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What Is Up in North Korea?
North Korea has changed a lot over the last years.
[T]he market has shaken up previously rigid social hierarchies.
One’s place in the pecking order was once determined by proximity to the leadership,
distance from a compromising past, or ability to work in strategic industries.
With a money economy now shaping a new social hierarchy, however, it is not
uncommon for former untouchables to pull together a bit of capital and rise
through the new economic ranks.
The North Korean elite, too, has changed over the last decade. Knowledge of
English has become a desirable asset. Travel and market training have become
indispensable. The rich have
enough disposable income to buy luxury goods from China.
But no it is going back into isolation. On December 1 it will close down the border crossings with South Korea and will close the industrial zone where North Koreans produce export products in factories financed by South Korean companies.
North Korea is also restricting Chinese travel within the country and has closed the border to its big neighbor to nearly all passenger travel. China is said to have moved additional troops to the boarder. This could be out of fear of a wave of refugees.
The North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il had a stroke recently and may have had a second one. The above may be some kind of retreat to provide for a more seamless change on the top. Or is it a power struggle between the military the ruling Kim family?
The close off could also be intended to not let out news of some catastrophe like a famine.
Or it could be in preparation of a war. But what could be reason for one?
Revenge if on Sunday the North Korean team loses against the U.S. team in the U-17 women’s World Cup final?
Something is up and in times of heighten alert and little available information a miscalculation on either site could start something bad nobody really wants to happen.
The relative size of dongs is irrelevant (although, for the record, b at #3 was informed correctly). There is presently no missile threat from NoKo, but missiles and nuclear capabilities will continue to be discussed by the western media because that is what is taken seriously by them and gets their attention. Koreans, conversely, have a much more conventional “hands-on” approach to hostilities and, if pushed, will gladly burn down their own house simply to watch you die with them. Since North Korea reputedly has an army of over a million potential arsonists, this represents a very real, although different kind of threat than the one being discussed in the media.
As a former anthropologist, I object in principle to the concept of “national character”, but as a human being and a political animal, I am seeing more and more use for the idea. Americans would have gotten much farther in Asia if they had observed the simple fact that not everybody else has an identical mindset. As for Korea specifically, it is my experience that Western psychology will never be successful at penetrating their psychology and every attempt to do so will only exacerbate political friction.
I was tempted in 2003 to begin an ethnography of SoKo’s famous “culture in transition” from Confucianism to Westernism, but abandoned it by late 2004 as a lost cause. What I came to realize is that SoKo is only interested in adopting Westernism in the most superficial of senses and has taken “style over substance” into a reductio ad absurdism; that is to say they do not merely prefer style. They completely reject substance. They are, at heart, a supremely brutal people (and unlike the headline I just linked to indicates, they will never “own up” to that)who, in their own words, “hide their knives” when interacting with others.
Granted, I do not know any North Koreans and have never interacted with them. If they are similar to their brethren in the south of the peninsula, however, it will be absolutely pointless for the western media to dissect and analyze any quotes coming out of Pyongyang. South Koreans eschew all forms of what they call “directness” in their communication with others. What is actually said is usually only peripherally related to what is meant and it is folly to think that a smile, handshake or encouraging words indicate genuine agreement with you.
My feelings are most closely summarized by this short article: North Korea: Nothing Has Changed. The money quote here is:
To hope that a new administration in Washington can build trust with the North Koreans where their most sympathetic blood-brethren have so abjectly failed would be to take American exceptionalism to a new extreme. Let us hope that in his effort to avoid repeating George W. Bush’s mistakes, Obama does not simply end up repeating Kim Dae Jung’s.
Kim Dae-jung’s “mistakes” referred to by the article were the pursuit of the “Sunshine Policy” of inclusiveness. The term is now something of a dirty word here in the South, but I don’t think the approach was as misguided as it has been subsequently played up by the hawks both here in SoKo and in Washington, DC.
Let us take off the table the idea that NoKo can be pacified in any way or that there ever will be any kind of mutually productive relationship between NoKo and the rest of the world. They could be conquered by a stronger country, of course… they were occupied by Japan from 1910-1945. The problem is that Koreans play an even longer game than Dick Cheney and when conquered (as has been the case for four thousand years by their own reckoning) simply obstruct the progress of their occupiers for as long as it takes to wear them down. Decades, possibly centuries, later, the same obstinate and ossified psychology we are dealing with today will once again pose an identical problem.
So, missiles or no missiles, NoKo represents a tightwire act for everyone. If they are accomodated (as Kim Dae-jung attempted), they will take what is given and grow belligerent. If they are confronted (as the Bush administration attempted), they will do what is necessary to get the attention of the world… up to and including national homocide/suicide. Part of me suspects that the latter might be an eventual inevitability as they will permit themselves to be neither ignored nor accomodated indefinitely.
Since SoKo represents a very definite US interest (it is geographically the US’s only present toehold into eastern Asia and Washington will under NO circumstances give that up!), we might be reaching an impasse of interests. It won’t be a nuclear exchange due to SoKo’s proximity, but it has the potential to be an astounding bloodbath. You folk in Europe and the continental US have no cause to worry… astounding bloodbaths go on all the time. You probably won’t even notice.
Posted by: Monolycus | Nov 15 2008 7:38 utc | 7
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