Tomorrows City

In 1980 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the earliest, and most eloquent, leaders of the Soviet dissident movement, published a short collection of essays called The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the threat to America. He evaluated the prevailing trends, which he saw as extremely worrying, in western perceptions and portrayals of the Soviet regime, in popular culture, academia and the news media, which had led many ordinary Americans, but also distinguished policymakers at the highest levels of government, to view the Bolshevik revolution, and the brutal regime it created, as a natural product of Russia’s autocratic history, a modern extension of the Tsarist monarchy that proceeded it. Instead of viewing the worst aspects of the Soviet system- the Gulag, the KGB, a one-party state that criminalized internal dissent- as the unique, and terrible, characteristics of a Communist dictatorship, it had become much more common and fashionable, by the early 80s, to blame all the atrocities of Communism in its Soviet form, along with Soviet provocations on the International stage, as a product of an autocratic tradition limited to Russia. This in turn had allowed the west, with the supposedly higher value it placed on democracy and freedom (as if the stoned hippies occupying college offices had a better understanding of freedom than people languishing in the gulag), to view itself as completely immune to a catastrophe like the Russian revolution. To suggest that the Soviet system had taken such a repressive form, not because of its Communist ideology, which advocated ‘any means necessary’ for the destruction of capitalism, but simply because its architects were Russians, and not say, Brits or Frenchmen, was little more than blatant racism. But aside from its offensive implications about Russian history, which were oversimplified at best and blatantly false at worst, the western assumptions- that Russia was uniquely prone to autocratic leadership, in ways that “the rest of us” were not- had enabled the “free world”, particularly its apparent leader, the United States, to lower its guard against the “mortal danger” of Communism.

Its 2011, of course, and the Soviet Union has collapsed, and despite its lingering appeal for contrarians in Che t-shirts, communism is widely recognized as the failure it was. But when it comes to popular analysis of “the last Stalinist regime”, the same disturbing phenomena that Solzhenitsyn wrote about, in relation to our stereotyped perceptions of Russian ‘autocracy’, consistently reappear in equally false, and often offensive, forms. Dictatorship is a historical crisis to which few nations have proven immune; countries that today can boast of themselves as model democracies, often *became* democracies only after centuries of tyranny. (Think of the Magna Carta, the American and French revolutions…) But acknowledging that our own democracies, far from being invincible, are the fragile products of centuries of continuing struggle, is hardly as rewarding as congratulating ourselves on “American exceptionalism”. So when we think of another country, thousands of miles away, ruled by a truly evil dictator, our initial naive reaction is to think “that could never happen here”. America, and the “free world”, are free because we’re lucky; we didn’t share a border with the Soviet Union and China, the two main Communist powers after world war II, so we didn’t have to worry extensively a Soviet occupation, North Korea on the other hand… But thats a bit unnerving even if its true. So we search for something distinctly “other” in a country’s history and culture, something that can explain, or *seem* to explain, its current destiny.

“An oppressive government is to be more feared than a tiger.” -Confucius

In 2009 the Discovery Channel aired a documentary about North Korea entitled “Nuclear Nightmare”, in which it attributed the cults of personality around Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and the fact that the North Korean people continue to submit to the dictatorship, to one of the oldest organized religion still in existence- Confucianism- even though the Korean Workers’ Party, in its own propaganda, describes its official ideology Juche, as simply a specific application of Marxism-Leninism. According to the narrator, “Kim enhances his godlike image by exploiting longheld cultural traditions rooted in confucianism. Juche is based on Confucian civilization, in that the state is an extended version of the family, and therefore the leader is the father.” Professor Moon Chung-in, in an interview on National Public Radio, made a similar argument in relation to the hereditary succession process- Kim Jong Il was appointed by his father in 1980, and just recently appointed his son, Kim Jong Un, to succeed him. “North Korea is more confucian than Confucius”, he claimed.

What he neglected to mention was that those same Confucian traditions, despite their insistence on obedience and a proper hierarchy, also explicitly stipulated that, with the respect of his subjects, a ruler also acquired a major responsibility- to use his powers for the benefit of the people he ruled- and that if he failed to fulfill his duty, the hierarchical relationship, in that particular instance, lost its validity. So the Confucian concept of the state, though hardly a democratic one, was in essence a social contract between ruler and ruled- not a carte blanche for tyranny. In 1945 when Kim Il Sung was installed by the Soviets, North Korea enjoyed the highest level of development in continental Asia. Today, it is the poorest country in Asia and one of the poorest in the world, its population has been decimated by mass starvation, and hundreds of thousands of its people have risked imprisonment, torture and even death to escape to China and South Korea. Kim Jong Il and his father alike, though clearly enjoying the general compliance, and at least the apparent respect, of their countrymen, have consistently failed, with often devastating results, to fulfill the basic obligations of a ruler worthy of obedience.

According to historian and author Bruce Cummings, the “demonization” of Kim Jong Il in the media, and the inclusion of his regime in Bush’s “Axis of Evil”, can be attributed to pernicious stereotypes about “Oriental despotism”. But in his book North Korea: Another Country, explains, and attempts to excuse, the repressive nature of the regime, by saying:

“Does this system promote human freedom? Not from any liberal’s standpoint. But from a Korean standpoint, where freedom is also defined as an independent stance against foreign predators—freedom for the Korean nation—here, the vitriolic judgments do not flow so easily. There is one undeniable freedom in North Korea, and that is the freedom to be Korean.”

What the author is suggesting is astounding, and quite disturbing, on two levels: first, it implies that personal freedom, and the rights of the individual, are not, in fact, universal; that human rights is a concept that varies from country to country (International law is based on exactly the opposite assumption, that human rights are innate and universal, and that no government has the legitimate authority to change that.) But what Cummings is also saying- in a blatantly racist fashion- is that Koreans’ understanding of freedom is radically different from his own; he actually juxtaposes a “liberal” definition of freedom, the basis of modern democracy, with a supposedly separate definition unique to Korea- as if “Korean” and “liberal” were mutually exclusive.

Sovietologists at the height of the Cold War- who had concluded that the Soviet regime, however unique in history for the nature and extent of its crimes, was essentially the logical extension of the Tsarist regime before it- made exactly the same error in analyzing a non-western culture. Ordinary Russians, they said, after centuries of continual oppression, first by the Tsar and now by the Central Committee, had a vastly different understanding of what it meant to be free. If that were the case, though, what about Solzhenitsyn? What about Sakharov? If Russians’ conception of freedom were radically different from our own, the Soviet dissident movement would never have emerged in the first place. And so it is today with the “last Stalinist state”.

North Korean society remains, in western public perceptions, practically identical to the image of it projected by the regime: hysterical mourners crying over the death of the “great leader”, goose-stepping soldiers marching ominously through Pyongyang, masses of people gathering, supposedly in awe and admiration, to file past the enshrined body of the Eternal President- all this is commonly regarded, and taken largely at face value, as proof positive that the entire population is brainwashed; that after a lifetime of indoctrination (in unheated schools, with empty stomachs) about the greatness of the Party and the evils of the Yankee imperialists, North Koreans today, like Hitler Youth in the 1930s, are fanatically and dangerously loyal to a madman-cum-dictator. Five or ten years ago, of course, many of these assumptions would have been accurate; if all forms of media, and all sources of information, are censored and controlled by the ruling Party, if the official version and analysis of the day’s events, and the official interpretation of history, is in fact the only version, and the only analysis, available, ordinary people often have no alternative but to believe that version. Value systems and ideologies different from or in conflict with Communism, political, social and civic groups separate from the Party, were violently eradicated at the very inception of the state. Christian churches, Buddhist and Confucian temples, nationalist or conservative political parties were all banned, and their leaders and members put to death or sent to labor camps. As a result, until very recently, the regime had maintained an internal hegemony, with airtight control and dominance over the entire civilian population, and its state regulation of all sources of information. The intended result, which until recently was an unquestionable success, was the almost total loyalty of its the vast majority of its citizens. But this is changing. Since the 1990s over 300,000 people, in a country of 23 million, have fled from North Korea to China, and another 20,000 have defected the Republic of (South) Korea. According to the regime, this is treason, and the penalty, if caught or repatriated, is imprisonment, torture and often public execution.

Dr. Cummings suggested that national self-determination, the “freedom to be Korean” by identifying with the current regime, is genuinely more important to the people of North Korea than the “liberal” concept of freedom, defined by the UN in relation to human rights. ( “The right to food; the right to life; the right to security of the person, humane treatment, non-discrimination and access to justice; freedom of expression/belief/opinion”, all listed in a 2004 UN resolution documenting and condemning the atrocities of the Korean Workers’ Party.) If Cummings were right, and Koreans’ concept of freedom were completely distinct from our own, why would ordinary people- over 300,000- risk their lives to escape?

Kim Jong Il is not an “Oriental despot”, he’s just a despot, plan and simple. The origins of a despotic regime are not unique to any culture; Ivan the Terrible and Stalin were both tyrants, this doesn’t mean the Russian people are more susceptible to tyranny, or less committed to the protection of human liberty, than “we the people of the United States of America”. All it means is that in the course and context of Russian history, the struggle for freedom has been longer and much more difficult. The same is unfortunately true, in 2011, in a country which, 66 years ago, at the end of a world war, had the ill luck to be “liberated” by the Soviet Army.

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