Vejas Liulevicius: belief

Transcript context

…You mentioned this earlier, but just to take a small detour, what are we supposed to think about North Korea and their declaration they’re supposedly a communist nation? What can we say about the economic, the political system of North Korea? Or is it just a hopelessly simple answer, “This is a complete disaster of a totalitarian state?” I think the answer that our historian can give is a historical answer that we have to inquire into what has to happen in order to arrive at the past we are today. Where you have a regime that’s claiming to be communist or has an even better version of Marx’s original ideas in the form of a Korean adaptation called Juche. How does that mesh with the reality that we’re talking about a dynastic government and a monarchy in all but name, but a communist monarchy if that’s what it is? I think that examining as much as we can learn about a closed society that goes about its every day in ways that are inscrutable to us is very, very challenging. But the only answer when an example like this escapes your analytic categories, probably there’s a problem with your analytical categories rather than the example being the problem in all its messiness. Yeah. So there’s a component here and it relates to China as well to bring somebody like John Mearsheimer into the picture. There’s a military component here too, and that is ultimately how these nations interact, especially totalitarian nations interact with the rest of the world. Nations interact economically, culturally, and militarily. And the concern with countries like North Korea is the way for them to be present on the world stage in the game of geopolitics is by flexing their military might and they invest a huge amount of their GDP into the military. So I guess the question there to discuss in terms of analysis is how do we deal with this kind of system that claims to be a communist system and what lessons can we take from history and apply it to that? Or should we simply just ignore and look the other way as we’ve been hoping it doesn’t get out of hand?…

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