As most of my readers are no doubt already aware, Kim Jong Un gave a speech at a party meeting last Saturday in which he described the inter-Korean relationship as one of two mutually hostile states, as opposed to two halves of one nation. Contrary to what many observers are now saying, with Fyodor Tertitskiy a notable exception, these remarks do not betoken the abandonment of either a) pan-Korean nationalism, b) the strategy of subjugating South Korea through peaceful means, or c) the end goal of unification.
To ask a question that seems not to have occurred to any of the chroniclers of a fundamental ideological shift: Why should Kim Jong Un choose this of all times to abandon the post-truce line his father and grandfather stood for?
Let’s take stock. I might as well start with the fact that the most popular movie in South Korea this winter is one demonizing Chun Doo Hwan. Hardline anti-Northism such as he stood for in the 1980s is virtually extinct now, the province of a rapidly dwindling group of elderly people with no political representation to speak of. There’s no far-right party here large enough to balance out the openly pro-North Progressive Party on the far left.
The People Power Party currently ruling the country isn’t even center-right by American standards; I’d put it on a par with Labour under Tony Blair. Not to mention that President Yoon, according to his wife, is well to the left of the PPP.
It’s odd that such a docile neoliberal administration should get less sympathetic treatment from our NYT and Wapo than the opposition Minjoo Party, a nationalist, anti-immigration, pro-Chinese, Ukraine-indifferent, none-too-LGBT-friendly party of a sort those papers would rage against if it were in Europe. But the Council on Foreign Relations works in mysterious ways.
It’s true that in his latest speech Kim professed to consider South Korea’s left and right equally devious and hostile. It should nonetheless be obvious that he has every reason to prefer a Minjoo-ruled ROK. During Moon Jae-in’s term (2017-2022), South Korean troops were pulled away from the DMZ, over which a no-fly zone was established; several key military exercises were downsized, postponed, or cancelled altogether; Moon gave a speech at a stadium in Pyongyang expressing his “unsparing praise and applause” for the resolute course Kim was on; the National Assembly passed a law, at Kim Yo Jong’s urging, which criminalized efforts to subvert the North with propaganda balloons; the left-wing press heralded the opening of the North-South liaison office as the first stage of confederation; and the ROK foreign ministry spent most of its time lobbying the US and the world for the relaxation of sanctions on North Korea. All the while the Moon administration stressed its opposition to “unification by absorption,” in contrast to Kim Jong Un’s assertion that support for it extends across the spectrum here.
Much more progress on the road to confederation would have taken place if not for the failed Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, but that was hardly Moon’s fault or his party’s, as Kim is well aware. He also knows that whereas Moon surrounded himself with veterans of the protest movement of the 1980s, the current Minjoo boss Lee Jae-myung hangs out with veterans of the even more radically pro-North movement of the 1990s. Finally, Kim knows that the Minjoo is likely to do well in the next parliamentary elections, and is equally likely to put Yoon’s successor (whoever it may be) in the Blue House.
So I ask you: Does this sound like a time for Kim — who as a de facto monarch takes, as we know from the public grooming of his daughter for the succession, a multi-generational view of things — to give up on peaceful unification? In favor of a strategy almost certain to result in North Korea’s destruction?
“But these tones are unprecedented….” Are they? Everyone seems to have forgotten the tense spring of 2013, when North Korea threatened to leave no one alive here to sign a surrender. Those words already implied that it had begun looking on southerners, left and right, as foreigners. Five years later Kim Jong Un and Moon were literally walking hand in hand.
“But this time Kim talks of the Republic of Korea, thereby signaling resignation to the permanence of the rival state….” Hold on. Use of the words Daehan minguk or Hanguk has long been common in North Korea in contemptuous contexts. It abounds in anti-ROK novels, e.g. Mannam (2001). The difference now is a mere orthographical one, i.e., no scare quotes, but we’re talking outer-track propaganda here.
Furthermore, Kim Jong Un said, “With the Republic of Korea people unification cannot succeed.” The sentence should be read with that emphasis, for the relevant words in the Korean original (대한민국 것들과는) imply that there are other people with whom unification can be worked toward. All the more reason, then, to infer that “Republic of Korea people” (“Republic of Korea types” would not be a wrong translation of the dismissive 것들) refers to the power elite and not to the South Korean masses. The latter are thus implicitly encouraged to put their support behind a better force or forces — such as (one presumes) the Progressive Party, already a significant influence on the labor movement. Of course Kim’s remarks were also intended to prod the Minjoo to be even more submissive the next time around.
As I have had to say far too many times already on this blog, North Korea’s safety still derives in large part from the Americans’ belief that an attack on its territory would result in the immediate devastation of Seoul. This belief is naturally undermined by the suspicion that North Korea is too nationalist, too intent on unification, to be serious about wiping out millions of fellow Koreans.
It’s therefore common for the regime in times of tension to make stern statements — in word or deed — of its readiness to stop at nothing. I’ve already mentioned the apocalyptic anti-ROK rhetoric of 2013, which came after the UNSC’s unanimous condemnation of a North Korean missile launch. Another example would be the way in which George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech in 2002 resulted in North Korea dramatically distancing itself from South Korea’s Sunshine Policy, most notably through the deadly Yellow Sea incident that June. Until we see evidence of a shift in inner-track propaganda, Kim Jong Un’s speech should be seen in this context.
UPDATE: Kim Yo Jong “praises” Moon (3 January 2024):
Kim Jong Un’s sister, who used to deride Moon for his stupidity, is now calling him “cunning” for having wasted the North’s time with his insincere peace initiative, thereby slowing down the nuclearization process; Yoon with his foolhardiness and open hostility is less of a problem for the North. This is another example of why statements like these cannot be taken as reflections of the inner-track line. Average North Koreans are highly unlikely to be hearing that a South Korean president outsmarted the Supreme Dignity for years on end. The real goal here is to revive Moon’s image in Washington (and by extension, the current Minjoo Party’s) as a good ally, and to undermine the PPP’s pose as the better guarantor of the South’s security.
UPDATE: Tongil News weighs in (24 January 2024):
In the following, the openly pro-North outlet Tongil News introduces its readers to the same problem I’ve been discussing here since the destruction of the liaison office in 2020.
The “balance of terror” that the North sought to attain through a nuclear capability had one fatal weakness. The “American empire” and the “Republic of Korea types” could attack at any time, but the North could not as long as the South remained “kin.” […..]
It’s a “tremendous” dilemma. That’s the question that Kim Jong-un answered in the National Assembly and in his state of the republic speech. How?
The answer is that since the North cannot use (nuclear) weapons against the “same” people, it clarifies the South’s nature as a puppet “Republic of Korea” dominated by “U.S. imperialists” and “Republic of Korea types,” and can thus arrive at the conclusion that against such a Republic of Korea, it is all right to carry out the second mission of the North’s nuclear doctrine. As a result, they have filled the “huge” logical hole in their own nuclear doctrine.
Kim Kwang-su, the author of the above piece, is too reverent a Pyongyang watcher to acknowledge that the regime might say one thing in the earshot of outsiders, and another in domestic-only communication. I’m sure he realizes there must be quite a gap anyway. For what shall it profit a state if it gains logical consistency, but loses its legitimatory myths — loses, to put things another way, its collective immortality project?
Since when have states cared about consistency anyway? My own government preaches human rights while disregarding them in foreign practice; it doesn’t renounce its humanism merely in order to look less hypocritical. For one thing, it doesn’t need to; the average American is oblivious to any logical or moral contradictions. For another, our government can’t afford to relinquish its claim to exceptionally high moral values, because it’s on that claim that its legitimacy rests.
Similarly, Kim Jong Un is under no domestic pressure to fill the logical hole referred to above; quite the contrary. The main reason he so noisily fills it at present is to keep the Yankees at bay. A brilliant strategy it is too, for it simultaneously makes North Korea look more dangerous and easier to reach a long-term peace with. What’ll it be, Uncle Sam? A nuclear apocalypse, triggered perhaps by a misfiring cannon at the DMZ? Or the placid peninsular coexistence of two ethnically dissociated states? A compelling choice. No wonder Pyongyang’s familiars are filled with new life.
UPDATE: “Our” North Korea (25 January 2024):
Last week the opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, reading out from a piece of paper, said Kim Jong Un should “see to it that the efforts made by his predecessors, our North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and President Kim Il Sung, are neither disparaged nor undermined.”
The whole gist was a bit much, when you consider what Kim Il Sung’s main effort at unification consisted of, but conservatives zeroed in on Lee’s use of the affectionate possessive, characterizing it as a display of his ideological tendencies. Needless to say, Lee would hardly have read out the statement had he not intended to elicit precisely such a reaction, thereby strengthening his Sunshiny “cred” with the Minjoo Party’s Moon Jae-in faction (which hasn’t forgotten that Lee never showed at student protests in the 1980s).
Now, my impression from attending conferences is that people on the nationalist left use that “our” when publicly chiding the North – a rare occurrence – to make clear that the criticism comes from a good place. After Hanoi, Moon Chung-in suggested that “our chairman Kim Jong Un” might have asked for too much.
Meanwhile, the left has correctly countered that when a conservative politician spoke of “our Japan” a few years ago, her party called this “a meaningless, habitual expression.” Habitual it may be, but meaningless it certainly isn’t.
Lee’s statement being likely to trouble Western observers, the local English-language press obligingly bowdlerized it, so that Lee was quoted as saying: “[Kim Jong Un] should make efforts to avoid undermining the efforts made by his predecessors, Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung.” It’s through little services like this that the West is kept under the illusion of a liberal ROK left.
[Relevant to this post is the update I appended to my thought experiment article on 29 September 2024.]
