Let them drink beer: Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, where Orwell meets South Park

This week, the U.N. gave the North Korean government another million dollars for flood disaster aid to North Korea. Last month, the U.N. World Food Program appealed for $98 million to feed hungry North Koreans. Earlier this year, European NGOs blamed international sanctions for their difficulties paying for their operations in North Korea. And yet somehow, Kim Jong Un has found plenty of grain for brewing beer:

North Korea completed construction of a brand new brewery in Haeju city that has up-to-date production facilities, the communist country’s leading newspaper said Thursday.

The Rodong Sinmun, an organ of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, said the brewery has fermentation, filtering, cold storage and bottling facilities that will allow it to produce alcoholic beverages to benefit people. [Yonhap]

This also happened in Animal Farm. It’s as if the North Koreans read Orwell and mistook parody for utopia.

You get similar ideas from this picture of Kim Jong Un supervising the construction of what richly deserves to be known as Cartmanland Pyongyang, “a waterpark, complete with slides, a wave machine and a restaurant.”

I’m not sure that oligarchical hedonism equates to capitalism, but it sure isn’t socialism. There’s no denying that this is a change from the image that the first two Kim emperors displayed, but is it a good change? It certainly isn’t reform.

Let’s assume that North Korea abandons all pretense of socialism and class equality. Say it declares itself to be a capitalist or mixed economy–exactly what proponents of engagement have spent the last two decades so eager to see that they sometimes celebrated signs that no one else could see.

Why does it follow that a non-socialist North Korea would be any less of a danger to its own people, or to us? Isn’t it more likely that a capitalist North Korea would simply use its increased concentration of wealth to threaten us more? Wasn’t Nazi Germany a mixed economy?