Pyongyang's True Ideology
North Korea is no communist state.
By
B.R. MYERS
Wall Street Journal Asia
JUNE 30, 2009
How long will the U.S. and its allies keep
misperceiving North Korea as a communist state? For decades the
regime in Pyongyang has preached the racial superiority of the
Korean people, and still the red label sticks. Now the country is in
the throes of a massive military propaganda campaign exhorting its
citizens to increase productivity not to better the people's lives,
but to strengthen national defenses against the racial enemy -- "the
Yankee beasts in human masks," as North Korean television news put
it last week. If Washington doesn't recognize Kim Jong Il's regime
for what it is -- a hardline nationalist state -- it will make
dangerous policy miscalculations.
Hardly had Pyongyang signed a disarmament
agreement with Washington in late 1994 than Kim Jong Il, calling
himself Chairman of the National Defense Commission, proclaimed a
"military first" policy. Henceforth the country's economy would
revolve around the army's needs. Kim's political convictions would
be obvious to anyone familiar with fascist Japan.
That country was the world's first
self-proclaimed "national defense state." Japan's leaders
demonstrated that a leadership cult, a repressive security apparatus
and a command economy do not a communist country make. In 1945
former North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il's father, and
his faction conducted a wholesale "Koreanization" of imperial
Japanese propaganda, taking over everything from the cult of the
parental Great Marshall on a white horse right down to the myth of a
uniquely virtuous race surrounded by an evil world. The elder Kim
paid lip-service to Marxism-Leninism even as he purged his young
regime of Korean communists.
This ideological heritage
is more obvious today than ever. Current propaganda extolling the
ongoing "150 Day Battle," the most hysterical in a long line of
production campaigns, likens every worker to a fighter. Signs
reading "battleground" hang over the entrances to mines and
factories. The nation's youth are exhorted, in ever more strident
tones, to prepare to sacrifice their lives for the General, to
become "resolve-to-die squads" (
gyeolsadae)
and "human bullets" (
yuktan)
in the "holy war" (
seongjeon)
against America. These are exact Korean translations of terms and
symbols used in fascist Japan.
North Korea is a state more interested in
enhancing national pride and strength than in raising the masses'
standard of living. Its militarism is ideologically driven and not a
reaction to U.S. policy shifts. This runs counter to current
thinking on the left in Washington, which argues that North Korea, a
chronic violator of contracts and treaties, would have adhered
religiously to the Agreed Framework of 1994 if U.S. had only kept
its side of the bargain. This is worse than mere naivety. The
"military first" policy was premised on the principle that a
normalization of relations with America was neither possible nor
desirable. It proclaimed a mere 10 weeks after that agreement was
signed.
Only by recognizing the true nature of North
Korea's ideology can the U.S. understand the impossibility of what
it now wants the country to do; namely, disassemble its nuclear
program. A communist state could conceivably disarm and go back to
pursuing its original goal of a workers' paradise. A hardline
nationalist state, on the other hand, lives and dies by its record
of standing up to the outside world. This is especially so for a
regime that must maintain some degree of domestic support with a far
richer South Korea next door.
Those in the West who still place their hopes in
negotiations and trust-building measures need to ask themselves this
simple question: How could the North Korean regime continue to
justify its existence after trading national pride for an aid
package? The simple answer is that it can't -- and won't.
Mr. Myers is a North Korea researcher at Dongseo University in
Busan, South Korea.