[Below is the text of a presentation I gave at Seoul City Hall on 11 July at the Seoul Forum on North Korean Human Rights 2024. The first session was moderated by Lee Shin-wha, Ambassador for International Cooperation on North Korean Human Rights (ROK). My turn came after presentations by Julie Turner, Special Envoy on North Korean Human Rights (USA); Elizabeth Salmón, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (UN); and James Heenan, head of the OHCHR Seoul Office (UN). Determined to pack 15 minutes of content into 10 minutes, I outraced the interpreter early on, only to find out this morning that both video recordings uploaded to Youtube have the occasionally divergent voiceover built in. The highlight of the event for me was talking afterward with very interesting young people from around the world — including North Korea — and I thank them again for coming up to introduce themselves.]
I’d like to start by thanking the other panelists, and everybody here today who gathers data on these rights abuses, because it helps all of us in North Korean Studies to understand the country better. I teach a course on human rights, to which I invite former North Koreans to speak — although there aren’t very many in Busan — so I’m more a follower of this discussion, and see my role today in humbly suggesting a few ways to popularize it. Now that China and Russia aren’t cooperating with resolutions related to North Korea, I think really the only way we can pressure Kim Jong Un to carry out reforms is to keep up a high and steady level of popular concern, such as was brought to bear on apartheid South Africa when I was a high school student there.
I think there’s hope here, because if you’ve seen the fuss KCNA makes about foreign praise, you know the regime isn’t indifferent to its reputation. One challenge we face is that Western people are increasingly concerned with rights problems closer to home. When I was at university in the 1980s, we all knew the names of Mandela and Sakharov — I knew the name of Kim Dae Jung — but the best known dissident of the past 5 years has been Julian Assange. And everyone’s grown wary of orchestrated bashing of pariah states, because it often heralds military intervention that makes things worse. So complaints about North Korea, I find, are starting to meet with indifference or skepticism. It hasn’t helped that a few defectors have been caught out in biographical inconsistencies, let’s say.
I want to say here what I say to skeptics when I encounter them. I’ve been to North Korea a few times, so I’ve seen what the regime likes to show us, but I’ve also spoken to enough migrants, most of whom hate publicity, to know that all too much of the bad news is true. Taking it seriously doesn’t mean we have to overlook our own governments’ rights abuses. When America condemns Kim Jong Un for surveilling his citizens, I think we Americans should point out that our government surveils us a lot more thoroughly; Kim just doesn’t have the power supply, for one thing. And most developed countries are moving toward more censorship and compelled speech. If this trend continues, the Kim regime’s counter-accusations of hypocrisy will only grow more persuasive.
But although the difference between democracy and dictatorship has become one of degree and not kind, that degree remains too great for moral equivalencies. Every North Korean dissident would find our punishments for saying the wrong thing preferable to the kind meted out in Yodeok, and we owe it to the inmates of those prison camps to keep a sense of perspective. Besides, renewing our horror of totalitarianism, which we felt so much more strongly during the Cold War, may strengthen resistance to the attrition of our own freedoms. South Koreans often respond to assaults on free speech by asking, “Is this North Korea?” I wish more Americans had that attitude.
I have a few reservations about linking rights abuses to the nuclear program, because so far, this linkage has made our side lose interest in the abuses whenever prospects for a nuclear settlement improve. Jimmy Carter came back from Pyongyang 30 years ago looking very impressed with Kim Il Sung, and the famine was then dignified in Western media as an excess of self-reliance, as no African famine has ever been. Only when the Geneva deal fell apart did we make the prison camps a priority. Not long thereafter an American president “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un, and the media establishment in the West cheered a South Korean president’s peace offensive that was equally blind to human rights. We’re now back to angry condemnation of Pyongyang, but everyone knows this has more to do with the Kim-Putin alliance than with changes inside North Korea.
I worry also that if we link prison camps and missiles, so to speak, we’ll only raise suspicion in Pyongyang that we’re highlighting the more emotive issue just to get the world behind our disarmament push. And let’s remember, it was during a supposed break in the nuclear program that the regime’s worst crime against humanity took the lives of almost a million people.
This brings me to the escapee issue. These days talk of the grim punishment awaiting repatriated escapees is often contradicted in the same breath by reference to how so-and-so just saved up enough money for a second escape. The sum needed just before the pandemic – if my sources are correct — was over $5000, and let’s face it, that’s more than the average American has in the bank, so I worry that if we continue to present these people as representative, we’ll be creating confusion about what living standards in North Korea are really like. I’m not downplaying the ordeals that they all go through, especially the women who are trafficked across the river, but it’s time, I believe, that we concentrated on the great mass of people inside North Korea.
That goes also for the issue of North Korean workers in China and Russia. If you spread the blame between three regimes, Kim gets off lightly. Just how bad are conditions at home, that people compete to get treated like slaves in foreign countries? I think that’s what we should focus on.
I agree that UN monitoring and cataloging must be comprehensive, but mass communication should strategically emphasize some abuses more than others. Our criticism must challenge Kim’s socialist pretensions, because unlike our leaders he has no liberal-democratic ones, and it must bear the potential to resonate – or from Kim’s standpoint, the danger of resonating — with average North Koreans, as our advocacy on behalf of nuclear scientists or escapees or abducted Japanese doesn’t. It must also speak to the South Korean public, right and left, because only in that way can we ensure the South Korean government maintains consistency in regard to the rights problem up there.
As the scholar Eric Posner explained years ago, people disagree on human rights, but agree on the need for basic welfare. I find that my international students, having grown up in depluralizing times, are less appalled by the lack of political freedoms in the North than by videos of women carrying buckets of river water up an icy flight of steps because they have no access to running water. That kind of thing hits home. Just two months ago a migrant said to my class, she’d like to make all South Koreans spend just one day up there as average people do. What she meant was: get up at dawn to sweep the street, then work 16 hours in a factory, to midnight or one a.m., and when you look out the factory window at night, you see your kids sleeping on the ground outside the gate, so they can walk you safely home through unlit streets after you finish. If you don’t ask “leading” questions, that’s the kind of thing migrants talk about. They complain about the self-criticism sessions, but I find they do so mainly because these were additional deprivations of rest and family time.
This hardship predates the nukes by decades. Kim Il Sung told his East German counterpart that high living standards make people lazy. Kim Jong Il put almost a billion dollars into monuments and luxury cars during the famine. The more food aid we gave, the less money he put into agriculture; that says it all. And we all remember how the North blocked South Korean efforts to pay North Korean workers directly at the Kaesong Industrial Zone. So let no one blame sanctions for the violations of labor rights.
The good news is that the regime has a bad conscience, though “conscience” may be saying too much; I prefer the Korean expression “찔리는 게 있다.” At the turn of the millennium it began promising prosperity, symbolized by meat and eggs.
Then in 2008 Kim Jong Il rashly promised that this Golden Age would begin in 2012, but as the year drew closer meat and eggs disappeared from the posters.
I’m vegan so I prefer the second poster, but most North Koreans aren’t. Kim Jong-un came to power saying belts could be loosened, but a lot of that propaganda was and still is aimed outward, like the Youtube videos of girls in Pyongyang that I think we’ve all seen. There are other signs that Kim wants to keep up socialist appearances. We’ve seen a revival of the term communism, more simulations of party procedure, and the pretended abandonment of pan-Korean nationalism.
This is why I think a “welfarist” focus will discomfit Kim more than our traditional emphasis on prison camps and migrants. It won’t get as emotional a response from some people as those issues do, but it may speak to a broader, more politically ecumenical audience. If we stress that labor exploitation results directly from one rapacious family’s ownership of the state — a fact we seem reluctant to stress, for some reason — Kim may grow worried enough about losing the residual goodwill of a big part of South Korean public opinion, and may become nervous enough about domestic unrest to ameliorate the worst violations of labor rights. Remember that some North Korean workers rioted recently in China. Other factors may add to the pressure. Kim cannot keep diverting the poor with missile launches, the wealth gap is widening, K-culture keeps coming in, and another hereditary succession needs to be put over on the public.
To sum up, it’s not the 1990s anymore, and this discussion needs to change accordingly, but as the gentleman on my right keeps reminding us, human rights is a long-term project, and I’m optimistic about the prospects for gradual improvement. Thank you all very much.
UPDATE: Orwell vs Buchheim: 13 August 2024:
Last month I invited a former North Korean to address the foreign students at my summer course in Busan. I told her what I’d said at the forum in Seoul a week earlier: that Uncle Sam surveils his citizens more thoroughly than Kim Jong Un does. Her face clouded; she was having none of it. “In North Korea, sitting in your house is like sitting outside.” She proceeded to explain how the party-appointed neighborhood snoop would barge into her home after midnight, flashlight in hand — her town had no electricity at night — and sometimes with a policeman in tow. What for? To count the number of occupants, or to ransack the place in another search for USB drives.
I let my guest carry the point. She was near tears at how much of her life had been lived that way, and where there’s sorrow there’s holy ground, as Wilde said. It felt — and still feels — wrong for me to insist on the greater thoroughness of surveillance in our societies, when the humiliation and fear that accompany violations of privacy are so much worse up there, to say nothing of the punishments for deviance. It seems no better to note that although the North Koreans are supposedly the world’s most misinformed people, they at least know who’s running their country. I’d rather remain ignorant about who’s running mine, and not get shouted out of bed at sunrise for “voluntary” street work.
Yet as a North Korea scholar I feel a duty to make clear that our system’s superiority to theirs isn’t what it used to be.
Case in point: The other day I read in the newspaper about how we must all accept as female a very male-looking boxer with a Y chromosome. So far, so 2024. What got my attention was the reason given: It says “female” in the boxer’s passport. A government had spoken, and that was that. It wasn’t even our sort of government.
In a flash I saw a remarkably simple solution to Kim Jong Un’s apparent lack of a male heir. Our journalists would certainly play along. Here’s the thing though: Because that regime is yet to launch an assault on common sense itself, there are limits to what it tries to put over on its people.
In North Korea as in Nazi Germany, one swears loyalty to the leader, not to a theorized worldview with a claim to absolute truth. Even cadres seem at a loss to quote from Juche Thought, a grab-bag of truisms for export use. It’s in our societies today — as in Stalin’s USSR — where any field with objective standards is thought suspect, and the dominant ideology trumps even scientific research. Which may be why North Koreans who have recently abandoned their Leader and escaped the country seem much freer of prejudices and taboos than Western people.
This raises the question of which system is more totalitarian. I’m pretty sure that Orwell, who associated such rule with boots in faces, gross economic inefficiency, and the smell of cabbage in hallways, would pick North Korea if he were alive today. But his view of totalitarianism was too obviously colored by the Soviet variant, just as Hannah Arendt’s was by the German one.
Hans Buchheim’s Totalitarian Rule (Totalitäre Herrschaft, 1962) is in some ways more perceptive. Naturally it’s out of print.
People under totalitarian rule are always on duty, always straining. They are no longer allowed to show themselves for who they really are, but must constantly play prescribed roles in an atmosphere of false pathos…. But the worst thing is that concepts, words and values are robbed of their accustomed validity, and moral standards become confused…. Therefore, although totalitarian rule also includes dictatorial governance, naked violence and the deprivation of freedom, its real characteristic is a creeping rape of the human being through the perversion of thought and social life. (13-14.)
That last sentence is key. Yes, North Korea is much worse when it comes to “dictatorial governance, naked violence and the deprivation of freedom.” For violence read torture, and I don’t want to rush past that; nothing (as Orwell reminds us in 1984) is as bad as physical pain. But those three things are common to authoritarian systems too.
On the other hand, the extent of “perversion of thought and social life” is greater in our societies, because having been nurtured in a pluralist, liberal tradition (such as never existed in the northern half of the Korean peninsula), we have much more that must now be driven out of us, perverted from us. When, in 2020, New Zealand’s prime minister publicly declared her government “your single source of truth,” and this in regard to scientific matters, the violation of accustomed values was much greater than it would have been had Kim Jong Un said it.
I suspect he would have rejected that formulation as too crude, too brazen. This is what surprises me most: our propaganda is losing even its subtlety advantage over the North’s.
