The New Capitalists?

Last week's issue of The Economist featured an article about North Korea entitled "The New Capitalists".  The article describes a so-called "revolutionary force" of "traders and merchants" that is beginning to emerge in North Korea.  The report is interesting in many ways, chronicling how this new emergent merchant class was created during the famine of the 1990s.

Nevertheless, the article wholly embodies the patronizing and sardonic tone the West adapts when discussing North Korea.  It begins with references to Kim Jong-Un as the "boy-dictator" and then pokes fun at the rarity of a, "well-stocked Pyongyang supermarket".  It proclaims that the best way to deal with North Korea is to, "undermine the regime, as the West did in eastern Europe during the Cold War".  This article, like so much of Western culture, sees free-market capitalism as the victorious, final stage of global economics, impervious to change or improvement.

And like so much discourse on North Korea found in the mainstream media, this article fails to contextualize North Korea in global history, asserting that it is merely a "repressive and backward" nation, that has isolated itself purely out of its ruler's maniacal ignorance.

A link to the article can be found here.