Sometimes war is the answer

By Deauwand Myers

I am not a pacifist, nor am I pro-war at every turn.

The American Civil Rights Movement (and movements like it) demonstrated nonviolent social protests, and the legislative victories attached to them, can be effective.

However, some societies, particularly ones governed by authoritarian regimes, usually are not swayed by public outcry, or even allow outcries by their citizens to occur.

Let's go back to the Civil Rights movement in America. Activists were brutalized, murdered, and socially and financially ruined. Only after many years of sweat, blood, tears, and a mounting death toll, along with shocking images and video of protestors being violently assaulted by citizens and law enforcement, did meaningful change occur. America was forced to engage what American democracy meant when large swaths of its population were denied basic rights for no other reason than race.

For all its triumphs and failures, America, like all democracies, has in it a core of morality attached to human value and human dignity.

Authoritarian regimes suffer from no such sentiment. Sanctions, and the threat of more, have a small impact on these governments, but only so much.

North Korea is the worst case in this regard. Life is cheap in North Korea. The Kim Dynasty summarily executes citizens, and even the elite, without pause. The great famines ravaging its citizens in the 1990s, in which many hundreds of thousands of North Koreans starved to death (a particularly slow and painful way to die) is proof of this.

Instead of providing the most basic needs for its people, the Kims and their comrades make themselves fat (metaphorically and literally) off of their country's meager resources, where only the very top of the military and civilian apparatus enjoy food, running water, and luxury goods.

There were crueler dictatorships in recent memory. The Stalinist Purges (at least 30 million dead) and Hitler's Holocaust (over 6 million dead) are examples.

Yet, in our current historical moment, North Korea makes Russia, and even China, look like tea parties in Montpelier, Vermont in comparison.

There's no easy answer to the riddle of how to unravel North Korea. Diplomacy hasn't worked. President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, bribed his way into the good graces of the late Kim Jong-Il. President Clinton won nuclear disarmament concessions with the North, only to have them renege on said agreements later on.

All of this is in contrast to Iran, Cuba, or China, who, to varying degrees, must consider public opinion, lest they face uprisings that could topple their regimes, or severely cripple their legitimacy as governing orders. (I say this even after the peaceful protests of college students were violently crushed at Tiananmen Square in Beijing).

There are organizations still arguing for a peaceful, diplomatic approach in engaging so called ''rogue regimes," particularly North Korea. ''If we only talk to the North, and work with them earnestly, and give them unabated access to food and money and love, all will be well."

It would be comical, if the naiveté of such arguments weren't asserted by serious intellectuals and policy wonks who study such matters. The Kim Dynasty, and the lucky few who prosper under its evil, benefit from the status quo. For generations, they have grown wealthy and well fed, whilst millions of their citizens writhe in abject poverty.

Cruelty, starvation, and deprivation of even the most basic of human rights have diminished their citizens to a weakened state.

Food and relief aid will go to feed their starving army. Money would go to research and development on weaponry, particularly perfecting nuclear warheads. This has been the cycle for decades.

What benefits would such a government accrue from serious, sincere diplomatic engagement with the international community? Regimes pursuing weapons of mass destruction in their recent or distant past, then abandoning said pursuit, were toppled in a violent fashion, like Libya and Iraq.

Any smart dictator would learn the lessons of these countries and see what the North already knows and has known for decades: to discard their nuclear weapons and research would be suicide, or most probably lead to an eventual overtaking of their country.

The atomic bomb is the North's only card, and they play it quite effectively.

Talking to the North is fine, but unless Kim Jong-un experiences a road-to-Damascus moment like Paul did in the Bible, force, and lots of it, will be the only language he and his ilk will ever understand.

Eventually, the Kim Regime will fall. It will not come from diplomacy. It will not come from goodwill or aid. It will come from a bloody war, either a well-orchestrated coup, or a Korean-American invasion. To think otherwise, after generations of evidence proving my assertion, borders on incredulity.

I'm sorry, but sometimes war is the answer.

Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.co m.