North Korea suspended its participation in inter-Korean negotiations across a broad front of issues due to the defections of several hundred Northerners to the South, enraging the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il, and his communist government. Despite its pleas to North Korea to rejoin talks, Seoul refuses to budge on its position of granting refuge to North Korean refugees abroad:

North Korea has boycotted scheduled cabinet-level talks with South Korea, angry over the defection of hundreds of North Koreans to the South last week. Pyongyang described the mass defection as an act of "kidnapping and terrorism committed by South Korean authorities in broad daylight." ...

The two Koreas have been at odds over the defection and Seoul's earlier refusal to let pro-unification activists visit Pyongyang for the 10th anniversary of the death of the North's founding leader, Kim Il-Sung on July 8.

North Korea also scrapped maritime and military talks with South Korea in retaliation.

It sounds like Kim Jong-Il just threw a major temper tantrum, but this problem has been brewing for the past few years and has a potentially humiliating scope. Since most of North Korea's defenses are arrayed at the partition border, refugees fleeing Kim's worker's paradise have a better chance risking flight into the border countries which remain (nominally) communist, such as China and Viet Nam. According to AFP, as many as 300,000 Northerners may be hiding out in China and hundreds more in other Southeast Asian countries. Seoul's willingness to keep its doors open to these refugees holds open the likelihood of an unprecedented mass migration from the last Stalinist outpost that would unequivocally demonstrate the collapse of the Kim regime's credibility, even among sympathetic Koreans.

Of course, Kim has to practice a little projection and blame the mass defections on kidnappings and terrorism, although the statement from Pyongyang does not explain how or why Viet Nam would participate in a mas kidnapping on behalf of Seoul. (The communist leaders in Hanoi must be scratching their heads over that one.) He cannot admit to his abject failure to feed his people, as that would just prove that the system of government imposed by his father and he for decades is nothing more than a tinpot tyrrany, and all the talk about worker's paradises were nothing more than rationalizations to enrich themselves and their cronies while their fellow countrymen starved to death.

It also would put yet another nail in the coffin for the curious and deadly political system of communism, which has killed millions over the past century through starvation and outright murder. Despite being the only system of government that routinely built walls around its states to keep its population inside rather than invaders outside, it still attracts a surprising amount of sympathy from fools and left-wing idealogues such as can be found at International ANSWER, a Stalinist apologist group that provided the driving force behind the antiwar protests this past year. At some point in the future, historians (freed from the current ideological shackles found in academia nowadays) will wonder in horror that such a social experiment was allowed to continue for so long with such horrendous results. They will ask why, and all we can do is point to those apologists for people like Stalin, Brezhnev, Castro, Pol Pot, and a host of others who enslaved their own people and watched them die. We will say, "These people told us that there was no such thing as truth and objective reality, and that all things were relative," while the mostly-unmarked graves of millions mock our empty words.

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» The Black Truth Of Communism from Jay Reding.com
Captain Ed has an absolutely brilliant post on the current flap over North Koreans seeking asylum in the South where he makes one of the most well-worded descriptions of the leftist fascination with communism I've ever seen: It also would put yet a... [Read More]

Tracked on August 3, 2004 7:44 AM