Back (Nationalism, Meet Socialism, Part 3)

For those who noticed my absence, thanks.  Work became too busy to allow any time for blogging, and what time wasn’t spent reading First Amendment cases was spent cleaning up kid-puke.

So, have you seen UsInKorea’s video?  You really, really should.  Especially if you’ve ever considered going to the Arirang Festival.

Update:   You may recall that I’ve noted some of the same similarities of ceremony,  as well as the  similar ideology of racial purity  shared by North Korea and Nazi Germany.  James Lilley, a former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea and China who actually believes in the Sunshine Theory to a limited extent, also draws the comparison.  Unfavorably.

James Lilley was ambassador to both China and South Korea. One of the few Americans to travel inside North Korea, he visited the country in 1995. According to Lilley, “Their system is so persuasive, so totalitarian. I mean, it almost makes Hitler look like a boy scout, what these guys do to their population.” Their leadership, he says, is delusional as they drag out talks on their nuclear arsenal. “They’re playing on it,” says Lilley. “They think eventually they’re going to take over the peninsula. You go up to North Korea, you’re in George Orwell country.” [CBS]

Although the Nazis  certainly inflicted horrors on a far greater scale  than those done by the North Koreans, the Nazis  had nothing on the North Koreans at  creating  a society  so regimented, or a system of control  so  omniscient and intrusive.  I’ve been interested in World War II history since I was a kid, and at various times in my life, I’ve met people who lived under Nazi occupation, including one  woman had been an ardent Hitler Youth member,  one man who had been a member of the SS-affiliated Latvian Legion, and others who had lived under the occupation.  The collective impression I got from them is that the Gestapo tended not to bother non-Jews who didn’t confront the Nazis on political issues, but that they were extraordinarily ruthless to those who got in their way.  On page 73 of “Rogue Regime,” Jasper Becker writes,

Hwang [Jang Yop] repeatedly claims that Kim Jong Il has been a keen student of Hitler and his methods.  ‘He worshipped Germany’s Hitler from an early date and wanted to become  such a dictator as Hitler,’ wrote Hwang in one article published in the monthly magazine Chosun.  The Suryong doctrine certainly seems to be a replica of the Nazi Party’s Fueherprinzip, which transformed Hitler into the divine executor of Germany’s national destiny and hence the source of all laws.  The rules of the Worker’s Party are almost the same as those listed in the Organization Book of the National Socialist Party of Germany.

I treat Hwang Jang Yop’s statements with skepticism, but Becker ends this passage in a footnote, note 6 on Page 277, that quotes extensively from the Nazi Party’s  Organization Book, and the similarity of the ideology is indeed striking.  From there,  however, the North Korean mutation shows much evidence of inbreeding.  Hitler’s  national socialism  borrowed extensively from a former  radical socialist named Benito Mussolini, and was  propogated by an avowed socialist named Josef Goebbels.  This leftist  criticism attempts, with some success, to  link  Park Chung-Hee’s  South Korean ideology to the confucio-fascism of Imperial Japan (Park was an officer in the Japanese Army, but he had also been accused of collaborating with Communists).  This argument holds some merit in describing South Korea as it existed 30 years ago, but you could search-and-replace this article  into a far better criticism of the North today.

Aside from some variations in the speed with which they expropriate wealth, national identity, industry, and religion,  all  of the ideologies that formed in post-World War I Europe shared the idea that  Big Brother’s right and duty was  to  expropriate everything and everyone (though they disagreed on who should  expropriate who).   They all proselytized  quasi-spiritual justifications for one-man totalitarian rule.   In a sense, these competing forms of socialism  were  products of their environment — marketing in  the age of newsreels, radio, and television; and organization by  communes, soviets,  and gaus  based on industrial societies.  In another sense, they weren’t new at all.  The red-banner  European tyrannies of the last century  deified  Big Brother with countless  statues, portraits, and icons, although they were nominally  secular doctrine  and in some cases,  tolerated religion.  In this sense, North Korea is another outlier:   its  highly advanced deification, complete with its own nativity story, makes modern North Korea  more like the  ancient Chinese dynasties, “divine right” monarchies  of  medieval Europe, and Shinto Japan  than Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.  Indeed, one can  wonder if that deification cost 40% of the national budget, even in medieval times.

The scholar B.R. Myers  has written several thoughtful pieces on  North Korean ideology.  In  a must-read article for the Atlantic Monthly,  Myers destroys Bruce Cumings and Selig Harrison, and also  lands a few shots on  Bradley Martin, whom he accuses of fundamentally misunderstanding the subject.  Myers does not explicitly compare North Korea’s ideology to that of the Nazis.  He tends to see it as  a uniquely vicious breed of dog, whereas  I still insist on looking  around the junkyard in wonder for the snarling cur’s parentage.  Still, Myers makes North Korea’s ideology sound more like Hitler’s than like Stalinism or Confucianism, and he thinks the very characterization of North Korea as “Communist” underestimates the emphasis on, and the ferocity and popular appeal of, the racism and xenophobia in its ideology.   Could a rotund little suckling  like  Kim Jong Il, who  loves pizza and watches Daffy Duck cartoons,  be as pathologically dangerous as Myers thinks he is?  Those who comfort themselves with the thought that Western culture is an  antidote to  homicidal hatred of the West should study this picture.

At the risk of  intellectualizing something  silly, I think one of Borat’s moments of comedic genius was how it parodied its protogonist’s view of America, and thereby, much of the world’s  [Spoiler warning!].  Borat falls  obsessively in love with Pamela Anderson, crosses America to  propose marriage, and then does so by trying to  throw a burlap sack over her and  carry her back to the hut in Kazakhstan he shares with a cow.   The  relationship between the  hatred of America as a political entity, the obsession with America as an unattainable myth (thus all the more hated),  and  the hatred of one’s own government are related, but they are by no means as mutally incompatible as political leaders, both ours and theirs,  sometimes want to believe they are.   It’s one more reason to keep Americans out of post-collapse North Korea, though that collapse would come sooner if we  show the North Korean people  how much better life could be without  Kim Jong Il around.