Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Unification Day, w/o Brownshirts

One evening last month in Gumi, an Australian colleague of mine asked a Korean colleague what the highest mountain in Korea was. 'Mount Baekdu' said my Korean colleague. 'On the border' - and being geographically ignorant I expected him to say 'of South and North Korea', - 'of China and North Korea.'

I thought I would share this fridge magnet I bought last month at Incheon airport. Note that Mount Baekdu is the only place it shows north of the DMZ. There are no names of cities or little pictures of the works of man, just a mediaeval-looking horseman hunting a tiger. North Korea is a terra nullius. In terms of useful infrastructure this is probably more or less true.


I think reunification will come soon, in the next decade, and what will follow will more closely resemble the colonisation of Mars than the reunification of Germany.

1 comment:

Lexifab said...

I think you're right. I hope you are. It will be tough on the south, but it will be unequivocably good for the north (except for the hardline leadership who will presumably not give up their absolutely unwarranted privileges without a fight, but fuck those pricks).