Trade Sanctions for North Korea - You Punish The Kim Dynasty You Punish The People

I want to get this out of the way: The Kim dynasty regime is responsible for many atrocities against the United States and other countries. With that being said I think it is important to consider where we stand as well. As of now, we can see that North Korea has weapons of mass destruction and is ramping up their efforts to bolster for an offensive strategy.  We can also say the following things to note the USA does as well as North Korea:

1. We have weapons of mass destruction and use it as leverage against our opponents.
2. We torture people to gain information about our opponents.
3. We actively try to change the opinion of our populace by instilling political propoganda to reduce opposing thoughts.

Now onto the aspect of North Korea weaponizing itself with nuclear weapons. Something seems familiar about this.

While I don't believe in weaponizing any country especially compared with nuclear, I would prefer to remove nuclear weapons entirely off the face of the Earth. Though in the reality of nuclear weapons technology, it becomes very difficult to pretend it doesn't exist. Russia has been known to bolster up its defenses as soon as it saw its opponent, the USA, show that it has the capability to strike their homeland.

Personally, in my opinion, I believe that North Korea is attempting to show how powerful it is to prevent the USA from attacking. It doesn't surprise me. This happened with Russia in the 1960's with the USA in the cold war. While we spent all our time increasing defensive and offensive capabilities, increasing technology to show what we were made of. We were terrified of Russia and the communist threat in the 1950's-1980's.

Little did we know that Russia was terrified as well. They showed that they could destroy the USA. They did everything in their power to show: "You don't want to mess with us."

I feel this is the same exact thing that is happening with North Korea. Yet another repeat of history right in front of our eyes.

Trade Sanctions against North Korea

Now lets talk about a serious humanitarian effort that has caused a huge amount of deaths that I feel most don't talk about in the USA. Trade sanctions. In the mid-1990s North Korea had suffered a massive flood that devastated a huge amount of farm land for the North Korean people. When this happened there was a mass starvation due to trade sanctions that have been in place against North Korea. Somewhere out of 22 million citizens, around 240,000 to 3,500,000 North Koreans died from starvation or hunger-related illness.(source) (Somewhere between 1% to 15% of the population killed due to flood and trade sanctions)

I consider trade sanctions to be a humanitarian blight and should not be used to employ leverage against another country. While I don't believe in North Korean ideology, we are still essentially inadvertently killing people due to ideological indifference. In the end we are talking about people here. While I would like to see North Korea denounce their Juche way of thinking, we are a long way from that being a reality.

In the end, we need to talk diplomacy over all. No more death. No more killing. No more forcing the other to stop trying to defend itself (though heck, they could desire to attack, but preimptively attacking to stop an attack is what gets countries into trouble), and help lift the trade sanctions of North Korea so we can get diplomatic efforts under way.

Please share if you agree. Send this to our authoritarian aristocrats interested in showing North Korea 'whos boss around here' or whether you consider the people of North Korea to be just that: People who just want to live their lives without fear, just like the rest of us.