As the outbreak was beginning, the South Korean government, in the personage of the NIS - the intelligence agency which later returned to being the Korean CIA - arrested the leadership of the most prominent leftist party in the country for "plotting with the North".
This was the society that they believe was "too free". Nevermind that 10 companies made up 60% of their economy, and when Samsung said jump, their government said "Yes sir!"
It's funny to me how he talks about 'ex-commies wanting handouts' as if food and housing weren't human rights. Did I say funny? I meant disgusting.
To be fair this is exactly how this Sort of Guy talks. Freedom is when corporatism and no living standards, and the more money billionaires make the freer it is.
So he pulled out. Cut contact with South Korea, stopped following Chinese "advice" on foreign policy, and enacted North Korea's absolutely monstrous take on the Redeker plan.
Yeah. I was going to say that throwing down with SK/US in return for... what, exactly? sounds like a massively stupid idea.
We know the DMZ is heavily mined. Last month a cargo plane nearing their airspace was fired on by a surface-to-air missile. The launcher was an automated model, the type they'd designed as a revenge weapon in case the population had already been obliterated.
Another argument is that the DPRK is clearly still kicking, if only just. Something's clearly gone wrong - you can't imagine they intend to stay in their bunker complex forever - but there's absolutely no fucking chance that any of their automated defences are still working after 20 years without maintenance - they can't even keep a pillbox or razorwire functional for 20 years without replacement parts, and you expect us to believe their SAM turrets are just ticking over fine?
It also sounds like a tremendously convenient excuse for a WRK shootdown.
Anyone who thinks you could have an automated SAM site still functional enough to kill a cargo aircraft after 20 years has obviously never operated a radar set.
Yeah, the North Koreans must be *really good* engineers or something.
So far as "how" the infection got in - I think it was probably the South Korean spies. Recall that this was before the outbreaks had really gotten going; only China and North Korea knew, at this point. If a South Korean spy got through the initial screening to get into the "let us all become mole people" meeting, they'd be assumed to be clean of the zombie taint. If they'd slipped out a side exit to try and contact Seoul, though… Been bitten by a homeless person whilst doing it? Do you think they'd tell anyone in the bunker? People would ask questions, like "what were you doing out there". So they didn't tell anybody, and then eventually they turned within the bunker complex.
Alternate explanation might be North Korean scouts coming back infected, and they refuse to send anyone out again out of fear of a repeat performance. Or someone just incidentally slipped through quarantine.
Before I read the rest of the paragraph I was expecting her to suggest it to be an intentional assassination-by-infection from South Korea, given that it hadn't really gotten going and therefore South Korea wouldn't realize how bad an idea propagating it was, morals and ethics aside. Not to mention the burgeoning KCIA.
Also a possibility, after all, basically every government (at least the Redeker ones) tried to keep the zombies a secret as long as possible, if they knew of existence if not extent for a month or so earlier than they let on... it wouldn't be out of the question.
My money's on just, you know, regular sickness. One bad cholera outbreak could easily spread and kill everyone in a closed environment.
You could definitely get some massive fatalities but its hard for mundane disease to kill
everyone. It could certainly cut the population to a... tiny fraction of what it was. If the survivors then fled
That's certainly how the Americans seem to handle it in People's History, so I wouldn't be entirely surprised if that's what happened in China, too. Though in that case you'd want to spell it out more aggressively in the narrative to make it a message of the work... and in the context of THIS thread... Well, I suppose the narrator has her reasons not to want to do that, because it would feel too much like giving into the official Sinophobia of the original book.
I recall from the discord that China had a nuclear exchange
with itself. (Specifically between the Politburo/State Sec who wanted to implement Redeker with Chinese Characteristics and left elements who... did not want that.)
Thinking about it now, my best guess is that it has to do with Brooks's odd affection for the monk's spade, and the Lobo might be an attempt to reflect a reverse-engineered version of the same idea: that being, a polearm with a wide, double-edged blade.
The monk's spade is... ah, it feels like a crippling case of overfitting, like he was trying to find the absolute best weapon for his (very specific) idea of how to fight zombies, while utterly failing to appreciate that 'actually having one' is a vastly more important feature in an apocalypse survival scenario than the exact shape of blade.
That said, if it was a deliberate attempt to emulate the spade, you'd think it'd actually have the key characteristics he so praised, such as a crescent-shaped blade on the opposite end to trap and ward off zombies and, y'know, being staff-to-polearm length.
Nonetheless, I still struggled to think of why you would actually need it to look like a shovel when the book had made it quite clear that trench warfare was a moron's game against zombies.
Because killing people with entrenching tools is COOL and MANLY, and it happened in WWI which is when soldiers were COOL and MANLY and EXPENDABLE.
(The Death Korps gets the same treatment, though they have a better excuse. Despite it being rather explicit that - as in history, they mostly fight with bayonets or actual trench knives in close combat, and for that matter their main method of digging trenches is 'excavator stuck on the back of a Russ hull. It also gets exactly one paragraph of description in IA5)
The term I've heard (though it would be kind of anachronistic in the WWZ timeline) is "Cult of the Badass." Not just reverence for combat and warriors, but for the idea that it is important to be a warrior combatant in a very specific way, to feel specific ways about it, to dismiss certain other specific feelings as "weak" and "unmanly" and so on.
I feel that's in many ways the pure essence of zombie fiction.
