite something. 70 times. man. whatever the number for North Korea's annual economy is, you take that number and multiply it _70 times_ to reach South Korea's annual economy. that's enormous. has there ever been such a discrepancy in such a tiny geographical and cultural distance??
Same happened in Mediterranean, 2000 years ago.. The sheep population was so huge during time of Antique, that all grass / hay was consumed by goat farmer herds. Mediterranean soil never recovered - not even after thousands of years later.
That is very well made - thank you. I knew before there was that switch between North being better off to South being so but this certainly explained it much better in my mind.
Such an underrated video, I thought there was at least a million views, hope that it would get to people's reccomended, especially for ones who watch RealLifeLore and such, because this is top tier content
Uh. No. He keeps referring to communist nations, USSR, China, etc, as “socialist”. That’s purposely misleading to promote the glorious wonder of capitalism. Sweden is socialist. North Korea is communist. There’s a huge difference. It’s like using “Christian and Jewish” interchangeably. They may have started from the same idea, but developed quite differently.
@@SilentJay8 There is a difference between socialism and communism indeed, but you seem to misunderstand it. None of the countries that are commonly called "communist" in the West would self-identfy in that way: almost all had "Socialist" in their official name. According to communist beliefs, 'communism' is the ideal stage that is yet to be reached. Sweden is in no way a socialist country, it's a multiparty republic that is well known for social democratic policies.
@@Ces91E multiparty country with social democratic policies can be socialist. They are not mutually exclusive. Also, Sweden is not a republic. It’s a constitutional monarchy.
Awesome video but just wanted to mention that your mic is picking up all the "wet" sounds from your mouth while talking and it makes it really hard to focus once I noticed. Might just be me though lol.
My heart goes out to all the peoples of Korea. To those in the North suffering from poverty, those in the South with the generational trauma of occupation and war, and those who are being discriminated against in countries their ancestors fled to like Japan. Despite all this, the Koreans I've met love to have fun and eat good food. What incredibly resilient and inspiring people.
Wow a truly and amazing informative videos!North Korea is sadly a disaster or accident waiting to happen it's a miracle that the country has lasted this long and imagine the potential it could've had actually being a highly developed industrialized if it had good sensible leadership but sadly it's another example of how unchecked and unchallenged authoritarianism can destroy a country!
North Korea is a third world country, but better for the average human in America or in every third world country. Free healthcare, housing, education, public transport, subsidized food, consumer products, etc etc.
It's incredible what organized indoctrination and complete state control of all media can do. North Korea is a prime example of what a nation from 800ad would look like if transplanted into the modern era. Slavish obedience to the ruling family, strong military focus to assert the ruling family's control and nation's sovereignty, and people are peasants who exist solely for the perpetuation of the state, and through that, the king.
Its a treat every time I see you upload! This again was another amazing video! Thank you soo much, continue spending a good amout of time making quality over quantitiy videos. I have watched soo many videos on N. Korea but there were still soo many new things I learned in a video fun and easy to follow along. Well well well done!!!
I am Canadian and I have lots of freedom I can choose my religion, I can travel to many countries, and I imagine what it’s like in North Korea with no freedoms at all
In this video, it is portrayed that Korea was really weak and was a ‘tributary’ state of China. However unlike in the western point of view on ‘tribute’, jmost east asian nations ‘tributed’ in means of trade and a good relationship, rather than a ‘I serve you’ meaning. So yeah, Korea wasn’t that weak during its history, it was just in a geopolitical hotspot, which lead to Chinese, Khitans, Jurchens, Mongols, and Japanese seeking to invade it (although only Mongols and Japanese succeeded in doing so) And there seems to be a strong ‘thought’ among Koreans that they never ‘invaded’ another nation, or started a war. This is damn wrong. The Goguryeo empire invaded various Chinese dynasties, or Jurchen tribes for centuries, and the kingdom of Silla invaded Japan a few times(for pillage)
Right, Silla invaded Japan and Abe Shinzo is the descendant of Silla. The Imperial Tokyo regime itself was raised by those Silla descendants, and it has nothing to do with Yamato. The successor of Silla, Korea today needs to be responsible for the Imperial Tokyo regime, it needs to compensate Yamato for taking over it. The Imperial Tokyo regime as the exiled Baekje and Silla regime exploited trillions of money from Yamato and then annexed the Korean peninsula, invested them in their motherland Korean peninsula. Both North and South Korea need to pay back it.
Koreans were militarily weak for almost 1000 years after its unification. Its existence was justified solely to combat pirates and peasant revolts. It got so bad that if Ming China didn’t intervene during the Imjin War, Joseon would’ve been Japanese Chōsen much earlier in history. The era of Korean military feats was short, and even then the Chinese did occupy nearly half of the peninsula for several hundred years.
And for the record, Korea was entirely subservient to Ming China during its tributary with that dynasty. As for the Qing? According to your logic, King Injo bowing nine times to Hong Taiji is totally “good relations and trade”. The Japanese, Vietnamese, Dali, Thai, all entered tributary status to either protect their border or open trade. No nation kowtowed to China more than Korea
Maybe they weren't really a nation at the time that Korea attacked? At least areas that were attacked? Jerchens were not a nation but just tribes throughout history. Neither was Japan...didn't get unified until later
8:04 The USA is not "technically still at war with North Korea", this is entirely incorrect. The last declaration of war for the US was WW2 against Germany and Japan. Korea was a United Nations Police Action, and as part of the United Nations, we volunteered to send forces, along with dozens of other countries. South Korea may still technically be at war with North Korea, I'm not sure, but the USA is definitely not. Later on, in another police action, the South Koreans sent forces to help us out in VietNam, little known fact.
There was a glimmer of hope that Kim Jong Un would bring some degree of sanity back into the country after his psychopath of a father died, but he ended up being just as hopeless.
No, North Korea is actually the richest and most prosperous country in the world (help me my family is being held hostage)
I see what you did there lol.
I feel like I'm in danger now for making this video. Kimmy please don't hurt me!
Lie! North Korea is the most free and just nation in the world.
Help me too I'm the guy on the second floor.
@@CasualScholar 😂😂😂
Ok mate 👍
So basically, NK was the adopted child of USSR and China. During the divorce, the parents fought to keep their son, while spoiling him to maintain their trust at the cost of the parent's withering relationship. At this point NK was so spoiled that he has a hard time of taking care of himself needing mommy China to conitue to support him.
It more looks like an "adopted child" of two gay brothers, the elder was USSR and the smaller was China.
There are only two air flight companies are flying to North Korea. One is Russian and the other one is Chinese.
It is just the same shit as was pro-Russian DDR in Germany.
LMAO
The USSR are hardly involved in the development of the KWP, The US however was heavily involved in installing Rhee, the fascist mass murder that ran the south.🤔🤔
@@franciszekdo The first Dictator of the North Korea was a Captain of the Soviet Army. USSR is still hardly involved?
@@Mighty-Man
yes, compared to the south especially. Kim il sung bravely fought off japanese imperialism for a decade before being part of the Red army to defeat japan. Ignorant people as though the Communist movement that existed throughout all of Korea was externally imposed. Soviets during their brief occupation allowed the Korean people to organize themselves politically. In comparison , in the south US helped rig the election for a fascist dictator collaborated in mass murder.
My favorite part of this story is that North Korean self-reliance means relying on Communist states for your food, oil, etc.
I couldnt believe the logic while researching for this video haha
*pirate voice* That’s what ya call ironic.
This is why socialism/communism is an oxymoron.
@@CasualScholar As BR Myers, an excellent researcher of NK, has argued, _"All militarist states of limited means have to impose austerity on their subjects, and they usually do so under the more inspiring banner of autarchy or self-reliance. North Korea is a typical case."_
Basically, whenever a regime starts promoting "self-reliance," it's usually a propaganda ploy to mentally prepare and acclimate their citizens to the economic deprivation and hardship that comes in wartime.
Putin started pumping self-reliance with his talk of a "sanctions-proof economy" _before_ he started the war in Ukraine.
Hitler and Mussolini pumped up the ideas of self-reliance _before (as they were planning)_ World War 2.
It's an extremely bad sign when a country starts promoting self-reliance; it means that country's government is planning to do something that they _know_ will get them cut off from the global economy.
@@CytotoxinK Just remember two things: 1. Self-reliance is not a bad thing. 2. Self reliance does not occur with a planned economy.
My father worked for a humanitarian organization in NK in the 00s. They attempted to solve the famine problem through food processing. The two staple foods were rice and sweet potatoes. Supposedly there should have been enough but the sweet potatoes would freeze and spoil during the harsh winters, leading to huge waste. So the plan was this: Build processing machines that would turn the potatoes into starch which then can be stored and will not spoil easily. Foreigners who had spent some time in the country warned the organization this plan wouldn't work because there is no electricity to run the machines. All the electricity goes to the rice threshing machines during harvest season. The North Korean officals assured everyone that *of course* there will be electricity and then plan went ahead.
My father was the head engineer for that project and with the help of the organization and local workers they started build these machines. It was a logistical nightmare because literally *everything* you needed right down to the tiniest screw had to be imported from China. You couldn't buy a thing locally. The North Korean government put no effort into helping the project but instead spied on anyone and everyone involved.
Against all odds, the project was completed, all machines installed and hooked up to the electrical grid. They were never used. You see, there was no electricity to run them...
This isn't just a story about communist mismanagement, but also of humanitarian aid mismanagement and the waste of kind-hearted people's money.
Thanks for sharing
북조선은 간첩을 돕지 않을 것이다
@@JoeBigBoxersSo just... don't comment, then?
@@JoeBigBoxersImagine thinking poor literacy is boastworthy.
@@jarrodheley7879 What did he say? Im really intrested but youtube has a stupid glitch
As a south Korean, I am overwhelmed with sadness every time I think of North Korea. We are one people, and yet the north suffers so greatly.
they should revolt
I completely understand your feelings 😢
i'm not a Korean, so i may miss some intricacies of the situation, but based on what i know on the subject, i can't imagine reunification though.
it would be orders of magnitude harder (and more costly) than reunification of Germany.
the regime is so much tighter than East Germany, the mentality must be completely incompatible by now.
(from what i've read, don't know how true this is: even the language itself has diverged substantially - this never happened in Germany).
North Koreans wouldn't really be able to function in a market-run society.
not to mention where would you fit all those that thrived on serving the regime, and actively persecuted their compatriots? will they just live next door to their victims? do they get to vote? and you can't really imprison thousands and thousands of people.
this was a problem in every post-communist country (like my native Poland), but given the rather extreme nature of North Korea, it could become outright terrible.
i think the most feasible scenario is that in a few decades the regime begins to thaw, heading towards something similar to the Chinese model (authoritarian, but not orthodox, with a form of state-controlled capitalism), and "reluctanctly neutral" rather than hostile towards South Korea.
i wonder what you think about this as a Korean
@@robi6317 your "advice" seems completely detached from reality to me.
@@vibovitold You are correct, reunification as it is now would come with some harsh consequences. I don't know the solution, and definitely don't claim to know a lot about the intricacies of the politics. (I don't live in South Korea, for one). The people who escaped from North Korea are often incapable of functioning properly in the south, and need months of training to be able to do basic things. Not to mention the economic differences and the burden on the south by just adding an entire population of what is essentially dead weight to a modern economy, and the burden on having to build that up. There's many south koreans who do not want this. Unifying under North Korea (the NK propaganda units claim to want this) would not be possible at all because the people of the south would obviously not cooperate. I wish there was some sort of way to unify, but if so, it would have to be after NK has 'cooled down' and become much more normal, even if it's in a weird chinese way. That being said, I am scared that China wants to 'claim' NK - if the regieme falls, it isn't unlikely for China to want to annex it like Tibet or Mongolia or any of the countless times that Korea in general has been under Chinese rule. Us Koreans have been subject to Chinese and Japanese conquest many times, and I would hate to see that happen again. But, honestly, it's all speculation.
I am not sure where the future will go, and I'm not sure where it should go. All I really know is that the common people are victims, and I wish there was some way to help.
Kim Il Sung's entire strategy for his countries economy was playing Soviet and Chinese governments off of each other. He lucked out dying right after the Soviet Union fell so he never had to lead North Korea without the massive support nets propping it up.
There is this misconception that North Korea was rich in 1960, but they were NOT rich.
North Korea was doing slightly better in 1960, compare to South Korea, but both of them were piss poor compare to other countries.
Even with China and Soviet Russia's aid, North Korea was bottom tier economy.
@@davidjacobs8558 NorthEast of China and N Korea was the richest place around WW2 in Asia. they have very good industries and sell industrial products to be rich.
it is easy to be poor, after collapse of Soviet Union, nobody will help N Korea. With the sanction from the West, nobody will buy their products, and they used to exchange food with industrial products.
Also with collapse of Soviet Union, Japan is not that important any more, it is time for the US to surpress Japan, thus suffering lost decades for Japan.
After WW2, Mac Athur wanted to make Japan a poor country relying on agriculture, and he wanted to destroy all industries in Japan. But after Korea war, Americans realised that they need to help Japan to be an advanced industrial country, rich enough to mess up with Communist countries.
For small countries, their fate is not in their hands but in other superpowers' hands. they can be either rich or poor immediately by the manipulation of superpowers.
@@redyellow4699 Manchuria was NOT rich, North Korea under Japanese rule was NOT rich. and North Korea was NEVER rich from 1945 onward.
North Korea was doing slightly better than South Korea back in the 50's and 60's. However, both Korea were still piss poor Countries compare to the rest of the world.
@@davidjacobs8558 Manchuria had the highest GDP per capital in Asia 70 years ago, N Korea was also industrial area. I have no idea why you consider Manchuria as not being rich. Also how is it possible for S Korea doing slight worse than N Korea while North Korea was industrial area that can produce industrial products and South was agriculture region.
Industrialization needs huge market, for small country like either N or S korea. as long as there is a superpower wanna help it or surpress it by sanction, it will rise or fall immediately.
North Korea and Machuria at that time had iron minerals and coals which are the most important resources for industrialization, thus becoming industrial area.
North Korea can be poor because of sanction that they can not exchange food and goods with their industrial products.
in 10 years, when e-car become popular, Japan will lose its car market to China as China pioneer in e-car, Japan will lose most of its GDP, and become a poor country.
countries relying on industrialization, without demostric huge population, they have to rely on the world market to be rich. if there is sanction or their products are not competitive, they become poor immediately.
back in 2010, Japan's GDP per capital was 10 times than China, now it is only more than 2 times than China. It is because China has made huge progress on electronics, cars, and take the market from Japan.
Japan becomes poor because of the collapse of soviet union that the US needed to surpress its development, also because of the rise of China that it takes market from Japan.
@@davidjacobs8558 for N Korea, it is very easy to be rich, its population is very small, it can be good at just one industry to be rich.
Taiwan is good at semiconductor, and it simply gets rich by semiconductor.
For big country China, it is harder to be rich, it needs to be good at almost everything to be rich. it needs to take market from all other countries. from computer, car, to big plane. but it is also hard to surpress a big country as it has complete supply chain.
Also, to surpress a small country is easy, a little sanction, forbidding other countries to import their products, the small country gets fucked up immediately as it does not have complete supply chain that has to rely on cooperation with other countries.
What is extremely sad about North Korea, is that this country actually has a huge potential in many aspects, one being tourism: the place is beautiful and could bring so many foreigners. But it is also a perfect example of how incompetence can ruin a place. Really sad for the people there.
are you high? North Korea is not beautiful. There is NOTHING special about North Korea's nature. what you can see in North Korea,
you can see in most other countries of temperate climate.
So, why would anybody pay money to see something that you can pretty much see any where on earth?
I haven't watched the video but do they talk about how America dropped more bombs on north Korea than all of the Pacific theater during WW2? Or the fire bombing campaigns that targeted civilians?
Don't get me wrong north Korea is bad, monarchies are inherently evil, but it isn't surprising that they aren't super developed.
@@MrThatguy333 I saw a Korean War documentary, where they interviewed a US bomber pilot. He said, on their first mission, they bombed any big buildings. the next mission, they searched for targets, but there weren't anything remaining that's worth bombing. Korea was piss poor country.
Basically to sum it all up when the Soviet Union collapsed North Korea’s main economic and political ally was gone and things went very downhill from there
@@bradley8575 now its Russias turn to experience North Korea 2.0
It's actually incredible and fascinating how North and South Korea basically switched places in terms of wealth and economic prowess. Nowadays South Korea is one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world (and widely known as such), while North Korea is known for its extremely poor and primitive living conditions. Hard to believe that 50 years ago it was pretty much the reverse.
It isn't that hard to believe when you do away with common sense and fully embrace a cult of personality, which is exactly what North Korea has done.
I love how you rephrased the same sentence 3 times.
Not incredible at all. After 1992 it was inevitable.
South Korea has one of world's lowest birth rates. That is a sign of moral degeneracy. That is nothing to be proud of. You need to include human possibility among your values. I presume, Mr WarpRulez4, that you are still young and far from achieving maturity. Never mind, there is still plenty of time to think about these matters.
NK is russian product, SK is USA product. So which country is better? :)
It's so funny how time changes things. I have a great friend that I worked with for several years who was originally from the People's Republic of China. He and I were born only a couple months apart from one another. It turned out that his Dad was a 'Chinese volunteer' in the Korean War, while my Dad was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Here we were, friends while our Fathers were both enemies so long ago.
I like how you use the offical title instead of china, as if we didnt know what china was
Goes to show you we’re all capable of being friends, until we’re trained to be divided from one another.
@@ayochill9716 You can resist being trained as an enemy, can't You? There's no excuse for not thinking and not deciding for Your own. They can maybe kill You, and then they would have Your body, but not Your dignity and willpower.
That's why they fought so the future could live in peace
Chona issufcering under xi ping pong
Man when Stalin of all people is worried you're not producing enough food for your people you've got serious problems
RIGHT?! 🤣🤣
ikr Stalin's like: you're spending too much money on your military
I remember my late Dad talking about the NK workers in Iraq during the late 70s early 80s. They would work hard, and long hours, without holidays. I believe their salaries and overtime were all probably collected and remitted to NK, while these guys would be given just basic sustenance- food, clothing and shelter. They all wore similar work apparel or uniform, and walked from their accommodations to site in a formation, which other workers found unique. They never mixed with others and kept to themselves.
Poor slaves
that's communism for you
@@jotr.9786 I don't think communism is the problem here
@@callmeandoru2627 it definitely is, that like almost step for step what happened in ex communist block romania, during the communism regime
in my country (italy) the situation is very similar with chinese immigrants, they don't walk in formation or anything that extreme but they work their asses off only to probably have part of their earnings taken and they very rarely mix or engage with the locals
Nothing says "self reliance" more, than relying on your neighbors to supply you with everything.
Nothing says oppressor like invading and sanctioning a country that did absolutely nothing to you just because you want to be a White man and rule nonwhite peoplike a batshit crazy psychopath for centuries now...👀🤦🏾♂️
That is a extremely arrogant socialist idea
If the west didn't sanction them as harshly as they do, they wouldn't rely on China
@@Yourcomputertutordotnetyou obviously know nothing about socialism😊
Socialism just means factories are owned by the workers. That's it.
That isn't the case in NK. Companies that do work like that are often very successful, but the greed and power gluttony of the rich won't make them common.
So what I gather from this is that a unified Korea would be a force to be reconned with, given the raw material wealth of the north, the technological know how and farm land of the south. Overall, Korea was an incredible-balanced country with one half being able to feed the other, while the other could produce all the materials the other needed to build stuff, and they got seriously fucked over by the Cold War and split. I really hope they can unify when the north collapses.
I fear what will happen when the North collapses, because the Kim dynasty heirs might be so demented that they'd nuke their own people, the South and the Japanese, out of spite.
Half of my family lives in Seoul and that's still in range of North Korean artillery. One of the main reasons that poor excuse of a nation still exists is because they could and would wipe out more than 100 000 people within the first hour of combat.
I see no way for the North to collapse without a massive popular uprising and that will never happen.
At this point I highly doubt the South would be interested in reunification like Germany, and if so it would be a decades long very slow process
The economic difference between the north and the south is far greater than that of west and east Germany, and they’ve been separated a lot longer. Beyond the south being astronomically wealthier, it’s also better educated, better fed, far healthier, far more liberal, and far more industrialized. This creates the issue of the south essentially facing economic collapse trying to quickly raise the norther standard of living, while being faced with a wave of millions of North Koreans flooding into the south as soon as the border is no longer militarized. And even then you’re looking at a century or longer until the North is even as close to as prosperous as the south (east Germany is still significantly poorer 30 years later).
I think at this point it would be better to turn North Korea into a democracy and try to build it up as it’s own nation rather than unify with the south
It has been concluded in some studies that if Korea stayed unified it could have had the 3rd largest economy of today, surpassing Japan and only falling behind China and the USA. But history did these Koreans dirty.
@@MacTac141 Yes and No, Germany seems like a good example at first, but if you look closer there are some key differences. East Germany is still lagging behind the West, because it had nothing going for it. The only companies that work there are some that like the cheaper workforce and workspaces, but apart from some coal, there is no reason for any company to actually set up shop in the East. From what I gathered in the video, the opposite is true for North Korea, they actually have rare materials, but lack the know how to use those, but that know how is existent in the South, so if they unified and one would do it carefully the North could get lifted up far easier than East Germany.
Basically, the materials in the area are reversed, while West Germany had both, the democratic system and the material wealth, while the East was rather blank, in Korea the opposite is true.
Unification is obviously always a fickle process, but if done right and the end of the North happens under optimal conditions (like Kim decides he is just tired and wants to unify, as an example) it could work quite well I imagine.
One day when South Korea rules the whole peninsula, United Korea is going to be a great power
You forgot to mention the "Sunshine Policy" of the 90s.
South Korea did try and help North Korea during their famine, and it eased tensions between the two side considerably. South Korea's President Dae-jung Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize for this policy and was hailed as the Nelson Mandela of the East.
Yup. Entire sunshine policy accelerated developing Kim dynasty’s nuclear weapon warfare. South Korea’s biggest mistake.
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists.
@@jins8144 America destroying Iraq and Libya when they got rid of their wmds accelerated that
The taxpayers who actually paid for the food should have all won the Nobel Peace prize instead.
@@bkm1104 If that's your understanding, you should feel bad. They propped up a tyrannical state with food which allows them to focus on developing weapons to suppress the population and hold onto power.
So yeah, rice turned into nuclear weapons (if that's really your level of understanding).
For me, as a South Korean, it's so sad that ethnically entirely same people in NK are the poorest on Earth. Because of Division of Korean peninsula, the dream of Korean co-prosperity had been ruined. Korean peninsula is small, and even it's divided...
That should very clearly illustrate the complete insanity that is racism & Xenophobia in South Korea.
If people ethnically similar to you are so different, how can you explain your attitudes towards black people & generally any non-white or Korean people without sounding like a hypocrite…
And you have China to thank. I'm ethnically Han Chinese myself, but China's government is pure evil. China would still be like North Korea if Deng Xiaoping hadn't realized the folly of Mao's ways and begun to embrace capitalism.
That's really sad. I'm honestly ashamed of my country for allowing yours to be split in half and giving the North to the Soviets.
As much as I tell other people that they don't have to apologize for their countries' faults, I find myself doing exactly that to you, because the fact is, America sold out millions of innocent people in Korea and in Eastern Europe to our Communist enemies just so we could be at peace. I'm sorry.
53000 Americans died in the Korean War. It is not like the US and the West we not invested.
@@briangasser973 , Please let me correct the figures of USA soldiers died 36,574 in Korean War. Injured 103,000 soldiers. DPAA archive. (However, the death figures are slightly different which carved as 36,595 in Memorial Wall in National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington DC. Maybe 21 added later but not sure, only my guess)
SKorea hugely owes its democracy and freedom, prosperity to America and Americans. Thanks for USA always.
Then when USA asked SKorea to join Vietnam War to defend free SVietnam in 1960's~mid 1970's, SKorea joined and fight together with USA side by side against communist North Vietcong.
5,000 SKorea soldiers died in Vietnam War and many more had injured.
SKorea has remained blood ally with USA and want to Go Together with America.
God bless America.
North Koreans: please, we have no food or medicine!
Kim family: you will make up for these shortcomings by doubling your steel output this week and every week forward
*Stuffs face with delicacies all-day long
I'm starving over here for the sake of you people! Work harder!
North Korea managed to do so well for a couple of decades specifically because it was receiving tons of aid from China and the USSR, on top of sitting on plenty of valuable natural resources and existing heavy industry. Once that aid dried up, North Korea promptly fell into ruin, because any state can be prosperous when being propped up by enormous amounts of continuous foreign aid.
Literally the story of South Korea, they are only prosperous because of the western world. North Korea wasn’t being given any aid, just the know-how and trading.
@@nope7389 south korea barely receives any western funding now. North korea is a example of how foreign aid can fail,while south korea shows how foreign aid is beneficial
@@brendanzhang7488 Still if the US stopped openly supporting and stopped considering South Korea as a ally they’d collapse
North Korea was NEVER RICH.
There is this misconception that North Korea was rich in 1960, but they were NOT rich.
North Korea was doing slightly better in 1960, compare to South Korea, but both of them were piss poor compare to other countries.
so north korea was just like a bad dot com startup , that made no profits and relied on VC funding until dieing
It's strange that North Korea and North VietNam were in the exact same situation in 1960 but they turn out very differently now. Dictatorship can really ruin a country
Vietnam became much more open for foreign investment in the 90s. There are western hotels all over Vietnam.
the only difference is vietnam united their country, and NK because of the states, was not able to
Vietnam is still a single party state. Their economy, however is more of a mixed economy.
@@alexxu3004 no the difference is Vietnam was not isolationist nor did their leadership have a cult of personality. The Kim family in Korea was very much in the Stalin model. While the leadership in Vietnam reflects the lessons learned from the horrors of the cultural revolution
@@voss0749 look, if your nation is seperated in two by soviet and usa, and still not unified in 21st century, you will end up in the same never ending cold war and no chance of developing.
As most of my fellow South Koreans do, I support the reunification of the Koreas, no matter the financial cost. Not only have we grown from one of the poorest countries in the world to a prospering state in just a few decades, we soldiered through an economic crisis that almost bankrupted the country in '97; I like to believe that our resolve for a common cause will continue to hold solid in the face of another economic hardship. We will suffer in short-term, but prevail in the long run just like the case of Germany.
It is also important to note that countless families had been torn apart against their will during the war; mothers separated from children, fathers from wives, brothers and sisters from their siblings. Displaced from their hometowns amidst the war, now unreachable. It is only right to grant the families the way overdue reunions and put an end to this tragedy.
Although, I do not have high hopes that a reunification will actually happen in the foreseeable future. North Korea has been acting pretty much as a buffer state between the two ideologies, and China will never want to share direct borders with the US-backed South; much like how Russia could not bear Ukraine leaning towards the West. In the event of the collapse of the Kim regime, China will most likely find an excuse to intervene, send "peacekeeping" troops across the border, and fortify their positions way before any other actor could respond. It'll probably end up as de facto Chinese territory. The South and the US would probably refrain from taking action so as to avoid military conflict with China.
Not to mention Japan would probably not whole-heartedly endorse the unification, since it would mean the emergence of a formidable rival, now rich with underground resources and manpower. It'd also mean that many of the Right Wing's claims and justifications for rearmament would be undermined. Japan would prefer the status quo over a reunified Korea.
But yeah, no harm in dreaming.
china does not minds a border with SK, its those US bases that come with SK that is the problem for china.
I think its to South Korea's benefit. Instead of cheap fabric being made in Bangladesh, it should be made in N. Korea.
Might want to consider china's perspective in this. Its not just a case of ideological conflict but also the fact that if the north fell, there would be a large refugee crisis as many from the north flee into the chinese province of manchuria.
Polls disagree. Support for unification is only around like 55% or so if I remember correctly. Still a majority but I wouldn't say most.
@@MinecraftMasterNo1 Most literally means a majority.
North Korea basically has become the very sort of dystopian existence that writers, like George Orwell, warned about in novels like "1984" and "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury.
It looks that Orwell referred to the modern west with its woke stupidity and the political and social oppression
Joe Biden says his tip-down economic programs are working....
......just like in North Korea
There is a tragic irony that NKs ideal of self reliance caused them to miss their one chance at it. As the soviet union waned and south korea grew, this was the perfect tine to pivot towards normalizing relationships and reunification. The resulting unified korea would have the balanced economy needed for independence, and the transition could probably have been achieved without a revolution. Kim may even have been seen positively by history, as a leader who did what was needed to weather a turbulent time. But instead, pride went before a fall, and NK lost everything.
As someone who grew up in South Korea in the 80s, I agree with you. When East and West Germany reunited, I thought Korea would be next. Sadly, well, you know how that turned out...
@@alexlee9180 Maybe it will happen some day.
You clearly don't understand the mind of a despot. It's all about him
The US and China wouldn't have let him do that anyways. Plus it would've required him either abdicating or becoming competent overnight.
"Instead, pride came before the fall, and NK lost everything."
By "NK" I assume you meant the Kim Regime and North Korean government/state.
They did not lose everything; they retained their power.
Had they agreed to reunify with SK, every single NK elite would have been driven out of power by their SK counterparts. Countless North Korean citizens would then start asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about their former regime's history and eventually discover the crimes of their former rulers.
The North Korean people would then start to demand justice, and their former leaders would be hunted down and hauled before a judge. The entire Kim family, and all of their cronies/collaborators, would likely be put on trial for crimes against humanity; those that didn't would probably have to spend the rest of their lives on the run, in hiding or in exile.
If you don't believe me, look at _South_ Korea. SK _also_ used to be a poor, isolated, corrupt military dictatorship (and also had a secret and illegal nuclear weapons program). But the SK military junta voluntarily dissolved and allowed democracy to take hold in the 1980s.
They _still_ were put on trial and put into prison.
If it can happen to SK, why not NK?
Every single dictatorship seems to involve people making decisions who have absolutely no clue on the subject just pure confidence.
Silence! If Dad says we're not lost... then we're not lost... Don't make him turn his car around.
This is a problem with all government, it's just harder to say no to a murderous dictator. I wish there were some political parties made up of scientists and engineers.
@@odizzido The Nazis had a lot of scientists and engineers.
@@brians7181 Okay? Are you trying to say if a party made up of engineers existed they would be nazis? Or is this a non-sequitur just for interests sake?
@@odizzido No, what I'm saying is, if a party is made up of scientists and engineers, that is no guarantee it will have a good outcome. However, if a party is made up of occultists or atheists, that is almost a guarantee for a bad outcome.
FunFact, during the big leap forward in China many Chinese migrated to North Korea mainly because that way they were able to feed themself and their familys, even so later many left North Korea again as Chinas economy hit the gas and got its economical wonder
similar to what happened with colombia and venezuela
They were able to leave North Korea?
@@Ianchia860 there's this thing called BOATS
@@Ianchia860 China is still technically a communist ally
@Theren so....still boats?
Ever feel useless? Remember North Korea has elections.
same with china lmao
North Korea begun as a democracy, just like the USA 🇺🇸, then the commies came in and ruined everything.
They are legitimate, but there is a lot of trust in the Kim family
@@MindFoggggamerican federal agent
@Kimyojonglover, no way you think those elections are real.
Just a little more detail on the Korean War. American bombing sorties didn't just destroy North Korea's industrial capabilities, it pretty much sent them back to the stone age. We leveled virtually every building bigger than a shack in that nation. The level of destruction was unparalleled: 16 of the 20 largest cities in NK were leveled beyond 50%. The only reason we stopped bombing Pyongyang was because there were no acceptable targets left. William F Dean reported the cities of the north were nothing but snow-covered wastelands which had been scraped clean of buildings. Dean Rusk reported that they had bombed "everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another". Fire bombing campaigns were also used indsicrimnately against civilian centers.
As USAF General LeMay said: "We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too......Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure?"
That sounds oddly similar to America fire bombing in Dresden & Tokyo during WWII.
@@garfieldandfriends1 Although two tragedies can never truly be compared due to the nature of them, I would say that the Korean War was a beast of its own category. It was the meticulously horrifying removal of every single structure in the North. They bent the UN rules severely by classifying pretty much every building in the region as a military installation because most of the time they had no idea where the North Korean and Chinese troops were, so they chose instead to scrape every house, shack, and structure off the face of the Earth.
@@cbir4830 "bent the UN rules" - some times it feels like those rules are made from rubber
@@yds6268 Well in the regard of total socialist dictatorship, the UN rules can easily be bent in the sense of every building is owned by the same military power as there is not exactly personal property. Which sucks in many ways...
Every nationality has frustrations in their past, as an American, I will say this is equally true for me. Also as an American, I would also like to say that although my government and the people running it are capable of making bad decisions, I wish only the best for everyone and I love you all.
@@reathyork It would be cruel for us to justify war crimes based solely on whether or not they were executed against a "dictatorship". Civilians are civilians, and the destruction of their homes, farms, and their own lives is never justifiable. At this time, North Korea was more technologically advanced, better fed, and stronger economically than the poorer south. Beyond this, if we're going to argue who was more "dictator-ey" keep in mind that at this time the South Korean government under Syngman Rhee had summarily executed over 200,000 civilians.
The goat thing sounds similar to how the Chinese Government had the masses killing sparrows not realizing those pesky sparrows that eat a small percentage of the seeds also killed tons of locust which wipe out huge swathes of farm land, causing a massive famine that killed millions.
There's really something about authoritarians fucking it up with ecological disasters. Imelda Marcos, then first lady of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, introduced apple snails to our country as source of protein to fight malnutrition. Thing was the poor still had their human decency and did not touch said snails. Now those snails are the most pervasive pests Philippine rice farmers contend with.
And the fact that sparrow nests are extremely valuable
They (the communists) were MORE than the Gods they denied.
Another case study of man's arrogance in believing he has control over nature.
@@gejamugamlatsoomanam7716 If you're thinking of bird's nest soup, then I'm pretty sure they're from a kind of swift; certainly not sparrow nests.
Sounds to me like a perfect example of wanting "short term large gain with later huge loses" instead of "longtime low but stable gain"
Absolutely fascinating history, I had no idea it was this complex, even though I should have imagined so, it just didn't cross my mind. Thanks for a great video!
Actually North Korea is the strongest snd richest asian country!!! (Im reading articles from North Korea to get a good source)
The story behind the Ryogyong Hotel in Pyongyang is DARK. Squandering a starving nation's gross domestic product (GDP) on a vanity project hotel apparently lead to mass cannibalism inside the capital. Many people moved from rural areas into the city in an effort to find work opportunities and food supplies; naturally many people ended up sleeping rough and, so the rumours go, families would abduct destitute people and well, you know, cannibalism would ensue. Meanwhile Kim Jong Il (who was arguably the most evil, ruthless, and simply too indulged in his life of luxury to manage a country) was throwing parties and having world-class chefs flown in from all over the world. Driving your citizens to cannibalistic levels of desperation for the sake of a poxy hotel that STILL hasn't been finished is next level evil.
A Beta voiced propoganda piece.
@@galvanizedgnome please elaborate?
Spreading bullshit stories like this only hurts the legitimacy of North Korean defectors.
Source?
@@stuartberesford3585 In North Korea, people don't decide where to live. Like we were in Covid time, they need a written permit form the Government even to move to the nearby village, to visit their dying parents. So, NO FREE MOVEMENT inside the Nation. ESPECIALLY THE CAPITAL CITY, which is EXCLUVELY inhabitated by the top elite class. There were NEVER "many people moving from the countryside to the Capital City" in North Korea, simply because it's strictly forbidden. All the tourist who went to North Korea said, and documented, that there were soldiers, barriers and even tank in all the streets who lead people in the Capital City; they're highly guarded; any "poor people from the countryside" who would TRY to come in the Capital City would be shoot down. So your story is not believable, sorry.
North Korea: voted 'Best Korea' by North Korean Magazine for 69 consecutive years
I can't tell whether that's a joke TT
I'm always just so fascinated by North Korea. It's just captivatingly tragic to me that a place like that exists today
I grew up in ROK, so I'm very familiar with the two Korea situation, I have to say this is well researched, well done
In Socialist Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu applied many things that he saw in his visit to North Korea in 1971. I remember how he decided to industrialize the country by forcing the farmers to work in the industry, and so agriculture was left for the children in school, the army and the workers in the factories, who were taken to the fields in their free day, the Sunday. I knew kids who lived in the country and only went to school Dec. 1st to Feb 28th (with a 3 weeks winter holidays), because they'd spend the rest of the school year working in the fields.
I've heard that Romani people gave good testes when it comes to how to treat dictators:p
Wasn’t socialist Romania the only violent democratic uprising in the iron curtain?
I guess these reforms didn’t do so well after all 😂
Thank you for telling the story of North Korea so objectively and concisely. I feel like it’s so hard to truly understand the entire context of this enigma sometimes
Although, as far as I can tell, the story in this video is true, it is not told objectively. The anti-North-Korean bias of the author is made very clear.
@@SimpleAmadeus To be fair its pretty hard to get a decent north korean perspective as a westerner, theyre not too keen on honestly sharing with the west in general
The army of North-Korea is the largest in the world by far. It's over twice the size of China's army. Which is still really weird to consider.
Of course over 70% of that is light infantry that are more so glorified police officers.
Lets just be greateful for living in the western hemisphere
The only reason is that NK was blocked and sanctioned by the Western world since the Korean War. There is no global trade or investment for them. The US and many European countries do not recognize NK until now. The Western world did this to China, Cuba, and Iran as well. The US will be poor if it was blocked by the world.
Having read a good many of the comments here, I must say, that, as a Westerner, I have learned a great deal about the area. Thank you every commentator.
I asked a US soldier who had been stationed in South Korea if there was any way to tell a South Korean from a disguised North Korean. He told me that overall North Koreans are 6" shorter than South Koreans because of malnutrition. North Korea spends about 30% of their national wealth on their military, a higher percentage than any country on earth.
Ever heard of the United States and the west
I don’t think you read what he said, your so focused on defending dogmatic beliefs about communism. The United States spends 10 percent of its overhaul economy on military. He’s not talking about entire blocs or spheres, he’s talking about individual nations states.
@@soviet_union1936 US Defense spending in 2021 was only 3.3% of GDP. An all time low. $742B total.
I think any country that had literally every city in the country bombed to dust and 4 million of their people killed would be concerned with national defense.
@John Amabile How many North Koreans would a U.S. soldier stationed in South Korea ever see? 6 inches shorter? Please!
Great video. I'd only like to add one point about the dangers of reform for North Korea (which you mentioned at the end) which actually relates to what you said about the lack of experienced/educated leadership that Korea suffered after liberation from Japan (which you mentioned in the beginning).
North Korea, similarly, suffers from a lack of leadership which is educated and experienced in modern economics (how to manage trade imbalances, attract investment, build positive and mutually beneficial relations with foreign trade partners, etc.)
If North Korea is to prosper, it NEEDS to allow foreign experts, investors and executives in to guide and manage these efforts. No one is going to invest their own money if the North Koreans are in charge of it.
Unfortunately for North Korea, these foreign experts are most likely to be _South_ Korean (since they would be the ones who are most familiar with the region, language and culture).
1) North Korea considers South Korea to be their ultimate enemy; North Korea has never accepted the division of the Korean Peninsula nor recognized South Korea's right to exist as a sovereign and independent state. To allow the "False Koreans" in to rebuild their entire economy would be considered the ultimate capitulation and humiliation.
2) Ordinary North Koreans would soon start to ask themselves _"If we're going to work FOR South Koreans... then shouldn't we have the same rights AS South Koreans?"_ Or even more dangerously, _"If we're going to work FOR South Koreans... then why don't we just BECOME South Koreans?"_
If North Korea reforms and opens up, then Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo, LG and all the South Korean _chaebol_ megacorporations would rush in an buy up everything, and North Korea will simply become the "northern provinces" of South Korea soon afterward.
They will not do this.
Well, when you've achieved final stage communism and have to eat people to survive, i'm pretty sure you'd be fine with dumping what you've got for all the thing going on in the south. If you listen to NK defectors like Yeonmi Park they know their lives suck and it's because of the Kim. They'd change it if they could, but they can't. I really don't think reunifying Korea would be as big of a deal as people make it out to be.
China will prop up north Korea as a sovereign state or take over the place
At the end of the day, it is not the ordinary citizens of North Korea who have to be ashamed of themselves. they didn't have the power. Heck, they can't even get their hands on enough food. At the end, the video does say something about dictators: Reforms will lead to their deaths. Once the people realize they had been suffering needlessly because of the whims of those in power... well, we all know how Ghaddafi met his fate.
They know "modern economy" quite well, they teach it at university, attracting foreign investments is not what they choose to do, opening up to foreigners would either be like giving the economy for free or making trade agreements that would bind their own hands and slowly transform north also to capitalist economy. Joint ventures and special economic zones are what they can do.
@@alfredkwaak _"Joint ventures and special economic zones are what they can do."_
That's been tried before. The Kaesong Industrial Zone (KIZ) was an industrial park and SEZ that South Korea had established in North Korea as an experiment in peaceful economic cooperation in the early 2000s.
In practice, the Kaesong Industrial Zone was everything EXCEPT a venue for peaceful economic cooperation. More often than not, the KIZ was just another major fault line and flashpoint in the Inter Korean Conflict; just something else for the 2 sides to fight over.
Every time NK had a dispute with SK, the North Korean authorities would barge in, shut down operations, seize all of the property of the South Korean firms operating there and sometimes even detain the South Korean workers (essentially holding them hostage until SK gave in to NK's demands).
The KIZ never even became profitable, despite the enormous cost savings from dirt-cheap NK resources and labor. The frequent harassment, seizures and detentions by the NK authorities were so disruptive and costly that it often completely erased the earnings of the companies operating there. The only thing that kept the KIZ open as long as it was were subsidies and frequent bailouts by the South Korean government.
The South Koreans shut down the Kaesong Industrial Zone themselves in 2015. North Korea was demanding an ever-higher cut for the "privilege" of setting up shop on their territory, and SK was tired of having their stuff/people frequently being held hostage by them.
On top of that, the UN sanctions were starting to get so strict that they even targeted third-party countries that did business with NK, so South Korea actually started to face the risk of getting sanctioned themselves if they kept the KIZ open.
You'll be extremely hard-pressed to find someone who would be as generous and patient with North Korea as South Korea was with the Kaesong Industrial Zone.
This is one of the best accounts of recent Korean history I have ever watched. Extremely well researched and excellently presented.
Thank you :) glad you enjoyed!
I second this comment. I had absolutely no idea about the background of North Korea, and now I do.
Exvept for the accursed commercials
This sounds an awful lot like the situation with my country and our neighbors. Down to our allies, political tensions, economies and their investments in the military to the point where they can’t afford food. We’re kinda going through a cold war right now but it’s heating up so rapidly. If they don’t attack us now, we’ll have way too much influence to be stopped (we’re allied with every country in the west and we’re expanding to Asian allies). Their population is extremely brainwashed, to the point where they think that every imagery of our country is fake because we can’t possibly be more developed than them. I feel like if a war starts, they will definitely fall into a totalitarian dictatorship.
Lemme guess, you’re from Taiwan?
@@lifeofabronovich7792 No. I’m not from Asia but I’d like to refrain myself from saying where specifically in public because I’d 100% get bombarded by insults from them (for instance, someone from that country just raided our chatroom to call us slurs)
@@Unknown-sw9pu That’s fair enough. Take care man… hopefully things don’t get too out of hand between your country and your neighbor.
@@lifeofabronovich7792might be Bangladesh
@@gagnepower he said he’s not from Asia so probably not
In addition to the mismanagement in North Korea, the economic decline began when the Eastern Bloc governments fell. The main suppliers to North Korea had been the USSR and Romania. China was going through hard times because of Mao's disastrous economic policies. During the 1960s to the 1970s, North Koreans lived a better life than the mainland Chinese did. Some of the communist countries had a policy to supply other communist countries. China (which is now wealthier than North Korea) still does this for North Korea. During the Vietnam War, the USSR, China and North Korea heavily supplied North Vietnam.
The South Koreans got aid from West Germany, Japan and the US later than the North Koreans got theirs from the Eastern Bloc countries. Japan gave money as compensation from when Japan had occupied South Korea. Later on, the US gave money after the South Korean president agreed to send troops to help protect South Vietnam. South Korea's industrialization began during the 1960s, and the development began to speed up during the 1970s.
I heard that the Philippines and Japan were the wealthiest Asian countries during the 1960s. Japan's economic recovery began during the 1950s. It's true that North Korea was wealthier than South Korea was at that time, (South Korea is now many times wealthier than North Korea was during the 1960s), but it doesn't mean that North Korea was wealthy when compared to the First World countries. The entirety of Asia at that time wasn't wealthy. This was a time when very few North Koreans owned a car, and this is still the case for North Korea now. Even by the 1960s when North Korea is said to have been wealthier than South Korea, more of the South Koreans owned cars than the North Koreans did. (This was probably because of North Korea's restrictive nature. Today, people in North Korea still need special permission to travel far. According to the defectors, most of the North Koreans never got the permission to visit Pyongyang). And even before the supplies got cut off after the Eastern Bloc fell, ethnic Koreans from Japan who moved to North Korea used to send letters to their relatives asking for medicine. (North Korea doesn't allow its citizens to send letters abroad now). The North Korean defectors confirmed that there always has been a lack of medicine in North Korea.
USSR barely helped North Vietnamese💀, they only helped north Vietnamese with military training, instructions and Anti-air missiles etc. USSR was not able to help North Vietnamese much because of the sino-soviet split and the Americans naval in south China sea.
@@notvergingai1053 From 1968 on, the Soviet Union provided the vast majority of the military and economic aid that North Vietnam received. They supplied their communist allies with food, petroleum, transport vehicles, iron, steel, fertilizer, arms, and ammunition.
yes, North Korea being rich during the 50's and 60's is leftist propaganda lies.
North Korea was slightly better off compare to South KOrea at the time, but both nations were piss poor compare to the world average at the time.
@@notvergingai1053 barely helped?? USSR risked starting a war with the US by not only supplying fighter jets and training to north Vietnamese forces, they also supplied their own fighter pilots in secret. Granted, it wasn’t nearly as much during the Korean War, but still. Definitely much more help than “barely”…
The Philippines 🇵🇭 was the WEALTHIEST country in Asia back in the 1960's. Because of Presidents like Elpidio Quirino and Ramon Magsaysay, Ferdinand Marcos was also a GOOD President but then he became a Dictator. Which became the Philippines 🇵🇭 DOWNFALL in the 1970's and 80's.
"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant." - Maximilien de Robespierre... I hope I would see N. Korea liberated in my lifetime...
By ''liberated'', I know you mean turning Korea into a smoking crater like what Amerikkkan bombers did during their invasion of Korea.
I'm starting to see a pattern of rulers in the 30s-50s overprioritizing heavy industries over anything else. Maybe a result of the ideas of late Victorian era those people most likely grew with that pinned down the success of the European colonial power in industrialization exclusively.
Heavy Industry was the backbone of the economy at that time though, and it was essential to win any military conflict. If the USSR hadn't managed to get it's factories past the Urals in ww2 they wouldn't have been able to beat the germans superior weapons with increased quantity. But after the 50's heavy industry become much less important, and whilst heavy industry might have been the backbone of the economy, if there's no food, there's no food.
In 1930 Stalin said in one of his speeches that "If we don't build heavy industry in 10 years then others will crush us". If USSR tried developing civilian economy this early we would all live under 3rd reich.
As the previous commenters said, heavy industries were the result of communist nations generally being surrounded by hostile powers; the real problem was the post-WW2 arms race, which played a massive role in bankrupting them. North Korea wasn't really an exception, living in a state of a perpetual shaky ceasefire with the South. I'd guess that's why the nuke is so important to them to day - securing a deterrent also carries with it the opportunity to ease off a little bit on conventional weapon costs, allocating more money and resources to revitalizing the civilian economy.
@@georgeousthegorgeous Unlikely. The 3rd Reich was powerful but nowhere near the economic engine of the likes of the US alone and guerilla warfare was rampant across the Nazi occupied zones. More to the point, without a hyper militaristic USSR to deal with, it's unlikely so many nations west of the USSR would have aligned against them by using Nazi Germany. Instead the Germans would have been seen as the great threat to align against.
Basically; we have no idea. Don't act like the thousands that died due to mass industrialization was some Godsend for the world.
@@stephenjenkins7971 not only that, the us was still working on the atom bomb, Germany was barley doing that, as they saw it as a Jewish tech, which to be honest they ain’t entirely wrong considering so many of the people working on the bomb were German Jews. So in the end Berlin and Germany as a whole would of been nukes to death, and even if they weren’t, they would of died due to instability anyways. Especially considering how fucked they would be when Hitler died(which would be soon due to his shit health)the power struggle would likely lead to civil war.
All that destruction and level of death and that was just 600,000 tons of bombs that the US dropped in Korea. It is therefore unfathomable that the US dropped 6 MILLION tons on Vietnam and Laos a little over 10 years later.
Bombs do in fact blow up
In Vietnam much of the bombing was ineffective as they had extensive tunnel systems
Different wars. Completely different situations. Completely different tactics. Also it is not "unfathomable" in a world where hydrogen bombs exist
All that bombing and they still lost
This taught me a lot about Korea the original nation, and the painful split that occurred afterward 😢
Pain, you'll go a lot farther in life if you just worry about your pain. Fuck them
@@trickydickie1988 I can't leave this video without leaving a comment - Now I feel no need to... Thank you for cutting right to the jugular - Your comment sounds harsh, but it's what I would be thinking if I thought it all the way through... Now I can go back to watching kitten-vids (and cars and engineering and other stuff), safe in the knowledge that I'm not the only one thinking fuck them... (It's not their fault but there's no option but 'fuck them').
I think I will watch the rest of the Vid first.
split wasn't painful, it was Communist North Korea which made the situation extremely bad.
there are plenty of countries in the world which were split, but doing fine.
It is not a real, true communist country, for all people do not receive the same wages@@davidjacobs8558 | Миру мир!
Another factor to consider is that the caliber of industry the DPRK tried to develop was unsuited to the type of nation that it was. They were a nation of mostly agrarian peasants and ex-soldiers, but they were also, as stated in the video, the pet project of larger competing powers. So, while basic, shitty equipment that required no skill or training to use would have been more beneficial, what they received was high-end prestige stuff. Neither China nor Russia wanted to be seen providing the inferior aid, and thus implicitly having the worse form of socialism. And the Kims fancied themselves technocrats, and wanted the newest, highest tech stuff to run their country with. And because it was a top-down, command economy, the problems with doing this weren't apparent until everything failed catastrophically all at once. The regime can't fail, and the regime controls everything, so nothing can be allowed to fail, ever, because it ALL reflects on them. So they double and triple-down to enforce success until that becomes literally impossible.
Contrast that with south Korea. You provide aid, but it flows more organically. Give money to a thing, and it works, so it gets more money to keep working better. Give money to a different thing and it goes bankrupt. Great, that was clearly a bad idea; pivot to something else. If anything going bankrupt and failing is a personal failing of The Leader, you never see that things are bad.
An example of what I mean about better stuff being worse: So, you've got a bunch of tractors. They are very fancy, amazing tractors that can do the work of 100 people each. That means you can pull 98 guys off a farm, leave a supervisor and a worker there with the tractor, and send the rest to a factory. Until the tractor breaks. You can't just take a couple bits off a bicycle and cobble something together to fix it, it needs custom stuff. Good news! You've got a factory that makes tractor parts. Bad news: those workers need food. And the farms don't work until they finish manufacturing, but they'll all starve if they don't abandon manufacturing to go back and farm. Neither side has any redundancy, and neither works without the other also working.
That's why you shoot for small, incremental changes that improve things gradually, instead of redesigning the entire economy into a utopia all at once.
Why bother spending 20 billion dollars on electrifying the entire country and building a massive road network if nobody owns a car or any appliances? And you don't build cars, which means all cars are imported. So the only place that needs roads is near the port, because that's the only place cars will be, at first. And the only place that needs electricity is also near the port, because that's where all the factories will be, because it is close to all the shipping (I guess stuff could come in by rail from Siberia, but you don't really want to design a big industrial center in Siberia, unless you have to). And then you build out as you need to and as capacity allows, instead of as a big prestige thing. Otherwise you're wasting money and effort on unusable stuff and designing failure into your system.
Yeah but what are you going to brag to the rest of the world about if you don’t have cool roads??
What are your thoughts on Ambassador Rodman and his inability to normalize relations between North Korea and the US? I'd love to read a two thousand word comment about that. Thank you.
@@mboyer68 I don’t think you actually would.
like real-time strategy?
It can all be summed up in four words; Central planning doesn’t work.
Such an interesting and informative video to watch, I am looking forward to more like this :D
Really glad you enjoyed :) and thank you!!
Go back and watch his older videos too!
@@KainYusanagi i watched all of them lol
So in a nutshell, North Korea declined due to...:
*the fall of the Soviet Union
*stubborn mindsets regarding trade and politics ("self reliance" and making all the commoners suffer)
*poor spending decisions (especially with Kim Jong Il)
*bad terrain (really cold and mountainous)
*lopsided growth (industrialized with little to no room for agriculture)
In South Korea in the 60s and 70s, black market was big. I remember housewives, grannies, soldiers, policeman, doctors, storekeepers all were a part of it. I wonder if there is an analyses of how Seoul and the rest of the country built the economy so quickly
So when people barter amongst themselves away from governance it's called a black market. LOL
@@haolejohn Well, it was a black market. What else do you want me to call it? I think you're equating what I said to criminal activity. This was a huge part of the economy of South Korea in that time. OK with you?
You should probably study Korean economics, specifically the time frame we're talking about. Maybe ask a friend or parent (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or other) who lived there in those times, and then comment. Seems you just want to express yourself as a pious ass, not having any knowledge of the time and place
@@jcl5345 That's what I'm saying the term black market sounds criminal but it's absolutely not unless it's something nefarious and illegal being sold. Selling our own goods to me is not illegal but they call it black market because they own the world with their corporations and are threatened by independent thought.
@@haolejohn What are you talking about? You snicker that people who call it black market are wrong. I'm telling you that black markets abound in Korea, and many other nations. And it is illegal generally in most countries but not enforced as a crime.
What you are saying is that you are a college age kid who wants to be special. Learn more
I wonder which countries that are succeeding for the moment will be featured in videos like this 20 years from now.
All nations that are resource based economies, China (maybe), Russia…
@@yourhandsomestep-dad2669 the idea of China turning into an enormous North Korea is pretty terrifying
Sri lanka is already heading there
Saudi Arabia when oil market is gone
@@yourhandsomestep-dad2669 Aren't all countries resource-based? I mean I know you mean they export resources and nothing else but the resources for more complex economies have to come from somewhere.
North Korea and South Korea really look like two different universes.
I'm not sure who had the bright idea of making a giant hotel in a place with virtually no tourists 😂
The economic decisions they made are 😂😂😂
Remember when you were young trying to play SimCity's scenario mode where you start out with a developed and prosperous city? A city that only has a few minor economical problems and you have until the year XXXX to solve them to win the scenario? Remember how you failed each and every single time? yea, north korea is Kim Il-Sung's first attempt at that.
You should talk about the India-Pakistan situation. It's actually pretty similar. After independence in 1947, Pakistan was more better-off economically, politically and militarily. Nowadays, however, India has a bigger economy than them (in fact, one state of India which isn't even the richest one, produces more income than the entirity of Pakistan's GDP), and they hold military and political superiority.
You should compare gdp per capita (in which india is better still) because comparing only the gdp isn't a good metric for example Israel's GDP is only 1.5 bigger than the Pakistan's GDP but have a GDP per capita 40 times larger only comparing gdp doesn't really show the nation's success.
India has an economy 10 times larger than Pakistan but per capita is only 1.5 times better. While Bangladesh actually have higher per capita GDP than both
@@shlomoshlomo963 🤓
@@narx2392 Average nerd emoji fan:
Almost no Islamic country is prosperous. There’s your answer right there
@@trashyraccoon2615 except ones with oil. Soon enough we'll have a smaller need for oil, then they'll jack up the prices so they can continue their Islamic Monarchies, but then we'll have a bigger need to get rid of oil dependency. Oil is too temporary to rely on. Soon enough they will come crashing down by a wind like a house of cards.
This was absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for the hard work and research putting this together. I feel I learned a great deal about N.Korea and the region.
The only reason is that NK was blocked and sanctioned by the Western world since the Korean War. There is no global trade or investment for them. The US and many European countries do not recognize NK until now. The Western world did this to China, Cuba, and Iran as well. The US will be poor if it was blocked by the world.
That's awesome! Congrats!
There is no wealth so great that 50 years of bad governing can't drive it to ruin. -A passing S. Korean
Sounds strange to say in this context, but before WW2, North Korea (or that area) was one of the most diverse in the world in some animal groups. The different initiatives (the goats etc) and the wars, and the hunger. has likely destroyed much of that. We need peace and restoration there.
that's a total bs.
Korea has 5000 year old history, and had high population density.
most wild animals were extint by modern time.
@@davidjacobs8558 Not at all. I am a biology professor and I have worked with biodiversity in South East Asia. Your rough and unpolite language is not appreciated. I have no idea what group you refer to but take for instance Symphyta with a huge number of species that have not been found since the 1930-ties in Korea.
That'll never happen
Great work on the video! Their Military definitely eats up a lot of the economy, especially the nuclear weapon maintenance, for a country with no impressive exports.
Which is crazy given how resource rich they are! Thanks for the kind compliment :)
@@CasualScholar you can't do business with so many restrictions. People would be terrified to do anything.
to be fair, they have so many injunctions and restrictions against them both internally and externally that it makes sense, sadly.
@@MutualistSoc To be fair, a lot of those sanctions are their own fault (I mean, they are technically still at war with the USA, after all, and refuse peace talks, for the most part). It's all because of the ego of the Kims.
@@MutualistSoc no, the U.S. would be much better off than North Korea. We have the population and natural resources required to sustain an industrial society. We were rich and industrialized long before the current era of containerized global trade. Would we have *everything* ? No. But we would have an economy far better than North Korea.
Thank you for making this documentary, it explains a lot. A very thorough work!
Makes me so sad and angry that those people have to grow up and live in a place like that.
Cope
Socialism has consequences.
@@456t23That's about what I expect from a commie. No compassion whatsoever. Ironic considering the root word of "communism" is "commune." Y'all are selfish as hell and don't seem to care about anybody but yourselves.
@@456t23No
As harsh and terrible as it sounds, it seems like the better thing might have been for the world to entirely withhold aid in the 1990s, because that allowed the regime to linger on. Better would have been the total collapse of the state and the society, since that might have led to the downfall of the regime. I hope that something better lies in the future for the poor people of North Korea.
The USA is the cause of all North Korea's problems. The same as the problems, with Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, the Caribbean , and Latin America, to name a few. The USA is the reason why many countries, have to spend billions in the preparation for war. They have seen the overthrow, murder and destruction, of other nations. What would happen, if the USA would use the billions spent on undermining other nations, and the stupid''' war on drugs''', to provide prevention programs, for their own citizens, sleeping and shitting on all the pavements of every USA city? and low income housing for the especially working homeless. Chances are these undermined countries would end up like Vietnam today, a prosperous communist, socialist? country. So that war and loss of lives, were all for NOTHING. If a country wants any type of govt.,, let them fight and die for it. Left alone to fight, tens of thousands might die. With the intervention, of the USA etc., millions will die. democracy is not for every country, the homeless people on the USA pavement? that's democracy for you
China wouldn't have allowed it. North korea is buffer between china and western aligned countries
@@ShubhamMishrabro China's willingness to let 26 million North Koreans suffer purely for geopolitical strategic reasons is arguably even more heinous than its treatment of its own Uyghur, Tibetan, and dissident citizens.
@@ShubhamMishrabro they almost did. They did NOTHING to help their famine
China would never allow it. They needed a buffer against South Korea and the Americans.
It's funny how North Korea went against all logic which would be using your advantages to export and trade to get other things you can't get but I guess nepotism kills logic.
the ruling class props itself up. same as always
I love exporting and trading when im sanctioned from doing that with the west!
@@xd-hc8cc You would be dumb to think that these sanctions just exist for no reason. Threatening Nuclear War is why they have been sanctioned by the world and not just the West.
They could have done a Turkmenistan and avoided headline news but no, to keep the self-reliance, they just had to develop nukes instead of being rational.
@@lostonearth7856 wow western propoganda really got to you. If not nuclear bombs north korea wouldnt exist, they wouldve gotten invaded by nato after ussr collapsed. Why would theh do that? So western companies could get the hold off nks natural resources. Turkmenistan doesnt claim to be communist, they dont care about them. U dont understand how the world works and u probably think that the west is the good guy. Delusional but not surprising for a westerner.
@@xd-hc8cc well, remind us reason of those sanctions would you kindly?
Very enlightening and educational. I didn't know why North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950. Now, I know. Great overview of Korea history!!
Yea I lowkey thought Soviet said attack them in take bck your lane n so they fought lol buh yk different ai n shi
Buh yea if south Vietnam never failed n had a stall mate might be trouble for north Vietnam since just like south backing up by us they would have better economy buh when they still fuse bck they was still doing bad
"Everything" is about teamwork. The idea of "self-reliance", at the purest level, is essentially to be a "god". From birth until death, there is teamwork. Even "self-study", "independent-study", "self-learning", whatever, one learns from someone that knew prior first, then passed on the wisdom and knowledge to the one that studies, applies, and advances in personal growth. Ergo, from birth until death, "everything" is teamwork.
your channel will be passing one million in no time. As a creator, I learn so much from your channel.
Thank you for such a kind comment :) I really appreciate it!!
@@CasualScholar I love the pacing Do for your videos. That’s some thing I’m trying to learn myself
Seriously? For me that was nothing new.
@@LMB222 LOL keep in mind he is always improving as well. As youtube who is still learning and growing, i can see him just taking off from here.
Hope you get monetization soon. Subbed you
Excellent documentary! The pace is perfect, at least for me. It is so clear, crisp and concise that I watched it three times in a row! An outstanding video!
There you have it, another example of planned economy being able to make wonders short-term but also being utterly unsustainable
Thank you for the video. I am descendant of the Soviet Union and cannot be happy enough that such a monster ceased to exist. I hope that one day I will see the same day to come for North Koreans, though it would mean a very tough time for the world to deal with them as it takes a few decades to adjusts to new world without dictatorship.
I am sorry to say people idolise the USSR and are blinkered to the suffering, destruction and death that it caused. Please keep spreading the word of its atrocities
@Dennis The Red Menace No, Kim is perfectly happy to let his people starve, and if China or Russia get too annoyed at him he's got nukes now...
The USSR liberated the people of the 15 republics. GDP rose by 2200% in just 10 years, the highest ever recorded
@Dennis The Red Menace damn what a nice country you are describing, i wonder how it is doing right now
@@tommylmao_ that's ussr narrative why don't you ask the natives who wanted to get out of ussr? When did communist started parroting elite pov instead of civilians
I can tell this channel will become LARGER
OMG Thank you so much for the like!!
I can't believe Ambassador Rodman hasn't been able to normalize relations between North Korea and the US yet. I don't understand.
lol
70 times! 70 _times_ the economic output!!
I thought it was 70 _percent._ and THAT would've been quite something.
70 times. man. whatever the number for North Korea's annual economy is, you take that number and multiply it _70 times_ to reach South Korea's annual economy. that's enormous. has there ever been such a discrepancy in such a tiny geographical and cultural distance??
@at2tdo you have the exact number between Romania and Serbia?
Same happened in Mediterranean, 2000 years ago..
The sheep population was so huge during time of Antique, that all grass / hay was consumed by goat farmer herds.
Mediterranean soil never recovered - not even after thousands of years later.
Iceland also. 70 years after the war, Iceland is trying to restore its deserts where forests once grew. But not enough soil.
Isn't the fate of the Easter Islands similar also?
The Sahara desert was once filled with vegetation and forest but suffer the same fate due to animal grazing on its farm land.
Commenting for the algorithm because this channel deserves wayyy more subs. Thank you for the quality content
An abridged version of a good semester of history on the past 100 years or so of North Korea in like half an hour.
What a well put together educational video. Thank you.
That is very well made - thank you. I knew before there was that switch between North being better off to South being so but this certainly explained it much better in my mind.
India stands with Korea, both North and South need to be united. Everyone should flourish with peace, harmony. End of wars.
Yes! I’d love a united Korea with the south’s government, it would be one of the biggest powers in Asia.
Such an underrated video, I thought there was at least a million views, hope that it would get to people's reccomended, especially for ones who watch RealLifeLore and such, because this is top tier content
I wasn't expecting to see my home town in a video on North Korea. Those buildings at 21:38 are the old grain silos in Cork, Ireland. Small world.
You earned a sub partner, this video is a master class on how to discuss a history of a nation without bias.
Uh. No. He keeps referring to communist nations, USSR, China, etc, as “socialist”. That’s purposely misleading to promote the glorious wonder of capitalism. Sweden is socialist. North Korea is communist. There’s a huge difference. It’s like using “Christian and Jewish” interchangeably. They may have started from the same idea, but developed quite differently.
@@SilentJay8 There is a difference between socialism and communism indeed, but you seem to misunderstand it. None of the countries that are commonly called "communist" in the West would self-identfy in that way: almost all had "Socialist" in their official name. According to communist beliefs, 'communism' is the ideal stage that is yet to be reached. Sweden is in no way a socialist country, it's a multiparty republic that is well known for social democratic policies.
@@Ces91E multiparty country with social democratic policies can be socialist. They are not mutually exclusive.
Also, Sweden is not a republic. It’s a constitutional monarchy.
Extremely high quality content, very well constructed, great job. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed :)
This seems well researched, I appreciate the depth of the video while still being well paced. like a professional documentary.
Great job on this Documentary!!
One of the few channels I enable notifications for. Not disappointed either!
Very well done video. The comment section has some actual scholarly debates infused with the normal pissing matches also, fun to read
Awesome video but just wanted to mention that your mic is picking up all the "wet" sounds from your mouth while talking and it makes it really hard to focus once I noticed. Might just be me though lol.
My heart goes out to all the peoples of Korea. To those in the North suffering from poverty, those in the South with the generational trauma of occupation and war, and those who are being discriminated against in countries their ancestors fled to like Japan. Despite all this, the Koreans I've met love to have fun and eat good food. What incredibly resilient and inspiring people.
BLACK PEOPLES
People get the government they deserve
There is no such thing as true self reliance, we all depend on something or someone that came before us
Wow a truly and amazing informative videos!North Korea is sadly a disaster or accident waiting to happen it's a miracle that the country has lasted this long and imagine the potential it could've had actually being a highly developed industrialized if it had good sensible leadership but sadly it's another example of how unchecked and unchallenged authoritarianism can destroy a country!
North Korea is a third world country, but better for the average human in America or in every third world country. Free healthcare, housing, education, public transport, subsidized food, consumer products, etc etc.
And international sanctions meant to isolate the country into starvation, which it has.
@@nope7389 so your saying living in America is some how worse than living under a communist regime that tortures and kills people?
It's incredible what organized indoctrination and complete state control of all media can do. North Korea is a prime example of what a nation from 800ad would look like if transplanted into the modern era. Slavish obedience to the ruling family, strong military focus to assert the ruling family's control and nation's sovereignty, and people are peasants who exist solely for the perpetuation of the state, and through that, the king.
*how fall of the USSR, UN sanctions destroyed a country.
North Korea is making my economy in the game Tropico seem functional.
I think this shows how doing things the quick and easy way only gets you so far
Its a treat every time I see you upload! This again was another amazing video! Thank you soo much, continue spending a good amout of time making quality over quantitiy videos. I have watched soo many videos on N. Korea but there were still soo many new things I learned in a video fun and easy to follow along. Well well well done!!!
That was actually a really interesting mini-documentary, thanks for all the insights
Crystal meth is a major problem in Japan, has always been since the war ended and the dear leader provides them most of the supply.
I am Canadian and I have lots of freedom I can choose my religion, I can travel to many countries, and I imagine what it’s like in North Korea with no freedoms at all
i envy social democracy of Scandinavian countries | Нехай наш Бог береже Україну
In this video, it is portrayed that Korea was really weak and was a ‘tributary’ state of China. However unlike in the western point of view on ‘tribute’, jmost east asian nations ‘tributed’ in means of trade and a good relationship, rather than a ‘I serve you’ meaning. So yeah, Korea wasn’t that weak during its history, it was just in a geopolitical hotspot, which lead to Chinese, Khitans, Jurchens, Mongols, and Japanese seeking to invade it (although only Mongols and Japanese succeeded in doing so)
And there seems to be a strong ‘thought’ among Koreans that they never ‘invaded’ another nation, or started a war. This is damn wrong. The Goguryeo empire invaded various Chinese dynasties, or Jurchen tribes for centuries, and the kingdom of Silla invaded Japan a few times(for pillage)
Right, Silla invaded Japan and Abe Shinzo is the descendant of Silla. The Imperial Tokyo regime itself was raised by those Silla descendants, and it has nothing to do with Yamato. The successor of Silla, Korea today needs to be responsible for the Imperial Tokyo regime, it needs to compensate Yamato for taking over it. The Imperial Tokyo regime as the exiled Baekje and Silla regime exploited trillions of money from Yamato and then annexed the Korean peninsula, invested them in their motherland Korean peninsula. Both North and South Korea need to pay back it.
Koreans were militarily weak for almost 1000 years after its unification. Its existence was justified solely to combat pirates and peasant revolts. It got so bad that if Ming China didn’t intervene during the Imjin War, Joseon would’ve been Japanese Chōsen much earlier in history. The era of Korean military feats was short, and even then the Chinese did occupy nearly half of the peninsula for several hundred years.
And for the record, Korea was entirely subservient to Ming China during its tributary with that dynasty. As for the Qing? According to your logic, King Injo bowing nine times to Hong Taiji is totally “good relations and trade”. The Japanese, Vietnamese, Dali, Thai, all entered tributary status to either protect their border or open trade. No nation kowtowed to China more than Korea
Maybe they weren't really a nation at the time that Korea attacked? At least areas that were attacked? Jerchens were not a nation but just tribes throughout history. Neither was Japan...didn't get unified until later
Chinese were saying the Tibet once paid tribute when a nearby army demanded it, which made it a province of their empire, justifying their takeover.
Extremely well done. Bravo!
좋은 내용. 잘봤습니다.
8:04 The USA is not "technically still at war with North Korea", this is entirely incorrect. The last declaration of war for the US was WW2 against Germany and Japan. Korea was a United Nations Police Action, and as part of the United Nations, we volunteered to send forces, along with dozens of other countries. South Korea may still technically be at war with North Korea, I'm not sure, but the USA is definitely not. Later on, in another police action, the South Koreans sent forces to help us out in VietNam, little known fact.
There was a glimmer of hope that Kim Jong Un would bring some degree of sanity back into the country after his psychopath of a father died, but he ended up being just as hopeless.