The Marmot’s Hole

As you may have noticed from a number of Korea-based blogs, the North Korean cheering squad (who finally went home yesterday) has been the focus of much press coverage here in Korea (Kevin at IA has an excellent post on it here). A number of pieces of been written concerning the lessons learned from the experience - this piece by OhMyNews’s Kim Hak-kyu, entitled “What the North Korean Cheering Squad has left for South Korean society,” I select because I think it reveals a number of flawed patterns of thought concerning both Northern realities and the future of “unification.”

Allow me to translate the last two sections of Kim Hak-kyu’s piece below:

Understand and acknowledging each other’s differences

The North and South have different systems. The South, despite ups and downs, is a capitalist society that guarantees a certain amount of pluralism. The North, with its singular Juch’e ideology, is at its base a unique kind of socialist society.
For instance, some people speculate that the whole “Kim Jong-il placard” incident took place due to compulsion from North Korean officials, but such talk is no more than conjecture. If we think about all the people who were lost in sadness and cried that “the Mother of the Nation has passed away” when Yuk Young-soo (Park Chung-hee’s wife) died (assassinated, actually) in the 70s, we can sufficiently understand.
But also the North, considering that that they demanded that the South government apologize (for anti-Northern demonstrations) on no less than three occasions, appears to lack sufficient understanding of Southern society. Although Southern society doesn’t guarantee absolutely the right to assemble and demonstrate, it does protect to some extent diversity of opinion and expression. This is different from the North. The North must understand that there are differences between those things that are the responsibility of the government, those that are the responsibility of the Games’ organizers, and those of groups and individuals.
If the North and South do not begin from acknowledging one other, sincere unification can not help but be far off. If both North and South do not change, they cannot sincerely become one.
Given the current situation with our race and on the peninsula, if North and South do not unite their strength and work together, there’s the danger that we will not be able to guarantee even our race’s right to survival. This is why North and South must reconcile and cooperate and urgently start down the road of peace and unification.
The South must recognize clearly that the North is a companion for peaceful unification and that North and South are one entity. Together, we can turn the Korean Peninsula into a wellspring of world peace. Only when we begin to think like this can we stop thinking of the North as an enemy and begin to recognize them as a partner with whom to hold hands.
The North must also recognize that Southern society is different from that found in the North. When the North acknowledges that the South respects diversity, it can begin to make more concrete requests (rather than unconditionally ascribing all responsibility to the Southern government).
North and South must change at the same time.

The South must change its excessively competitive society - a society with extreme differences in wealth, where if you have money you can do all, where people are forced to be hostile and jealous of one another rather than work together. If we do not do so, we cannot embrace the North and go forward in the unification process. If the South does not change, then during the course of “sudden unification” (i.e. following a North Korean collapse), the North can be reduced to a new target of exploitation, and the Northern “people” (used here in the Marxist sense) can become “third class citizens,” amplifying other sources of discord and chaos.
The North must transform its society from a rigid one controlled by a single ideology formed during its long Cold War confrontation with the United States into an inclusive one accepting of diversity while overcoming (its weakness). If the North does not do so, the North will not be able to accommodate the Southern masses’ “wild freedom” during the unification process, and the chances of it becoming wrapped up in discord and chaos are high.
It’s clear from this visit to Taegu by the Northern cheering squad yielded big results in reconfirming that North and South are indeed one. But at the same time, we have to say that it taught us that if both North and South do not change at the same time, then we can not sincerely become one in the end.

Where do I begin with something like this? Perhaps the nonchalance in which the writer deals with the North’s “unique socialist society”? Nowhere does Kim go into detail about what that society entails, perhaps because that would immediately call into question why anyone would want to unify with it. North Korea is, after all, a gulag society, and a dysfunctional one at that. To his credit, the writer does express concern for the North Korean “masses” and the exploitation they may suffer should the North be absorbed by an unreformed South. Yet strangely enough, he mentions neither their current exploitation at the hands of their own government nor that inflicted upon them by South Korean conglomerates (like Hyundai) in the name of “peaceful unification” and “inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation.” Really, what’s the point in protecting the North Koreans from “capitalist exploitation” in a state where insulting the head of state is a capital crime? And what’s the point in unifying the nation if one half is going to remain unfree? That arrangement didn’t work in the United States, and its hard to see how it might work in Korea.

Perhaps more disturbing, however, is Kim’s calls for change in South Korea. Personally, I’m all in favor of reform in South Korea - it’s a nation in dire need of change, and Infidel’s post from yesterday does an excellent job of explaining why. But the LAST thing this nation needs to do is gear reform to the North Koreans, i.e. making South Korea look more attractive to the North Korean leadership. The North Korean state is an anachronism left over from an uglier time in human history, and the sooner it is consigned to the dust bin of progress, the better. Is South Korea’s society “too” competitive? Depends on who you ask. Will it be difficult for North Koreans to adjust to said society? Hell, yes. But it’s South Korea’s competitive drive (i.e. “where people are forced to be hostile and jealous of one another rather than work together”) that is in large part responsible for this nation becoming the economic powerhouse that it is. And its current economic woes are due not to excessive competition and wealth inequalities, but to a lack of competition derived from trade and investment barriers, protected markets, and highly interventionist economic policies. Look, not that making South Korea look more like the North would bring about unification faster, but even if it did, why would you want to unify the two if you’re left with a nation that is even less able to compete in the global economy?

The piece, as a whole, does not make it clear why unification should be so fervently pursued a goal. Yes, Kim writes of “uniting the strengths of North and South” and ensuring the survival of the race, but to be honest, the survival of the race does not currently appear to be in jeopardy - assuming that Kim does not ascribe to the same kind of racialist theories expounded by Chinese and Japanese intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s that envisioned the world as one big racial survival of the fittest. Yes, the threat of nuclear war does exist, but that is not so much a product of Korea’s division than it is a product of the political decisions of the North Korean leadership, and “working together” will do nothing to alleviate that threat. If Kim is referring to the race’s survival in the global economic “war” (as I have heard it referred to many times), it is just as unclear how the addition of 20 million extremely hungry mouths to feed and an entire national economy to rebuild will greatly assist the race in facing competition from abroad (especially if South Korea undergoes the kinds of changes Kim promotes). Sure, perhaps the Korean Peninsula can become a catalyst of world peace, but then again, I’m not quite sure how peaceful unification will affect people in Angola.

To be fair, it should be pointed out the Kim is under the assumption, as are many deluded souls both here and abroad, that North Korea can somehow be reformed. Judging from something Kim says towards the end, he appears to believe that the North’s “rigid” system is a product of the nation’s confrontation with the United States, i.e. it’s due to the American “threat” that North Korea must take the extreme security measures that it does. Of course, the writer would hardly be the first to make such a mistake - Western apologists used to say much the same thing about Stalin and Mao when they unleashed equally brutal reigns of terror on their own citizens (”useful idiots” was the term Lenin applied to them, I seem to recall). What Kim fails to understand is that without a rigid system, the North Korean state would simply cease to be - the American “threat” is simply an ideological crutch. The bizarre behavior exhibited by North Korean citizens - so often interpreted as deep respect and affection for their Dear Leader - is the product of a totalitarian system with a stranglehold on information and complete control over life and death. Loosen social controls, and what you have is not reform, but the start of a revolution - a revolution North Korean leaders, many of whom are likely to face charges of crimes against humanity should they loose power, are determined to prevent.

In the end, no matter how much people talk of “peaceful unification,” there is precious little anyone can do to actually bring it about. Sports events, cheerleader troops, high-level negotiations - they may (or may not) be useful in keeping relations between the two Koreas relatively cordial, but in the end, they do nothing to bring unification closer. There can be no “negotiated unification” - the two systems are diametrically opposed, and what’s more, one of those systems no longer works. Talk of improving relations between the two Korea can be constructive, but ultimately, talk of unification is counterproductive - at best, it leads to unrealistic expectations, and at worse, it may lead to unwise policy decisions that not only cause great harm to the nation, but make it less able to handle unification when it finally does occur.