Post-18: No Walmarts in Pyongyang

Heard on a U.S. radio show, broadcast April 10th, 2013:

Pundit: It's brinksmanship. It's like the Cold War. You make threats, you rattle your saber, and then you say , "Okay, I'll stop rattling my saber is you give me $10 million'." So it's all posturing and show business.

Host: I have the feeling this Kim Jong-Eun wants to put the money in his own pocketbook, rather than feed his own people. What do you think?

Pundit: I don't know what he can buy. There's not a lot of Wal-Marts in North Korea. [Chuckles]
                                                                                                                                                     [From Coast to Coast AM with George Noory]

North Korea exists to keep Wal-Mart (and all that it entails) out, it seems to me. I think the pundit inadvertently hits something profound, even though he was just aiming for a laugh line.

One of the hardest things in the world to get a true sense of is how many South Koreans sympathize with the North. The outright pro-North-Korean candidate in last year's election polled at only 1%. But then, consider that only 3% of Americans voted for Nader in 2000 (including my cousin B., he told me), but far more support environmentalism.

I once heard a Korean, with whom I was close at the time, express a respect for the North in the following terms: "Everything they have, they've built themselves". By implication, he was saying, South Korea had gotten a lot of outside help, mostly from the USA, and that was less admirable than autarkic North Korea.

There is something appealing to the Korean psyche (I think) about this "No Wal-Mart" attitude. Looking back to late 2011 and early 2012, this attitude may also be the well from which the fiery opposition here to the U.S./South-Korea Free Trade Agreement drew its water.