Götterdämmerung Watch
Open News reports that banditry by hungry North Korean soldiers is turning the population against the army:
According to our source, this kind of situation, where soldiers clean out cattle pens, steal pickled cabbages, take everything from people walking in the streets, and rape women in broad day, has been going on for a long time ““ ever since Kim il-sung’s death.
The source revealed, that North Korean residents looking at rice bags with American flags say, “They once said Americans should be beaten to death”, but now North Koreans even dare to say in public places, “We are still alive because of America, at least they are sending us rice. [Open News]
This isn’t the first report we’ve seen of North Korean soldiers “foraging” at the expense of a hungry population, and in one interview of North Korean refugees conducted for this site years ago, one refugee also seemed to imply that young women lived in fear of rape by soldiers (the rest of that group interview is here).
Reports like these suggest that the regime is having difficulty feeding some military units, particularly those in “non-strategic” interior regions. That probably tells us nothing about conditions within special forces or front-line units, which likely have a much higher place in North Korea’s food chain. In any event, negative public sentiment will be of relatively little consequence until the public is armed, or at least organized.
So much of watching North Korea inevitably comes down to explaining many levels of uncertainty, by sorting out which reports are plausible or at least with other known facts. The disagreement between Good Friends and the Daily NK over the food situation is a good example of this. Both publications have their own independent sources inside North Korea, but both also have different political objectives that may color their reporting. In fact, it’s just very difficult for us to know the true state of North Korea’s food situation, much less how it affects Kim Jong Il’s approval rating, but one impeccable and well-informed source is suggesting that there are widespread negative views of both situations:
The Korean people, on the occasion of the 16th anniversary of President Kim Il Sung’s demise, are recollecting the devoted efforts made by him for a solution to the food shortage. In his lifetime the President visited many farms throughout the country in all seasons regardless of the intense cold and sultriness.
One day in December Juche 36 (1947), he told officials that he was obliged to open the gate of the country at dawn and close it at night and that the Koreans had long desired five things (longevity, wealth, health, blessing of children and peaceful death) but he wanted to make them enjoy all kinds of good luck.
With such devotion to the people, he gave the peasants farmland after the liberation of the country, carried out agricultural cooperativization (sic) after the ceasefire and built socialist rural communities in the country. [KCNA]
The emphasis on Kim Il Sung is interesting. The elder Kim probably remains an object of some reverence for many North Koreans — the beginning of the Great Famine coincided with his death — but my best information suggests that the son and grandson are both widely (if quietly) reviled. And as Kim Kwang Jin explained to me last Thanksgiving, North Koreans have their own ways of expressing those sentiments, chiefly by openly wishing for a war with America and the Götterdämmerung they hope would follow. Open News is reporting more of that sentiment, too.
Public opinion can be an extraordinarily complex thing, particularly in states where information and expression are suppressed. Even in states where opinions can be expressed openly, Americans are often taken aback that societies that are the most anti-American, politically speaking, are often the most enthusiastic consumers of America’s lowest-common-denominator pop culture (personally, I’ve concluded that both sentiments are two sides of one coin, but I’ll leave that discussion for another day). I suspect that we’ll eventually find the same thing to be true of North Koreans — that their views of America are “complicated.” The emotions of their two-minutes’ hate are probably as real as the object of their passion is a caricature. Yet after all of this conditioning, many North Korean defectors want to go to America, and others remember they’re at least eating our rice.
The regime lets people carry about those American rice bags because it has found a way to explain — to spin — their existence as the winnings of nuclear extortion. Many North Koreans probably believe that spin. But in many of those same minds, that belief is probably still subject to reinterpretation.
Please don’t discount Good Friends. They appear to be translating official reports that identify adverse conditions in specific towns or factories. The reports appear to come from factory managers, local police and perhaps some designated Public Opinion section of the Party. Such materials were regularly gathered in alll Sovbloc countries in order to gauge public opinion (or apathy.) In the normal course, in a totalitarian state, these reports would be Top Secret, and any disclosure of them would be treated as the worst of all crimes. For that reason alone, their reports are significant — and apparently truthful.
Good Friends’ access to them suggests that there is a disaffected faction in either the gatherers, the police reporting facility or the Central Party — or all of them. This is a very big crack in the system. The people who are co-operating with Good Friends are extremely brave, and their entire families face summary execution for their conduct. They obviously feel that what they are doing is important — and it is.
The Daily NK denied that there is widespread famine in the North, and stated that Good Friends’ reports to the contrary were wrong. But Good Friends does not claim there is nationwide famine: it reports on specific matters. It does not generalize from the particular. Read the latest report on 8 people starving to death in a rural train in winter; Good Friends does not conclude, as I do, that the DPRK is descending into chaos. It just reports the facts, and North Korean opinion on those facts.
The most significant fact yet reported is the 5.26 (May 26) bulletin from the Party that it can no longer feed the proletariat at all. That is the end of Juche, or self-sufficiency, in all but name. It is also a systemic failure in a system where the system is perfect and it is only the implementation that ever shows defects. Again, no significant editorializing from Good Friends, but just the facts and many local reactions.
The totality of Good Friends’ reports suggest that Gotterdammerung, however one spells it, is still far away, because the people are unarmed, disorganized, decentralized and uninformed on the whole: the exception is the organized (non-Special Forces) military, where starvation and desertion are taking a hold. This suggests that the only real future change of any immediacy, if it is not the collusive succession of Baby Kim, is a major military takeover with Chinese backing by concerned younger colonels and majors — and even that is wishful thinking.
Can you go into further detail about what the disparate political objectives of Good Friends and Daily NK might be? Newcomers find reputations hard to judge without a starting point.
First, Good Friends deserves to be credited for its heroic efforts during the Great Famine, and the Ven. Pomnyun certainly comes across as a hero in Andrew Natios’s “Great North Korean Famine.” Good Friends tends to have a classically liberal approach to aid — one that I respect — that supports continued aid without denying the regime’s role in making the people miserable. So I have great respect for Good Friends and its goals, even if I respectfully differ from some of its strategies. But that being said, Good Friends’s reports have sometimes sounded false alarms, in which I’ve admittedly joined. Part of this may be because Good Friends supports continued aid and is more willing to compromise on monitoring than, say, the Daily NK might be. The Daily NK tends to take a more skeptical and jaundiced view, a view toward which I’m migrating. One influence on that view is that personally, I’ve predicted 2 out of the last 0 famines. Another is Marcus Noland’s conclusion that aid organizations have been overestimating North Korea’s annual needs, which by itself raises some pretty chilling questions. As time passes, I’m increasingly leaning toward the conclusion that aid delivered through the NK government isn’t going to reach the North Koreans who need it most, and that markets — as imperfect as they are — are really the best way to deliver food to people who’ve been cut out of the Public Distribution System.
As outside information gets in, (and it cannot be kept out anymore), the only device the regime is to make the adoration of the Kims more grotesque and more compulsory. Christianity has also made phenomenal inroads into the world’s most hostile regime against that faith, with an underground church population near 500,000 according to Cornerstone International Ministries which supports about 1,000 underground cells. The Christian balloon launches have delivered millions of leaflets policed up by KPA soldiers, 70% of whom are deployed along the DMZ. In the last 2 years, a massive spike in activism by defectors who have converted to Christianity has also emboldened the underground church and no doubt contributed to its attractiveness. In North Korea’s official propaganda narrative, Christianity is always associated with capitalism and political liberalism.
South Korea’s missionaries have mature plans, abundant resources and scores of willing volunteers to surge across the MDL at the first crack of an opening. The linkup between the RoK missionaries and NK’s underground believers could provide a nascent reunification that could quickly form the basis of a unity that is social and religious and that happens irrespective of the will or actions of either government. Christianity will also link NK people with international Christianity, most critically the Vatican, which even China fears.
Sorry, the above post should read, “the only device the regime has left is to…”
Thanks so much for the follow up!