Progressives need a policy clue about North Korea that doesn’t start with tedious talk about negotiations. Meetings are on again – boring, been there, done it to death! This isn’t news, it’s a sleeping aid.

Refugees aren’t all that exciting, either. 31 North Koreans got near Yeonpyong Island, or else no one would have cared. How many South Koreans care about the refugees already in South Korea?

Thirty-one North Korean people crossed the tense Yellow Sea border by boat and arrived on the frontline South Korean island of Yeonpyeong on Saturday in an apparent defection, a government source said Monday.

The North Koreans, consisting of 11 men and 20 women, arrived on Yeonpyeong Island by a fishing boat and were towed away to the western port city of Incheon, the source said on the condition of anonymity.

“Currently, a team of military and intelligence officials is interrogating the North Koreans on how they crossed the Yellow Sea border,” the source said. The source said the North Koreans are a “work group,” not family members.

A military official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said investigators are looking into the possibility that the North Koreans arrived on Yeonpyeong Island after drifting at sea.

There are no children among the North Koreans and they were believed to have left North Korea’s western port city of Nampo, about 60 kilometers southwest of Pyongyang, according to the military official.

They were spotted in thick fog as of 11:00 a.m. on Saturday by the South’s military stationed on Yeonpyeong, the official said.

“Given the circumstances so far, they might have been drifting after setting the wrong coordinates or losing power on their boat,” the military official said.

What could be more boring than avoiding a “work group” for the sake of tedious talks in Panmunjom?

Now, this looks a little more incendiary

The North Korean internet newspaper website “Daily NK”, relying on the words of a North Korean defector, reported that “on January 1st of this year in a city in Hamgyeongbuk-do a manager in his own home sets fire to the photo and on a piece of paper writes ‘Kim Jong-il is a son of a dog, and Kim Jong-un is his bastard child’… This video was produced to show the hostility towards and generally bad opinion of Kim Jong-il within North Korea.”

The defector said that “the video was made secretly at home, but the home appears to be a typical North Korean home… The photos are the kind sent to managers and not ordinary painters.”

The video shows the photos of Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-suk being set on fire, and then on a piece of paper it is written that “son of a dog Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un is shriveled and dead… he is your bastard son… You’ve never married, so now you come here and look for your son until you die? We don’t believe that.”

The defector who transmitted the video said that “this video was created to show the worsening state of public opinion in North Korea,” and the website said that it had published only still photographs because of concerns that its creator could be found by the North Korean authorities.

Still it all reeks of desperation, self-promotion, and, frankly, little more articulate than most of what adolescents would say, not a genuine movement for democracy. I doubt any such organized resistance does exist, lamentably. It infuriates me, but I fear Matthew Yglesias is right: North Korea is the world’s benchmark for evil.

Still, I think there’s a general lesson here. People sometimes look at something like the DPRK’s nuclear proliferation and conclude that there’s little the US can do to influence the behavior of other states short of threatening war. But while North Korea certainly highlights the limits of diplomacy in terms of coercing a profoundly determined actor, the right conclusion to draw is that most national leaders—even “bad guy” ones—don’t want their country to end up like North Korea.

That’s it – North Korea, the country even dictators despise? Do we keep North Korea around just to scare fledgling Hitlers enough to negotiate themselves into a better deal? At some point we need to stop jumping at news of videos and refugees and either get used to the stench of Beijing-style hegemony, or offer the Kim’s what the US seems to be willing to give every Marcos and Mubarak. Most South Korean are not willing to sacrifice their GNP for their crazy Northern cousins, and arguing so sounds about as fascist as calling for a crusade to invade the North. Just how much moral authority does the US think it has after it plans to anoint an intelligence chief in Egypt for president? How about transporting the Kim clan to Dokdo, and putting off the issue of disputed claims on ice until the family expires? Does it make you angry? So what!

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Filed under: Korea Tagged: dprk, kim jong il, north korea, panmunjom