Everything I know about North Korea in one blog post

One of my favorite passages of fiction comes from Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: 

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian ‘chinanto/mnigs’ which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan ‘tzjin-anthony-ks’ which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.

What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

As someone in transition from being a young structural IR theorist to an old one, I’ve now seen enough to recognize when certain patterns begin to recur. For example, I’ve now read enough articles about the North Korea’s Worker Party Congress to know the following:

1) This was a Very Big Deal

2) Kim Jong Il’s family got some promotions

3) It is impossible to write an article about North Korea without quoting either Andrei Lankov or Victor Cha.

And after reading all of this, I can now state with confidence the following: no one knows exactly what the f*** is going to happen in North Korea once Kim Jong Il dies. There are plausible stories that can be spun any which way. But no one really knows.

I hereby encourage all young political scientists to get excited about this Party Congress and convince me that something very important and of profound significance was revealed in the past 48 hours.