What with the recent death of Kim Jong-il, the nutty, nuclear weapons-possessing North Korean dictator, I wanted to share some thoughts and photos with you about my trip there in September - as a few photos, I think, are more relevant than ever.

Scratch that, for the words I’m going to quote heavily, because there are smart people who can articulate much of what I feel better than I can.

If you’re not familiar, Kim Jong-un, who is 29, will succeed his father. Right, so now we’re dealing with a 29yr old, nuclear weapons-possessing dictator. Maybe:

Very little is known about Kim Jong Un, the likely successor. What is known is mostly that he’s young and inexperienced. Moreover, his succession is far from assured — it reportedly took Kim Jong Il three years to consolidate his lock on the job. No one likes the idea of some unknown persons, possibly even crazier than Kim Jong Il was, getting their hands on North Korea’s substantial arsenal.

From Foreign Affairs (emphasis mine):

With the transfer of power now at hand, Kim Jong Un finds himself in a challenging and dangerous position without much training. Success, above all, will mean survival — political, and, perhaps, physical as well.

Kim Jong Un’s most immediate task is to prevent any challenge from members of the top leadership. In most dictatorships, the chief bureaucrats and generals would feel ashamed to recognize a 29-year-old as the Supreme Leader, but North Korean leaders understand that instability in their divided country is likely to bring a crisis which, in turn, could provoke a popular revolution and eventual unification with the South. In such a scenario, the current elite would have no future.

With that fear in mind, North Korea’s top brass is unlikely to threaten Kim Jong Un’s claim to power. Of course, some contenders might emerge, and reports may appear in the coming days and weeks of unexpected troop movements or disappearances of prominent generals and party leaders. But most of the leadership will likely stomach the rise of Kim Jong Un in return for maintaining internal stability, a necessary condition of their position.

Should Kim Jong Un succeed in establishing himself over the next few months, policymakers and analysts will express hope that he will usher in an era of reform. But as long as he wants to remain alive and in control of North Korea, he will have little choice but to continue his father’s policies. To survive, the North Korean state will have no choice but to remain what it is now — an anachronistic, nuclear-armed dictatorship whose population lives in an abject poverty.

It has often been suggested that North Korea can cure its economic problems by implementing Chinese-style reforms and market openings. Although such changes worked well for China and Vietnam, both ostensibly communist states, neither country encountered the political difficulties that North Korea faces — namely, that it remains part of a divided country. Indeed, the existence of a rich and free South Korea makes the situation in North Korea unique from that in China or Vietnam. The affluence and freedom of the South represent a dire threat to North Korea, whose rulers realize that the spread of knowledge in their country about the prosperity of the outside world, particularly of their fellow Koreans in the South, would deliver a heavy blow to the legitimacy of the regime.

So, scary times. And while it’s great to envision a North and South unification, they literally can’t because then the North Koreans will have have to be told that they’ve been lied to for decades. And a lied to people are an angry people. But what can angry North Koreans do? As an impoverished people, it’s not like the North Koreans could overthrow the current regime as we’ve seen a few times this year. Further, even if it were politically tenable, practically, it’s a nightmare. Megan McArdle nails it, “(h)ow do you integrate 20 million new citizens who basically missed out on the 20th century?”

Frustrating.

Back to my trip. One stop was the Goseong Unification Observatory, in South Korea.

Located on the north/south border, you can literally look over into North Korea. No, there’s not much to see. But what there is, is a 40ft tall Maitreya Buddha that points directly north from the South Korean side. Maitreya, for those of you that don’t know loosely translates into “peace and love.” I think that’s a fantastic gesture.

(click the pic for a larger view)

So that’s nice, right? Sure, except that the entire coastline south of the border still looks like this -

That’s to keep North Koreans from swimming down the coast into South Korea.

At this point I don’t really have one. I have a vested interested in what happens in South Korea, an opinion, and I had these images and I wanted to put them together to give you a better idea of what things look like right now because the nuance of the situation I hadn’t really grasped until I was able to literally set foot there and see it with my own two eyes. Maybe it’ll help you, too.

So while there’s lots of this -

And this -

And while Seoul is a massive, cutting-edge city -

And South Korea’s a first world, well-fed country -

There’s sadly more barbed wire than not.