LiNK: Project Real Sunshine
[Update: LiNK reports that they’ve extended the deadline to sign up for Project Real Sunshine through April 7th.]
[Correction: A reader points out that I’ve confused two LiNK projects, “Project Real Sunshine” and the “Chollima Leadership Program.” My apologies. The Chollima Leadership Program is actually the one I described in the post below; Project True Sunshine is an advocacy project, which I should have remembered. Fortunately, Andy Jackson didn’t get confused and put up a perfectly fine post.]
One of the points that I’ve often stressed is how unprepared North Koreans will be for self-governance when what we’ve long expected to happen “eventually” actually happens. Clearly, the existing regime isn’t governing effectively or providing essential services for the population, and given that so much of North Korea’s educational curriculum is about ideology and loyalty, it’s no wonder. What that will eventually mean it that North Korea will be governed by (at best) South Korean carpetbaggers or (at worst) a Chinese governor-general. No government that the governed see as unrepresentative of themselves will succeed for long, and both South Korean and American governments should be preparing North Koreans to establish their own transitional government.
Finally, someone is doing something about this — LiNK. If you have one week to devote full-time, two weeks to devote part-time, and some useful skills to pass along to North Korean refugees with the potential to lead North Korea out of its current bleak condition, follow this link and sign up today (I didn’t find the time to post this last week when I first received it, sorry). Some of the subjects Project Real Sunshine the Chollima Leadership Program will teach include:
· Democracy and governance
· Rule of law
· International human rights
· Comparative movements
· Comparative politics
· Business protocol and etiquette
· Leadership development
The time will come when suddenly, the state can’t frighten people into dying in place, and that will place some unpleasant sights before the eyes of the world. There will be mass migrations that will spread disease, further destabilize the food situation, and place some stark choices before the leaders of South Korea. Social ills that had stayed hidden will become the new route to riches for people who were taught that all morality served the state.
It may not be possible to completely prevent those consequences; after all, there are only about 10,000 North Korean defectors in all of South Korea, and only a small percentage of any population could do what we’re talking about here. There may also be less time for this task than many people think. Still, the sooner the job is started, the more people that can be trained for the day they’re needed … whenever that day comes.
It will be interesting to see what North Koreans do after collapse???
We didn’t expect the Japanese to behave as they did post-defeat. They say we owe much of that to the control the emperor’s government had on the people + the fact the emperor himself told the masses to accept defeat.
With North Korea, I think all guess are out. We judge things by human nature or examples from the past, but North Korea is too different from anything before (that I can think of), and the level of deprivation and fear, for so long, has taken us beyond human nature, I believe…
I think you will have an expectations problem when the collapse happens just like we had in Iraq after the war. The Iraqis thought the US military could just go and make the impossible possible and when we didn’t they got pissed and thought we were intentionally not making things happen.
I think the same thing could happen in North Korea as they learn more and more about how advanced South Korea is. This could cause North Koreans to have unrealistic expectations of how quickly their county could be rebuilt and when it doesn’t happen they could think the South Koreans are intentionally not rebuilding their country at the speed they expected.
Nor do I imagine that a Chinese administration of Outer Changbaishan — it’s historically been a part of China, you know 😉 — would incubate a lot of media carping about the slow pace of reconstruction. They’d probably be a lot more effective than us at getting out a message of progress on reconstruction in a Chinese occupation zone.
Such a zone, incidentally, would certainly include most of the worst concentration camps in the far northeast, where China would probably destroy whatever incriminating evidence the North Korean regime didn’t destroy first.
China might intially make an effective reconstruction effort if it made it a national priority to do so. Remember that by the end of 1945, the Soviet occupation zone in Berlin was probably more efficiently administered than the U.S., British, or French zones. The Soviets behaved hideously toward German civilians and looted their industry, but they certainly got food rations going much faster than we did. Command economies — China probably still qualifies to a degree — tend to be better at providing just enough essentials for everyone.