Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto (Part 4)by Joshua StantonBefore the Great Famine, the North Koreans had Thanksgiving, too. The Korean harvest holiday is called chuseok, and in South Korea, it means that millions of cars clog the highways carrying people to visit and feast with their relatives. In North Korea, there are no traffic jams, no traffic, few travel passes, and for most of the people, there’s little to feast on, so Chuseok has become a modest celebration. Still, the idea of inviting a North Korean family to Thanksgiving may have caused me a greater sense of irony than it did my guests, Kim Kwang Jin and his family. Before he and his family defected in 2003, Kim had been a trusted member of North Korea’s Inner Party: a graduate of Kim Il Sung University who had studied English literature, married a general’s daughter, and obtained a prized job that allowed him to travel abroad. Kim Kwang Jin’s particular job was buying insurance — specifically, reinsurance policies from large international insurance companies — and then collecting payouts after catastrophic “accidents” that only North Korean authorities would be allowed to investigate. The policies later became the subject of much litigation, and Mr. Kim has since revealed to The Washington Post that they were actually a global insurance fraud scheme. This was just one of many ways Kim Jong Il sustained his regime with foreign currency.
Dulled by tryptophan and ginseng rice wine, we spoke of Mr. Kim’s homeland. I asked Mr. Kim if his former colleagues in Pyongyang still believed in the system. He said they did not. But how did he know? As it turns out, North Koreans have found their own ways to express ideas without convicting themselves. They tell jokes with close friends, but mostly, they use inflections. What do the North Korean people want? Mr. Kim paused for a long time and thought carefully.
“They want to get rid of Kim Jong Il.”
“But surely they don’t say this.”
“No, of course they can’t say that.”
“So, how do you know?”
“They say that they want a war.”
He meant Götterdämmerung, known locally as OPLAN 5027. This was North Korean code-talk for the end of the system, a war that was worth the risk because the survivors would live with hope and ChocoPies, and without rising before dawn to attend criticism sessions. This is difficult stuff for most Americans to comprehend, but it was not the first time I had read of similar sentiments by North Koreans — prayers to a forbidden God for the twilight of the living ones. In North Korea, there are people who pray for Götterdämmerung, but I would rather they simply had chuseok back.
Götterdämmerung will have to come first, but it is coming, regardless of whether we decide to hasten and shape the form that it will take. If Kim Jong Il believed he had more than a few years to live, it’s hard to believe that he’d already be deifying his 27 year-old son, Kim Jong Eun, to succeed him. In a theocracy like North Korea, the succession between gods requires many more levels of indoctrination and rewiring of devotions than exclusively political transfers of power. It is questionable that the Kim Dynasty will accomplish this in the time Kim Jong Il appears to have left on this earth, or that Jong Eun will be able to command the unquestioning loyalty of septuagenarian generals who have survived decades of purges. Once Kim Jong Il becomes incapacitated, North Korea is going to confront a severe — and probably terminal — crisis of confidence. Sooner or later, a state of severe economic or political distress will cause factions within the regime to compete for limited resources, and the North Korean state will begin to fail. Our decisions now will influence whether North Korea will be a nuked-up Somalia or a state that can be reintegrated into South Korea without a major conflict.
If recent reporting is to be believed, the crisis of confidence has already begun among the North Korean people. Talk of the succession of Kim Jong Eun has caused intense despair among most North Koreans, many of whom hold him responsible for the Great Confiscation or exhausting labor mobilizations. Some call him “an immature little bastard” who is “more savage than his father,” or decry his dynastic succession in an ostensibly socialist society. Above all else, the succession of a young tyrant represents the extension of this regime for more years than they have left on this Earth. His succession means that Götterdämmerung is many North Koreans’ last hope for a better future.
I have proposed in this series that South Korea and its allies, including the United States, join forces to flood North Korea with subversive ideas and smuggled goods; support its infiltration by an underground opposition; and empower it to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and catalyze the formation of a shadow government that provides them with their essential needs, including hope. It is unlikely that anyone but profoundly desperate or devoted people would undertake tasks like these. Indeed, almost all of the most intrepid, cohesive, and effective organizations smuggling North Koreans through China have been Christian missionaries. Few of the more dispassionate experts on the diplomatic, economic, or military aspects of North Korea are likely to agree that the North Korean system has weakened enough to be undermined by such an ambitious effort today, and for the record, neither do I. Collapse has to follow contain and constrict. Creating more favorable conditions will require a combination of information operations and targeted sanctions to strain, and eventually overload, the security forces. Other stars may also have to align in how the regime (mis)manages the succession issue. Preventing China from undermining such a strategy will require us to raise the cost of its support to Kim Jong Il, such as by sanctioning Chinese companies investing in North Korea, or raising the stakes with our supply of arms to Taiwan. On the other hand, the conventional military, economic, and diplomatic wisdom has a poor track record at foreseeing the most consequential social shifts in repressive states. No one can really claim to have a complete understanding of what’s happening in North Korea today. But if the right conditions do not exist for the subversion of North Korea today, there is much we can do to help catalyze them.
But does any of this matter if the security forces have all the guns? Yes, to a degree. The expert consensus is that most of North Korea’s political and military units will probably hold together as long as Kim Jong Il lives and controls the key levers of power, though anything is possible after he dies. As long as the military and the security forces remain loyal to the center, clearly, they will be able to crush any underground they ferret out. This means that as conditions are now, no opposition can challenge the state directly. Absent a military mutiny, there will be no march on Pyongyang. For now, an underground can only survive clandestinely, if it can survive at all. But the capacity to deliver food and essential services is the power to influence and organize people, often without most of the participants even knowing who they’re working with. If an underground can take root and spread by delivering necessities and information to the people, it can build strength, seek out and coopt neglected and dysfunctional elements of the state’s infrastructure, and link up with its leaders in exile in South Korea. It would take years, but one day, neglected clinics could be supplied with medicine and money to treat resistance cells; mechanics could be given tools to repair resistance vehicles; informers could be paid or bribed to report on other informers; and if the financial pressure works well enough, elements of the security forces could be paid to look the other way. As it quietly takes root, this movement would wait for the crisis of confidence to create division and disarray within the security force, and then take advantage of a moment of opportunity.
Or, that moment may not come. If an underground can establish itself inside North Korea, it will have to decide on the next step based on conditions that are unknowable now. That decision is at least three years into the future, and probably much longer. Without the support of a clandestine political or religious organization, no opposition will never have the logistical, intelligence, and personnel networks it will need to survive. Then, we are back to waiting for the unknowable, most likely the overthrow of one dangerous dictatorship by another, followed by an outbreak of factional civil war that draws in foreign intervention.
America, Japan, and South Korea must not merely watch for opportunities created by North Korea’s succession crisis; they must create their own opportunities by saturating North Korea with information to destabilize the regime and to seed the soil with a better alternative. Our information operations should seek to amplify North Koreans’ lack of confidence in the system, reformat years of indoctrination, and build durable connections between individual North Koreans and their relatives, friends, business partners, and collaborators in South Korea and beyond (which is why the establishment of a cell phone network may be the most important subversive option we have). At the same time, we should seek to build connections not only to discontented North Koreans, but also to key constituencies in the military and the government who may provide the firepower that defeating a tyranny always requires. When the North Korean state begins to fail, a few officials and officers could decide whether the center holds or fractures. The presence of a sympathetic organization among the North Korean people could also make the process of reunifying and reconstructing North Korea much easier.
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It is too early to write the next installment of this series before we observe the effects of cracking North Korea’s information blockade and what happens when Kim Jong Il dies. It is almost certain that violence will follow. There’s probably nothing we can do to prevent that, although I’m one who believes that we can influence its scale and outcome. No one will win a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping North Korea’s public executions and shutting down its gulag, but since when has the Nobel Committee or any other international institution — particularly Ban Ki-Moon’s U.N. — done anything tangible for the people of North Korea? As Americans, we reserve to ourselves the right to use violence against terrorists to protect our civilian population. Today, there is no North Korean resistance to arm; in any event, the North Korean people themselves will have to decide when and how to confront the security forces who terrorize, torture and murder them. That time is years away if it is to come at all, but the very possibility that an organization exists to challenge the state will give us influence within and over North Korea, and over China. I hope that if a North Korean opposition rises and decides to fight, that we’ll support them, but I’m under no illusions that our anemic political class would. The alternative may be to watch banditry and warlordism fill this vacuum instead. Even if the opposition does decide to acquire arms — perhaps from within North Korea itself or from a disgruntled regime faction — it will never be able to overthrow the state by force. But after several years of decay in the security forces’ resources, training, discipline, and morale, the knowledge that the resistance is armed may be enough to deter the state from using deadly force. It could also assist one regime faction over another at a crucial moment, facilitate an easier South Korean occupation, and deter a Chinese occupation.
It is a sure thing that if North Koreans decide to oppose this regime, people will die, but many people are already dying now. Financial constrict and political subversion could also cause chaos near the Chinese border, but given China’s brutality toward North Korean refugees and all that it has done to support Kim Jong Il, this is not entirely a bad thing. Once China’s leaders conclude that the continuation of the Kim regime means more violence and chaos and only ends with Götterdämmerung, they would have new incentives to support an orderly disarmament and transition of power. A regime as politically and financially beleaguered as North Korea’s couldn’t hold out for long without Chinese money and intervention. If China does intervene, it would galvanize North Korea’s ferocious nationalism, and the Chinese army might find itself dodging convoy ambushes along the main road between Pyongyang and Dandong. That could threaten the stability of China’s own one-party rule. Because China probably knows this, I tend to doubt that it would intervene. (America should also take heed; North Koreans have been inculcated with nationalism and anti-Americanism for decades. Their discontent with their own government is not the same thing as affection for us. For obvious reasons, South Korea is the only country that can pacify North Korea, although the United States and Japan can play important supporting roles).
What end serves the common purposes of the United States, Japan, South Korea, and the North Korean people? Surely it goes far beyond nuclear disarmament to making North Korea a less dangerous place, something that requires North Korea to accept a fundamental transparency that is the antithesis of this regime’s pathology. It is at this stage that the Six-Party Talks could acquire a useful function by allowing the region’s powers to coordinate their support for a contained implosion of the North Korean regime and a phased transition to Korean reunification. As a price of its support, China may ask that no U.S. forces be stationed north of the present-day DMZ, but this demand should be acceptible, because the entanglement of an occupation of North Korea is not in America’s interests, either.
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History may eventually record that overthrowing the Kim Dynasty was the easy part. Rebuilding North Korea will be one of the greatest humanitarian, financial, and political challenges the world will have faced since 1945. It will be painful, expensive, and lengthy under the best of circumstances. A 20o6 RAND Corporation study estimated that South Korea would need as many as 440,000 troops to stabilize North Korea after the collapse of the existing regime, but only if North Koreans resist a South Korean occupation. North Koreans will more easily accept a reconstruction effort led by Koreans — North Koreans with a base of indigenous support, returned North Korean exiles, and the South Korean government — than a foreign occupation.
There are now 18,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea. Among these, several thousand could be trained to as judges, administrators, policemen, military officers, and technocrats to assume key positions in a post-Kim Jong Il North Korea, and to lead those North Koreans who will be prepared to accept and assist a new Korean government. If North Korea is to be a stable and functioning democracy ten years from now, it will need the combined support of these exiles, American and Japanese capital, South Korea’s ingenuity and drive, and the courage and vision that lies latent among the North Koreans themselves.
Mr. Jefferson argued that when a government becomes destructive of the ends of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. His words are as compelling when applied to North Korea as they have ever been in any other place and time. I am not such an American exceptionalist that I would deny the North Korean people to alter or abolish a system that culls the expendable, murders the independent-minded, and wounds the survivors. And it so happens that the interest of the North Korean people undeniably aligns with our own.
TNL
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