Op-Ed What's really going on in North Korea

[davidpdx]

The international media were feverish with speculation about a possible power shift in Pyongyang. So-called experts took turns hypothesizing on Kim's health and his grip on power. When one high-profile North Korean defector suggested that the policymaking unit of the Workers' Party might have enough influence to occasionally contradict Kim, the mainstream media distorted his words into the announcement of a "coup." Much of what has been said and written over the last few weeks has muddied the waters rather than cleared them.

Most experts' key mistake is to treat each sign from Pyongyang as if it is sent to the international community, when Kim and the Workers' Party have a more urgent audience: their own people. The story for the outside world was Kim's "disappearance." For the North Korean people, indications are that the big news was his reappearance, and what he looked like when he did: thinner and leaning on a cane.

Image, in North Korea, is everything. The Kim family mythology is the foundation of its statehood narrative. A big part of that is that the Kims — the dictator dynasty started with Kim's grandfather, "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, and father, "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il — are the purest, most virtuous, most perfect humans, superhuman even. They cannot be shown to be wrong, to be weak, to fail. The state goes to great lengths to maintain this. The goiter on the Great Leader's neck was airbrushed out of portraits and photos, as were the Dear Leader's paunch, wrinkles and liver spots.

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We in the West have been repeatedly proved wrong in our predictions about the plucky little dictatorship that could. We just knew, for example, that it would crumble within months after the Berlin Wall fell, and again when Kim Il Sung died. It didn't. We felt certain that Kim Jong Il, the family black sheep, would never take over; indeed, that father-to-son dynastic rule would never be accepted by a state governed by the principles of socialism. We even go on calling North Korea a communist or socialist state, when it has long ceased to be either and is in fact a military dictatorship run by one family and its cronies.

North Korea is, by all accounts, on the brink of enormous change. It is a failed state, isolated and mostly reliant on foreign aid. It exists in an ideological reality that is anachronistic and contradictory. Discontent is growing, with "illegal" black markets in every town and corruption rampant. Citizens repeat the propaganda they are force-fed, declaring themselves the luckiest people in the world, knowing full well they are not. They have DVDs, VHS tapes and photos, bought from the Chinese, showing them how much more peaceful and affluent four-fifths of the rest of the world is.

They struggle to reconcile the “truths” they are hard-wired to believe with the truths they see with their own eyes. The poor, starving and beaten are fed up. The elite, who know how much more luxurious life is in Japan, China, South Korea or the West, are fed up. The picture we have of North Koreans — homogenous, blindly obedient, brainwashed people — is incomplete, in spite of major news outlets dangerously and inexplicably acting as if it is.

The change, when it comes, will present risk and opportunity for the West. China, South Korea, Russia and Japan will also have an interest. We willfully misunderstand and misrepresent this regime at our peril.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-fischer-understanding-north-korea-20141026-story.html

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The last line pretty much sums up how I feel about the speculation over Kim Jong Un's death recently (though I feel that underestimate should be there as well).