This is the dramatic moment showing the once-powerful uncle of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un being hauled away by police from a political meeting.Read the rest here.
The stunning purge of Jang Song Thaek, 67, once considered the force behind the young leader, delivered a chilling message: No one is beyond Kim's reach, not even family.
North Korean state-run news agency KCNA announced Monday that he had “led a dissolute and depraved life” and said he had been dismissed for a string of criminal acts including corruption, womanizing and drug-taking.
"Jang and his followers committed criminal acts baffling imagination and they did tremendous harm to our party and revolution," the agency said in a report following a meeting of the ruling Workers' Party politburo on Sunday.
Kim Jong Un attended and "guided" the meeting which decided to dismiss Jang from all his posts and expel him from the Workers' Party, KCNA said.
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This raises some interesting other points.
First, it's clear that the party leadership has plenty to eat, which means at least enough soldiers and bureaucrats and their families and friends are getting enough to eat. And beyond that, probably enough non-connected citizens are getting enough to eat. Otherwise, the country would collapse as all its starving citizens stopped working or got desperate enough to slaughter government functionaries. North Korea obviously stays afloat because of some combination of economic self-sufficiency and foreign aid.
Second, for a totalitarian regime, its operations are incredibly transparent. And it follows that US/NATO intelligence, and probably South Korean intelligence, has the whole place wired up and surveyed, 24/7.
Clearly (to me anyway), the leadership could be assassinated and the country pacified whenever anybody wills it. I imagine even the Chinese would join in so they could get this last Stalinist step-child off their teat.
But nobody does anything. North Korea is like the World's wayward stray dog that hasn't gotten so bad we could bring ourselves to put it out of its misery.
My guess is we continue to prop the place up because nobody knows what to do with 24 million experientially and (to a much lesser degree) cognitively stunted individuals who have no idea how to function in free society. I have read that South Korea wants nothing to do with them but I don't know if that's the majority view.
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