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PYONGYANG WATCH
Guerrilla, or
just outlaw?
By Aidan Foster-Carter
Our last column argued - not for the first time
- that the term "Stalinist" remains useful in explaining
aspects of North Korea's behavior and structure today
(see Stalinism,
revisited, May 7). A more
general claim is that terms of this kind - theory, in a
word - are essential if we're to have any hope of making
sense of what Pyongyang does.
But clearly
Stalinism is not the whole story. It isn't even the
starting point. The Australian Koreanist Adrian Buzo,
who makes the strongest case for the relevance of the
Stalinist epithet, does so in a book whose very title
bespeaks a different - but complementary - hypothesis:
The Guerrilla Dynasty.
Even before his
formative years in Siberia in the 1940s, the young Kim
Il-sung was an anti-Japanese guerrilla in Manchuria in
the 1930s. Hence his Stalinism was grafted on to and
overlaid an earlier key experience, which Buzo sums up
as "the tastes, prejudices and experiences of the
Manchurian guerrilla mindset - militarist, Spartan,
ruthless, conspiratorial, anti-intellectual,
anti-bureaucratic, and insular".
It's a
plausible argument. Nor was Buzo the first to make it.
The Japanese historian Haruki Wada, more sympathetic in
outlook, interpreted North Korea as a "partisan state"
in a book published in 1992. Two years later, searching
then as now for the roots of Pyongyang's bizarre
behavior, I wrote as follows: "Perhaps in his head Kim
Il-sung has never left the maquis of his youth, and
never can. It is as if he has elevated the second-best
exigencies of the guerrilla condition - furtiveness,
mistrust, vigilance, defensiveness, skirmishing, making
do - into a whole way of life and Weltanschauung
[worldview]".
That was when the Great Leader was
still alive. His son Kim Jong-il didn't go through that
formative experience, yet those same state traits are
still very much on display. Maybe by 1994 North Korea
had been so firmly molded by his father that the dear
leader couldn't - or wouldn't, out of Confucian filial
piety (yet another ingredient in the mix) - change the
essentials of the system he'd inherited.
Nor
does this apply only to politics, and to dealings with
the outside world. North Korea also practices what one
can only call guerrilla economics. Patching up and
making do; hunting for scrap metal, even if it means
cannibalizing idled factories; building mini-power
stations on streams that freeze in winter; telling
provinces and counties to fend for themselves for food;
and much more. All this is a great leap backward not
only from a capitalist investment and division of labor,
but from true socialist planning.
But back to
theory. Conceptually, a further twist on the guerrilla
theme comes from South Korean film director Shin
Sang-ok, who simply says: "They are mountain bandits."
If that sounds less than complimentary, Shin speaks from
bitter experience. In 1978 he was kidnapped from Hong
Kong on the Dear Leader's personal orders, as was his
actress ex-wife Choe Eun-hee, to revive North Korea's
film industry. After eight years of (mostly) playing
along, they dramatically escaped in Vienna in 1986.
Importantly, "mountain bandit" is not just an
insult (like James Cagney saying "you doity rat").
Rather, like "guerrilla" or "partisan", it's a concept -
but a different and less forgiving one. Whereas the
guerrilla may have had a noble cause, bandits are
cynics: they're just in it for the money. And they are
parasites: unable to produce anything of their own, they
prey instead upon the productive and law-abiding.
This, I must say, seems a highly apt analogy for
North Korea today. Pyongyang's militant mendicancy over
its nuclear and missile activities is basically bandit
behavior, demanding money with menaces. Pay up, or else:
that's the subtext. (The unspoken rider: And we'll be
back for more in due course.)
Here's a
hypothesis. Perhaps the generational change from Great
to Dear Leader corresponds to this adding of a new layer
of cynicism and calculation to a worldview already
narrow and nasty. It would hardly be the first time that
those who begin as rebels with a cause turn into mere
gangsters. Just look at the so-called "Marxist" FARC
(Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia)
guerrillas, who control large swaths of Colombia -
thanks to the cocaine trade. Or their good friends the
Irish Republican Army in my country, who - like their
Protestant counterparts - have become gangsters using
fear and drug money to control "their" communities. Some
liberation.
And speaking of drugs: remember the
Pong Su? Australian readers will need no reminding of
this big recent bust, involving US$48 million worth of
heroin and a North Korean freighter. If you missed it,
check out Alan Boyd's article on these pages (North Korea: Hand in the
cookie jar, April 29). Though
this case is sub judice, it fits in - as Boyd
details - with a long lurid line of North Korean
complicity in trafficking: from Japan and Taiwan to
Siberia.
Mountain bandits indeed - even if all
at sea, to mix metaphors. Perhaps "outlaw" is the best
word. Many of history's best-known outlaws - Jesse
James, Ned Kelly - remain folk heroes to some, but
common criminals to others. Might Kim Jong-il somehow
see himself as Robin Hood, and the big bad USA as the
Sheriff of Nottingham? In his dreams, maybe. But when
did the Dear Leader ever give to the poor?
Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior
research fellow in sociology and modern Korea, Leeds
University, England.
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