What do you want to bet that PUTIN is the shit stirrer behind all of this?

There's a largish group of SK citizens who are sort of pollyannish and self-serving at the same time.

They like ethnicity cohesion and identity. North Koreans and South Koreans are the same. There should be solidarity between them. I mean, how is it possible for people of a given ethnicity to harbor such ill-will against their own kind? It's unthinkable. It's hard to fit a piece of gold foil between the genetic and cultural components here.

These are often very much scapegoaters. If things aren't good, find somebody else outside their identity to blame. Can't blame people inside your group. That threatens identity and group cohesion. It's a commonplace among human beings--good luck finding a group that is both stable and prefers to irrationally blame itself for the world's problems. Somewhere between "we're exceptionally evil" and "we're exceptionally evil" lies the usual truth.

Often these are fringy, totalitarian of some stripe. They like NK socialist policies or they like NK authoritarianism, to the extent you can easily separate out the two. Vanishingly rare are examples where a handful of governmental leaders hold all kinds of economic power and don't extend that to political power (or vice-versa).

And, finally, these very much want stuff. They don't like that money is going someplace else when it could be going to satisfy *their* causes. They want the money to provide services for them and those they consider their group. Education, most often. Food. Health. Living space. Transportation. And because the NK are K, if the south had no military, of course NK wouldn't invade. And if they did, surely things would be little worse than the capitalist hell that SK is currently enduring.

It's hard, ahead of time, to tease out which is the primary motivation for a given person: racism and xenophobia, lust for power and control, or greed. But these protests go back decades and decades. If an American rapes a Korean woman, you'd think it was the American South in 1905 and a black man raped a white woman, much of the rhetoric is that headed in those particular circles.

A moderate form of this is the power behind the Sunshine Policy. I like the idea of peace, but so far either the Sunshine Policy has only either encourage NK or it's pretty much failed. Note that the failures sometimes were celebrated as successes for years before they flopped, so it's risky to point to any current successes. Present appraisals say little about future outcomes. Most of its gains are things that could easily have been done without too much blind trust and encouragement of NK.



Yeah, it's cynical, but it makes the protestors merely human.

thanks to the GOP crime family. If I was in those countries I wouldn't want anything to do with the US either.

He's a useless Trumpster.