Col. David Maxwell, on why the North Korean people don’t rebel

It’s funny how life moves in oddly circular ways sometimes. I first met Col. David Maxwell more than a decade ago on Okinawa, when I was an Army defense counsel and he was commanding a Special Forces battalion. This unequal juxtaposition of his cred versus mine makes me begin this post feeling sheepish about disagreeing with one of his conclusions here, that the North Korean people are so thoroughly indoctrinated that they would not consider rising against the system. I don’t pretend that Col. Maxwell’s piece was a response to my Unified Theory of North Korea Policy over at Marcus and Stephan’s blog, but it might as well have been. Of course, Col. Maxwell has held these views for some time; about a year ago, he was even generous enough with his time on a Saturday to explain these views to me at length.

Col. Maxwell’s piece is well worth reading in its entirety, but I wonder if he reached the right conclusion (for now) for the wrong reasons. Without question, he’s had access to a great deal of intelligence that I haven’t, but my own conversations with North Korean defectors, the reports on cross-border migration, occasional glimpses of popular defiance in the reports, and harder data, like that we’ve seen in Witness to Transformation, suggest a very different picture to me — one of widespread cynicism and latent dissent (the usual disclaimers apply, but those reports can’t all be wrong). Sure, the indoctrination and isolation probably still hold more sway on some topics than others. I suspect, for example, that there’s much residual reverence for Kim Il Sung among some demographics, compared with a blend of awe and hatred for his son, and general contempt for his grandson. Most Americans these days would find it easy enough to believe that many North Koreans could simultaneously harbor deep anti-American hostility while dreaming of living here, as a few refugees have managed to do. There will also be demographic differences, according to geography, songbun, and individual experiences.

But the balance of available evidence suggests that the system holds not because people still believe in it, but because they’re afraid of it. We’re all guessing if we’re honest about this, but my best guess is that the security forces remain mostly cohesive despite endemic corruption, declining standards of fitness, growing lapses in morale in some units, and even a few defections across the DMZ. A recent apparent defection attempt by an Air Force pilot tells us that even elite units aren’t immune. In some units, notably the border guards, that cohesion has been especially fragile. There have also been questions about the discipline of some Army units. Still, because North Koreans lack any effective means of intranational or international communication, any dissent that erupted would be easy for the regime to isolate and crush, as the regime presumably did on the many occasions when dissent did erupt (this and these reports being examples of that). This is a picture of fragile stability, neither identical to nor profoundly different from pre-revolutionary Syria or Libya, which were almost as tyrannical as North Korea, but less totalitarian in their capacities to control the movement of ideas. For obvious reasons, no one — not even in North Korea itself — is in a position to say how fragile that stability is.