John Oliver considers North Korea on Last Week Tonight

Between Trump, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and the threat of nuclear war, there’s a lot to discuss in this week’s Last Week Tonight

At this point, many people probably think of North Korea as some sort of terrifying but ill-defined threat. That’s fair enough, given how much the country’s leaders have isolated its citizens and how tightly they control the information fed to both its citizens and the outside world.

Likewise, it’s easy to reduce the U.S. to the blustering comments made by the president about “fire and fury” and vaguely standing up to North Korea. However, as John Oliver explains, the situation is, like almost always, more complex than much of the news or popular culture may suggest. There are real people involved on both sides. In fact, though it’s easy to forget in light of recent events, many Americans and North Koreans alike are simply innocent people who probably just want to go about their lives without fear of nuclear annihilation.

Of course, avoiding said annihilation can seem hard when Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un get in a verbal battle about hitting “the brink of nuclear war.” Neither do news reports from either side instill confidence.

What can North Korea do?

North Korea (officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or the DPRK) has nuclear warheads, but it’s not clear that they could reliably hit the U.S. mainland. However, military experts believe that North Korea could have that capability within a year. So, as Oliver says, this is probably “America’s number 1 excuse for putting off chores this week.” Why do the laundry when it could be all be a pile of cinders in a year, after all?

Anyway, it’s great that we have a leader that can handle this tense situation with sensitivity and a keen understanding of our complicated relationship with North Korea. Just kidding. Donald Trump is our president, and he used some very big boy words these past few weeks. Most recently, they centered on how North Korea should expect “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if they attack first.

In response to these comments, North Korea has threatened to land missiles off the coast of Guam. This in turn made Trump wonder if his statement was “tough enough”, because of course the appearance of toughness will be the key to solving this diplomatic situation.

So, what’s North Korea’s deal? How did we get here? What, if anything, can the U.S. or anyone do about this mess?

What’s up with North Korea?

A certain level of wackiness has leaked into the narrative about North Korea. There’s The Interview, intense displays of devotion towards the Kim family, and Dennis Rodman’s weird relationship with the country. Seriously, the news media really has to worship the Kim dynasty that has led North Korea since the end of the Korean War. This includes current leader Kim Jong-un, his father Kim Jong-il, and grandfather Kim Il-sung. Kim Jong-un got three bullseyes as a seven-year-old, according to one awkward interview.

But there are trickier inaccuracies. How can you properly fact check your sources when they all come from North Korea, where you’re hard-pressed to get first-hand accounts of practically anything? For example, there’s no evidence that every North Korean man has to have the same haircut as Kim Jong-un. However, according to a more reliable BBC report and another one in The Guardian, it may be more likely that they were urged to cut their hair “in accordance with the socialist lifestyle.”

Neither is it clear that every teacher is required to play the accordion. Honestly, that’s pretty hard to believe, though apparently, there is plenty of media from the DPRK that shows them really, really grooving on the accordion. We will give them credit for a pretty good cover of “Take on Me,” too.

The North Korean Godzilla knockoff is honestly pretty incredible, also. In a clip aired on Last Week Tonight, a tiny monster runs around saving people from certain death and eating swords. “It works because it resonates,” said Oliver.

North Korea isn’t a joke, however

So, yes, it’s sometimes really easy to laugh at North Korea. “But, the very fact that it is true can be frustrating to the journalists that cover it,” said Oliver. However, there are 24 million people that live in the country. For example, that silly Godzilla knock-off? It was made by two South Korean filmmakers who were abducted by Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father and predecessor as North Korea’s leader. At least those filmmakers eventually escaped and made their way back home.

“The underlying truth of North Korea is that it’s a dark place” said Oliver. Literally—when you look at it in nighttime satellite images, you see dramatically fewer lights compared to its South Korean or Chinese neighbors. Furthermore, during the 1990s, between 600,000 and 2.5 million people died during a famine. Satellite images and personal accounts also testify to brutal work camps that exist even today. It’s far more difficult to laugh off the DPRK when its citizens could be tortured at such a camp for expressing the “wrong” opinion.

How did this brutality come about? It may be due in large part to Kim Jong-un’s precarious situation. Though he’s at the top politically speaking, his position is far from secure. Neither is he probably some sort of wacky madman, as many reports prefer to depict him.

After all, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi scaled back their nuclear program and paid for it with gruesome deaths. By the way, the DPRK’s economy is reportedly smaller than that of Birmingham, Alabama. However, it’s spending a ton of money on its military, likely because North Korean leaders don’t want to end up in the same situation.

North Korea’s bogeyman

Who’s their villain? The United States, thanks in large part to its role in the Korean War. Yes, you may have learned very little about it in high school, but be assured that North Korea hasn’t forgotten the conflict. In one clip played by Oliver, a North Korean museum guide claimed that “American hyenas” tortured one woman, literally drank her blood, and ate her flesh.

What are we going to do about this war of ideology?

Donald Trump has claimed that he would speak to Kim Jong-un? “Who the hell cares? I’ll speak to anybody. Who knows? There’s a 10% or 20% chance that I can talk him out of those damn nukes!”

No, really, no, said Oliver. He reminded the audience that the Trump administration currently has a bad track record when it comes to deals. Where the Mexico-U.S. border wall? How’s that Obamacare repeal going? Is anyone feeling great again?

Trump also claims that China could maybe, kind of fix the North Korean problem for us. Now, the idea of pushing China to do something isn’t totally disastrous, at least on the surface. After all, China shares an 800-mile border with the DPRK. As much as 90 percent of North Korea’s trade depends on China.

Still, it’s difficult to determine just how much China would do. For instance, China could enforce economic sanctions, but that may lead to a collapse of the North Korean system as a whole. That itself could lead to a wave of refugees, a possibly united Korean country that is pro-American and anti-China, and approximately 15 nuclear weapons now in play.

U.S. responses to North Korea

What about the so-called “fire and fury” threatened by Trump? Military solutions could get super messy, super fast. While much of the U.S. media has been fretting about the reach of ICBMs, it’s worth remembering that North Korea also has a lot of heavy artillery. Those weapons could easily reach Seoul, the capital of South Korea, which sits only 40 miles south of the border and is home to more than 25 million people. According to Oliver and nearly every other well-informed commentator, “even a non-nuclear war could have horrific results.”

Okay, what if the U.S. tried some sort of targeting strike against North Korea’s leader? That doesn’t work, either. Simply “removing” Kim Jong-il could create a power vacuum that could be filled by terrorist groups. Just sit with the phrase “North Korea’s ISIS” for a while.

Oh, and by the way, Trump improvised those “fire and fury” comments. Hey, buddy, is… is now the time for making those comments on the fly? After all, do any of us really believe that Donald Trump has a fine-grained understanding of North Korean culture and their perception of “American bastards”? Since those comments, they have judged that Trump is “incapable of rational thought” and is “stuck at the golf course.”

What now?

So, we now have two world leaders “goading each other to Armageddon.” What do we do? Honestly, it’s not clear. “On the off chance that this show is smuggled across their border,” Oliver greeted North Korea. “When our president says words, he doesn’t necessarily mean what those words mean,” he explained. “I want to talk to you about misconceptions”. Americans have misconceptions about North Korea, yes, but neither are we horrible cannibal monsters. We’re more focused on fidget spinners and Game of Thrones than we are on the day-to-day threat of North Korea.

How do we make a good impression on the people of North Korea? Weird Al, of course, who Oliver says “plays the accordion like a f***ing angel.” At the very least, that might work with the one group of accordionists who rocked out on “Take On Me.”

Next: John Oliver discusses Border Patrol in this week’s Last Week Tonight

You’ll have to watch the performance for yourself to get the full effect, but Weird Al asked North Korea not to nuke us, considering that “we’re just a bunch of simple fidget-spinning goofy dorks/who probably couldn’t find your country on a map.” Also, and perhaps most compellingly of all, Tom Hanks lives in the United States. And “nobody doesn’t like Tom Hanks.”