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The North Korean nightmare
Azmi Bishara
By
Azmi Bishara
The wild shouting
and gesticulation the North Korean newscaster went through as
she announced her country's testing of a nuclear bomb reminds
one of the hysterical wailing that accompanied the late Kim Il-Sung
to his grave. Was it an act or were those real tears? Were the
tears triggered by the occasion or did the occasion merely offer
the opportunity to vent her personal misery? Was the newscaster
such a consummate actress that she was carried away by her role
or is it more the case of a person thinking that as long as one
has to spend all of one's adult life performing a role, with no
hope of ever changing it, then you might as well act to the best
of your ability? The human psyche offers endless possibilities.
What is certain
is that there was nothing in the North Korean announcement to
merit jubilation, not even the kind of Third World bravado that
makes some rejoice at the fact that Pakistan has the bomb. Whatever
the feelings of despair or frustration that might make people
long for displays of independence in the face of the US they pale
next to the revulsion we should feel for the North Korean regime.
It is only
madness of the sort that afflicts Bush, madness that screams I'm
crazy so you'd better watch out, and which has conveyed itself
to Ahmadinejad via the Europeans, that can place North Korea in
the same basket as Iran and Iraq and call them the "axis
of evil". These regimes have absolutely nothing in common,
neither in terms of the levels of repression, nor the types of
economic and social controls they use to perpetuate themselves.
There is a difference between the authoritarian state and the
totalitarian state, between having prisons and turning the whole
country into a prison, between a theocratic state and a state
that has turned atheism into a fully-fledged religion complete
with its own rites and rituals. Only Bush and Hollywood could
lump Islam, Al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hizbullah into a single basket
and then place Iran, North Korea and Saddam's Iraq side by side
along an axis of evil. Syria was not an original member of the
confederacy.
North Korea's
official ideology is Juche (self- reliance), a political philosophy
initially produced and directed by Kim Il-Sung, the self-appointed
sage, inspirational leader, father of the people and national
god. The tenets of this philosophy have been taken to their logical
conclusion by Il-Sung's son, the weird looking and super eccentric
Kim Yong-il, since his appointment as the ruling Communist Party's
secretary of cultural indoctrination and propaganda. It was at
the hands of this father- and-son duo that the ideological cover
for perpetuating a state of poverty coalesced as they engineered
the tragic transformation of their country, severing their people
from the rest of their countrymen, separating them from their
closest relatives by a border that not even a rat can cross. They
have turned their country into a huge concentration camp. It has
become a kind of electrified chicken coop, run to the beat of
incessant martial music, where the uniformed citizens are issued
orders to move from one city to another, forced into training
to perform athletic feats, subjected to compulsory birth control,
rented out as unpaid labour in exchange for hard currency from
countries such as Russia or else pressed into corvee labour in
North Korea itself. This is a country that killed 10 per cent
of its own population -- an estimated two and a half million people
-- in the space of four years. North Korea boasts the third largest
death toll from starvation in modern history, having been surpassed
only by Russia and China. This achievement, moreover, is not the
result of drought, famine or other natural catastrophes but rather
of experiments in economic planning conducted on farmers and agriculture.
We do not know that much about North Korea, but what we do is
sufficient to rank it somewhere between Pol Pot's Cambodia and
Stalinist Russia at its worst.
The president
of North Korea is not a president in the ordinary sense; in fact,
he doesn't even go by the name of president but by a title that
translates as Dear Leader. In practical terms he is treated as
a demigod. In advancing his cult official propaganda falsified
the place and date of his birth. Instead of 1941 and a remote
Siberian village where his father lived in exile he was officially
born a in 1942 on top of the highest mountain in North Korea.
The narrative also has it that a previously unknown star sparkled
in the firmament at the moment of his birth and a double rainbow
appeared in the sky. All that was missing was a visit by three
wise men.
After considerable
searching, I found an official North Korean website which offered
a description of Mount Paektu, on the ethereal heights of which
Yong-il had his miraculous birth. The mountain has long been sacred
to the Koreans, a symbol of youth, might and immortality. The
official version, however, runs thus: "The highest point
in Korea, its peak is covered with snow year around and it is
regarded by the Korean people as their most sacred mountain because
of its association with the revolutionary activity of President
Kim Il-Sung and because it was honoured by the birth at its summit
of the Leader Kim Yong-il." What an honour it must be for
a mountain to have seen a fictitious birth on its peak.
Thanks to
the application of a perversely literal interpretation of a version
of Marxist Leninism, a pre-distorted import from China and Russia
and superimposed on an Asian dictatorship prone to militaristic
regimentation, the people of South Korea have been transformed
into work battalions and military regiments in one of the largest,
and the poorest, armies of the world. Equality has been reduced
to identical daily routine, identical dress bearing the picture
of the Dear Leader on the chest, identical beliefs and attitudes
and a pace of life so monotonously predictable as to rob life
of all meaning. It is totalitarianism gone wild. This is a far
cry from secularism, which keeps the private realm wide open to
religious diversity; it is a system of lockstep conformism in
which religion has been replaced by hero worship, religious rituals
by communist party rites and emblems and patriotism by abject
allegiance to the leader. Worldly political religions are ephemeral
phenomena. After they pass societies are left entirely hollow,
with no moral reference points and no traditional structures,
such as the family, to fall back on. They have all been destroyed
by the pseudo-religion's uncontested priests-cum-gods who in their
vainglory have reduced their people to slaves, to a commercial
commodity.
The psychological
profiles of Yong-il vary. He has been described as perverted,
demented, a sexual degenerate and hedonist who indulges in the
bodily pleasures in the luxury palaces that are sealed off to
his people and known only to his personal guards, nurses and mistresses.
Other more sympathetic reports refer to him as the prisoner of
a system that he inherited and is unable to alter without the
system collapsing. The current situation in the country certainly
lends some credence to the second view.
Some heads
of state have remarked on how impressed they were by his ability
to hold a coherent conversation, as though this talent for talk
absolves him of the horrors he has perpetuated upon his people.
If anything such observations reflect poorly on the state of international
diplomacy. He can't be that bad, some president or minister thinks,
if he's a connoisseur of wine and likes his cognac. The fact that
he can comment at length about some film or other (he is said
to be an avid film buff) and can express cogent views on classical
music is insufficient to declassify him as someone off their rocker
and turn him into an intelligent, really a nice guy after all.
Since when has a discriminating taste for cognac or a passion
for music so deep that he composed six operettas in two years,
or so his people are told, become the defining characteristics
of a competent head of state?
All dictatorships,
sultanates and other authoritarian regimes have availed themselves
of their own instruments of domination and control in addition
to the ones that have become so widespread that no one can claim
a patent. What sets the North Korean system apart and visits such
a tragedy upon its people is that it uses all available instruments
at once and to their fullest capacity. It has a propaganda machine
that has sealed off the country entirely from all other sources
of information and that constantly drums home the message that
the country is a symbol of progress, even as mass starvation forced
it to appeal to UN relief agencies. It has 200,000 political detention
centres according to the estimates of human rights agencies and
a per capita income lower than that of the occupied West Bank.
Meanwhile it is holding the world at gunpoint, using every form
of weapon, including the biological and the nuclear, to demand
it hand over food and money with no strings attached since those
strings would be an affront to the state philosophy of self- reliance.
The greatest
danger North Korea poses, however, is to its own people. This
enormous prison is crushing its 22 million inmates, producing
a human catastrophe of greater proportion than that which would
be inflicted by the nuclear weapons it is using to terrorise the
world.
Due to strategic
concerns, including the unpredictable madness of Yong-il and the
fact that it would be the first to be hit by a war with its northern
neighbour, South Korea's policy has been to handle North Korea
with kid gloves and it is prevailing upon the West to do the same
in the belief that maybe North Korea can be changed by subtly
inducing it to open up. Apparently the logic is to play along
with the madman so he doesn't go berserk.
North Korea,
for its part, is engaged in nuclear blackmail not only to keep
others from meddling in its domestic affairs and maintain the
status quo but also to coerce its wealthy neighbours into helping
preserve regional stability by handing over financial aid.
It is a situation
that gives rise to some existential questions that go beyond North
Korea to include the meaning and conduct of politics as a whole.
Why is it, for example, that governments seem to behave on the
international stage as though they are autonomous individuals
indifferent to the lives of the real individuals they are meant
to represent but who are instead brainwashed, intimidated, impoverished
and starved, sometimes psychologically by creating a desperate
want for consumer goods, at other times controlled, regimented
and reduced to something less than human? An equally if not more
horrifying question pertains to the mental stability of governments
that possess nuclear weapons.
Something
is hovering over us like a spectre and we are determined to pretend
it does not exist. Nuclear weapons have been used only twice in
history. The power that used them had no strategic reason to do
so. It cannot claim it did so as an act of desperation for it
was on the offensive and victory was in reach. Nor was it a renegade
state whose insane leader had his finger on the button. It was
a democratic state -- the democratic state par excellence according
to some -- and its leader was the symbol of the rational president,
a president whose popularity has yet to be surpassed.
When the US
dropped atom bombs on two peaceful Japanese cities at the end
of a war that everyone knew it was soon to win it either wanted
to avenge itself for Pearl Harbor and hasten victory, or to send
a message to the other major victor of the war, the Soviet Union.
The madness is that the decision was taken so coolly. Factor out
the desire for revenge and it was entirely calculated in terms
of profit and loss, as one might calculate an endgame in chess.
The tragic cost in innocent human lives did not figure.
No nuclear
weapon has been used since this madness was unleashed against
Japanese civilians. This is not because sanity has come to prevail
in modern times, or because of democracy, or because democracies
are more rational than dictatorships when they go to war. The
reason is that the monopoly on nuclear weapons was broken and
allowed for a balance of terror. If history tells us anything
it is that there is a greater risk to mankind when one nation
possesses nuclear weapons than when two rival nations possess
them. This lesson, I believe, applies to the Middle East, where
Israel's monopoly of the nuclear weapon constitutes a greater
threat than that which would exist if there were a balance. Of
course we would all be better off if no one possessed such weapons,
though that would mean that rationality had prevailed. It would
be unwise to hold your breath and wait for that to happen.
Azmi
Bishara
is an Israeli Arab politician and an elected member of the Knesset.
Bishara was born in Nazareth, where he lives. is a founding member
of the National Democratic Assembly in Israel, also known as Balad,
a political entity representing the Arab minority in Israel under
the banner of liberal democratic values. He was born into a Christian
Palestinian family, though he is explicitly secular. Petroleumworld
not necessarily share these views.
Editor's
Note: This commentary was originally published in Al-Ahram Weekly
19-25/10/2006. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest
of our readers. Petroleumworld not necessarily share these views.
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Petroleumworld
News 10/22/06
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Azmi Bishara/NYT. All rights reserved.
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