The Cult Of Kim

Via Atrios we are directed to a very charming Aussie travel blog. There's a great and humorous account, with plenty of excellent photos, of Ari Sharp's recent trip to North Korea. Given the US' foreign policy obsession with the Hermit Kingdom over the past half-century, there's a lot of interesting stuff here. Having read and seen quite a bit of documentary-type descriptions of the place, much of it confirms what we already know, or assumed we knew. But there's a very human and first-person element to this that's missing from most dry news retellings and such. Definitely worth checking out.

One thing that bears repeating, though, in regards to the nature of the Kim regime, which Sharp reinforces in his posts of life in Pyongyang -- this is a society in desperate need of deprogramming, very much in the cult sense. Through decades of fear, isolation, total control of all media and information, and overt nationalism and militarism, the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not any of those things (except, of course, Korean).

It is a place where the temptation is to get all Waco on the cult, but even without N. Korea's new nukes, that would be a tragic strategic blunder. The terrain is rugged, and the people have been kept so isolated for so long, they have no idea what the rest of the world is doing until they defect. So they'll certainly fight if attacked; a cakewalk is no more likely in Pyongyang than it really was in Baghdad.

They're out of the news for now, as we prepare to teach the Syrians and then the Iranians how to love apple pie and reality TV. But sooner or later, something is bound to happen within North Korea. They won't get the respect they want from China or South Korea; or Japan will start squeezing them militarily as it begins its own nationalist re-awakening after 60 dormant years, and the paranoid bluster of the NK regime gets more reckless.

Or, just as likely, word finally gets into the Hermit Kingdom, and the citizenry begins to understand how the rest of the entire world basically laughs at them; laughs at the foolish pretensions of their Dear Leader; snickers at his pot-belly and his comb-over and his five-foot-nothing in elevator shoes. And the façade will begin to crack internally at that point, as the people begin to realize just how enormously they've been kept in the dark all these years. This is a big unsung reason why Korean re-unification fell through -- the South wouldn't be able to afford a literal welfare case of a country; it'd be far worse for them than it was for West Germany to absorb their Eastern brethren. The people who don't make up the administrative/military/scientific elite that runs the country don't do much besides make-work and constant infusions of happy-talk from the state, so many (if not most) would be uncompetitive and unemployable in the South.

Don't worry; for once we are not working up to some satiric comparison here between Kim and Bush. As bad as Bush is, as contemptible as his toadies and cronies and pep-rally weirdos are, they could all learn a lot from the machinations of Kim, a guy whose family has truly led a proud and ancient country down the road to ruin, parked them there, and burned the map so they don't know any better.

This guy Kim (or at least his dad, who now drives the chariot that brings up the sun each glorious workers' morning) is a Sun Myung Moon-level pro at brainwashing the captives into an entire Stockholm Syndrome society. Here's hoping that we can figure out how to shine a light into the darkened room, and let the people know just what their Dear Leader's been keeping from them all these lonely years.

In the meantime, go check out Ari's blog. You won't be disappointed.