Jasper Becker on Appeasement

More required reading from Jasper Becker. Thanks to Norbert Vollertsen for the hat tip. What is this nagging inconsistency about the region’s North Korea diplomacy? Becker articulates:

Anyone proposing to offer Kim cast-iron security guarantees and unconditional aid thus has to engage in a kind of “double think.” They must ignore their better instincts in order to justify engaging him and simultaneously believe that, given his track record, he is capable of unleashing nuclear weapons. Chinese diplomats routinely claim that there would be tremendous civil disorder if he fell from power. Kim therefore becomes the pillar of regional stability. South Korean officials claim the burden of restoring the North Korean economy is too huge even to think about. Instead of being seen as the chief obstacle who needs to be removed in order to make progress, Kim is elevated to becoming the vital conduit for change.

Becker’s essay goes into so many aspects of what’s wrong with the assumptions beneath our diplomacy, I couldn’t begin to find one paragraph to do it justice. He also tabulates the North Korean regime’s butcher’s bill, which adds up to a ghastly seven million dead. And then there’s this:

The moral case against the North Korean regime was already strong in 1994, but has been strengthened immeasurably with the famine. After Kim deliberately allowed three million of his own people to die in the famine, should he be allowed to stay in power? Genocide is normally interpreted to mean the mass killings of another race … but this too is a form of genocide.

Legally speaking, I’d agree if the Genocide Convention hadn’t been influenced by Stalin’s diplomats to exclude the mass murder of political and social groups. The message to aspiring tyrants is that they are free to slaughter all the commies, fags, kulaks, class enemies, and bespectacled “new people” they wish without having to confront the “G” word in a court of law. Needless to say, the definition is controversial and differs from common understanding of the term.

But is Kim Jong Il a mass murderer? By all means. The rest is up to the lawyers and the hangman.

I’d add that I bought Becker’s new book, Rogue Regime, last weekend, and it does not disappoint. This would make four books on North Korea that I’m currently reading, since I finally turned up that copy of Marcus Noland’s Korea After Kim Jong-Il that I lost on that hectic night I had to bring my son to the hospital.