In the land where all that the Dear Leader deems is made to happen, failure is dangerous:
North Korea has executed a ruling party official blamed for a botched currency reform, in a desperate attempt to quell public unrest and stem negative impact on Pyongyang's power succession, a news report said on Thursday.
The execution by firing squad in Pyongyang last week of Pak Nam-ki, Labour Party chief for planned economy, was for the crime of "a son of a bourgeois conspiring to infiltrate the ranks of revolutionaries to destroy the national economy," South Korea's Yonhap news agency said, quoting sources.
But both North Korean officials and even many in the communist country's public do not believe the explanation that Pak was a conspiring anti-revolutionary, Yonhap quoted sources knowledgeable about the issue as saying.
Failure is especially dangerous in times when the people are starving and increasingly desperate--and who increasingly don't care who in the government knows they are mad.
Still, I have to wonder about the wisdom of letting the peasants know that the proper punishment for failing in North Korea is death. Have the elites looked around the country much lately? Sure, their gated communities are looking superb, as usual. But the F in PDRK stands for "failure."
Ok, there isn't an F in PDRK, inconveniently spoiling this little witticism. But the fact remains that the entire country under the Dear Leader's enlightened rule is one giant failure rolling along at breakneck speed toward the cliff. "Ruining the economy" is the 5 year plan.
But now the people know what the proper punishment for failure is when they get their hands on the pampered elites who've dragged a nation along on their Thelma and Louise ride of defiance. Regime collapse is going to be ugly for the elites.
