The Playboy of the Eastern World

Salon passed along a remarkably empty article on North Korea from the GlobalPost, "an awarding-winning international news site that focuses on original reporting." Donald Kirk's "reporting" in "The Unlikely Threat to North Korea" is original mainly in the sense of being creative, spinning wordage out of nothing. "Long dismissed as a playboy, Kim Jong Il's eldest son has become an outspoken and dangerous critic of the regime," promises the subhead, but the article doesn't deliver.

Of course that's typical of American reporting on official enemies. Kim Jong Il was fat, ugly, and crazy, with the biggest porn collection this side of the Vatican -- or so we in the West were constantly told, with propaganda feeds from the South Korean CIA. In the case of Kim Jong Nam, the subject of Kirk's article,

The wires are abuzz with news of a soon-to-be-released book based on emails and interviews between Kim Jong Nam and a Japanese journalist Yoji Gomi over a seven year period. In the book, which is called “My father Kim Jong Il and Me,” Jong Nam reportedly said that North Korea is bound for collapse and called his half-brother, Kim Jong Un, a figurehead.

What “a joke to the outside world,” Jong Nam is purported to have said of the ascent of Jong Un, whom he admitted he has never actually met. More seriously, Jong Nam predicted, “The Kim Jong Un regime will not last long” and “without reform … the regime will collapse.”

So, let's see: a book that hasn't been published yet (and the author of the link in that quotation hasn't read it either, though she does scratch Kirk on the back: she says he "called Kim Jong Nam 'an unguided missile' whose 'uncensored, unauthorized comments provide relief from the relentless flow of propaganda.'" Radical!); an estranged son who's been speaking truth to power on his Facebook page, since 2001 when he

fell out with his father following an incident at Tokyo's Narita airport, where he was nailed for trying to get through on a fake Dominican passport. Jong Nam fled to Macau and has been living it up ever since.

If you can't trust someone like that, who can you trust? For Donald Kirk, he inspires absolute confidence:

Into this morass of ignorance steps Kim Jong Nam, firing off verbal salvos that are wildly unpredictable, not to mention improbable. Isn’t he risking his neck with casually dubious comments to journalists who find him from time to time near his home in the gambling enclave of Macau?

Could it be that one day we’ll wake up to find that Jong Nam has been mysteriously snuffed out like a few others who’ve dared to spill the regime’s “secrets” after fleeing for sanctuary elsewhere?

Sounds like just the kind of guide the US needs into the murky morass of North Korea. Someone like Ahmed Chalabi, who never steered us wrong about Iraq. Maybe the Pentagon should give Kim Jong Nam a stipend too, if they're not already doing it. Who's supporting him in "the gambling enclave of Macau?" Kirk says he "has the Chinese on his side," though he's vague about what that means, as he is about everything else in his article.

This is not a recommendation of Kim Jong Un, who is young and inexperienced to be running a country, especially one like North Korea. Kim Jong Nam's prediction that the Northern regime will collapse is not absurd; but then, Western analysts have been predicting the same thing for decades, which may be why they talk now about "stability" instead; you can only go on being a false prophet for so long. Kirk prattles about the "threat" Kim Jong Nam somehow poses to Pyongyang, but doesn't back that up with any substance. Does Kim have viable supporters back home who'd want him to take his half-brother's place? Does he have a way to get past North Korea's state-run media to stir a spirit of rebellion among the masses? Does he have a magical ring that has the power to rule all others, if he can only find his way into the depths of Mordor? Kirk doesn't say. Nor does he say anything to back his claim that "With his views now on the record, [Kim]’s emerged as a font of wisdom and insight into his late father’s fiefdom."

A collapse of the Pyongyang regime would be a human disaster, but there are always scum who fantasize about such things. American frothers were cheated by Gorbachev and fate of the bloodbath they'd dreamed of since 1917 for the Soviet Union, and they preferred to ignore the many deaths from disease and hunger that resulted from the Chicago boys' restructuring interventions in the 90s. The US under George W. Bush blocked attempts at conciliation initiated by the South, especially Kim Dae Jung's Sunshine Policy, and backed hardliners like Lee Myung Bak instead. Funny; you'd think that it should be up to the Koreans to decide such things, wouldn't you? And it's also funny to see Kim Dae Jung denounced for allegedly giving money to Kim Jong Il when the US gives palette-loads of cash to US collaborators like Hamid Karzai.

Yep, Kim Jong Nam sounds like just kind of friend the US has been looking for. Or at least the kind that right-wing ideologues like Donald Kirk want us to look for.

Grace in Division

I'm not really a good judge of these matters, but I think the South Korean government handled the question of condolences for the death of Kim Jong-Il rather well, as the Hankyoreh reports it:

Regarding the death of North Korean National Defence Committee Chairman Kim Jong-il, the South Korean government stated on Monday, “We offer our consolation to the citizens of North Korea. We hope that North Korea will swiftly regain stability and become able to cooperate in order to achieve peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula.”

The government also stated, “We have decided not to send a governmental delegation to North Korea. However, we will permit relatives of late former president Kim Dae-jung and late Hyundai chairman Chung Mong-hun to visit North Korea to offer condolences, in return for visits made by the North [when the two men died].” In other words, Kim Dae-jung’s widow, Lee Hee-ho, and Chung’s widow, Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, will be allowed to make visits to the North to express their condolences.

Given the churlishness of official American reaction, this was downright graceful. To say nothing of unofficial American reaction, which has been downright shameful. I hadn't intended to post a copy of the screengrab of Kim Jong-Un holding back tears as his father's body lies in state, but it might be a good counterexample to the video clips of wailing North Koreans that have gone viral in the US. Yes, Kim Jong-Il was a bad man, with a lot of blood on his hands, but so was Ronald Reagan, and any criticism of the circus that passed for his funeral was unwelcome in the US. So is Barack Obama, but his daughters will probably weep at his funeral. Yes, some of the public grief over Kim in North is staged (professional mourning is not unheard of, especially outside the West), and some of it is probably coerced, but a lot of it is probably sincere. A lot of the reactions I've been seeing seem to come from American discomfort with public displays of emotion not related to professional sports, plus the connected joy at being able to make fun of official enemies they know nothing about.

I still wonder, when I read mainstream commentary on North Korea and on Kim Jong-Il in particular, how many Americans have forgotten (or never knew) that South Korea and North Korea were one country until the US divided them, admittedly with the connivance of the Soviet Union. There are still families on both sides of the DMZ who were separated by the war and the endless state of truce, though more and more are dying off. It's been over sixty years, after all. I sympathize with my countrypeople's ignorance, since I knew very little more about Korea until the mid-1990s myself. All I knew until I met some Korean students and began to inform myself was what most Americans of my generation knew: that it was a country where college students seemed to be endlessly fighting the police in the streets. These clashes were shown every so often on TV news programs, though it was never explained what they were about. Oh, and there was a war there, named after the country, wasn't there?

It's because of that war, in which over 30,000 Americans and at least a million Koreans died (in much less time than comparable numbers died in Vietnam); because that war was deliberately forgotten in the US (we didn't "win" it, you see, and that's intolerably traumatic for us) though not in Korea; because of the continued presence of tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea; because of longstanding economic and political ties between South Korea and the US; and because the US continues to interfere in Korean affairs, often blocking rapprochement that might lessen tensions or even bring about reunification, that Americans should know more about Korea than we do. But hell, we hardly know anything about our own country, as American Korean War veterans could tell you.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, Americans are in no position to condemn other countries until they have condemned the crimes of their own government, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" as he called it in 1967. Imprisonment of vast numbers of its population? Torture? Militarization? Close surveillance of the population for traces of dissent or disloyalty? Let Americans take the log from their own eye first. That's about the only teaching of Jesus that has any real power to it as far as I'm concerned, and of course most Christians ignore it.

There Goes the Sun King

Kim Jong Il is dead, as I'm sure everybody in a position to read this blog knows by now. (Judging from what I've been reading online all day, it might be helpful to some readers if I explain that East Asian names usually put the surname first. So Kim was the dictator's surname or family name, Jong Il his given name; Jong Il Kim in Western order.) I certainly don't mourn him, but it's hard to know what to say when so many willfully ignorant people, people who know only that Kim was an official Bad Guy, are jumping for joy at the news -- especially in the US, where many people and our corporate media have been doing the Happy Dance over the guys it's safe to hate in the past year.

There are plenty of people on the Korean peninsula who have reason to hate Kim Jong Il; here in the US, not so much. He hurt a lot of people, but few if any Americans; so why are Americans so excited about his decease? Well, aside from Fidel Castro, we have hardly any Commies left to hate anymore, and for many Americans, Commies have a special place in what we laughingly call our hearts. Second, he was insubordinate, refusing to recognize that we are in charge of the world -- and worse, he played us rather effectively. This was a special slap in the face to American pride, given that we'd always thought him a joke from the day he succeeded his father in 1994, and have continued to treat him as a joke while simultaneously inflating him into a world-class threat to peace, justice, and the American way. Those are the only genuine reasons I can think of, as opposed to pretenses.

It can't be because he was corrupt, as he undoubtedly was -- America gets along just fine with corrupt heads of state and their families. It can't be because he ran a viciously repressive state with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, and a failed economy that periodically collapsed into famine -- America gets along just fine with the rulers of viciously repressive states etc. No, it can only be because he wouldn't take orders from us; why, he wouldn't even take orders from his Red masters in what the deranged wing of the American Right used to call "Peiping." (It was the pronunciation used by Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists.)

My first thought when I heard the news and began to see Western reactions was Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia for over thirty years. Suharto took power in a spectacularly bloody 1965 coup, epitomized by the slaughter of uncountable ethnic Chinese designated as Communists. Estimates range from half a million to two or three million or even more. It seems certain that the US was involved (via) (though given our record, US involvement would be plausible even if we didn't have other good reasons to believe it), with the CIA giving Suharto the names of labor activists to butcher. At the time, FAIR has reported,

After the scale of the massacre began to be apparent, [New York Times writer Max] Frankel was even more enthusiastic. Under the headline "Elated U.S. Officials Looking to New Aid to Jakarta's Economy" (3/13/66), Frankel reported that "the Johnson administration found it difficult today to hide its delight with the news from Indonesia.... After a long period of patient diplomacy designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, and months of prudent silence...officials were elated to find their expectations being realized." Frankel went on to describe the leader of the massacre, Gen. Suharto, as "an efficient and effective military commander."

After having pacified the country,

Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into an "investors' paradise," only slightly qualified by the steep bribery charge for entry. Investors flocked in to exploit the timber, mineral and oil resources, as well as the cheap, repressed labor, often in joint ventures with Suharto family members and cronies. Investor enthusiasm for this favorable climate of investment was expressed in political support and even in public advertisements; e.g., the full page ad in the New York Times (9/24/92) by Chevron and Texaco entitled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

A decade later, in 1975, Suharto invaded the neighboring country of East Timor, initiating a quarter-century-long reign of terror, again supported faithfully by the US, which killed a quarter-million Timorese.

When Suharto left power, he received the harsh judgment you'd expect such a person to suffer at the hands of the American media.

In the months of his exit, he was referred to as Indonesia's "soft-spoken, enigmatic president" (USA Today, 5/14/98), a "profoundly spiritual man" (New York Times, 5/17/98), a "reforming autocrat" (New York Times, 5/22/98). His motives were benign: "It was not simply personal ambition that led Mr. Suharto to clamp down so hard for so long; it was a fear, shared by many in this country of 210 million people, of chaos" (New York Times, 6/2/98); he "failed to comprehend the intensity of his people's discontent" (New York Times, 5/21/98), otherwise he undoubtedly would have stepped down earlier. He was sometimes described as "authoritarian," occasionally as a "dictator," but never as a mass murderer. Suharto's mass killings were referred to--if at all--in a brief and antiseptic paragraph.

I believe Kim Jong Il deserves nothing less than the same kind of pitiless scourging Suharto got.

By all accounts, North Korea is a dreary, regimented society, with no civil liberties and little material security. (A good place to begin reading if you want to know more would be Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country [The New Press, 2004].) At the same time, I keep getting the impression that much of what is depicted as grim regimentation is simply normal for communitarian societies, including South Korea. I remember reading a sketch of a North Korean extended family, comprising at least three generations, out for a night of karaoke, which from the description sounded just like its South Korean working-class counterpart. The massed rallies and organizing chanting also sound to me like South Korean society in the days of its dictatorship: GoGo 70, a recent South Korean film set around 1970, began with archival footage of marching soldiers, cheering crowds, and martial songs that at first I took for the North, but it turned out to the freedom-loving South. And the standard of living was higher in the North than in the South until the 1970s, partly because until then the South was run by corrupt American-backed dictatorships more interested in lining their pockets than in raising up their people. Not until Park Chung Hee's Five Year Plans (did he deliberately take that label from Stalin's USSR?) did the South Korean economy begin to take off, though as with all modernizing industrial economies, at great human cost.

But despite the occasional concern trolling -- oh worra worra, what will happen to North Korea now that Kim is dead? is his young heir-designate, Kim Jong Un, mature enough at twenty-something to take the reins of power? surely he should invite the US to step in and guide him with the same benign wisdom we've exhibited everywhere else -- I don't believe that many of the people celebrating Kim's death give a damn about the North Korean people, or about peace on the Korean peninsula, or about anything except venting the free-floating rage and hatred they don't dare express about anything that matters. The US government is no more interested in democracy in North Korea than it is in the South, which means (at best) hardly at all; and most Americans don't know enough about either Korea to have an opinion.