Foreigners assume that because of the war, the two sides must dislike each other more than West and East Germans did. The opposite is the case. Some … - Brian Reynolds Myers

[A]t the risk of sounding like a broken record: this is a far-right, militarist state. Such states tend to experience uprisings only when they have failed by militarist or nationalist standards, as the Argentinian junta did in 1982.

[T]here has long been in the North a very real contempt for the South Korean left, the kind that radicals always feel for moderates no matter how obsequious the latter might be. Believe it or not, there were always more South Koreans willing to work with the North than it was willing to work with; the history of the underground in the 1960s and 1970s is replete with tales of how this or that Kim disciple got cold-shouldered by the DPRK embassy in East Berlin and had to go begging for funds in Japan instead.

"What belongs together, is growing together again," Willy Brandt said in 1989. The formulation implies a more balanced and grass-rootsy process than actually ensued in Germany — or is likely to take place here. Koreans belong together and will someday grow back together. But if the South doesn’t take the upper hand in training and guiding that growth, the North will.