+1 vote
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5 Answers

+2 votes
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Of course not.  North Korea will eventually collapse, as all brutal dictatorships do, sooner or later.

+1 vote
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This is just my opinion, but I don't see any union forthcoming.

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Did you see any union between East and West Germany forthcoming  before the GDR suddenly collapsed?

+1 vote
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I strongly suspect they will eventually be a single political jurisdiction. But that's not really the most important question, as I see it. What really matters isn't countries, but conditions on the ground.

In a sense, I don't particularly care where the government that claims me as a citizen is located, or what territory it controls. What I care about are things like how much freedom I have, how high the taxes are, whether my personal liberty and privacy are respected, whether I have the ability to travel, etc. If more people focused on those types of things, i.e. viewing the world in terms of peoples' quality of life instead of in terms of countries and national boundaries and so on, I think there would be fewer wars.

To use a sporting analogy, do you go to a game in order to root for "your team" to win over the opposing team, or do you go in order to enjoy watching talented people engaged in a competition? Of course it may be more "fun" to attend a game when you really care about the outcome (i.e. wanting "your" team to win), but imagine if people were getting injured and killed in the stadium as fans fought with each other, and players were being exploited by power-hungry coaches driven to win, etc. Then would it still be fun?

That's what the world is like. People identifying with the countries they live in (nationalism) causes them to support discrimination or violence against people in other countries, because they think that this will make "their team" safer, or more powerful, or whatever. Power-hungry politicians exploit these feelings to expand their control and make themselves richer and more powerful at the expense of people in "their" countries or others. Nationalism is as harmful and ugly as racism, sexism, or homophobia.
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Ha ha, Starchild your comment about the sports events...

Well, I am NOT a sports fan, but still remember many years now I (reluctantly) took my little nine-year-old friend to see the Seattle Supersonics basketball team play...the days of players like Slick Watts and Downtown Freddie Brown (because he could make basketball shots from the other side of the center line, almost downtown!).

Somehow we ended up with seats almost ON the center line...so close to those magnificent athletes, I remember thinking they were artists, how beautifully they could play! I had such a wonderful time and have loved basketball since then.

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I'm not a sports fan myself – I would rather play a sport than watch, and I don't relate to the intense team loyalty, when the reality is that the players don't stand for any particular ideas or anything, and usually aren't even from the local community that their team supposedly represents. Even if they were from the community, my feeling is "so what" – that wouldn't automatically make them more deserving to win or worthy of support than another team.

But sometimes sports provides good analogies that people can relate to, and this human tendency to root for the "home team" shows up clearly in sports, where it's not usually a problem, but also in politics and worldviews, where it often contributes to very big problems.

I brainstorm about lots of things though, including sometimes about sporting events that I *would* care about or find more captivating to watch. Pro wrestling, as staged as it is, gives a taste of a potentially more interesting approach. The matches are entertaining in part because there is character development – the wrestlers are built up as good guys or bad guys. I can imagine a team sport where the teams actually stood for different principles or ideas or real-world outcomes. World Cup football (soccer) and the Olympics are a little like that since they involve competition between teams or athletes representing countries.

But of course seeing the world through the lens of nation-states is nationalism, and contributes to conflict and strife. If Iranian people are seen as connected with, or synonymous to, the regime that has power in Iran, they may wrongly be blamed for the regime's actions, and made to suffer because of it. This arguably happened in the 9/11 attacks – terrorists were upset about the U.S. government's policies overseas, and reacted by carrying out an attack that didn't just target the government, but individual Americans, most of whom had little if anything to do with those government policies, and who in many cases actually opposed the policies.
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Starchild, I find your thoughts agreeable!

0 votes
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I hope North and South Korea will eventually reunite. The book I read, NOTHING TO ENVY, describes how refugees are welcomed to South Korea, and given 25,000 in the currency to get new lives started. Not many people are able to defect because of the tight controls, as well as the propaganda.

Like O'Tink, I also don't believe any regime as oppressive as North Korea can survive.

0 votes
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Maybe, they will be united but I don't know when and how it will happen. It is better for Coreans to be united nation.

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