We Know

It should have been another picture (to the right).  The UN report that came out over the past day reveals horrifying stuff about North Korea -- rapes, murders, forced suicides, brain washing, forced labor.  Basic habeas corpus rights are so far from what's going on in the playland of the Kims that even a good-old-fashioned-Saudi-Arabia-let's-not-allow-women-to-drive style oppression sounds humane by comparison.  Here we go again; another totalitarian state putting people to death by the thousands.  In the 1950s, the philosopher Hannah Arendt defined totalitarianism as a state which relates to its population through terror. Indeed.

  There's three points to be made about this -- serious ones, as people's lives are at stake.  Firstly, the North Korean regime will fall.  Regimes, all states, empires, civilizations or any manner of political structure eventually takes its tumble.  Some of the world's less friendly regimes have had relatively short lives -- the Greek colonels regime of the late '60s and early '70, the twenty years or so of military dictatorship in Brazil from the '60s to the '80s and the Franco years in Spain (1939-1975, as brutal as they were) at least found some variety of end point.  Others last longer.  Make no mistake; when the Russian Revolution came, for the vast majority of the people -- the peasants specifically -- three hundred years of the Romanovs had been no liberating experience.  The Qing Dynasty, China's last imperial dynasty, was also rotten to the core; it tortured, murdered and weaseled its way forward over a good few hundred years (though at the end, the West was exerting serious pressure upon it).  Theoretically, there could come an invasion of North Korea (it seems to have been quite possible in Iraq [twice], Libya [well, bombing] and Afghanistan).  Such action is unlikely in North Korea anytime soon; China wouldn't have it, it would be bloody and possibly nuclear.  There might come an Eastern Bloc-like 1989-like uprising -- though that's also unlikely as the flow of ideas is radically more controlled in North Korea than it was in Eastern Europe (it's not even close).  There might come a much darker version of such a revolt -- like what happened against Ceausescu in Romania times three, or maybe three hundred.  The extra factors come because such a revolt would be the result of hunger -- not liberal ideas and an interest in following other revolutionary dominoes.  When real hunger sets in, danger can follow (and there have been significant famines).  One way or the other, however, we can be guaranteed the end will come.

Point two is that America and the West -- well, America really -- need to acknowledge their responsibility in all this.  The U.S. backed Syngman Rhee at the end of the 1940s and his old-fashioned authoritarian crackdown on left-wing political dissent contributed to the start of the Korean War.  No one was holding free elections on the Korea peninsula before 1950; two regimes faced one another in a cauldron of Cold War pressure.  By the end of the war, North was beat back into a corner and it barred itself in. There's never really been any move towards entente.  There's been a couple of pragmatic interventions like Madeleine Albright's in 2009.  However, those have been about specific issues (nuclear weapons) rather than attempts to hold out a hand of general  acceptance such that North Korea might come into the international community rather than shun it (that's always been posed as "their choice").  Many of the problems the UNHCR is now reporting on have been known for a long time -- North Korea's gulags have hardly been a secret.  The gulags, for all their atrociousness, are nonetheless intended to defend something.  Were there an indication that there were nothing against which to defend, who knows what ideas and technologies might flow across a border that for sixty years has been one of the world's most difficult to permeate?

Lastly, the defeat of North Korea, when it does come -- and again, it will at some point -- will be the end of a particular variety of the socialist idea.  Now, one might say "good riddance."  One should -- we'll get to that in a minute.  However, the notion of a full and absolute rejection of anything capitalistic -- in nearly any form -- is an extreme rarity in today's world; never mind the willingness to bar oneself off from the rest of the world and rot rather than give in (and don't give me the example of Cuba; there's no Europeans drinking white russians from coconuts on North Korean beaches).  Might that latter move -- the barring off and rotting -- really be about the dictatorial mindset of a ruling clique?  Undoubtedly.  However, that the principle of absolute socialist utopia is at least brandished forward and held out as an idea to consider exists virtually nowhere else.  It was once an idea that held some cachet -- societies with no wealth inequality, universal cooperation among its members, full employment for all, the absolute guarantee of medical care, education and the removal of market-based and commercial drivel  from our minds.  It's not to say that's the society had in the Democratic People's Republic.  It is to say it's at least the principle held forward, though -- without any compromise.

Nonetheless, such old fashioned absolutisms have to be put aside for now.  In the words of Michael Donald Kirby, the head of the panel that issued today's findings, "we can't say we didn't know."  100% right.  The age old excuse for why states haven't acted in the face of crushing human tragedy has been thrown out the window.  The UN is challenging us to do something.  We should.  If the DPRK won't allow in UN inspectors and clean up its act (the best thing would be to get the Chinese to supervise any possible team [again, Chinese standards will be better than North Korean standards, and at least it might get done]), you have to think about the use of force, damn the consequences.  If one wants what the DPRK said it was trying to build -- and one might -- one will have to try again.  The first time didn't work.