SPEAKING FREELY North Korea - pick your godfather
By Thor Nay
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
CHUNGJU - My friendly neighborhood supermarket checkout girl greeted me with a
joke about emigrating to Australia. Geopolitics is not the currency of daily
conversation in this small, sleepy city in central South Korea, so clearly
something was up.
For a crowded population living in a tiny state on top of 20 nuclear
power reactors (more on the way), and under permanent threat of
annihilation from artillery, missiles and biochemical warfare from their near
neighbor, South Koreans are remarkably phlegmatic about hypothetical threats.
The elders have blocked them out of consciousness, and for the young, raised
like battery chickens in concrete block apartment towers, ignorance is bliss.
Computer game battles are far more real. Suicidal drivers aside, this is one of
the safer parts of the world to live in, day on day. It is rare to feel
personal physical menace. Yet somehow, Kim Jong-il's reported atomic bomb test
has penetrated the blood-brain barrier, torn the delicate psychological veil
behind which ordinary apolitical South Koreans preserve a sense of normalcy. At
the very least, that signals a sea-change in South Korean populist politics.
Political power the world over is a depraved business, mostly in the hands of
rather depraved people. Power, quite simply, is a narcotic for humans, and for
the addict there is no greater priority than guaranteeing the supply.
Deception, fraud, murder and mayhem are small change in the pursuit of power.
This is hardly news. A large part of the world's literature deals with the
subject exactly. News happens when there is competition among the mafia gangs
of politics over territory. If they are fighting over shakedown money in some
unlucky city, that's stuff for the tabloids. If they are fighting over
countries, it is called history.
North Korea is a mafia state par excellence. For two generations now a whole
nation has been held hostage to the depredations of a ruthless power clique.
How have they gotten away with it? Internally, their tools have been
propaganda, brainwashing, isolation, terror and starvation. Externally, the
story is complicated.
The Korean War (1950-53) killed several million Koreans in fratricidal conflict
and traumatized the whole population. They weren't the only losers. China lost
over a million young men for no gain whatsoever, and geopolitically by
sacrificing any possibility at the time of reconciliation with the United
States, it effectively lost Taiwan.
The Soviet Union thought it had gained a client state in North Korea, yet the
historical record shows costs but no profit for the Soviets out of that
relationship. When the USSR dissolved, any remnant illusions about influence on
the Korean Peninsula went with it. The United States acquired an excuse, if it
wanted one, for maintaining a presence on the Korean Peninsula, but with the
passing of time was seen by a large proportion of the South Korean population
less as a saviour than an occupier.
The Japanese, who in spite of lingering animosity have been able to finesse
their relationship with South Korea on many levels and profit handsomely,
gained a dour and implacable enemy in North Korea. The South Koreans themselves
have lived with the knowledge of permanent insecurity and castrated statehood.
They swing between desperate energy to survive and psychological denial helped
along by a passion for alcoholic oblivion.
The North Korean mafia thus established its turf and were able to maintain an
uneasy stability with the wider world at their margins. There were provocations
and skirmishes, but they have survived for 60 years. The reasons for this
warped success have been pretty elemental. They have not been a serious threat
to anyone, except perhaps the South Koreans. Recent memories of the bloody
Korean War have been a real discouragement to letting the dogs of war loose
again. Nobody relishes that prospect, and there isn't even the temptation of
booty. North Korea isn't floating on oil. It can't even feed itself. In
Pentagon-speak, there is hardly a worthwhile list of assets to bomb back to the
Stone Age, and (unlike in China) there's no restive North Korean middle class
to put pressure on the party.
The North Koreans have always held just one major ace: it is a city called
Seoul, and it is within direct range of massive North Korean artillery. The
greater Seoul metropolitan area contains about 22 million people. The Pyongyang
command cabal has demonstrated repeatedly and deliberately that it has no
compassion for its compatriots in the North, let alone the South. Any attack on
their lair could therefore easily involve millions of deaths in Seoul. Such a
sacrifice is of course unconscionable to South Koreans, but even the nabobs in
Washington, Tokyo and Beijing, who aren't bleeding-heart types, won't play that
card without serious provocation.
The reported small North Korean underground test on October 9 may provide real
provocation for external action against the North Korean regime, if it was
actually nuclear. That regime is no longer simply a threat to Seoul. It is now
posing a significant and growing threat to Japan, and possibly even to Beijing.
They will be looking for any opportunity to do something about it. The loudest
noises are likely to come from Japan, whose conservatives have the perfect
excuse to jettison the armament restrictions of the Japanese constitution. The
ultimate effective sanctions, however, will emanate from Beijing, once China's
balance of geopolitical interests tilt against maintaining the status quo in
North Korea.
On paper, North Korea is China's ally and a buffer state against the unwelcome
presence of US military and economic power on the Korean Peninsula. It has also
looked like a handy lever against Japanese pressure. The reality of the
relationship has been less wholesome than that for Beijing. Like the Soviets
before them, they have found the North Koreans eager to grasp goodies, but
reluctant to reciprocate.
Worse, the decrepit public fundamentalism and private gangster mentality of the
North Korean elite has been an insuperable barrier to real economic
development. This in turn has much hampered the economic potential of China's
industrial northeast provinces. An economic powerhouse like South Korea
adjacent to these Chinese provinces would create great synergy and mitigate the
simmering political revolt which now characterizes this rust belt.
North Korea's defensive and attack postures are concentrated on the South. A
Chinese invasion from the north would be extremely hard for them to deflect.
Retaliating against Seoul for Chinese actions from the north would make little
strategic sense, especially since the South Koreans, looking aghast at this
situation, would be unlikely to coordinate with the Chinese military in such a
conquest. Further, Kim Jong-il and company surely realize that the hard men in
Beijing would scarcely be open to blackmail on behalf of Seoul's wretched
citizens.
Well, this is all kite-flying. It is very, very difficult to guess the internal
machinations which would lead the Chinese leadership to such a definitive
commitment. China itself is a vast, roiling polity, virtually ungovernable
without a cloaked threat of blood and iron (as Otto von Bismarck would have
said).
However, its own military is much less than a well-oiled machine ready to jump
to the master's bidding. Perhaps more in line with the thinking of those gents
in the power corridors nowadays would be a distaste for machine-gun diplomacy,
but a heavy investment in extortion, subversion, economic blackmail and, at the
final extreme, things which go bump in the night. All up, Kim Jong-il might
need more than an armor-plated railway carriage and a taster for poisoned food
if he wants to stave off a sticky end.
Thor May has been a visiting professor in South Korean universities since
2000. He taught in China from 1998 to 2000, and has spent much of his life in
expatriate environments. He is an Australian.
(Copyright 2006 Thor May.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
