When Evil Has A Thousand Names But No Admissible Cause
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4668.htm
By Andrei Kozhev
09/09/03: Have you seen the news lately? What, in your view, should one make of a report this past week that “ North Korea 's parliament…approved the communist government's decision to increase its ‘nuclear deterrent force’ in angry reaction to what it calls a hostile U.S. policy”? [1] Can we simply brush this new development off as yet another unreasonable action of an undemocratic, “evil” foreign government, or should we consider awaking to the uncomfortable reality of living in the midst of yet another cold but dangerously melting nuclear stand-off between two of the world’s strongest armed forces?
I am seriously inclined to consider the gravity of this latter possibility, particularly considering that I still remember what it felt like living on the opposite side of the chilling Cold War confrontation precedent. Having grown up in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s and 1980s, I can attest to the insidious potency of collective fear, misguided hatred and self-righteous indignation, which were fuelled equally well by the other side’s contemptuous rhetoric—you might recall President Reagan’s unhelpful “empire of evil” metaphor—and by the servile, heavily-censored coverage and xenophobic propaganda of state-controlled domestic media and academic establishments.
Every authoritarian regime thrives on indoctrinating its citizenry into the myth of their selective superiority typified and represented, of course, by the cult of larger-than-life political leaders. The more powerful the regime, the more effective and intricate the indoctrination, denial and enforcement mechanism. Belligerent patriotism, unquestioning loyalty, and rigid conformity to the bigger, infallible whole become the ultimate goal and direction of individual accomplishment. Personal awareness of elusive truth and onerous wisdom becomes irreconcilably equated with ignorant adherence to the carefully-crafted collective dictates of right and wrong. The resulting effects on individual ethics and morality are devastating and long-lasting. With generations of human beings thus being led horribly astray, any concept of a “regime change,” which does not originate from within the society in question through the logic of its own development, is highly unrealistic and dangerously presumptuous.
Consider, for instance, what could have happened during the star wars years of the Cold War confrontation, had not the Russian society, which incredibly managed to preserve the grain of intellectual and spiritual accomplishment through the worst of psychologically and ideologically repressive years, produced a new, atypically agreeable kind of political leader in the face of Mikhail Gorbachev. Had the control of state power remained the unscrupulous hands of the militant apparatchiks and generals of the Brezhnev ilk, who attempted belatedly to restore their tight grip on the Soviet society with an unsuccessful putsch in 1991, instead of Perestroika and Glasnost’ in the East this human civilization could have experienced its first (and probably last) nuclear winter.
Unfortunately, I do not see crucial evidence of local Perestroika winds in the contemporary North Korean society. Kim Jong Il and his entourage seem a lot closer in their intellectual and psychological profile to Leonid Brezhnev and his associates, who directed the Soviet military into Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan with Leonid Ilyich’s innovative foreign policy doctrine, than to the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev. The North Korean society itself is in a deplorable intellectual situation given the unprecedented level of state indoctrination, coercion, and xenophobia in the midst of utter economic devastation. Scarce public resources are being funneled almost exclusively into maintaining the country’s military standing and preparedness. The 1.1 million army is not only an integral and solitary emblem of national pride and accomplishment, but also the only hope and prospect for a better life for many North Koreans. Better life, unfortunately, comes with a price, which in totalitarian societies demands total, unquestioning loyalty to the greatest cause of them all—the state.
In fact, as Han Ho Suk, Director of the Center for Korean Affairs, writes in his recent paper, “North Korean soldiers are taught to fight to the bitter end. In September 1996, a North Korean submarine got stranded at Kangrung , South Korea , and its crew abandoned the ship. Eleven of the crew committed suicide and the rest fought to the last man except one who was captured. In June 1998, another submarine got caught in fishing nets at Sokcho and its crew killed themselves. Such is the fighting spirit of North Korean soldiers.” [2] Combine this suicidal spirit with the concept of total war, which “is North Korea 's avowed strategy in case of US preemptive attacks,” and with the fact that weapons of mass destruction, and ballistic nuclear missiles in particular, are an essential component in North Korea ’s total war plan, and the emerging picture of the current stand-off is truly troubling. [3]
As someone well familiar with the DPRK military strategy and capability, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry, who presided over the Defense Department when it first learned back in 1994 that North Korea had acquired the nuclear bomb, has recently given this country a dire warning that the current crisis “was manageable six months ago if we did the right things. But we haven't done the right things…time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous.” [4]
Exerting external pressure on the DPRK through economic isolation and military posturing under these ominous circumstances is not likely to work, except to provide further indoctrination support to Kim Jong Il’s regime in rallying his impoverished subjects against the “foreign enemy and aggressor,” who becomes a convenient scapegoat to blame for all their current suffering. Given the complete absence of external sources of information inside North Korea , unparalleled even by the former isolation vacuum of the Iron Curtain, the overwhelming majority of the country’s population can reasonably be expected to buy into the xenophobic, fear-ridden collective mentality breastfed by the domestic totalitarian culture and mass media. And as many of us even here in the United States are aware, official myths have an incredibly long and painful way of dieing out.
They prey on their carriers’ individual fears, prejudices and insecurities, alienate human beings treacherously from their true selves and from each other, and cannot be easily extricated from a society that espouses such myths. Naturally, no amount of military posturing on the part of the United States, combined with the Bush administration’s steadfast refusal to consider direct talks or a nonaggression treaty with an “evil” regime, is going to do anything to alleviate the latter’s paranoid, suicidal fears. Unfortunately, the late precedent of the ill-fated invasion of Iraq by the “coalition of the willing” also does little to assuage North Korean concerns for their own safety. So, with neither side willing to question the sanity of uncompromising, militant self-righteousness, we are slipping arrogantly towards an impending nuclear catastrophe.
