OhMyNews Against Reunification

Remember reunification–the dream of all Koreans? That’s soooo last week. Have a look at what OhMyNews is printing now—

Regime change in North Korea would mean the disappearance of the country itself. North Korean statehood as such would be finished, as South Korea could not possibly accept any new separate power in North Korea formed “on the local base”.

Such a new power constellation is anyway highly unlikely, simply because there is no human potential for it in the North in the short run, and would seem even more unlikely in a crisis likely to involve massive refugees and local conflicts with arms falling into the hands of warlords. This means that any change of regime in North Korean case would boil down to the absorption of North by South, with the North becoming an “occupation zone”.

Yes, reunification would mean the disappearance of North Korea. It would also mean the disappearance of South Korea. Reunification, if I understand the term, means that two smaller things become one bigger thing. Does the author mean to say that maps must remain constant lest we go to the expense of reprinting all our atlasses? Or does the author suggest that this is really worth preserving? Or that it’s irrelevant? What exactly is the connection between occupancy of a palace, the possession of helicopter gunships, and the divine right of a monarch to rule his subjects?

The other interesting thing to note is how the left’s yearning for reunification seems to dim when the odds of a Communist government surviving it start looking bleak. Granted, the author, Georgy Bulychev, is a Russian, but given the lack of ideological diversity at OMN, one suspects this view is shared by many on the Korean left.

Given the differences between Northerners isolated and brainwashed for generations and Westernized Southerners, would a Southern occupation be peaceful? Are more than twenty million North Koreans ready to become a “second rate people” in a unified Korea? What would happen if they were suddenly to be thrown into a ‘raw capitalist’ environment, when we know that most North Korean refugees today cannot adapt in the South even after coming there on their own volition? And what about the numerous (two to three million) North Korean nomenklatura and military?

They would expect the worst — not just being left out in the cold like their colleagues in East Germany, but repression. That means that they would be likely to resort to armed, guerilla-type opposition, which would be viewed at least with sympathy by the population. There is evidence that such contingency plans already exist in North Korea. And what if the hypothetical nuclear weapons were in the possession of these rebels?

I’m the last one to deny that reunification will be very difficult–that there will be enormous psychological, social, and economic barriers to overcome–but wouldn’t it be nice if as many North Koreans as possible actually survive to see it? If so many North Koreans prefer the life they live in China to the one they can have back in North Korea, one suspects that they will find ways to survive, adapt, and eventually prosper under reunification. The predictions of an inter-Korean guerrilla war and a new Chong Dong-Young reign of terror are hyperbolic, although plenty of secret police, militia, and Party officials have blood on their hands and are facing some well-earned comeuppance. That has happened in plenty of places that went on to form functioning, prosperous, democratic societies–Afghanistan being only the most recent example to show great promise. North Korea will have its initial spasm of payback, after which it will settle into a long, gradual climb out of chaos and lawlessness that have already swept the countryside in any event.

And what makes North Korea uniquely unsuited to living under anything but repression, as the author suggests? The same old racist argument that Asians aren’t capable of self-government, that they lack the same capacity for thought, reason, love, hunger, and pain as the rest of us. Don’t believe me?

The closed and isolated society still lives by the iron laws of Stalin’s U.S.S.R., made even worse by an oriental reverence for those in power who rule the country by anachronistic command methods. . . . one should not forget that the Oriental Confucian understanding of personal freedom is narrower than that in the West.

Another expert on “the oriental mind.” It crosses my mind that at least 300,000 North Koreans lack the reverence for power that Mr. Bulychev ascribes to them. At the very least, Mr. Bulychev is basing his views about North Koreans’ thinking on his observations of those who are under regime control, who can’t actually express their own views (there are ways to measure such things, of course; we call them “elections”).

Indeed, I suspect that North Koreans are deeply aware that they are neither free, nor prosperous, nor happy. They may even have a better-developed sense of freedom than the South Koreans do today. After all, freedom isn’t tangible. Freedom is the absence of things that no doubt affect the lives of North Koreans every day: spies on the shop floor, one-channel radios, fear of arrest, and resentment of a thousand petty despots and their arbitrary powers.

Oh, and this guy also believes that Kim Jong Il should have nuclear weapons. He says the idea that Kim Jong Il is dangerous is merely a fiction invented by the U.S. media (and we all know how the media types love G.W. Bush, right?). If this guy’s thinking is in the same axis as the editors at OMN, who are the political base for the people running South Korea today, it’s pretty apparent why there are “differences” between the negotiating positions of the U.S. and South Korea.