The Cleanest Race (22 page)

“Kim Jong Il doesn’t believe that stuff himself,” an American diplomat cheerfully told me in 2005 after I had finished a lecture on North Korean ideology. “He told Madeleine Albright it’s all fake.” Many in Washington evidently think the same way. Indeed, America has so far negotiated with Pyongyang under the apparent conviction that the regime believes the
opposite
of what it tells its subjects. The louder the Text calls for a “blood reckoning” with the Yankee enemy, the more firmly Washington believes that the DPRK wants better relations. At
a government-sponsored conference in Washington in 2008 I heard more than one Pyongyang watcher argue that Kim Jong Il wants America
as an ally
.

The obvious retort to this wishful thinking is to ask how the DPRK could possibly justify its existence after giving up the confrontational anti-Americanism that constitutes its last remaining source of legitimacy. We are dealing here with a failure not just of information analysis but of common sense—a failure to understand that North Korea is one of two states laying claim to the same nation. It must either go on convincing its citizens that it is the better Korea or acknowledge Seoul’s right to rule the whole peninsula. This is why it is so futile for the West to promise Pyongyang aid and assistance in return for disarmament. As if the poorer Korea could trade a heroic nationalist mission for mere economic growth without its subjects opting for immediate absorption by the rival state! But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the regime in Pyongyang is as unaware of this problem as so many outside observers seem to be. The question still arises why it would enshrine the military-first principle in the DPRK constitution, groom the putative successor as yet another invincible General, and continue demonizing America as the eternal race enemy, if it had not already rejected the possibility of a fundamental change in policy.

Some might insist on the unlikelihood of such a manifestly intelligent leader, such an urbane and well-informed ruling elite, such a literate and resourceful populace genuinely believing things that everyone else in the world finds so irrational. But if outside observers knew
North Korean ideology better, they would understand (as I trust the reader of the preceding chapters has understood) that it is not as irrational as all that. Praising a leader as the perfect embodiment of ethnic virtues is less extravagant than praising him, as Stalin was praised, as the highest authority in every science. One could also argue that there is at least more historical justification for the DPRK’s anti-Americanism than many other states have had for their own hatemongering campaigns. Paranoid nationalism may well be an intellectual void, and appeal to the lowest instincts—there is nothing in North Korean ideology that a child of twelve cannot grasp at once—but for that very reason it has proven itself capable of uniting citizens of all classes, and inspiring them through bad times as well as good ones.

As I explained in the historical part of this book, the regime was very quick to adjust its claims downward when it had to, i.e. in response to post-Soviet economic realities and the influx of heterodox information. But to concede the regime’s genius for propaganda—a genius which only now seems to be deserting it—is not to imply that it does not believe the official myths itself. Could it be any clearer that in its relations with the outside world, the leadership practices what it preaches in the Text, and not what it tells impressionable foreign visitors behind closed doors? Barely-veiled hostility to allies and aid providers, terrorist adventurism and drug-running, blithe indifference to trade and debt obligations, abortions forced on returnees from China—whence does this unique pattern of behavior derive, if not from the belief that the world’s “cleanest, most civilized people” can and indeed
must
play by
its own rules? What other kind of regime would be able to boast to its own people that it had signed a nuclear treaty in bad faith?

* * *

I have dwelt in this book on the continuity between the imperial Japanese worldview instilled into colonial-era Koreans and the official North Korean worldview that immediately succeeded it. This racialism is utterly irreconcilable with Marx and Lenin; not for nothing was the DPRK almost as isolated from the rest of the East Bloc as it still is from the West. But while drawing a clear line between North Korean ideology and communism, we should not overlook that which distinguishes the former from Japanese and (even more so) German fascism. The Text has never proposed the invasion of so much as an inch of non-Korean territory, let alone the permanent subjugation of foreign peoples. This is not to say that it does not propose military action against the US either as a pre-emptive strike or as revenge for past crimes. (I have already mentioned the wish-fulfilling posters of the US Capitol being blown to pieces.) But this is not the same as wanting to re-shape the world. Where the Nazis considered the Aryans physically and intellectually superior to all other races, and the Japanese regarded their moral superiority as having protected them throughout history, the Koreans believe that their childlike purity renders them so vulnerable to the outside world that they need a Parent Leader to survive. Such a worldview naturally precludes dreams of a colonizing or imperialist nature.

This does not make North Korea any less of a threat to South Korea—or vice versa. At present the DPRK’s main security problem is not America, but the prosperity of the other Korean state, whose citizens are content to prolong the division of the peninsula indefinitely. This is another reason why Pyongyang cannot normalize relations with Washington: the Text would never survive the North Korean masses’ inevitable realization that it was their own blood brothers and not the Yankees who had been blocking reunification all along. From the North’s perspective, America’s friendship would be—to paraphrase something Burke once said of revolutionary France—more dangerous than its enmity.

Pyongyang therefore negotiates with Washington not to defuse tension but to manage it, to keep it from tipping into all-out war or an equally perilous all-out peace. Ignorant of this, because ignorant of the North’s ideology, Americans tend to blame problems in US-DPRK relations on whoever happens to be in the Oval Office, thinking him either too soft or too hard on Pyongyang. The right talks in moralistic terms of Kim Jong Il’s evil and perfidy in refusing to disarm, with no apparent understanding that he
cannot
disarm and hope to stay in power. The left, meanwhile, continues to call for bold American trust-building measures.
¹
In doing so, it overlooks the failure of the ROK’s Sunshine Policy (a decade of generous and unconditional aid) to generate even a modicum of good will from the North. To expect Washington to succeed with Pyongyang where the South Korean left failed is to take American exceptionalism to a new extreme. The unpleasant truth is that one can neither bully nor cajole a regime—least of all one with nuclear weapons—into committing political suicide.

Much hope in the West centers on the infiltration of heterodox culture into the DPRK, but here too it would be folly to extrapolate from Cold War history. Blue jeans will not bring down
this
dictatorship. Race-based nationalism does not need to fear cultural subversion as much as Marxism-Leninism did. Hollywood films were all the rage in imperial Japan, and Luftwaffe aces famously flew into battle with Mickey Mouse painted on their fuselages. More to the point, perhaps, South Koreans were as ready in 2008 to believe that America was saving its deadliest beef for their consumption as they were in 2002 to believe that US soldiers had run over two schoolgirls for the fun of it. Anti-Japanese sentiment, for its part, has actually
increased
in the ROK since a ban on Japanese cultural imports was lifted several years ago. There is little reason, therefore, to believe that smuggled CDs and DVDs will undermine the average North Korean’s hostility to the outside world.

The DPRK is more likely to suffer a mass legitimation crisis if it is seen as failing on its own ideological terms. Such a perception could result from a humiliating retreat in regard to nuclear weapons, but the North Korean leadership is less likely than our own to make that kind of error. The chronic nature of the economic malaise poses a greater problem. It is all well and good for the military-first regime to shrug off responsibility for such matters, but if the acquisition of a nuclear deterrent constituted such a glorious victory over the US, where, the malnourished citizen may well ask, are the material fruits of that victory?

But most dangerous to the regime, as I have already said, is the inevitable spread of public awareness that for all their
anti-Americanism, the South Koreans are happy with their own republic and do not want to live under Pyongyang’s rule. There is just no way for the Text to make sense of this highly subversive truth. We should not, however, sit back and gloat over the regime’s troubles, because it is bound to counter any sign of internal unrest by ratcheting up tension with America or South Korea. The result could well be a serious conflict or even another attempt at “liberating” the South. While I take the experts’ word for it that the DPRK would be unable to beat either of its arch-rivals, I do not share their confidence that it would never be foolish enough to try. Although the anti-American and pro-North sentiments expressed in South Korean opinion polls are belied by the continued lack of support for a US troop pull-out, the DPRK has at least as much reason to expect a liberator’s welcome as America had in 2003 when it invaded Iraq.
²
In any case, the prevalence of motherly authority figures, the glorification of “pure” racial instincts, the denigration of reason and restraint—all these things encourage rashness among the DPRK’s decision-makers just as they encourage spontaneous violence among average North Koreans. We must be careful what we wish for.