From Sinatra to Dylan: Kim Jong-il's new groove
PYONGYANG WATCH
Asia Times Online
By Aidan Foster-Carter
February 8, 2001

We're still waiting for Kim Jong-il to start putting into practice some of what he saw in Shanghai. But be patient. It's a momentous task. He'll only get one shot at this, so he'd better get it right. And as we wait, it's worth thinking through what changing North Korea will involve. Earlier columns looked at the politics and economics of this. This time we focus on a third dimension: ideology, a key part of the system in Pyongyang. Leaving aside what the Dear Leader is going to do, what is he going to say?

"Sorry" would be nice -- but forget it. Being Kim Jong-il means never having to say you're sorry. This is partly pride, but mainly self-preservation.

Even the kind of formula China now uses for Chairman Mao -- 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong; or is it the other way round? -- would be very risky in North Korea. Not only is the memory of his father Kim Il-sung sacrosanct, but Pyongyang continues to claim infallibility on a papal scale, even for the party. Everything the Korean Workers' Party has ever done has always been 100 percent correct. So if you're starving, blame nature for floods and fickle ex-comrades for pulling the plug. Anyone but us.

The point is less whether people believe this (Abraham Lincoln's "You cannot fool all of the people all of the time" comes to mind) than how an absolutist regime is to justify a policy U-turn without repudiating its past or weakening its grip. Already we have some clues, above all in an intriguing series of remarks by Kim Jong-il carried in the party paper Rodong Sinmun on January 4. Quite different from his usual turgid treatises, these are brief aphorisms that mainly talk sense -- and make the case for change.

First then, Sinatra. "We did it our way" has long been a North Korean mantra, along with less singable phrases lauding "peculiar [sic] socialism of our own style". This of course is infinitely flexible. You do one thing today and the opposite tomorrow -- but it's "My Way" every time. So when Kim Jong-il says "the outworn patterns and practises followed by other countries [need] all-round re-examination", that could be a ploy to ditch old-style communism -- for being foreign. Ironically, hitherto the Sinatra gambit had been used to attack reform as un-Korean, not to say traitorous. But hey, times change.

Cue Bob Dylan. A second point, the one Kim Jong-il starts out with, is indeed that the times they are a-changin'. His own words -- "Things are not what they used to be" -- directly quote another ditty: the Cockney comic Max Bygraves' "Fings Ain't Wot They Used Ter Be". Pleasing though the notion is of the Dear Leader as a closet Bygraves fan, Dylan is an apter analogy. Max moaned, but Bob exulted; and Kim is on Dylan's side -- now. Unlike My Way, changin' times is a new note for North Korea. Here too, until now they'd stressed the opposite: steadfast and proud, no matter what storms may rage.

Next up: Fairground Attraction, chart-toppers (in the UK at least) with "It's Got To Be Perfect". Or as the Dear Leader puts it: "A new age requires us to seek perfection in doing everything" (a tall order for a country mostly unheated during its coldest winter for years). This may be a critique of the old line that urged everyone just to make do, like the partisans did.

Now make-do is no good: only the best will do. That links to a fourth point, where we switch media to advertising. Audi's "Vorsprung durch Technik" echoes Kim Jong-il. Perfect means "technical modernization [in] an era of science and technology which shows startlingly rapid progress". Shanghai rubbed in how far North Korea has fallen behind.

But this "appliance of science" (slogan of the home-appliance maker Zanussi) theme is two-edged. It argues for modernization -- or even for foreign investment, to get hold of the stuff. Yet it may also promote the illusion of a technical fix. Kim waves his wand, and presto! Science solves everything, with no need for markets or capitalism. That is emphatically not the true lesson of Shanghai, which extends to social science: not a category yet accepted in Pyongyang. Another scientific illusion to which Kim Jong-il is definitely prey is the old Marxist one of conquering nature, with dire ecological effects (more on this another time).

In sum, Kim's case for change has four prongs: our way, new times, only the best, and science. They hardly add up to a coherent argument, but that isn't the point. The beauty of this approach is that it avoids direct confrontation with the old line. So lip-service can still be, and will be, paid to army-first politics and other avowed principles -- while in practice moving in a different direction entirely. In a nice piece of casuistry, a more recent Rodong Sinmun editorial on January 16 loyally endorsed the army-first line -- but insisted that the only way to make it effective is to focus on improving the economy.

Purists may object that all this involves squaring the circle. Indeed it does. Yet China continues to call "socialist" an economy that is manifestly ever more capitalist -- though ruled by a communist party. Mao would call that a contradiction, or worse. But most Chinese couldn't care what it's called, provided it works. North Koreans too would rather just eat and get warm than split ideological hairs. Anyhow, the bottom line is that what the Dear Leader says, goes. Or in the Lennonist version: "I Am The Walrus".