North Korea - what's going on?

When I started studying north Korea it was the early 1990s, and few were paying attention.   Nobody paid attention then, and few pay attention now to the horrors of the totalitarian slave state that it has been for over 60 years.   The name - Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) - says much in itself.   Governments that use names to deliver messages about how utterly devoted they are to "the people" are  naturally quite the opposite.

The adjectives thrown about by the mainstream don't do justice to the place.  Stalinist?  No, the extent and efficiency of the  cultural revolution, the rewritten history and the personal cult far exceed that of Stalin, and it has now gone into two subsequent generations.   Dictatorship?  That bland term doesn't really highlight the totality of control in the DPRK.  Life there is under constant surveillance.  Totalitarian?  The DPRK should be the dictionary definition of it.

Much of the media coverage of the place focuses on how amusing it is to have a strongman leader, legions of soldiers goosestepping, and now how it is a bit of joke that he threatens to attack the United States.  Yet the DPRK isn't that funny for those living there.  

Thatcher was allied to Reagan, but never kowtowed to the USA

The Falkland Islands.

Grenada.

Supporting the right to first use of nuclear weapons.

Repelling Iraq from Kuwait.

On all of these, Thatcher disagreed with the US President of the day.

Why?

It was principle.

Thatcher week and then some

It's been huge in the UK.  Paeans on one side, hatred on the other.  So much to read, but today's bits are

- City AM editor Alastair Heath on how the left are wrong that Thatcher's policies led to the banking crisis and as an acolyte of Hayek, she would have disapproved of the protection from moral hazard presented by the pre-crisis regulatory and monetary policy environment (and the post-crisis bailouts).

- People are organising "Thatcher death parties" which, of course, she would say is their fundamental right.  Reminding us all that to even discuss such a thing for a dead leader in the former Soviet bloc would be to risk   the secret police having one, for you, without so much laughter.  She might have wondered if they think their children and grandchildren would be proud of them, and who else they would hold such a party for, but finally that it says more of them than of her.  Highlighted is one Romany Blythe, a drama teacher who is organising a death party saying "people danced when Hitler died" and who proudly flies the red flag.

Think the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust might invite this vapid empty head to meet some people who can tell her what Hitler was like.  She's prove beyond doubt that Thatcher's biggest mistake was not to privatise education.

- The Adam Smith Institute take on current popular UK leftwing pinup Owen Jones on "something called facts", which as a child of communist parents Jones finds get in the way of a good bashing of capitalism.

Meanwhile...

Here is the intellectual depth of most of the hatred of Thatcher

Meanwhile, George Galloway, sympathiser of Saddam Hussein, supporter of "accepting" the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the man who said the Syrian people are "lucky" to have Bashar Assad as their leader (and who calls out Western intervention wherever he finds it, but is curiously silent about Russia's intervention in Syria, has done one better.

He now sympathises with North Korea with its "innocent and pristine" culture.... of locking up children as political prisoners for the sins of their family.   Of course he still trots out the North Korean line that the USA started the Korean War, a piece of propaganda disproved by the opening of the Soviet archives and even more recently by a few Chinese academic pronouncements.

- Christine Lagarde and the IMF warn against what monetary policy retard Russel Norman is proposing.  Money printing is creating a timebomb (City AM) warning it will be hard to reverse these policies when it is needed without there being a profound market reaction (i.e. bursting bubble)

British politics changed this week - principles are being discussed

Having lived only in the UK and New Zealand, I've witnessed only a few passings of political leaders.  In the UK,  I barely missed Ted Heath and James Callaghan's passing.  In NZ, I recall the passing of Rob Muldoon and David Lange, oh and Bill Rowling (truly a footnote I barely recall).

None have been more than a fraction of the influence that Margaret Thatcher has had on the world, and because she was driven first and foremost by principle and a commitment visceral belief in freedom and resistance to communism.

The more there is of her, the more it is abundantly clear that she turned the tide of history for the UK, and that the left, with its faux compassion and peculiar attachment to central planning, only wishes it could do the same in reverse.

The media coverage of her has been wall to wall, and there is no lack of writing for and against her, but what really counts is the level of discussion.  Conservative Home is perhaps the best place to find links to much of that coverage, positive and negative.

Perhaps the most poignant point made of her yesterday was in the House of Lords. Lord Tebbit, who left Parliament in 1987 for family reasons, regretted his retirement from politics saying "I left her, I fear, at the mercy of her friends. That I do regret".   Men, and they all were, who will themselves be footnotes in history, floored a giant.  Yes, because she made one big mistake, but none would get her to change that through principle, but for popularity.  She wasn't going to have that.

Time after time, backbench Conservative MPs have paid testimony to her out of principle. Those who opposed her have shown themselves up for what they are.  Socialists who think they know how to spend other people's money, whose compassion is only shown by their belief in spending other people's money, and whose decade after decade of caricature have been shown up for being false.

Portrayal of Thatcher as a warmongerer, for taking on the invasion of the Falklands by a fascist military dictatorship is simply churlish.  To say she supported apartheid has been thoroughly shouted down, because she considered those fighting it to be no angels either.  The claims that what she did "caused the ills of today" are treated as laughable, 23 years later.  Memories of rubbish piling up in the streets, blackouts and strikes shutting down the economy, and limits on foreign currency purchases, cause some of the young to notice how far we have come.  Few want to go back to a phone monopoly that took weeks to supply a new phone.

Finally, the caricature of her as a predatory heartless hater of the poor is shown to be just that - the creation of leftwing spin that could not confront her willingness to cut the blood supply of dying industries, that was draining the life from the living.  She didn't cut the welfare state, she didn't privatise the NHS and nobody could accuse her of withdrawing state support for the poor.  She was a conservative, not a libertarian.  She believed the welfare state existed to cover people when they had bad fortune, to give them what they needed before they found or created a new opportunity.  The left simply wanted all of these people to be forever dependent on the state, and the unions that destroyed businesses by demanding pay rises of 20-30% every year.

"Divisive" Thatcher won three elections in a row, with landslides, whereas the 1970s were plagued with governments of tiny majorities and a short run coalition.  Indeed the late 1970s were plagued with militant union strikes under the Labour Party, as the unions thought Callaghan to be too moderate, as what they wanted was Soviet style socialism (don't believe me? Google "Arthur Scargill and Lenin").  

There were 605,000 miners in 1960, 289,000 in 1970, 235,200 by 1979 and 62,000 in 1990.  Far more lost their jobs under Harold Wilson than under Thatcher.  Manufacturing production rose 7.5% between 1979 and 1990, smashing the lie that she destroyed industrial production.  What did happen was that the services sector took off, shrinking manufacturing as a proportion of GDP.  

What shines above it all were her principles, and these are like a shining light in today's politics of spin, compromise and polls... they are worth remembering.

Eastern Europe did it, why not Liverpool and Glasgow?

Thirty years ago Margaret Thatcher closed antiquated, heavily loss making industries, putting hundreds of thousands out of work in many towns in the North, Scotland, Wales and elsewhere. 

Today, many of those towns and cities appear to have never recovered.  It takes little for the BBC or other journalists to find groups of disgruntled people old and young, saying that Thatcher took away their jobs, their childrens' jobs and destroyed all hope.  It is like without nationalised industries, they can do nothing.  The GDP in many of those regions is between 55 and 70% state based still.

Twenty or so years ago, post-communist democratic governments across eastern Europe closed antiquated, heavily loss making industries (perpetuated under 40 years of the sorts of policies Arthur Scargill and the British trade union movement advocated), putting millions out of work in most cities across their countries.

Today those countries are transformed, with new industries, with new jobs, with thriving growing economies.  Some with per capita GDPs at the levels of the poorer western European states.  They have open competitive economies, with public sectors less than half the size of what they were when they threw off the shackles of authoritarian communist governments.

Why?