A TKL Re-Run: Winning the Information War
Richardson’s writings on the maintenance of the Cult of Kim, and Matt‘s latest comment on my post on recent acts of resistance inside North Korea turn my thoughts back to the question of what the outside world could do to influence events inside North Korea. The answer: at least something, although the impact is hard to guess before we make a concerted effort. I previously posted my thoughts on the subject at NKZone, in October 2004, and republish them here today because of their pertinence to the discussion. I edited some bad links.
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Winning the Information War in North Korea
(Originally published Oct. 13, 2004)
Someone in the White House will soon have to face the reality that the talks with North Korea have failed and have no reasonable prospect of success.
Having given diplomacy its obligatory chance, the next administration will need another option, or else it will have to learn to live with a radioactive charnel house selling nukes to the highest bidder. We must admit that diplomacy shows no prospect of success on either weapons or human rights. Our policymakers need a realistic formula to either make our diplomacy more effective or achieve our essential goals by other means. That formula requires more than an eternity of pointless six-party haggling or the patently silly of idea of both bilateral and multilateral talks. It will also require a blunt recognition of North Korea’s cheating. North Korea’s secret uranium program, always denied by North Korea and beyond the reach of U.N. inspectors on whom John Kerry places such faith, precipitated the end of the Agreed Framework, not President Bush’s stubborn refusal to ignore it.
What’s Missing from Our Diplomacy?
Our diplomatic prospects are bleak because North Korea wants nuclear weapons more than it wants any inducement we are likely to offer, and because it has no fear that it will face negative consequences if diplomacy fails. Proponents of the Sunshine Policy tell us that Kim Jong-Il fears continued isolation and wants more engagement. In fact, Kim Jong-Il does not fear continued isolation. He might fear the total isolation of a blockade, but his regime needs little foreign trade to survive, and no blockade could completely isolate North Korea without the unlikely cooperation of Russia, China, and South Korea. In fact, the regime needs isolation to survive. It tightly restricts engagement to the bare minimum it needs to preserve its ruling elite. Some in America suggest that we must present North Korea with a credible threat of military force, but Kim Jong-Il has not feared war since the mid-1990s, when the United States concluded that he had nuclear weapons. The threat of war is an empty threat, and the repositioning of U.S. forces in Korea reflects that everyone understands this. Kim Jong-Il does not fear an ignorant, hungry, and miserable future for his country. He does not fear sacrificing them by the millions. He does not fear war his enemies dare not launch.
The NKHRA: An Incentive for Kim Jong-Il?
Kim Jong-Il fears the loss of his control and his lifestyle. He perceives a limited number of real threats to that control. These include a blockade or invasion by China, assassination, coup, or a military revolt, but the United States is unlikely to have the means to bring about any of those results. Kim Jong-Il does, however, have one fear of action the United States could realistically take to threaten his regime’s survival–the breaching of his information blockade over North Korea. North Korea is now suggesting that the United States has already begun to break this blockade, and it’s worried. Here is where the NKHRA becomes critical to the success of diplomacy resulting in a verifiable bargain, or failing that, to changing the North Korean regime without launching a war.
The provisions of the NKHRA that have received the most coverage and discussion are those relating to the appointment of a human rights special rapporteur, increased pressure on the UNHCR, and new conditions on food aid. Those provisions are admirable but unlikely to inspire much concern inside Pyongyang. Provisions on granting asylum to North Korean refugees might merit more concern in both Pyongyang and Beijing, but the United States is unlikely to accept large numbers of North Korean refugees who have proven so emotionally scarred as to be unable to adapt to like in South Korea. Arguably the most underreported parts of the NKHRA are Sections 102 through 104, which appropriate funds for cultural exchange and educational programs, increased radio broadcasts to Korea, and this provision:
The President is authorized to take such actions as may be necessary to increase the availability of information inside North Korea by increasing the availability of sources of information not controlled by the Government of North Korea, including such sources as radios capable of receiving broadcasts from outside of North Korea.
This could mean a lot of things, including smuggling or flying radios into North Korea clandestinely, or even setting up clandestine means to broadcast or publish from North Korea’s borders or interior. It directly threatens North Korea’s fragile but necessary fictions that North Korea is an earthly paradise that provides a far better way of life than neighbors like South Korea, which official propaganda describes as an impoverished vassal state.
Break the Blockade or Break the Bank?
What effect would it have if rural North Koreans, overwhelmingly classified as “wavering” or “hostile,” suddenly began finding color photographs of Seoul’s packed markets, gleaming skyscrapers, or traffic jams? What if thousands of leaflets and inexpensive solar radios fell from the skies, washed up on the shores, or mysteriously appeared in subways cars during power outages? What if a government-in-exile began delivering newspapers, leaflets, and vials of medicine to the most disaffected? Nicholas Eberstadt’s article, The Persistence of North Korea, gives us a pretty good idea of what the North Koreans think:
It is the imperialist’s old trick to carry out ideological and cultural infiltration prior to their launching of an aggression openly. Their bourgeois ideology and culture are reactionary toxins to paralyze people’s ideological consciousness. Through such infiltration, they try to paralyze the independent consciousness of other nations and make them spineless. At the same time, they work to create illusions about capitalism and promote lifestyles among them based on the law of the jungle, in an attempt to induce the collapse of socialist and progressive nations. The ideological and cultural infiltration is their silent, crafty and villainous method of aggression, intervention and domination . . . .
. . . .The imperialists’ ideological and cultural infiltration, if tolerated, will lead to the collapse and degeneration of society, to disorder and chaos, and even to the loss of the gains of the revolution. The collapse of socialism in the 20th Century — and the revival of capitalism in its place — in some countries gave us the serious lesson that social deterioration begins with ideological degeneration and confusion on the ideological front throws every other front of society into chaos and, consequently, all the gains of the revolution go down the drain eventually.
Professor Lankov, of course, recently told us that North Korea’s regime could not survive if its people knew the truth about life in other countries, particularly South Korea. A few of us “imperialists” from throughout the political spectrum have discussed ways to bring about just such a result. The North Koreans think some “imperialists” are already sowing the poisonous seeds of free thought to North Korea:
The imperialists are extensively infiltrating reactionary ideas and culture into other countries by crafty means, vociferating that whatever is impossible to be solved by military threat and blackmail can be solved easily by cultural infiltration . . . . The imperialists are trying to benumb the independent consciousness and revolutionary spirit of the popular masses and enervate them through the infiltration of reactionary ideas and culture into other countries[. . . .] The U.S. imperialists are now bent on their moves to send midget radios and TV sets into the DPRK in an effort to break up the single-hearted unity there and degenerate and disintegrate it from within. . . . Out of the same motive, the U.S. imperialists are trying to send impure publications into the DPRK.
Which proves, if nothing else, that North Korea is as weak in the field of information warfare as it is strong in the artillery department.
When the President signs the NKHRA, a $2 million appropriation will become available to research what those “crafty means” might be. They could include floating cargo into North Korea with large numbers of cheap mylar balloons, or with inexpensive, GPS-guided UAVs. Given favorable winds, objects dropped in international waters and sealed in plastic would wash up on North Korea’s long coasts. South Korea tried these methods on a small scale for years, but gave them up long before the North Korean people were hungry enough to pay them heed.
Of course, North Korea would try to jail everyone caught with an illegal leaflet or radio, but North Korea has already jailed a quarter of million of its own people, and as Martin Luther King taught us, no government can afford to jail everyone. The regime no longer has room to imprison everyone sent back from China, and tuneable radios remain highly prized in North Korea. This is not to deny the possibility that people could die as a result, but many are already dying now.
Degrading the North Korean Military Threat
The regime would also send soldiers and police to try to pick up every smuggled item. Let them. This leads us to the most interesting part of the analysis. Could North Korea’s road-bound, mechanized army and all of its antiquated vehicles effectively keep the countryside free of radios, leaflets, and other contraband? How would this impact the nation’s infrastructure? Would it force the army to send its personnel away from their guns and tanks along the DMZ? Would it force the North Koreans to disperse their forces? Would it loosen the regime’s control in the cities? Would it force the cancellation of military training exercises? Would it strain ageing equipment and lead to a maintenance fiasco? Would it, in effect, keep the regime perpetually off-balance as its army tried to cover vast areas of mountainous countryside, its navy tried to protect two long coasts, and its air force tried to stop thousands of inexpensive balloons and UAVs from penetrating its airspace?
What these key provisions of the NKHRA offer us is a creative, non-violent, but cunningly effective option for bringing true sunshine to North Korea. Think OPLAN 5030 meets Martin Luther King. It would leave North Korea with two choices, both of them bad: spend the entire national budget on litter control, or let the people see the truth. This could force Kim Jong-Il to do what he will never do through diplomacy alone–negotiate in good faith. The other alternative would be his departure from this world. Either way, the big winners would be the people of North Korea.
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