“Who has the power to mystify … and how does he keep it?” Ernest Becker
It’s Korea’s fate to be always arriving splashily on the world scene, yet never counting as having arrived. Japan needs no introduction; Korea needs another book-length one every year. A “central point” of last year’s — according to a respectful review in the Financial Times — was that Korea is neither China nor Japan, but has its own history, its own traditions. And I thought we’d established that during the Seoul Olympics.
This year’s handbook is Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale University Press, 2023) by Victor Cha (CSIS) and Ramon Pacheco Pardo (CSIS). New does not mean fresh, not when each author has already issued a handbook on North and South Korea respectively, Pacheco Pardo’s being that one from last year.
A few paragraphs in, I realized I was reading an anecdote Cha had related more vividly in 2010, so I jumped ahead a bit. Stale photo of cheering Seoulites, wrongly captioned as having been taken on 15 August 1945? Check. Assertion that the emperor’s surrender “abruptly” ended Japan’s occupation of the peninsula, which in fact continued in the southern part for more than three weeks? Yes, that’s there too.
I turned to the North Korean part. Sure enough: Kim Il Sung launches his Juche concept one fine day in 1955, like a line of perfumes. In fact, as readers of my writing on the subject will know already, the “concept” in question was neither new to North Korea nor unique to it, having long been orthodox across the Soviet sphere of influence: Marxism-Leninism must be creatively adapted to each country’s unique conditions.
To be fair to the authors, you couldn’t write a 250-page history of the peninsula if you kept up with the state of research. You’d go mad. Besides, the law of handbooks dictates a certain shallowing, because an ever-increasing amount of information must be cut down to fit more or less the same length. Not to mention that this one was purportedly written with Hallyu buffs in mind, who are bound to be more interested in 21st-century South Korea.
To be fair to those kids too, though: I doubt they’ll be turning to the arms industry’s favorite think tank for enlightenment. Having been in Busan Station last year when some multi-ethnic BTS Army platoons arrived for the free concert, the language of their idols doing loud service as lingua franca, I can attest that the average K-Pop fan speaks Korean at least as well as Cha or Pacheco Pardo. The very designation implies a greater familiarity with primary sources than these pages reflect. Which may bother that target audience more than it seems to have bothered Yale University Press.
But what’s any reader to make of this?
Throughout the 1960s, Kim sought to develop and clarify the meaning of this concept on which he had staked his leadership. Most notably, Kim gave a speech in Indonesia in April 1965 to lay out the principles behind Juche. The speech was significant because Juche had almost disappeared from public discourse.
So throughout the decade the leader sought … yet by 1965 it had almost disappeared? So he clarified it … overseas?
Too US-centric and IR-“realist” to care what the North Koreans think, the authors fail to see the obvious problems. Like the ship in the Auden poem, they have somewhere to get to, and sail calmly on. One gets ahead in that world not by being right, but by being in with the right people.
Apropos of which point, it was Robert Scalapino (1919-2011), a Korea expert famously close to the CIA, who got the Juche fallacy rolling with a collection of articles he edited and put out in 1963, two of which misrepresented the 1955 speech in passing as a significant deviation from the Soviet line. One of the two articles called it “famous,” which it wasn’t, at least not in North Korea itself. Why this effort to treat the least intellectual leader in the Soviet sphere as an original thinker, while shirking analysis of his thought? Was it honest confusion? Or an effort to sow disunity between Moscow and Pyongyang?
Or was it to prepare American public opinion for a shift in policy toward the two Koreas? Two things should be kept in mind here. First, the US Embassy in Seoul had in April 1960 helped to topple Syngman Rhee. (Notoriously, English-Korean instructions on how to organize street protests turned up shortly thereafter in Indonesia.) Second, a US senator popular with the globalist set had helped destabilize the ensuing Chang Myon premiership (1960-1961) by floating the idea of a neutral peninsula, something Kim Il Sung had proposed at Khrushchev’s urging a few months earlier.
There may be a parallel here to how and why Western experts and media hyped up the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini as a renowned Shī’a theologian before he had attained to any such reputation among the faithful. (Guido Preparata, citing Houchang Nahavandi, has written interestingly on this subject; see page 195 of The Ideology of Tyranny, 2011.)
The supreme mystifier of Juche is Bruce Cumings, who discourages readers from even trying to understand it. I’ve ragged on this aspect of his work too often already, but for those who’ve forgotten, here’s an excerpt from his influential book:
The term is really untranslatable; for a foreigner its meaning
is ever-receding into a pool of everything that makes Koreans Korean, and therefore ultimately inaccessible to the non-Korean. (From Origins of the Korean War, 2:313.)
It’s actually highly translatable and accessible, as I explained in the introduction to my demystification effort. It’s germane to point out that Cumings was never the rebel the South Korean left still takes him for. The parts of Origins that deal with FDR’s bold vision for a new world order under Anglo-American leadership could have been written by David Rockefeller (see 1:102-113). In the acknowledgments, Cumings expressed gratitude to the globalist Henry Luce Foundation and Social Science Research Council for their support.
Do oligarchs fund research in order to get the excerpted sort of mumbo-jumbo in response to their inquiries? No, they fund it so you and I get the mumbo-jumbo. Speaking of Rockefellers, it’s known that while sponsoring universities, scholars and think tanks, Nelson got his own info about world developments from a private intelligence network. Note also that funding for ROK-delegitimizing “revisionism” began at a time when Wall Street’s think tank — as the Marxian scholar Lawrence Shoup calls the CFR — had lost all patience with Park Chung Hee, and not for the human-rights reasons Jimmy Carter trotted out.
The larger point I’m driving at is this, that our foreign policy establishment has an interest in keeping Americans in a state of bewilderment about foreign ideologies, lest they become informed enough to resist Uncle Sam’s compulsive interventionism. Educate them in such matters — which are far easier to grasp than they’re made out to be — and the number of foreign actors they consider deserving of costly support will decline sharply, as will the number of foreign actors they think insane or evil enough to deserve “fire and fury.”
Patronage therefore goes to experts who share, in Robert Jay Lifton’s words, “the American preoccupation with what might be called ‘practical mechanisms’ rather than ideological or theoretical considerations.” (Due in no small part to that patronage, America’s preoccupations are now Europe’s.) I’m not recanting my view that inattention to ideology is connected to the decline of language study, the social sciences’ increasing focus on the quantifiable, and the supplantment of political scientists on conference panels by IR types, but I’m now forced to conclude that to a significant extent, a higher design is at work. The power to mystify lies with the funding class. The instrument of that power is an expertocracy that may not even know it’s mystifying.
North Korea’s straightforward if extreme nationalism was around long before the export construct of Juche Thought (“man is the master of all things”), which had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. But I suspect the regime’s worldview will be kept “inaccessible to the non-Korean” until such a time as Uncle Sam decides to go either full dove or full hawk. If it’s the latter, mysterious Juche can always be spun as a genocidal quasi-religion, a suicide cult. If the decision is to appease Kim Jong Un, we may hear calls for Washington and Pyongyang to join as “unlikely partners in the quest for Juche,” to borrow a softline phrase from an AEI conference in 2004.
In the meantime, the handbooks will keep coming — and they’ll only get worse.
