Why
the Kim regime will never
die By Kim Myong Chol
The political unrest sweeping the Arab
world is spawning all-too-familiar wishful
thinking in Western capitals about North Korea.
The more widespread this thinking is, the more
grudging respect the world will need to show for
Kim Jong-il's statesmanship when it is proved
false.
No sign of instability The BBC, reporting on February 24 from Seoul,
notes no sign of instability in North Korea:
Since the end of the
Korean War in 1953, various experts on the North
have been predicting it would collapse. It has
not. At present there are no signs that what is
happening across North
Africa and the Middle East
makes that any more likely.
The following day the New
York Times echoed a similar view:
But has it been a winter of
discontent? Not so much. Officials in Seoul said
they have seen no signs of unrest in North
Korea, and certainly nothing that suggests a
Middle East-style revolt might be taking shape
there.
Recent refugees, scholars of
North Korea and South Korean government
officials see no signs that the economic
hardships are pointing toward political
instability. They see no existential threat to
Kim Jong-il and his regime, whether through
civil unrest, political factionalism or a
military revolt.
Regime change, as
tantalizing as it might be to Seoul and
Washington, seems remote. Mr Kim looks to be in
passably good health. And the apprenticeship of
his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, appears to be
under way, albeit slowly and
quietly.
The New York Times of
November 30, 2010, dismissed the talk of the North
Korean collapse as "rooted more in hope than in
any real strategy":
They [State Department cables] also
show that talk of the North's collapse may be
rooted more in hope than in any real strategy:
similar predictions were made in 1994 when the
country's founder, Kim Il-sung, suddenly died,
leaving his son to run the most isolated country
in Asia.
The West's two leading media
outlets failed to come up with any convincing
reason for the absence of political unrest.
What the West has yet to appreciate is
that North Korea under Kim Jong-il is so resilient
that it will last hundreds of years and enjoy a
millennium prosperity, as indisputably shown in
his first-class statesmanlike stewardship of North
Korea's emergence into two elite clubs - that of
space and nuclear powers - nullifying the United
States-initiated sanctions.
The Telegraph
of London on September 22, 2010, called the
resilience of Kim Jong-il's administration "a
puzzle to many Western observers":
The fact that the Kim Family Regime
has lasted this long is a puzzle to many Western
observers ... North Koreans remain politically
loyal to the Kims, with almost half the people
who leave the bankrupt state returning
voluntarily, according to Korea specialist Brian
Reynolds Myers, the author of The Cleanest
Race: How North Koreans see Themselves and Why
It Matters. "Even today, with a rival state
thriving next door, the regime is able to
maintain public security without a ubiquitous
police presence or a fortified northern border,"
he remarks.
The 5,000-year history of
one of the oldest nations in the world shows that
a millennium kingdom is a Korean tradition.
Ancient Korea, founded by Dankun 5,000
years ago, lasted 2,000 years, Koguryo lasted not
less than 700 years, Silla about 1,000 years,
PaeKche nearly 700 years, Koryo more than 500
years, and Li Korea more than 500 years.
Korean history knows very few rebellions
or coups, unlike China or Japan whose dynasties
lasted up to about 200 years.
South Korea
is an exception. Its first president was dethroned
in a student rebellion. Two military coup d'etats
enabled General Park Chung-hee and General Chon
Du-hwan to seize power. Nationwide protests
against US beef imports nearly toppled the regime
of President Lee Myung-bak.
In an op-ed in
The Age of Australia on January 8, 2003, Dr Gavan
McCormack, professor of Pacific and Asian History
at the Research School of Pacific and Asian
Studies, wrote:
North Korea's real uniqueness in the
nuclear age is its having lived under the shadow
of nuclear threat for longer than any other
nation, from the Korean War, when General
Douglas MacArthur had to be restrained from his
plan to drop "between 30 and 50 atomic bombs",
through the long Cold War, when the US
introduced nuclear artillery, mines and missiles
into Korea, and after it, when rehearsals
continued for a nuclear bombing strike.
After facing for half a century the
threat of extermination, it would be surprising
if North Korea did not now show signs of
neurosis and instability.
A long-time
Korea watcher and former CNN reporter Eason Jordan
declared at a Harvard University lecture on March
10, 1999:
North Korea is the most bizarre
country on the planet. And some people would say
it doesn't qualify as a country on the planet;
it should be planet into itself. But North Korea
is unique in many ways, including having the
first hereditary passing of the torch in a
communist country.
So I would say the
outlook is bleak, but I can guarantee you this:
When you hear about starvation in North Korea,
you hear about famine in North Korea, you hear
about the backwardness of the country, a lot of
very level-headed, logical thinking people think
"Well that country cannot survive. There is no
way a country like that can survive." And I'm
here to tell you with absolute certainty those
guys will tough it out for centuries just the
way they are.
The New York Times on
June 3, 2009, reported that senior Defense
Department officials routinely describe this
enigmatically tough North Korea as "not of this
planet".
The most striking thing about
North Korea is that its whole population of 24
million people make up an awesome corps of highly
motivated and well-disciplined candidate suicide
bombers, dedicated to their supreme leader-cum
father figure Kim Jong-il in a highly
nationalistic society with traditional values.
More often than not, Western media
mistakenly compare North Korea to "a state of 24
million cult members".
In a nationalistic
North Korean society, a national leader is a
benevolent father and mother figure who takes good
care of his people, who are his children.
The North Korean people take this for
granted and are willing to lay down their lives to
protect the fatherly leader and the nation as the
source of infinite pride and joy.
An
individual's life, youth, and happiness are
precious but each citizen is aware that Korean
sovereignty, dignity and national security are
much more valuable, since the loss of the country
would mean their automatic disappearance.
This traditional code of conduct governs
North Korea and the Korean diaspora abroad, where
little violence is seen in schools or homes as
parents, teachers and elders wield absolute
authority.
It is beneath Korean dignity
and ethics even to feel aided and abetted to the
slightest degree by domestic violence next door or
far away. Korea's traditional values are such that
fratricide or matricide or domestic disobedience
is unknown.
Like the founding father Kim
Il-sung, Kim Jong-il distinguishes himself from
previous national heroes and leaders, Korean and
foreign, by his close ties with his people and his
status as a paragon of direct democracy,
transparency and accountability: carrying out more
than 200 on-the-spot guidance tours a year, a
total of not less than an estimated 3,000 local
visits since 1994.
The Christian Science
Monitor wrote January 4, 2007:
One side of Kim only now emerging is
how closely he stays in touch with the people.
The Dear Leader is on the road, working the
crowds, a great deal. Studies of Korean media
show Kim averages about 150 local visits a year.
He may not make live televised speeches, but
he's at a school, a factory, a farm, a military
base - every three days. (He shows up at a
military unit once a week.) This suggests a
populist streak.
"When someone you
worship comes to your factory, it's a personal
connection. We tend to overlook this simple
fact," says [Alexander Mansourov of the Asia
Pacific Center for Security Studies in
Honolulu], who has tracked Kim's appearances.
"Kim knows the local leaders, the opinion
makers, the local cadres. He's not in a
fishbowl. He may be a dictator, but he's also a
populist."
The North Koreans see a
heaven-sent peerless national hero and great
patriot in the father image Kim Jong-il and
identify him with the proud Korean nation, its
future and destiny.
Kim Jong-il has
established his nationalist credentials as the
greatest peerless nation hero by miraculously
saving the country from the greatest threats to
the Korean nationhood:
The 1991 collapse of the socialist camp
The repeated nuclear showdown with the US
The 1994 passing away of the founding father
Kim Il-sung
The 1995-97 arduous march in the wake of
severe natural disasters
The harsh criminalizing sanctions and
regime-change attempts by the Americans and their
followers.
This long list of shining
achievements whose credit goes to Kim Jong-il is
topped by two feats: One is his successful efforts
to keep the trigger-happy Americans at bay and
prevent the Korean Peninsula and the rest of East
Asia from being reduced to another Iraq and
Afghanistan. The other is his first-class
statesmanship that catapulted a tiny Far Eastern
country sandwiched by big powers to the regular
membership of the three elite clubs of space
powers, nuclear powers and prosperous nations.
Kim Jong-il stands out as the first
national hero who will not leave the ancestral
land of Korea in war and ruin, in other words, has
won successive bloodless victories over the
world's sole surviving superpower.
There
is little doubt in the eyes of the Korean people
that their father figure is an ever-victorious,
iron-willed and brilliant commander. He has
transformed North Korea into an impregnable
fortress equipped with the nuclear second-strike
capability to the point where the main theater of
a new war will be the metropolitan USA.
Former US ambassador to China, Winston
Lord and Leslie H Gelb, president emeritus and
board senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, discussed America's repeated cave-ins
to Kim Jong-il's North Korea in their joint op-ed
in the April 26, 2008 edition of the Washington
Post, "Yielding to North Korea Too Often".
United States Defense Secretary Robert
Gates cited on January 11 Pyongyang's development
of intercontinental ballistic missiles as a direct
threat to the US.
Kim Jong-il's North
Korea has had six standoffs with successive US
administrations from Lyndon B Johnson to the
present President Barack Obama, each of which has
ended with the US backing down.
What
figures most prominently in the defense of peace
and security of the Korean Peninsula is the
signature military-first policy of Kim Jong-il and
the resulting austere life the Korean people
accepted in upholding that policy.
Otherwise, the booming economies of South
Korea, Japan and China may have evaporated in a
consuming thermonuclear conflagration. The
skyscrapers of the metropolitan US would have been
bombed back to the Stone Age in a nuclear exchange
between nuclear-armed North Korea and the
declining superpower.
Next year when he
will turn 70, Kim Jong-il will certainly wear a
new cap: architect of prosperity, heralding a
golden age of a Koguryo-like millennium state in
Korea's history of 5,000 years.
The year
2012 will most likely witness North Korea -
already a regular member of the two elite clubs of
space and nuclear power - garner a third title, a
member of the club of prosperous nations at long
last.
Next year, no less than one in 10
North Koreans, or more than two million will own
cell phones, with the entire population of more
than 20 million North Koreans to own their own
cell phones well before 2020. It is by this year
that North Korea plans to catch up with France,
Germany and Japan, finding itself among the most
advanced countries.
North Korea's
scientists, engineers and workers have built many
ultra-modern clean computer-operated plants across
the country which produce a wide range of
products, from machine tools, heavy equipment for
construction, power generators, iron-making
equipment, automatic looms, socks-making machines,
glass bottle-making machines.
North Korea
will be exporting low-cost high-tech products such
as off-grid small mobile lightwater reactor power
plants, low-enriched uranium fuel,
satellite-launch vehicle (SLV) services, machine
tools, and heavy construction equipment and steel
alloys, and rare metals.
The Washington
Post reported on February 26 on the completion of
an ultra-modern SLV center in North Korea,
complete with a rocket engine test stand, missile
assembly and test buildings, as well as a launch
bunker and an observation tower.
Britain's
Sky News reported on November 21, 2010:
An American nuclear scientist has
said he was "stunned" at the advanced stage of a
new uranium enrichment facility he visited
recently in North Korea. Stanford University
professor Dr Siegfried Hecker said the plant was
"astonishingly modern" and "would fit into any
American processing facility".
In
September 2006, an American Citybank presented an
amazing economic report to the then-secretary of
Treasury Henry Paulson, portraying North Korea as
Asia's next tiger:
North Korea's economic reforms are
probably broadly comparable to those in China in
the mid- to late-1980s. In some areas, such as
foreign exchange rate policy, North Korea is
probably already beyond the China of the early
1990s. Actual progress in economic reforms has
been way beyond our expectations.
Four
years later, on September 11, 2010, the Chinese
news service Xinhua reported from Pyongyang on its
fantastic nightlife, a clear sign of North Korea
about to join the club of thriving nations:
Roller coaster screams, karaoke
happy hours, and beer glass clinks at night,
quite a deja vu of metropolitan areas like New
York, Tokyo or Beijing. Well, make no mistake.
That's just a snapshot of what night life in
Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea (DPRK) can
provide.
Kim Myong Chol is
author of a number of books and papers in Korean,
Japanese and English on North Korea, including
Kim Jong-il's Strategy for Reunification. He
has a PhD from the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea's Academy of Social Sciences and is often
called an "unofficial" spokesman of Kim Jong-il
and North Korea.
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