[KS] Re: first message

[David McCann]

Why would anyone be thinking that the DPRK regime is going to collapse
soon?  What does that mean?  Who is telling that story?  Is it the folks in
Washington D.C.?  Why aren't they busy debating impeachment?  How many
years, now, has it been since the policy analysts started predicting the
collapse of the North Korean regime?  The old question about the tree
falling in the forest:  does it make any noise if no one hears it?  How
about the noisy and noisesome  predictions that a regime is going to
collapse?  No collapse, but plenty of  noise.

There is something not even subtly offensive about using the idea of the
collapse of a regime as a  beginning point for speculation in a "final
paper" about the reactions of other countries.

Let me ask, how many others out there are writing papers that begin with
the premise of the collapse of the North Korean regime?  Is that an idea
that appeals because  "collapse" is limited to  "regime," semantically? How
about collapse of the regime and reaction of the North Korean people?  Or
how about the reaction of the North Korean people to all these facile
predictions and postulates about the collapse of the government?

What is this world of Korean studies coming to?  Must we push it along so
thoughtlessly?

David McCann




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