Oxford Liberty in North Korea

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."  -  Robert Frost, 'The Road Not Taken'   When the darkness came down with a few drops of rain in Oxford, a few students, including myself, walked through a cobblestone lane. When we finally reached the top of a circular staircase that seemed as though it appeared in Harry Potter, we saw a group of students lined up in front of a room with warm lights. This event, filled with students, was nothing but a lecture on "How do you solve a problem like North Korea?" by Edward Howell, an expert on North Korea. As most would assume from the title of the event, the talk started with big questions: "Why is North Korea a problem to the international community? Can we actually solve this problem? What does it mean to ‘solve’ the problem?" In response to these questions, Howell emphasized that we do not really know about North Korea. In fact...

"I shrink - I shrink with a horror that I cannot express in words. The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20,000,000 people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there. After I looked at the wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited… if you go on indefinitely, you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind." - General MacArthur to the Senate's Committee on Armed Services and Committee on Foreign Relations  The Korean war has often been called a ‘proxy’ war between America and the capitalist West, and communist China and North Korea, the first of the Cold War period. The conflict was instigated by North Korean troops of the North Korean Peoples’ Army crossing the 38 th  parallel into The Republic of Korea on 25 June 1950. The invasion ...