UK Observer: The madness of Kim Jong Il

[T_i_B]

Long article, but well worth it IMHO.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1075267,00.html

Kim Jong Il says he regards 'the people' as 'the most beautiful and excellent beings in the world and deeply worships them'. But he doesn't trust them. In North Korea, the truth has never been a matter of fact so much as an expression of the Kims' whim - father and son. The great preponderance of this so-called truth is a confection of outright lies - not merely false but, more perniciously, a form of unreality, imposed with such relentlessness and violence on a people hermetically sealed from any alternative sources of information that it has become their own reality. His adoration, like a jealous lover's, is only rhetorically distinguishable from contempt. To maintain a kingdom of lies is to live in perpetual fear of being exposed, and the Pyongyang regime considers its insularity its proudest accomplishment, the key to its survival, and proof, as Kim Jong Il has said, that 'we have nothing to envy the rest of the world'. Indeed, despite the heavy doses of Stalinist and Maoist jargon in its economic policies and party doctrine, to speak of North Korea under the Kim dynasty simply as a Communist state is insufficient. In recent decades, references to Marxism and Leninism have steadily faded from its propaganda. Marx and Lenin were not Korean, and North Korea's ruling ideology, Juche - which means self-reliance - is predicated on being independent from the claims or destinies of other revolutions.

In its most obvious form, the Juche idea is a claim of radical autonomy: absolute political and economic independence for the Korean nation without any desire or need for traffic of any kind with other peoples. Kim Il Sung first promulgated this inward-turning, nativist ideology in 1955, when he officially distanced North Korea from Soviet patronage. The Kremlin regarded him as a canny ingrate. After all, with tens of thousands of American troops perched on permanent high alert across the demilitarised zone (DMZ), there was no gainsaying North Korea's strategic significance as a Cold War buffer state, and no question that, despite Kim's posturing, he'd retain the vital support of Moscow and Beijing. Yet even as North Korea grew ever more indebted to its Communist trading partners, the separatist teachings of Juche developed into Pyongyang's paramount doctrine, and the idea came to stand for something more inchoate than it had at first appeared.

Nowhere has Pyongyang's mythology of self-sufficiency been so painfully laid bare as in the record of the state's economic devastation since the disappearance of the Soviet empire. In the mid-50s, when Juche was introduced, North Korea, which had been the centre of industrial development under the Japanese, was more prosperous than the predominantly agrarian South. But by 1970, the balance had shifted. Since then, the South's economy has grown to become the 12th largest on earth, while the North's steadily declined and is now estimated to rank somewhere below Burundi's. The North devoted the bulk of its limited resources to outdated heavy industry and military expenditures, imposing one antiquated, Stalinist economic plan after another with such a radical disregard for markets that it became dependent on Soviet largesse to feed its people and supply its fuel. Then suddenly, in 1991, there was no Soviet Union, and although China took up some of the slack, North Koreans discovered that self-reliance meant hunger, cold and darkness.

It is estimated that starvation has killed between 2m and 3m North Koreans in the past decade - a 10th of the population. When foreign governments and international organisations demanded greater transparency in exchange for food, Kim Jong Il warned that 'Imperialist aid is a noose of plunder and subjugation, aimed at robbing 10 and even 100 things for one thing that is given.' Many megatons of food aid did get through and lives were saved. But by all accounts the bulk of it was hijacked by the state to keep the party elite, and especially the military, fed and faithful.

[minto grubb]

1. Korea

I am interested to see a British newspaper here.
I am from the UK myself, and have come upon D.U. via internet friends.
The question of hunger has come up. I would like to see global IMRs reduced to below 50. We do have the resources to accomplish this, but in areas like Korea, and Afghanistan, it will be hard without some shift in the political climate. I am not advocating an invasion, but I think that sooner or later, Democracy will meet Dictatorship, and whether it is a military or a theocratic dictatorship, there will be trouble.
If we pull out of Iraq, we let Saddam back in. I don't have any slick answers, but I would like to hear some views.

[newyawker99]

2. Hi minto grubb!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[tinnypriv]

3. Hiya

You want to take a look around LBN or General, they're the places to go for Iraq.

Just ignore all the stuff about Confed flag. :think:

[bpilgrim]

4. no choice but to negotiate

or we risk nuclear war for what? another 'shock-N-awe' op?

who knows with the neoCONs at the helm :shrug:

welcome to the DU :hi:

peace

[T_i_B]

5. Hello minto grubb

Nice to see another new face. :-)

We tend to have lots of stuff from UK sources such as the BBC, Grauniad, Independent etc on DU.

I would agree very strongly that the Stalinist dictatorship in North Korea is at the root of that countries problems. Even Kim Jong Il would relucatnly agree according to the article

When Shin and his wife escaped from North Korea they carried with them secretly made recordings of private conversations with Kim Jong Il. On the tapes, Kim readily acknowledges that North Korea's brand of socialism is flawed; that its technology is at a 'kindergarten level'; that its people lack enterprise and motivation because they are given none of the individual incentives that competition thrives on; and that anyone else in North Korea who said any of these things would be considered an ideological deviant, and purged.