I think North Korea has some serious problems
They have been in a defensive posture since the US and Russia divided up Korea in the cold war
Basically North Korea went into lock down and has been on a war footing ever since the Korean war
The paranoia of the North Koreans is increased by the US president describing North Korea as part of 'an axis of evil'
How the North Koreans interprete such a statement from the public face of the US leadership is that they are on the shit list of the US
The US has also been on a war footing since the second world war and has developed its economy around the manufacturing of weaponry, leading president Eisenhower to warn the US public in his farewll speech (link posted below) that a powerful group of financiers and industrialist, whcih he called 'the military industrial complex' had infiltrated all the corridors of power within the US:
[video=youtube;8y06NSBBRtY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY[/video]
That is why the US has been at war since the second world war...because there is a cabal of people who profit from war, running the US
The US is the only country in the world to have used the atomic bomb in anger....it used it twice....two different ones, so that they could compare them (although it killed more Japanese civilians through convential bombing raids than it did with nuclear weapons). it conducted a similar bombing campaign in Cambodia and also sprayed a cancer inducing poison onto the crop fields, forests, villages and water supplies of vietnamese civilians leading to generations of vietnamese children being born with birth defects.
It has also left many battlefields such as Iraq littered with unexploded cluster bombs (which children often pick up out of curiosity) and uranium depleted shells which have also caused cancer and birth defects due to their radioactive nature.
The US has in recent years invaded and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, whilst flying bombing missions in Libya and the Balkans and supplying Israel with military hardware which they have used for bombing raids (often killing civilians for example in Lebanon, most recently in 2006 which saw the killing of over 1000 lebanese civilians)
The US is however involved covertly and overtly, militarily and financially in many countries around the world
Anyone who does not want to bow to the US basically has to ring fence their country and militarise it. The Koreans have developed nuclear weapons to protect themselves and have created an army millions strong.
People in North Korea are living under a totalitarian dictatorship but North Korea is not causing violence and misery around the world, the US is
For that reason, it seems inappropriate for people from the US to focus on what is happening in North Korea because North Korea is not a direct threat to the US. However the US IS a direct threat to North Korea.
There is a further dimension to this as well. That is the growing tyranny within the US against its own people which has seen amendments to their constitution and the senate recently passing the law to enable the US military to arrest US citizens on 'suspicion' of 'terrorist' acts, indefinately without trial.
The US citizen Bradley Manning is already being held without trial for releasing some footage of a US helicopter gunning down unarmed civilians in Iraq including shooting up a vehicle with children in it that was trying to pick up the wounded in order to get them to a hospital. This exposed the kind of behaviour which the military industrial complex gets upto to around the world so they are now punishing Bradley Manning by putting him in solitary confinment in an attempt to break his mind and spirit.
There are parallels with the case of the 'Pentagon Papers' (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_papers) in the vietnam war that exposed President Johnson as having lied to the US public.
Top government legal advisor Cass Sunstein has advised the US government that it should take action against 'conspiracy theories' including legal or violent action and he suggests that: "Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."[SUP] (2008 'Conspiracy Theories' Paper)[/SUP]
The point i'm trying to make is that yes there are problem in North Korea but that the situation there is largely the product of the paranoia and hostility generated in the cold war when Russia and the US polarised much of the world. The US has played a MASSIVE part in shaping North Korea.
Also US citizens should not allow the media to distract them from what is happening in their own country with the economic crisis (which is only just starting) which the military industrial complex has created and also with the attempts by the military industrial complex to change the laws in the US in order to take the rights and freedoms of Americans away.
The corporate controlled media will show lots of programmes about how bad things are in other countries to distract the US public from the fact that their country is turning into a police state, their wealth is being robbed from them by the financial industry and their military is spreading, death, destruction and terror around the world
For Americans the battle for freedom is not in North Korea....it is in the US itself.