Guns And Drugs

I recently watched a well made BBC documentary
on how North Korea seeks to beat the regime
of sanctions that works against it,
and trade with the world in spite
of it's socioeconomic isolation.

I watched as outsiders from other countries
identified with the outsider country, N. Korea,
and travelled the world meeting wealthy men
who would pay North Korea to make things for them.
What did these wealthy men want? Guns
and illegal drugs, with which to make
even more money, as they denied the values
of the countries named in their many passports.

'How like Northern Ireland' I thought.
In the time of 'the troubles' (1969-1997)
guns and drugs were the shadow economy
that became the currency of popular capitalism,
whatever the shops and the shoppers thought and did.

Beneath the acronyms the paramilitary warlords, 
were all basically the same. They all competed
to lengthen the shadow of the shadow economy,
to the loss of civil society which was in retreat.

When, at last, civil society recovered itself
it found that what weakly bound it together
was what had previously divided it;
a puzzled sense of loss that continues,
though what was lost should be clearer.

We will never know what ordinary North Koreans think,
any more than that country will retrieve a shared sense citizenship.
It's history of hereditary dictatorships-a black hole into which
all power retreats-has removed all sense of citizenship with it,
and the back hole has been deepening by the day-since 1950.