I keep coming across scenarios of North Korean aggression that take no account of the political realities here, so I’m going to complain again. This time I’ll heed Ecclesiastes and let my words be few. First, this is the sort of thing I mean:
One analysis previously published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimates that up to 25% of the population of Seoul could be killed if the North launched a “sea of sarin” artillery attack using 240 tons of the gas….“[I]t will have an effect on the population and it will terrorize them,” said Col. Maxwell. “It goes to the brutality and the nature of the Kim family regime.” (From “The Continuing Threat of North Korea’s Chemical Weapons,” The Peninsula, 7 March 2022).
Let’s prepare for the worst by all means, but without dehumanizing the North Koreans by saying in effect, “and it would be just like the bastards to do this.” Because in fact it would be quite unlike them. Most of the wartime massacres carried out by the People’s Army against South Koreans took place (as we know from eye-witness accounts) after some effort to separate left-wingers from “reactionary elements.” The indiscriminate mass killing of civilians in the Korean War was done largely from the air. And which side controlled the skies?
We waged our civil war more brutally too. The KPA had no general like Sherman, who (with Lincoln’s approval) kept his pledge to “make Georgia howl” through the “utter destruction of its roads, houses and people.” No South Korean town of any size met the fate of Meridian, Mississippi. Why the difference? The Union generally saw itself as fighting and punishing a monolithically hostile populace, from which it often had a hard time distinguishing even the slaves. The DPRK saw itself as liberating the southern masses from landowners and traitors.
Its domestic propaganda still depicts average South Koreans as wonderful people yearning to live under Kim Jong Un. That’s not how you get your military in the mood to kill millions with sarin gas or nuclear weapons. (The killing of two South Korean workers in the Yeonpyeong Island artillery attack of 2010 is known to have compelled the propaganda apparatus to account for it.)
Without neglecting to prepare for an all-out attack, we should consider a hybrid war more likely. And just as someone trying to predict Russian tactics in Ukraine must know the ethno-linguistic territory, we need to face up to South Korea’s ideological terrain. It may be scandalous to identify the region best suited for a little-green-men incursion à la Crimea 2014, but is it better to act as if the North Koreans couldn’t take over a port without WMD?
North Korea recently tested a route to “final victory” that need not entail even conventional warfare. I’m referring to the confederation process that got underway during the Moon administration. It will resume when the left returns to power, by which time the distance between the two main parties will be even narrower than it is now. (The current front-runner to become chairman of the pseudo-right party is Ahn Cheol-soo, until recently a confederation supporter and ally of arch-pro-Norther Park Jie-won.) The incremental subjugation of the South will take time, sure. But if you were Kim Jong Un, a de facto monarch with children to leave the family-owned state to, would you risk an apocalypse just to speed up things?
Our Korea watchers do the cause of peace no favors by continuing to ignore the ideological affinity between Pyongyang and South Korea’s nationalist left. Already the danger of a nuclear strike on Seoul — half the population of which supports pro-confederation parties — is being treated as urgent and serious enough to merit a significant ramping up of our side’s weaponry and rhetoric. This is what comes of putting taboos above frank discussion.
