Now I wanted to put down to one idea that apparently there are many ticklish, sensitive elements to making peace with North Korea. And one of them is the number of people who are alleged to be in prison camps. And I've heard some people speculate that you can't loosen up the North because it would bring to light all the people who were in prison camps and there's so many of them it would be a big disruptive thing. And so I asked myself what would be the best way to handle that because that does seem like a legitimate problem.

And here's my solution that I'll propose. Suppose that Chairman Kim said the following: In order to release the past I'm going to pardon all of the people who are in prisons or work camps for political reasons that were not legitimate crimes. Let me say it differently. So as opposed to normal crimes like murder and theft and stuff, suppose he said that we're going to forget the past and I'm going to pardon everybody who's in a gulag for criticizing the regime. And this pardon will apply to anybody who did anything bad in a political context. Do you see where this is going? It's a self-pardon.

So in other words, pardoning everybody who did anything wrong politically would include all the people in the gulags who are only there for political purposes. But it also includes himself, right? And it includes any family members or top aides. Now of course you'd have to say that from this day on if you do anything bad that's a new problem. But to forget the past he's going to have to pardon himself, his family, everybody close to him. And at the same time everybody in the gulags.

But what happens when you release a few hundred thousand people into the public who don't like Chairman Kim? It's dangerous, right? So here's the second part of the plan. I'm just proposing this as a thought experiment by the way. Anybody who's new to my periscopes should understand that I don't believe I know what I'm talking about. I talk about these sort of things to improve the diversification of the idea portfolio, just to get some more ideas flowing. That doesn't mean I have the right ones but I can help you think in a new way sometimes.

I suppose the second part of this idea is that those people who are released from the gulags are released to South Korea. Right? Because the people who come out of the gulags are the ones who are anti-Kim. And having them in his territory at the moment they're released could be a little destabilizing. So how about the first group that gets to cross the border and gets to enjoy the fruits of South Korea, suppose they were the people from the gulags. But you want to do this quietly. You want this to be an agreement between South Korea and North Korea. Keep the United States out of it. You want South Korea to fund this process because these people have to be taken care of. It wouldn't be that hard to give them a better lifestyle right off the bat than whatever they were doing in the gulag.

So you could create a situation where the people who were punished for their political crimes actually are the first ones who get the added benefits of the South Koreans' embrace. Now why would South Korea be the one to be involved with this and not the United States or China and anybody else? Here's the main reason: you want to keep it on the down-low. You don't want to make a public thing or a big one anyway. The news should know. It should be reported. But once it's reported that the people in the gulags have been pardoned and released to the south, we should by mutual agreement just stop talking about it after that. Just stop talking about it. Because it's not going to help anybody. The best thing we can do is take that pressure off of North Korea and just keep it quiet. Keep it on the down-low. Keep those people out of the news.

You could even have a law that says temporarily, it could be like a one-year law or something, where you say to South Korean media you're not allowed to talk to the people from the gulags. You just can't get their personal stories for one year, whatever it might be, longer than that. And they say the reason is for privacy. We respect the right of the press but there's a real privacy issue here for those people. They don't want attention and it would not be safe for them to get it because they might still have people they love in the north.

So South Korea could probably pull that off because they would understand the importance of keeping a respectful position toward North Korea. They probably understand about keeping things on the down-low. They would understand that this is just being helpful and we don't need to make things bad. We're just trying to help these people in the gulags at the same time we're trying to make life easier for North Korea so that they can do their denuclearizing and they don't have an unstable country at the same time.

So I just throw that out there as an idea. Getting people to not talk would be hard, yes. But you could ask the major publications to back off and I think South Koreans would largely want to get on that page. You could just say hey this is a one-year moratorium. Just give them some privacy. It's not about the news. It's more about the privacy. And you could also report the facts so that you haven't glossed over anything. You could do a press release that says these people were in these gulags for the following reasons. Life was brutal in a variety of ways but now they're here. Just stick to the facts. You don't have to sensationalize it more than it is.