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" All sorts of people who are not the usual suspects are telling us that the latest round of bomb-rattling from North Korea is different from the previous 950 rounds of bomb-rattling we&amp;#039;ve seen from North Korea. Primary among these are the perception that Kim Jong-un, the young Dear Leader, hasn&amp;#039;t been Dear Leader for very long and, thus, might be prone to making catastrophic &amp;quot;misinterpretations&amp;quot; of events, leading to an unstoppable escalation of events beyond anyone&amp;#039;s control. Secretary Of Defense Chuck Hagel who, as we have seen, is not prone to Cheneyesque overreactions to imaginary events, is quite serious about being quite serious. It seems to me, however, that all of this concern hangs rather vitally on the notion that the new young Dear Leader is either crazy or that he has a death wish, or both. The North Koreans can&amp;#039;t hit the US mainland with a missile. They can&amp;#039;t put a nuclear warhead on a missile in any case. They might be able to hit a US military base in the Pacific. However, if they were to do that, North Korea would be a glass parking lot by the cocktail hour. Any similar attack on South Korea likely would have the same result, except that it likely would be the Chinese who&amp;#039;d get the contract to build the glass parking lot. Statistically speaking, almost eight-hundred of those casualties would be foreigners given Seoul&amp;#039;s international demographic. Chinese make up almost seventy percent of foreigners in Seoul and its northern environs which means KPA might also kill six-hundred Chinese diplomats, multi-national corporation leaders, and ranking cadre children who are students in Seoul.  North Korea has no allies in the region. It has managed to make China, Russia, and the United States all nervous for the same reasons, which is quite a parley. It is a country that is run deliberately ass-backwards by lunatics. It has a huge army and almost no technology to back it up. It does have a carefully cultivated gift for apocalyptic rhetoric -- a trait it shares with, say, the American Family Association, and a trait that seems to run true in the new young Dear Leader. Hours after Mr. Kim&amp;#039;s call to arms, thousands of North Koreans turned out for a 90-minute mass rally at the main square in Pyongyang, chanting &amp;quot;Death to the U.S. imperialists&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Sweep away the U.S. aggressors,&amp;quot; according to The Associated Press, which has a bureau in Pyongyang. Soldiers and students marched through downtown Pyongyang.  Entirely spontaneously, I&amp;#039;m sure. What I&amp;#039;m old enough to remember is that it is Fearmongering Trope No. 1A to tell your citizens that the monster du jour either &amp;quot;doesn&amp;#039;t respect life&amp;quot; the way we do,&amp;quot; or, conversely, will use the bomb because the monster state believes that doing so will bring about some desired eschatalogical end. Back when I was a kid, they filled us up with Cold War, quasi-theological rhetoric that argued, in all seriousness, that the Soviet Union was more likely to launch a nuclear attack because they were all atheists -- or because, as dedicated Marxists, they believed in the historic inevitability of the triumph of international communism. (This latter was even a plot point in the novel, Fail Safe.) Listen to Rick Santorum talk about a nuclear Iran, and sooner or later, he&amp;#039;ll get around to telling you that the Iranians don&amp;#039;t care about the inevitable rain of death and fire that would come upon them if they actually launched a nuke of their own because they believe that the ensuing holocaust will hasten the arrival of the 12th Imam. Now we have North Korea, where we are being told that they might commit national suicide because Dear Leader is new on the job. The insane logic of apocalypse entered our politics at Los Alamos. The language of apocalypse found modern voice at Hiroshima. That logic and that language have embedded themselves do deeply that we hardly even notice them any more. Kim un-Jong speaks it more roughly than does Chuck Hagel, but they both speak it, and they both act out of the logic without realizing they are doing so. It is the lingua franca of the End Times, which do not come with monsters and Horsemen, but in the things we build with our own hands. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18006/the-north-korean-condition/>