Leadership Matters

We have known for some time that North Korea is an awful place to live. It is a prison camp run by a heartless tyrant. Looking at a nighttime satellite photo of the Korean peninsula shows South Korea lit up and North Korea dark. That is a true picture of the total lack of nearly everything in North Korea. Recently a video was posted on the Internet showing a North Korean soldier escaping North Korea. He was shot five times as he fled to the safety of South Korea–but that is not the whole story.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line reported yesterday:

In treating the North Korean, doctors discovered that he was malnourished and had a severe parasitic infection they hadn’t seen before except in medical textbooks. The tapeworms they found in the man hadn’t been seen in South Korea since the 1970s. Uncooked corn was in the soldier’s stomach.

These discoveries shocked South Korean, given that the soldier came from an elite military unit. If the regime can’t feed its best soldiers, it is probably in more trouble than we have assumed.

Would a malnourished army fight for the regime against South Koreans? If so, how effective would it be?

Meanwhile, Kim Jong Un does not look as if he is starving. Even if the North Koreans wanted to rebel against their leadership, would they be physically able to do it?