Kim Jong Eun Becomes a Focus for North Koreans’ Anger

Interesting report from the Chosun Ilbo:

Nonetheless, starving families are said to have swarmed local party headquarters and protested, and even local party officials are openly complaining. Provincial party officials in Chongjn, North Hamgyong Province, and Hamhung, South Hamgyong Province, effectively stopped working, telling party headquarters there is nothing they can do if there is nothing to eat.

With rumors spreading that Kim Jong-un led an unpopular “100-day struggle” and “150-day struggle” that pressed people into service on the farms and even the currency reform, public disaffection is reaching critical mass.

A recent North Korean defector said people are openly calling Kim Jong-un “an immature little bastard” who is “more savage than his father.” Anti-government sentiment prevails among college students in Pyongyang and other major cities, who say the dynastic succession is a feudal practice and a betrayal of socialism.

Kim junior has become a sort of lightning rod for discontent, and earlier hopes for change seem to have been abandoned, the defector said. [Chosun Ilbo]

If these reports describe the sentiment of even half of the North Korean people accurately, you have the perfect environment for an insurgency to rise. First, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the regime. Second, there is an absence of effective government.

If an organization rises to snyc up the discontent among the people and oppose terror of the anjeonbu and the bowibu, enough people will be inclined to join that opposition to pose a real threat to the regime’s authority in those areas.

Insurgencies prosper amid anarchy. Wherever the state fails to govern and provide, a well-funded organized opposition movement could move in and quietly assume the role of governance. The opposition could harness existing trade and smuggling networks to resume food distribution, and the supply of clothing and medicine. It could pay the doctors and nurses and stock their clinics. It could pay mechanics and obtain tools and parts for their use. Where the government can’t govern, the opposition would be able to subvert the regime’s infrastructure with little violence, and without most of those collaborating with it even realizing it until they were already implicated. Insurgencies that rise by trying to shoot their way to power usually fail. Insurgencies that rise as shadow governments are very difficult to uproot.

If you want to know how we get Kim Jong Il and Hu Jintao to negotiate in good faith, we do it by acquiring influence inside North Korea and threatening the stability of the regime.

7 Responses

  1. The report in Daily NK of an emergency SPA meeting that will reinforce the “Military First” policy suggests that the discontent with the potential for succession by Baby Kim is now so great that the party needs to bribe the military to stay loyal.

    I still don’t see a grassroots surge for national independence and free markets — the threat is a reformist agenda by a privileged subset of the dictatorship. In a society that has seen mass starvation recur twice within a single generation, that threat is most likely to come from 40 year old majors and colonels.

    But what a fascinating report this is — it suggests that, after Good Friends lost their reporters, Chosun Ilbo has found its own internal sources.

  2. I agree with the comment above.
    I’m not sure I see how even a regional grassroots surge could potentially overthrow or destabilize a region’s security and control apparatus. I’m not saying that conscientization through various forms of media is ineffective. Quite the contrary. But unless there is a plausible way to fund, arm, and provide logistical support, any dissident movement would be doomed to failure.

  3. But what a fascinating report this is — it suggests that, after Good Friends lost their reporters, Chosun Ilbo has found its own internal sources.

    Assuming that the report is accurate. I’m having a hard time imagining citizens openly calling Dear Leader’s son a bastard and elite university students from loyal families sitting around debating whether the perfect socialism of the cleanest race is, in fact, feudalism. The gulags are still in operation. I wonder if the report is an intentional or unintentional amplification of information from sources.

  4. I’m having a hard time debating it to myself also Sonagi. But we do now know for a fact, that even the elite in the fortress of hermits questions it’s Founder’s son’s walls. Sonagi within one year from this date, even the elite in Pyongyang will have openly cursed the Kim Dynasty. Mark my words, before the Julian Month of next year (2011), the Kim regime will have fallen. Not the DPRK however. But at least the Kims will have perished.

  5. But we do now know for a fact, that even the elite in the fortress of hermits questions it’s Founder’s son’s walls.

    We do not know that for a fact because there is no accessible primary source to support that statement. Your comment is a conclusion drawn from rumors like the ones floated in the report.