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.