Portugal 7, North Korea 0

Above Criticism,

I’ll retract the “racist dwarves” comment, but I’ll stand by the rest of my post. I revel in their misery because it’s yet another blow to morale and regime ideology. The more demoralized the population becomes and the more the regime’s ideology is proven false, the more likely it is that the people of North Korea will be liberated from their massive concentration camp by their own hands. The mighty pure-blooded Warriors of Joseon, guided by the ever-victorious Lodestar of the Race and the invincible Military First Politics getting skewered at the hands of a mixed-race, capitalist team on live TV? Priceless. And probably a little–just a little– more doubt has been sowed.

Hence, I don’t think my reveling is out of line.

True, teams are made of ordinary people, but the team itself has symbolic value; it represents the country it came from. As Seinfeld said, when you root for (or against) a team, you’re really “rooting for laundry.”

This is somewhat unrelated, but:

Morally, is there any difference between rooting for North Korea in the World Cup and Nazi Germany at the ’36 Olympics or South Africa during the Apartheid-era?

Above Criticism,

Good points. I think this is where we disagree:

I’m inclined to think that
many (most?) North Koreans are no longer true believers, but have simply been bludgeoned into submission by the sheer, grinding misery of their daily lives.

I am of the B.R. Myers School of thought which in effect says that the ethno-nationalistic and the Orwellian “war is peace” propaganda is so thoroughly deployed that regime support is quite strong and most, if not nearly all people, are true believers. Defector testimony seems to support this position, as many defectors who come to the South still look back fondly on Kim Il Sung and the system he created (usually they blame petty functionaries for all their misery, and it’s interesting to note that NK refugees are economic refugees, not political refugees). Admittedly, defector testimony is going to be biased, and there is no real way to judge the popular opinion of North Koreans residing in the North, so I think on this point we will just have to agree to disagree.

I think North Korea’s players have nothing like the freedom to come to knowledgeable, moral points of view, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be able to act on them.

I think this point is valid for average North Korean citizen, but not for the soccer team. The team travels extensively throughout the world and interacts with foreigners on a regular basis. There are also several Zainichi Koreans on the team who have experienced life in the South and Japan. Certainly the team is part of the “chosen elite” (just the fact that they are able to play pro-soccer and not work the fields or the factories shows this), and they are capable of making informed choices.

As for a single lose, the effects on North Korean worldviews are hard to quantify and the overall effects in isolation are probably fairly low. That said, a single sheet of paper has almost no thickness (relatively speaking), but a stack of papers is quite thick. In the same way, a single lose won’t throw the country into a tailspin, but a series of shocks—coming about as reality is revealed through greater openness and the spread of markets—will have an effect in the long-run. What makes this lose hard to take for average North Koreans is the fact that KJI himself was hyped up as the genius behind the team’s victories. The lose against Portugal was in many ways a personal defeat for KJI (in the eyes of his followers). Combine this with the recent string of economic failures, and suddenly it seems quite potent.