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2 The inevitability of Kim
revisionism By Andrei Lankov
Once
every decade or two, television screens show
powerful and memorable images such as the toppling
statue of a tyrant. The destruction of a
dictator's statue makes for a potent political
symbol, and few revolutionaries can resist the
temptation.
It is said that sooner or
later this fate will befall statues of Kim
Il-sung, in 1945 a minor guerrilla commander who,
with much Soviet backing, took power in North
Korea and remained its absolute ruler until his
death in 1994. However, this author is somewhat
skeptical about the prospects: I would not be
surprised to learn that some time in the 2030s it
is trendy to keep a portrait of the long-deceased
dictator in a North Korean house.
Let's be blunt: the rule of
the Kim family was a disaster which has
few parallels in world
history - even if judged by the brutal standards
of the 20th century. The ratio of the political
prison camp inmates to the total population in
North Korea is roughly similar to that of Stalin's
Russia. The famine of 1996-1999 killed a larger
part of population than the Great Leap Forward
famine in Mao Zedong's China. The Korean War
(1950-1953), launched by the Kim Il-sung as an
unsuccessful attempt to unify the country, was the
bloodiest conflict in Korean history.
And,
unlike many other strongmen of the last century
(not least Joseph Stalin, Kim Il-sung's mentor),
the Kims cannot even justify this manslaughter
with social or economic success. On the contrary,
during the 60 or so years of their rule, the Kims
have ruined what in 1945 was economically the most
developed region of continental Asia.
In
short, the Kim family regime has been a disaster.
So, it seems only logical to assume that after its
eventual demise (and few would doubt that this
demise will happen sooner or later), the Koreans
in both South and North will be unified in
despising the North's former rulers. The names of
the two Kims, and in heir apparent Kim Jong-eun
possibly a third, may well be damned by history.
However, something makes the present author a bit
skeptical about the unavoidability of such an
outcome.
Maybe it is my Soviet/Russian
background? When nowadays one drops into the
average Russian bookshop, he or she sees in the
history section a large number of treatises which
extol in great length the superior wisdom of
Generalissimo Stalin and the wisdom of his devoted
generals and statesmen. Sometimes these books
mention the terror of 1936-38 or the famine of the
1930s, but usually as tragic mistakes or,
rather, results of some intrigues by anti-Stalin
conspirators.
More frequently, though,
references to the Great Purge are laughed at, with
an explicit assumption that reports of mass
executions were grossly exaggerated and that those
few who were killed by Stalin's police actually
got what they deserved (being spies and
saboteurs). It is a bit more difficult to ignore
the famine of the early 1930s, but it also can be
blamed on bad weather and bad officials.
One
should not dismiss these books as fringe writings
(after all, Italy has its share of Mussolini
admirers, too). They clearly belong to the
mainstream. Stalin's popularity hit a record low
in the early 1990s, but he is now again popular in
Russia, and his admirers are by no means small
fringe groups.
The attitude is even more
powerful when it comes to the discussion of the
Soviet past in general. Every Russian politician
knows well that he or she is not going to win
votes by being excessively harsh in appraising the
achievements of the glorious Soviet past. The same
trends exist in many (but not all) ex-communist
countries: in Germany, at the some point in the
late 1990s as many as one third of East Germans
told pollsters that the unification was a mistake,
and that they would prefer to move back to the DDR
(German Democratic Republic).
Educated Western readers tend
to see the case of de-nazification in Germany and
the complete rejection of Hitler's past by the
Germans as something normal. But it is actually an
exception with few if any parallels worldwide.
Japan, for example, is far less willing to admit
the scale of its former misdeeds, and in Turkey
the mainstream opinion is not ready even to accept
the fact of Armenian genocide - probably, the
first "modern" genocide. Each case has its
explanations, but one should realize: the total
rejection of the recent past, German style, is by
no means typical.
We cannot know the future,
but currently it seems that the eventual
unification of Korea under the Seoul regime is the
only possible long-term outcome of the Korean
crisis. But once the Kim family regime is gone,
the 25 million human beings who lived under their
rule will have to make something of their sad and
terrifying experiences. Frankly speaking, the
entire era was a massive waste of time, resources
and lives, but can the average North Korean person
accept and admit this? Some people, no doubt, will
come to such painful conclusions, but many more
will probably not.
There will be no shortage of
people who are bound to lose out from unification
and/or regime change in North Korea. The Kim
family has produced a small army of professional
indoctrinators and overseers. Many a well-educated
North Korean has made a decent (that is by North
Korean standards) living by lecturing his/her
compatriots about the finer points of the Juche (self-reliance)
doctrine or the heroic deeds of the Kim family.
Many others have been employed to enforce the
manifold regulations and rules. Under the new
system, these people will instantly find out that
their arcane skills will be of little use. They
are bound to feel unhappy about the new world and
they are also bound to search for ways to justify
and embellish their past.
The
social and material difficulties of these people
can be trivialized by describing them as "willing
collaborators of a brutal regime" (as if informed
career choice would have been possible in their
youth). However, in the post-unification Korea
there are social groups whose problems cannot be
dismissed so easily.
Once the country is unified,
the majority of North Korean professionals will
find out that in the new world, their skills are
of little if any value. What can be done by a
North Korean medical doctor who knows nothing of
95% of all the procedures and treatments which are
routine in modern medicine? What can be done with
an engineer who has spent all his life repairing
rusting industrial equipment of 1960s' Soviet
vintage?
What about a school teacher
who has spent decades teaching Korean literature
but still has no clue about the majority of
authors who really constitute its mainstream
(Korean literature as understood in North Korea is
essentially a collection of eulogies to the
Leaders, whilst everything produced in the South
since 1945, as well as a significant part of the
colonial era literature is ignored)?
None
of these people can be portrayed as a regime
collaborator, but they are likely to share the
sorry fate of former ideological indoctrinators
and minor police clerks. Some of them will manage
to re-educate themselves, while others will find
new and rewarding career paths, but the lucky will
be few in number. The majority is bound to have at
least ambivalent feelings about the
post-unification situation.
However we should not be too
elite-orientated. Unfortunately, the common North
Korean will also have many good reasons to feel
dissatisfied about the state of the country after
unification. Assuming that North Korea will not
change much until its collapse (and this is very
likely), after unification more or less every
North Korean above the age of 30 will find
his/herself restricted to low-paid, unskilled or
semi-skilled jobs.
This does not mean that
unification will bring ruin to a majority of North
Koreans. On the contrary, their incomes, their
nutrition and their consumer lives are likely to
improve dramatically and almost instantly.
Nonetheless, they will probably soon take the new
relative prosperity for granted, and will compare
their income and social standing not with Kim
Il-sung's past, but with the situation of South
Koreans.
Alas, this comparison is
almost certain to be discouraging. Most North
Koreans are likely to remain second-class citizens
because the lack of relevant skills will prevent
them from acquiring skilled work in the
post-unification economy (reeducation is difficult
in their age, with a heavy burden of social
responsibilities on their shoulders). Formerly
skilled blue-collar workers as well as many office
clerks will have to spend the rest of their work
lives sweeping streets and washing dishes. They
will probably earn more than a minor official
under the Kims' rule, but their relative
inferiority will cause much problem.
In
most cases their inferior social position will be
a result of their low skills but one should not
count on them admitting and accepting this. It
will probably be thought of as discrimination by
the "arrogant and greedy" Southerners - and, to be
sure, this allegation will have much truth to it.
The experience of North Korean refugees in the
South today seems to confirm that such
discrimination is indeed very likely to be
present. Like it or not, in the post-unification
at least some North Koreans (perhaps many of them)
will see themselves as collective losers who were
first seduced by visions of South Korean
prosperity and then let down by the (real and
alleged) arrogance of Southerners.
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