In Whose Service Is Perfect Freedom

While I was in Chicago over the New Year, I found a book of fiction from North Korea, the first I've encountered and evidently the first that has appeared in the West.  (By coincidence, I found it in the same used bookstore where in 1995 I found the first South Korean novel I ever read, A Gray Man by Choi In-hun.)

The book, a collection of stories, is called The Accusation; the author uses the pseudonym Bandi.  The English translation, by Deborah Smith, was published in 2017 by House of Anansi in Canada and by Grove Press in the US.

There are some strange things about it.  According to a rather novelistic afterword, Bandi's manuscripts were smuggled into South Korea in the late 1990s; they weren't published even in Korean for another couple of decades.  There may be good reasons for the delay -- maybe publication waited until Bandi died, for his own safety? -- but there's no explanation.  Also the account of the process by which the material was smuggled seems unnecessarily complicated, even contradictory; again, that could be to protect the smugglers and the author.

I'm not sure what I expected from the stories.  They're about the oppressiveness of life in a harsh totalitarian regime, where people can lose their homes and jobs for infinitesimal ideological deviations, or even for being anonymously accused of them.  The cover blurb, reproduced on Amazon, calls The Accusation "eye-opening" and a "vivid depiction of life in a closed-off one-party state."

The Accusation is a deeply moving and eye-opening work of fiction that paints a powerful portrait of life under the North Korean regime. Set during the period of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il's leadership, the seven stories that make up The Accusation give voice to people living under this most bizarre and horrifying of dictatorships. The characters of these compelling stories come from a wide variety of backgrounds, from a young mother living among the elite in Pyongyang whose son misbehaves during a political rally, to a former Communist war hero who is deeply disillusioned with the intrusion of the Party into everything he holds dear, to a husband and father who is denied a travel permit and sneaks onto a train in order to visit his critically ill mother. Written with deep emotion and writing talent, The Accusation is a vivid depiction of life in a closed-off one-party state, and also a hopeful testament to the humanity and rich internal life that persists even in such inhumane conditions.

The publication and translation of The Accusation is surely an event, but is it really "eye-opening"?  As an official enemy of the US, North Korea has been very effectively demonized in South Korean and Western media; much of the half-century-long flood of propaganda is even true.  I doubt any reader of Bandi's stories will find any fundamental surprises in his account of life in a highly repressive society.  Quite a number of books by Western visitors and North Korean defectors have appeared in the past few years, so we don't lack for first-hand accounts of life there.  The Accusation would have been more of a revelation if it had been published sooner.

What struck me most about The Accusation was how familiar it felt.  I've read a fair amount of fiction from Korea, some of it written under the Japanese occupation of 1910 to 1945, some of it written in the postwar period, during and after the South Korean dictatorships imposed and supported by the US.  Much of the claustrophobic feel of Bandi's fiction was reminiscent of the stories of those earlier periods.  During the postwar dictatorships, people suffered discrimination and repression because they had family or other ties to the North; being accused even of socialism, let alone communism, could have uncomfortable consequences much like those suffered by Northerners with family in the South.  For many years after the Korean war, there was a curfew in the South, and woe betide anyone caught abroad between midnight and 4 a.m.  The Kwangju uprising in the Southwest of South Korea of 1980 was put down with extreme brutality by Park Chung Hee's successor.  People were jailed, tortured, and executed for often flimsy political reasons; they might spend many years in camps in the countryside.

Or consider this anecdote, from the opening pages of  Korea's Grievous War by Su-kyoung Hwang (Pennsylvania, 2016):

In 1960, a crowd of mourners dressed in white formed a long funeral procession in a provincial district in South Korea. Young men and widows holding portraits of the dead led the grieving throng to a graveyard where their deceased family members were to be buried together. The collective casket contained the remains of over seven hundred people who had been massacred at the beginning of the Korean War. Their families had disinterred the bodies from a mass grave and were giving them a decent reburial. An inscription placed at the graveside read, “To the traveler passing by: historians of the future generation will tell the story of this grave.” One year later, under a newly established dictatorship, both the inscription and the burial site had disappeared without a trace. The families who had organized the mass funeral were arrested, imprisoned, and silenced. Their stories disappeared from public consciousness for decades.

Both North and South plotted to infiltrate and subvert each other.  In the 1960s a little group of convicts was sequestered and trained as commandos to cross the DMZ and assassinate then-DPRK dictator Kim Il Sung, as payback for an earlier attempt by Kim to assassinate then-ROK dictator Park Chung Hee. The operation was shelved when Park decided to make friends with Kim instead; it remained a deep secret until it was commemorated in a blockbuster 2003 South Korean film, Silmido.  South Korea, though nominally more open than the North, still had a reputation as the Hermit Kingdom until the 1988 Olympics were held there.  But the old rulers of the Republic of Korea were never really happy about the increase in freedom south of the 38th parallel, and there has been more or less constant pressure to turn back the clock.

Because of all this and more, I was taken aback by the claim at the end of the book's second afterword, that the "manuscript that had been in Bandi's possession was now going to South Korea, to a land of freedom and hope" (245).  That was much more true at the time Bandi sent his work south, than it was when he began to write it.  Outside of those few who knew something about Korean history, the change went largely unremarked in the United States.  Remember, like many other dictatorships South Korea was officially part of the Free World during the Cold War.  Little glitches like torture, massacres, and death squads were not incompatible with the US conception of "freedom" then, and not much has changed.

This is not to say that North Korea is a free society -- of course not -- or that I don't hope that the Kim dynasty will ultimately be replaced with a freer, more democratic government -- of course I do.  These days I dare to hope that such a change might happen in my lifetime, without the bloodbath dreamed of by South Korean and US hardliners alike; we've had enough of those.  I just believe that The Accusation was published a bit late to be effective propaganda.  If you haven't read much Korean literature, or even if you have and want to hear from a wider range of voices, it's worth a read.  The day may not be too far off when it will be as dated as Soviet-era dissident literature.  That's something worth hoping for.

False Equivalence for Dummies

I heard a lot about supposed false equivalence during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, and in almost no case were the allegations accurate.  I believe, however, that I've been seeing some genuine specimens lately, in connection with the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore.  Here's a good example, from a reasonably sober commentator:

As someone who supported Trump-Kim summit it’s important to stop referring to outcome of Singapore as a “nuclear deal.” It was a handshake based on a few understandings between two men with few, if any, expert input on the details that typically cause most real deals to collapse.

It's the "two men with few, if any, expert input" that I want to draw your attention to.  I don't dispute that Trump had no expert input from his side, though that was because he wasn't interested in it.  I don't know what input, expert or otherwise, Kim Jong Un drew on, and I doubt this writer does either.  But North Korea has a long history of negotiating with the US, and until there's some evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to suppose that Kim didn't draw on it.  Kim definitely appears to have prepared for his earlier meeting with ROK President Moon Jae In, and behaved sensibly even while he was staging a performance for the cameras. 

And this is milder than most discourse I've seen, which routinely calls both Trump and Kim "deranged" and the like.  I think that's wrong about both men.  Trump is an evil clown, and the cascade of accusations about his mental health have been mere abuse; deserved abuse, but not accurate because of that.  About Kim Jong Un we know less, but I see no reason to think that he's insane either.  Yes, he postures and provokes, as North Korean leaders have often done in dealing with the West (and so did Hugo Chavez, who wasn't insane either).  Similar claims were made about Kim's father, Jong Il, and he definitely wasn't crazy: he also managed negotiations with the US, getting an agreement that only "collapsed" because of US refusal to keep its commitments.

Bruce Cumings wrote about Kim Jong Il in North Korea: Another Country (The New Press, 2003):

Way back when, Kim Jong Il was the same Mad Dog he is said to be today [2003]: a drunk, a womanizer, a playboy, Stalinist fanatic, state terrorist, unstable, psychotic, another David Koresh, Jim Jones, or Charles Manson—“Public Enemy Number One,” running a country always making “one last lunge for survival.” When the father died, the American media dredged up all these things, but Newsweek perhaps outdid them with its racist cover article: “Korea after Kim: The Headless Beast” (July 18, 1994). According to “one U.S. diplomat,” the son was “irrational, far more dangerous than his father.... No one in his right mind wants to see Kim Jong Il in charge of a nuclear-armed North Korea.” South Korean “experts” told the magazine that the end of the regime was nigh; “great turmoil is on the way.” As for the deceased father, Newsweek’ s intrepid researchers had uncovered what no one else ever did: Kim’s presence with “Stalin’s military” in the Soviet Far East in the 1930s. But “whether he actually fought against the Japanese is a matter of debate.”

Then, six years later, top American officials actually met the Dear Leader, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang in preparation for President Bill Clinton’s (aborted-by-Bush) summit with the younger Kim: “He is amazingly well-informed and extremely well-read,” an American who met him related to a reporter; “he is practical, thoughtful, listened very hard. He was making notes. He has a sense of humor. He’s not the madman a lot of people portrayed him as.” A State Department official said, “He can talk about almost any subject . . . market economics, the Internet, coming technologies.” Madame Albright presented him with an NBA basketball signed by his basketball hero, Michael Jordan; Jong Il immediately wanted to take the ball out and dribble it around [Kindle edition, location 796ff].

I quoted this at length partly because I couldn't resist including that bit about Michael Jordan and basketball; the interest in the sport evidently runs in the Kim family.  Cuming's book is out of date by now, but it's short and readable, and if you read it you'll still be better informed about North Korea than most people in the US media or government.

I wouldn't want to take too seriously the "top American officials'" evaluation of Kim Jong Il, but at least they make it clear he was not the cartoon that South Korean hardline and American mainstream propaganda made him out to be.  We don't know much about his son, but I suspect he also is smarter, more serious, and better prepared than Donald Trump.  Obviously that sets the bar quite low, but equating the two men is almost certainly mistaken, another example of the enduring American tendency to underestimate and caricature Koreans, both in the North and the South.  (The US media aren't terribly happy with South Korean President Moon Jae In, either, for presuming to put the interests of his own country and people ahead of American wishes and fantasies.)

It's difficult to find the right balance here.  I'm not denying that Kim Jong Un is a dictator, presiding over a horribly repressive state with many serious human rights abuses.  One can say all that without caricaturing him or lying about him; isn't the truth enough?  Not, it seems, for the American mainstream.  The same could be said of Trump, after all: he's quite bad enough that it shouldn't be necessary to lie about him. It could be said of Obama, or Hillary Clinton.  I find it interesting, though also profoundly depressing, that so many people prefer the fantasies to the truth.

Ignorance about North Korea by Americans is understandable: it's a closed society, and reliable information is hard to come by.  Ignorance about South Korea, which saturates most American coverage of the peninsula, is inexcusable.  But again, it appears that most Americans prefer fantasy to reality in politics.

Those Who Manufacture History Get to Repeat It Over and Over

Something to keep in mind amid all the Trump administration's ranting about North Korea: Iran entered into an agreement with the US to ensure that they would make no nuclear weapons. Iran hadn't in fact been making nuclear weapons in the first place. US propaganda consisted largely of references to Iran's "nuclear program," which most people, often including the propagandists, heard as "nuclear weapons program."  The GOP and some Democrats opposed the agreement, for unclear reasons. The agreement is now in place, and Iran is in compliance with it, but the warmongers still are trying to portray Iran as a nuclear threat to the US.

Now imagine that North Korea agreed to get rid of its (still very few) nuclear weapons, and kept its promises, as Iran has. Does anyone believe that the US would lay off, would stop threatening North Korea and presenting it as an existential danger to American security? Or would the US continue to lie, as it does about Iran and its compliance with the agreement that the US forced on it?

You don't have to imagine very hard, because North Korea made such an agreement with the US in 1994, and kept to it.  The US broke it.  I think it's reasonably clear that these media campaigns have nothing do with peace, stability, or even American security -- not least because our hawks are doing everything in their power to diminish our stability and everyone else's. They're not even about oil or other resources that our plutocrats crave; Iran has oil, but North Korea doesn't have much we could want.  The issue is domination, the demand that nowhere in the world should there be any nation that isn't under US control.

How Doth the Little Crocodile

In a blurt of US-bloc propaganda, associate editor Max Fisher posted "The Dolphins of Pyongyang" at the Atlantic's website today.  It's about a shiny new aquarium that just opened in the capital of North Korea, despite the ever-diminishing standard of living most North Koreans endure, but even more it's about how brainwashed the people of North Korea are.

As far as North Korean propaganda is concerned, their own steep economic decline and the South's amazing rise never happened. The dozens of state-produced films that attract wide audiences every year -- movie tickets are subsidized and there's little other available entertainment -- depict South Korea as a land of poverty and crime. Many North Koreans, as Barbara Demick reported in her excellent book on the country, gratefully believe that they live in relative wealth and that poor South Koreans are desperate to join them.

Wow, I thought as I read those words, that sounds familiar.  It sounds like the fantasies of many (most) Americans, epitomized by the Only President We've Got just a few days ago.  We all know that America is Number One, despite the fact that we aren't, and we know that everybody in every other country wants to move here.  And we have much less excuse than the North Koreans, who do live in a sealed-off society with state-produced media.  Even our corporate media aren't controlled by the state, and those who want other sources are free and mostly able to access them.

That's not to say that the North Korean government isn't a failure, if you count failure as the inability or refusal to provide for the basic well-being of its citizens.  But the US is, by that standard, far from a success.  Nor do I deny that the North Korean government is brutally repressive, with vast numbers of unjustly incarcerated political prisoners.  But the US is becoming more repressive by the day, and one area in which we are Number One is the number of prisoners housed by our increasingly corporate prison system.  Many of them are arguably political prisoners, victims of our regime's War on Drugs.  Many are wrongly convicted, often because of the color of their skin.  No American who isn't loudly critical of US conduct first is in a position to cast the first stone at North Korea.  But as Noam Chomsky and others have noticed, it's always safe to attack official enemies -- especially relatively powerless enemies like North Korea.  The US has happily supported brutal dictatorships, in South Korea for example from 1946 to 1987, often instigating and supporting military coups against elected governments to install them, and their leaders are seldom referred to as "dictators" in the corporate media, as Fisher calls Kim Jong Un in his piece.  Really, the US and its elites have nothing against dictators who waste money on empty public works while their people go hungry, as long as they're our dictators.

Consider too that the American economy, while in better shape than North Korea's, is in trouble, with stagnating unemployment numbers, large numbers of people who rely on public assistance and private charity to feed themselves and their children, and an infrastructure that, while not a disaster, is well on its way to one.  (There's also poverty in South Korea, more than I suspect Fisher knows or wants to know.)  But we can still spend billions on sending a machine to Mars to take some rather boring digital snapshots of its vacation, and England (our right-hand partner in the Free World) can spend billions on a glitzy Olympic extravaganza.  (It's not irrelevant that that extravaganza happened to entail a fascist lockdown on the population of London, for "security.")  Of course we're still better off than North Korea, but that's one function of such a failed state: so that our citizens can look at the plight of its people and count ourselves lucky. 

Fisher mentions a report which "notes that [North Korean] defectors increasingly say that they wanted to leave on finally learning of the south's relative wealth and their own poverty."  This is also why so many Latin Americans have defected north of the Rio Grande, but it's not considered a good excuse in their case.  Despite the economic advantages of the US, most Mexicans who come here would rather be back home.  And North Korean defectors have found that the freedom-loving South didn't greet them with open arms.

The same group that produced that report

more darkly predicts that the regime will replace the lost legitimacy by escalating its acts of random aggression, writing, "The more the North Korean economy loses its distinctiveness vis-a-vis its counterpart to the south, the more the DPRK must demonstrate its legitimacy through military means." It's almost enough to make you wish for more dolphins in Pyongyang.

First, one should remember that North and South Korea are still technically one country; that they exist in a state of armed truce, not peace; and that both sides have been guilty of "acts of random aggression" over the years, except that the South's are seldom reported here.  In addition, the US has encouraged hardliners in Seoul by displays of military might, including war games, new bases sited primarily to threaten China but with North Korea in their sights, and interfering to prevent negotiations between North and South that showed promise of lessening tensions -- to say nothing of tens of thousands of American troops forty miles from the DMZ.  (Imagine thirty thousand North Korean troops permanently stationed in Vancouver.  Of course Washington wouldn't object to that, any more than we objected to Soviet troops in Cuba fifty years ago.)

Fisher's article could be worse.  I remember well how many Americans gloated over Kim Jong-Il's death less than a year ago, hoping that the regime would come crashing down, with no evident concern about the ordinary people who'd suffer in such an event.  (By the way, though Fisher writes as though this aquarium was wholly Kim Jong Un's doing, a project of such scale must have begun while his father was still alive.  Since Jong Un's status as leader was evidently fragile for some time, I doubt he could have stopped the aquarium even if he wanted to.  American liberals are are very big on not holding new leaders responsible for situations they inherited, so it would be only fair to cut Jong Un some slack on fixing an economy as throughly broken as North Korea's.)  As I wrote at the time, 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. Max Fisher may know more about Korea than most Americans -- why, he edits the Atlantic's International Channel! -- but I don't believe he really cares about North Koreans' well-being any more than he cares about most Americans' well-being.

You Can Trust the Capitalists ... to Be Capitalists

Today Democracy Now reported that North Korea has agreed to "suspend uranium enrichment and halt testing of nuclear and long-range missiles in exchange for food aid", and international nuclear inspectors will be allowed to return. This is good news, of course, but we all know how treacherous them Reds are.

Mindful of this, Secretary of State Clinton warned:

The United States, I will be quick to add, still has profound concerns. But on the occasion of Kim Jong-il’s death, I said that it is our hope that the new leadership will choose to guide their nation onto the path of peace by living up to its obligations. Today’s announcement represents a modest first step in the right direction. We, of course, will be watching closely and judging North Korea’s new leaders by their actions.

I especially appreciate that last sentence: we will be judging North Korea's new leaders by their actions, not by what they say. It's what Noam Chomsky has been saying about America's leaders for a long time, though we know that in his case he's just saying it, because he thinks that the United States is the source of all evil in the world. You can judge the United States, and especially President Obama, by his words, which express his ideals; his actions are just what the Republicans and the MICFiC make him do, and so they're of no consequence.

But then I began having this feeling of deja vu: surely I had heard this story (or one very much like it) before. Aha:

In 1994, the Clinton administration negotiated a deal by which Pyongyang suspended its nuclear weapons program in exchange for oil and the foreign-sponsored construction of two cool-water reactors. But the U.S. didn’t follow up on the agreement, and North Korea resumed its program. Having withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty last January, it now develops that program legally, arguing (sensibly) that it’s necessary for self-defense. As the U.S. once argued, followed by the USSR, Britain, France, China, Pakistan and India. Nuclear Israel would argue similarly if it talked about its program, which it doesn’t as a matter of policy. (The U.S. currently conveys the impression that any nuclear newcomer commits a fundamentally evil act in acquiring this technology. But putting things in perspective, one must observe that each new nuclear state merely follows in the footsteps of those who first developed nuclear weapons and used them, with unapologetic efficacy, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

(Bold type added by me.) One detail that I'm sure is purely coincidental: 1994 was the year that Kim Jong-Il succeeded his late father as leader of North Korea. The new concession has been made at an analogous time, just after a change of leadership in the North, a difficult time for any country.

So, Secretary of State Clinton is worried that the North will not live up to its obligations? It seems to me that the real threat lies elsewhere, closer to home.

Bonus extra: According to the Guardian, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has demanded that President Obama "commit to military action if Iran sanctions fail." Well! I'm not such a fool as to believe that a US attack on Israel would be a cakewalk, but if Israel chooses to commit aggression again in the Middle East, there may be no other alternative. But it would pay for itself, and we'd certainly be welcomed as liberators.

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.

Look at You, Miss Information!

Here's another story that people should be aware of, but I can link to it. Briefly, John Caruso at The Distant Ocean saw a story from Ha'aretz claiming that another blockade-busting aid ship, the Rachel Corrie, had been negotiating with the Israeli government and would land quietly in Ashdod and allow its cargo to be shipped to Gaza from there. "The most recent messages from Halliday were said to be particularly encouraging," Ha'aretz reported.

But then, another story, from CNN this time, reported:

"We have not stopped and have no intention of stopping," said former Assistant U.N. Secretary-General Denis Halliday from aboard the vessel. "We will only stop when Israelis force us to do so." [...]

But [Adam] Shapiro said people on the ship deny that report and believe it is part of a misinformation campaign by the Israeli government.

So, be wary what you believe from the Israeli and US governments. The other day an article at the Korea Times described what is known as the "Sleeper Effect," complaining that "many South Koreans remained doubtful" about about the report, the work of "a multinational investigation team ... [which] concluded late last month that the Navy frigate Cheonan sank on March 26 due to a North Korean torpedo attack."

A vast majority of countries accepted the explanation backed by convincing evidence but many South Koreans seemingly remained doubtful. Rather, they turned to online posts, which alleged the Seoul administration fabricated evidence.

Domestic observers point out that the phenomenon is caused by the "sleeper effect," under which people tend to trust a message from low-credibility sources some time after they learned of it.

"Most people do not advocate even a persuasive message if it comes together with a discounting cue, or incredible sources, such as rumors on the Web," said a professor at a Seoul-based university.

"After some time passes, however, people forget about the source and remember just the persuasiveness of the message. Then, they believe in it and this is called the sleeper effect. I think the effect is behind the distrust on the Cheonan case."

This story appeared in the Biz/Finance section, under News rather than Opinion. But notice the sourcing. Why wasn't the professor or his university named?

Media Research, a local public opinion pollster, commissioned a survey in late May on the announcement of the sunken navy ship. To the surprise of the government, 24 percent of respondents said that they did not trust the official report.

This means that more than 10 million of the country's 48 million population are suspicious about the in-depth investigation by a multinational team, comprising both private experts and government officials.

North Korea reportedly used identity theft of South Korean people to upload a flurry of posts to contend that the South manipulated the evidence and the North had nothing to do with the case. The anonymous professor said that such a maneuver would have also played a role in creating the sleeper effect.

"Reportedly"? According to whom? And once again, why is that professor anonymous?

Now, there's very good reason to disbelieve anything worked on by low-credibility sources like the US government, or the South Korean government, or the Israeli government -- particularly when official enemies like North Korea or Iran or Hamas are involved. And while "online posts" are not necessarily reliable, sometimes they are, much to the fury of governments. Staff Reporter Kim Tae-gyu is carefully vague as to which "online posts" people were going to. And at the very end of the article, he tells us this:

Ever since the idea of the sleeper effect appeared around 60 years ago, debate has continued as to whether the phenomena take place often or is observed under only very unusual circumstances.

So, we have an anonymous professor pulling an unproved "effect" and North Korean computer hacking out of his fundament to explain away people's distrust of their untrustworthy government. That's serious journalism!

Staying with responsible and thoughtful newspaper work, longtime Korea Times pundit Michael Breen argues that South Korea should change its name so people won't confuse it with North Korea. Oh, and Kim Kardashian wants a bigger ass.