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PYONGYANG WATCH
When the statues
are toppled
By Aidan Foster-Carter
Our last column (How 'shock and awe' plays in
Pyongyang, April 12) looked at how the Iraq
war, and the fall of Baghdad to US forces in particular,
is likely to be perceived in Pyongyang, focusing mainly
on the international dimension and the nuclear issue.
But those potent TV images - surely hidden from
North Korean viewers - of Saddam Hussein's statues being
felled and desecrated, with their echoes of Eastern
Europe 1989, also raise the question: Could it happen
here? Will we ever see joyous and frenzied North Korean
mobs meting out the same treatment to statues of Kim
Il-sung, and all the portraits of him and Kim Jong-il?
(Come to think of it, there are few if any actual
statues of the Dear Leader. His role is more that of
high priest of his father's cult.)
Let me come
at this one sideways. In one of Paul Theroux's travel
books, he's on a ghastly, filthy slow train somewhere in
the wilds of Central America. His fellow passengers are
all poor locals, their native faces passive and
impassive. It worries Theroux that they accept this hell
on Earth as normal. Finally, someone spits and says:
"This is crap," or something of the sort. Everyone
mutters assent. Theroux is elated: the human spirit is
alive, and judgment unclouded after all. They may be
powerless, but not for a minute were they fooled.
Similarly, I've long wondered how North Koreans
really see the state they're in. Another way to put this
is in terms of two great mid-20th-century literary
dystopias, each presciently but differently imagined by
English writers. Is North Korea George Orwell's 1984, or
is it Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?
The
difference, you may recall, is that in the latter people
are programmed to believe; whereas in Nineteen
Eighty-Four everybody knows they live under a Big
Lie. North Korea does a remarkable job of presenting
itself as a Brave New World. All those shiny happy
people praising the Leader: grinning lipsticked
munchkins warbling to accordions, or the serried ranks
of human cartoons in mass games like last year's
Arirang.
This is quite a contrast from the
cynicism that in the old Eastern Europe was never far
below the surface. Forty years ago, an early British
visitor to North Korea, economist Joan Robinson,
reckoned that "no deviant thought has a chance to
sprout". A society closed off from the wider world, with
universal nursery education, had an unparalleled
opportunity to capture and mold its citizens' hearts and
minds.
Has it worked? I wonder. Especially now,
there are contradictions aplenty. For one thing, even if
they don't know how well South Koreans or even Chinese
now live - and I suspect many do know - North Koreans
have seen their own living standards fall
catastrophically, from industrialization to famine, just
when Kim Jong-il succeeded his father Kim Il-sung. Don't
they make a connection? Or do they really buy the
official excuse, that this is all the fault of cruel
nature, fickle allies, and imperialist blockade?
The famine has undermined the Kim regime's
legitimacy in another way too. Where the state used to
provide, now many - maybe most - people must fend for
themselves, buying food in private markets. The state
must grudgingly tolerate these, but it still refuses to
give market forces free rein as in China. Add in last
July's half-baked reforms, and it's hard to imagine that
most North Koreans don't harbor criticisms of their
rulers' failure to provide (while the elite live well),
even if it's unsafe to speak out.
Another factor
is that North Korea classifies everyone into three
categories - loyal, wavering, or hostile - with up to 50
subdivisions. This determines everything: where you
live, what you eat, what job you do, whether you can go
to university, and more. Defectors confirm what is
hardly surprising: that this is hugely resented as
grossly unfair, based as it is on ascribed guilt (eg
having grandparents who were landlords, or relatives in
South Korea) rather than anything you yourself have
done. With more than half the population classified as
wavering or hostile, why should they be loyal to rulers
who mistrust them? The extreme and arbitrary cruelty of
the gulag, where whole families are sent, similarly
breeds hatred.
Will the worm ever turn? Over the
years there have been occasional reports of unrest,
usually military, but none has been fully confirmed. If
any risings did occur, they evidently failed: Kim
Jong-il is still there. Iraq, after all, has shown how
an unpopular but brutal and well-organized regime can
crush resistance and cling to power. In that poignant
and pointed TV image, even pulling down Saddam's statue,
let alone the man himself and his rule, needed a big
helping hand from an American tank.
Whatever Kim
Jong-il's nightmares, somehow I doubt if we shall ever
see tanks of the USFK (United States Forces, Korea) - or
even South Korean - rolling down Pyongyang's broad
avenues. But there are other ways to separate a people
from their rulers. Doug Shin, a US-Korean activist,
plans to send thousands of tiny radios by balloon across
the Demilitarized Zone from South Korea. Sounds crazy to
some, but hey, why not give it a try?
Two final
contrasting stories, both of which fall back on the
Confucian paternal imagery so prevalent in North Korea:
an odd fate for a place that started out to be
communist. A pro-North Korean in Japan, shocked by Kim
Jong-il's admission last year of kidnappings from Japan,
struggled to stay loyal thus. Your father may do bad
things and come home drunk - but he's still your father,
right?
By contrast, two Dickensian urchins who'd
crossed into China to beg for a living, caught on camera
in one of Kim Jung-eun's fine documentaries on North
Korean refugees, drew a different conclusion. Relaxing
for a moment into a childhood cut all too short, they
sang a song about Our Father (aboji) Kim Jong-il
and how he cares for all the children. Then the penny
dropped. "Pretty crappy dad, huh?"
Aidan
Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in
sociology and modern Korea, Leeds University,
England.
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