Guerrilla, or just outlaw?
By Aidan Foster-Carter
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/EE15Dg01.html
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 yongyang'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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