Kim Jong Il Thinks He's a God-King: Why Ignore It?

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 08:56 AM 5/24/00 -0700, Brad DeLong wrote inter alia:
>I don't know why Tim Shorrock thinks that Korea would have been 
>better off had it been unified and ruled by Kim Il Sung since the 
>late 1940s. I don't know why any inquiry into the character of North 
>Korea's regime is met not by discussion of the North Korean 
>regime--and what should be done about it, by who, and on what time 
>scale--but by dismissal: to ask about the character of North Korea's 
>regime is to demonize the North Korean people, is to be "hysterical," 
>is to "know nothing of history," is to be "arrogant."

Since there is no such thing as counterfactual to history, we he no way of
telling (at least within the realm of empirical science) what an
alternative course of events would have been under a difference set of
circumstances.  Hence we cannot really tell withouth wandering into the
realm of metaphysics or ideology whether countries like NK, Russia, or
Germany would have been better or worse without Kim Il Sung, Stalin, or
Hitler, or if the world would have been a better place without the world
war II, the cold war or US imperialism.  We can only speculate about that,
and in so doing, impose our own value judgments.

I thus suppose what people on this object to has less to to do with NK or
Russia than with your value judgments - especially your unabashed
panglossianism that views US institutions and policies as the best of all
possible alternatives.

wojtek