There’s ominous (is there any other kind?) news from North Korea. South Korean intelligence has reported that Kim Jong-un has executed some fifteen of his top officials, including the vice minister of forestry. Granted, as satraps of the world’s cruelest regime, it’s hard to gin up much sympathy for the dead. But, unfortunately, it does indicate that the dauphin Kim is every bit as brutal as his father and grandfather were. They would be so proud.
The news also underlines the fact that we’re – alas – highly unlikely to see any kind of Perestroika, economic or political, under Kim Jong-un’s leadership. There are two reasons for this. For one, Kim has evidently taken to quite literally executing officials who lobby for reforms. He appears to be fully committed to maintaining his country’s ghastly system as it is.
Secondly, as the perceptive North Korea analyst Andrei Lankov has pointed out, the incentives facing North Korea’s intelligentsia are aligned in such a way as to discourage reform. After all, as soon as the regime lets in even a bit of daylight, it will plant the seeds of its own demise. That is to say, if the North Korean people were to find out how they lived compared to people in the rest of the world (let alone in South Korea), there’s little doubt that Kim and his henchmen would get the Ceausescu treatment. Deservedly.
