Götterdämmerung Watch

Writing in Foreign Policy, Marcus Noland writes about discontent and dissent in North Korea, and the impact of The Great Confiscation as a catalyst for it.

The surveys’ results suggest that the regime’s discomfort might be well founded. Countries such as North Korea, where people routinely hide their true opinions, are prone to sudden, explosive political mobilizations like the ones that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1980s. Those mobilizations happen when nascent expressions of discontent cascade — each person who sticks their head above the parapet encourages another to do the same. And in North Korea, the market appears to be just such a semiautonomous zone of social communication (and potentially political organizing) beyond the state’s reach. [Marcus Noland, Foreign Policy]

Until now, I hadn’t gotten around to discussing this piece in the Wall Street Journal by Brian Myers, either, which concludes that the North Korean people have seen the clay feet on the state’s idols. This deserves a more thorough discussion, but I will pause to note that Myers’s view about the subversive power of information does seem to have evolved. In the WSJ, he writes:

What the masses are learning is incompatible with their decades-old sense of a sacred racial mission. They have known since the 1990s that their living standard is much lower than South Korea’s. The gap was explained away with reference to the sacrifices needed to build up the military. What the North Koreans are only now realizing, however–and this is more important–is that their brethren in the “Yankee colony” have no desire to live under Kim Jong Il. In 2007, after all, they elected the pro-American candidate to the South Korean presidency. Why, then, should the northerners go on sacrificing in order to liberate people who don’t want to be liberated? Unable to answer this question, the regime in desperation has resorted to the most reckless propaganda campaign in its history.

Myers casts the discrediting of the regime’s propaganda mostly in terms of the failure of its sacred mission to win the loyalty of South Koreans, but comparative economics is at the heart of this failure:

This “strong and prosperous country” campaign is nothing less than an effort to persuade the masses that economic life will change drastically by 2012, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Great Leader Kim Il Sung, the father of Kim Jong Il. The official media have dubbed 2010 a “year of radical transformation” that will “open the gate to a thriving nation without fail in 2012.” On TV news shows, uniformed students smile into just-delivered computers, and housewives tearfully thank the Leader for new apartments. The media predict even greater triumphs “without fail” for next year. The Juche calendar–which starts with Kim Il Sung’s birth year of 1912, from one and not zero–numbers 2011 as year 100, and thus hugely significant.

Yet while posters show soldiers and workers arm in arm, refugees describe a sharp rise in public resentment of an army that often steals from farms and factories to feed itself. Refugees are just as credible when they report of a severe fertilizer shortage. The party has responded by demanding that apartment blocks deliver ever more human waste. Alas, the residents don’t eat enough to meet the demand.

Such misery prevailed in the mid-1990s too, but at least then the regime admitted an economic crisis, even as it mostly blamed the Yankees. Now it talks of a country transforming itself from one year to the next. No dictatorship can afford to lie so stupidly to its people, or to raise public expectations that will be dashed in a matter of months.

But in this comment on Robert Koehler’s site a year ago, Myers wrote, “I do wish, then, that people would stop acting as if Pyongyang is afraid that its people will find out about the South’s wealth.” To get the complete context of Myers’s argument, read the whole comment and see if you also see the tension between his arguments then and now. Andrei Lankov responded to Myers’s point this way:

If Prof. Myers’ estimates are correct, NK regime has another dirty secret to hide ““ the fact that the average Southerner does not envy the “˜pure’ North Koreans and does not admire their leader. In fact, s/he does not give a damn about the North. If Prof. Myers is right, this revelation is equally dangerous for the NK system .

Myers readily agreed with this in the comment thread, and the same theme seems to be at the core of his point in the WSJ piece. Not that this is a negative criticism. Frankly, I’d seen Myers as a bit too interested in pedantic arguments about the political taxonomy of the North Korean system as left or right, which is much like debating the biological taxonomy of the platypus. More power to Myers if his views yield to the evidence; after all, it is a regime’s capacity to deliver prosperity that lies at the heart of its superiority and legitimacy. Increasingly, even North Korea concedes this.

It is Myers, by the way, who will likely be vindicated in his predictions that any “engagement” permitted by the regime will come to nothing. Meanwhile, the kind of engagement that hides in shipping containers, reflects off of the ionosphere, or gets floated across the Yalu by corrupt border guards is transforming North Korea profoundly, and irreversibly.

Also worth reading are the observations here of Scott Snyder here.