By Stephen Gowans

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the U.S. journalists who snuck into north Korea and were captured, tried and sentenced by north Korean authorities, have recounted their story in the September 1st edition of The Los Angeles Times. Their op-ed piece is more a propaganda offensive aimed at vilifying north Korea (and excusing their crime) than an honest account of their ordeal.

The journalists, freed last month after former U.S. president Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang to arrange their release, acknowledged that they entered north Korea illegally, a charge U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton originally dismissed as baseless. The U.S. media, acting in its accustomed role as unofficial propaganda apparatus of the U.S. government, accepted Clinton’s claim, never wondering whether the charges were indeed baseless or how Clinton could know one way or the other.

But while admitting their actions were illegal, the two journalists nevertheless sought to extenuate their guilt. “There were no signs marking the international border, no fences, no barbed wire,” they wrote, suggesting they stumbled innocently into north Korea, and that part of the blame lies with north Korea for failing mark its border clearly. They also suggested that their guide had ‘set them up.’

But it’s clear the two journalists (a third, cameraman Mitch Goss, eluded capture) knew they had crossed an international border. They were led by a seasoned Korean Chinese guide who knew the terrain. And they recognized that the frozen Tumen River, which they walked across, marked the frontier. When “our guide beckoned for us to follow him beyond the middle of the river” (i.e., the international border) “we did, eventually arriving at the riverbank on the North Korean side,” the pair wrote.

Ling and Lee had travelled to the area to interview what they called “several North Korean defectors – women who had left poverty and repression in their homeland.” The designation of the women, economic migrants, as ‘defectors’ (are Mexicans who cross the Rio Grande ‘defectors’?) is a standard practice of Western journalists seeking to vilify an ideological enemy. So too is the obligatory reference to ‘repression.’

Yet while the journalists invoked hoary anti-communist shibboleths, they failed to cite even the flimsiest evidence the women were fleeing repression, noting only that “most of the North Koreans we spoke with said they were fleeing poverty and food shortages.”

Indeed, it is poverty, not political repression, which compels north Koreans to leave their country. They leave in search of a better life elsewhere, just as poverty compels countless Latin Americans to migrate to the United States, many illegally, also in search of a better life.

Ling and Lee failed to ask, or indeed to illuminate, why north Koreans are poor and short of food in the first place, implying, in the standard U.S. media fashion, that north Korea’s command economy has failed north Koreans. The real reason has much to do with U.S. foreign policy.

Korea scholar Bruce Cumings explains that north Korea “has been sanctioned since 1950, when the Korean War began. It’s been isolated by the United States since the regime was formed in 1948.” [1] Why? According to David Straub, director of the U.S. State Department’s Korea desk from 2002 to 2004, “North Korea’s closed economic and social system means the country has virtually nothing of value to offer the United States.” [2] U.S. policy since 1948 has been to pressure north Korea militarily and economically to open its doors to U.S. exports, investments and military bases. Pyongyang has, however, successfully resisted Washington’s pressure, remaining closed to U.S. domination, and therefore remaining of virtually no value to the U.S. corporate class. As a consequence, it is an object of U.S. enmity.

Despite being sanctioned, north Korea managed to rebuild after the Korean War (the U.S. Air Force flattened every structure in the country over one story) and was able to grow economically at a faster pace than south Korea, until the mid 1980s. And this despite the reality that south Korea received huge injections of aid from the United States and Japan, while Pyongyang received far less from the Soviet Union and China.

A major set-back came when the socialist bloc collapsed. North Korea was deprived of its markets, and this eliminated counter-pressure against the West’s sanctions. Now, the sanctions bit more deeply.

On top of economic warfare, north Korea faced unceasing U.S. military hostility. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops were stationed on Korean soil, and continue to be stationed there, while 40,000 more are deployed in nearby Japan. U.S. warships patrol the country’s maritime borders, and U.S. warplanes fly menacingly close to its airspace. Washington introduced battlefield nuclear weapons into the Korean peninsula soon after the war, and while claiming the weapons have since been withdrawn, refuses to renounce the first strike use of strategic nuclear weapons against north Korea – and refused even before Pyongyang acquired its own nuclear weapons capability. The principal reason north Korea embarked on a program of nuclear proliferation is to deter U.S. nuclear aggression. Had the U.S. Strategic Command not announced in the early 1990s that, with the Soviet Union having collapsed, it was re-targeting some of its missiles on north Korea, Pyongyang might never have withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

North Korea hasn’t been the only country to face Washington’s hostile treatment. What Felix Greene wrote in 1970 of China and Cuba, remains true of north Korea today.

“The United States imposed a 100 percent embargo on trade with these countries; she employs great pressure to prevent her allies from trading with them; she arms and finances their enemies; she harasses their shipping; she threatens them with atomic missiles which she announces are pre-targeted and pre-programmed to destroy their major cities; her spy ships prowl just beyond these countries’ legal territorial waters; her reconnaissance planes fly constantly over their territory. And having done all in their power to disrupt these countries’ efforts to rebuild their societies by means of blockades to prevent essential goods from reaching them, any temporary difficulties and setbacks these countries may encounter are magnified and exaggerated and presented as proof that a socialist revolutionary government is ‘unworkable’.” [3]

Faced with much larger, hostile adversaries (south Korea’s military budget is many times larger than north Korea’s) Pyongyang has been forced to channel a crushingly large percentage of its meagre budget into defense. With scarce resources going to the military, productive investments can’t be made. That, in combination with sanctions and financial isolation, has meant poverty for millions of north Koreans.

The United States used the same strategy against the Soviet Union. The Reagan administration spent massively on an arms build-up in the 1980s in an effort to spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. [4] As the Soviets struggled to keep pace, their more limited resources were diverted increasingly into arms spending. Improvements in living standards were slowed and investment and consumption expenditures were forced to take a back seat to military outlays. U.S. cold warrior Robert McNamara explained the strategy.

“The Soviet Union came out of the Second World War with a brilliant military victory. With heavy casualty and high economic expenditure…this country had three priorities for its plan after the war. 1. Renewing the country’s infrastructure completely so the Soviet people could reach the promise of communism; 2. Rebuilding and renewing the country’s defense in the face of the stalking capitalist world; 3. Gaining new friends in the world, especially in Eastern Europe and the Third World…

“If the United States succeeds in engaging the Soviet Union in an arms race, then all these plans would go out the window…Our goal was very simple: the second priority would, if possible, replace the first priority. In other words, first increasing the military expenditure and last, improving the people’s standard of living…and of course this would affect the third priority as well.

“What is the meaning of this? It means that if the Soviet Union is dragged into an arms race and a massive portion of its budget, 40 percent if possible, is allocated to this purpose, then a lesser amount would be left for improving the people’s lives, and therefore, the dream of communism, which so many people are awaiting around the world, would be postponed and the friends of the Soviet Union and the supporters of the idea of communism would have to wait a long time…On the basis of this calculation, the arms race may even threaten Soviet ideology in Moscow.” [5]

With few socialist countries left, and Cuba and north Korea struggling with poverty, the received doctrine is that socialism is unworkable. But as author William Blum points out,

“…every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies.

“Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

“It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.” [6]

“North Korea is the most sanctioned nation in the world,” noted then U.S. president George W. Bush in 2008, adding that it would remain the most sanctioned nation on earth for some time. [7] Is it any wonder north Koreans are poor and short of food?

While the causes of north Korea’s difficulties are partly endogenous, they are largely exogenous. In an effort to discredit socialism and create the impression that it is misguided and unworkable, anti-communist ideologues attribute all of north Korea’s difficulties to internal factors, deliberately ignoring the larger external causes. Ling and Lee portray themselves as motivated by humanitarian concern over the plight of impoverished and hungry north Koreans, seeking only to bring their hardships to light. But if they were genuinely galvanized to bring relief to north Koreans, they would have trained their sights on the anti-north Korea policies their own government has implemented, rather than blaming the victim. Poor and hungry north Koreans aren’t sneaking across the border into China because they’re repressed, and they’re not poor and hungry because socialism is incapable of providing for their material needs. Prior to the collapse of the socialist bloc, north Korea was a rapidly industrializing country that left U.S. State Department planners in despair that their south Korean neo-colony would never catch up. [8] North Korea’s problems are not related to socialism. Indeed, it is far more likely the case that north Korea’s socialism has mitigated its externally-imposed difficulties. North Korea’s problems have been largely created by Washington, whose goal since W.W.II has been the domination of the Korean peninsula in its entirety, and the destruction of pro-independence forces within.

1. “North Korea warns of new tests as nuclear standoff intensifies,” Democracy Now!, October 11, 2006.

2. Kim Hyun, “U.S. Has No Intention to Build Close Ties with N Korea: Ex-official,” Yonhap News, September 2, 2009.

3. Felix Greene, The Enemy: What Every American Should Know about Imperialism, Vintage, New York, 1970, p. 292.

4. Sean Gervasi, “A full court press: The destabilization of the Soviet Union,” Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1990, 21 – 26. 14.

5. Robert McNamara, cited in Bahman Azad, Heroic Struggle, Bitter Defeat: Factors Contributing to the Dismantling of the Socialist State in the USSR, International Publishers, New York, 2000, p. 138

6. William Blum, “The Anti-Empire Report,” September 2, 2009. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer73.html

7. The New York Times, July 6, 2008.

8. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2005.

By Stephen Gowans

The Bush administration removed north Korea last year from its list of states deemed to support international terrorism. Washington placed north Korea on the list in 1988, when it claimed the country’s “agents were implicated in the bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed 115 people.” (1) The US agreed to remove north Korea from the list as part of a deal that saw Pyongyang begin to dismantle its nuclear facilities.

Yesterday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington will consider reinstating north Korea to the list “as the Obama administration looks for ways to ratchet up pressure on Pyongyang after recent nuclear and missile tests.” (2)

“’We’re going to look at it’,” Clinton said on ABC’s ‘This Week’ when asked about a letter last week from Republican senators demanding that North Korea be put back on the list. ‘There’s a process for it. Obviously we would want to see recent evidence of their support for international terrorism.’” (3)

In other words, Washington has no evidence of north Korean support for international terrorism and no legitimate reason to restore north Korea to the list. But the Obama administration needs to find “ways to ratchet up pressure on Pyongyang,” and re-listing north Korea seems to fit the bill.

But how much additional pressure will re-listing north Korea create?

Last summer, The Los Angeles Times noted that Washington’s removal of north Korea from the list would “have little practical effect…given the raft of economic sanctions currently in force against Pyongyang.” It went on to point out that then US president George W. Bush said the move would have “’little impact on North Korea’s financial and diplomatic isolation’ and that sanctions related to human rights violations, past nuclear testing and weapons proliferation would remain.” (4)

“North Korea is the most sanctioned nation in the world,” Bush said, “and will remain the most sanctioned nation in the world.” (5)

Bush’s promises made two things plain: (a) north Korea’s removal from the list was largely symbolic and (b) the US had no intention of normalizing its relations with north Korea, despite the deal it had struck with Pyongyang at the six party talks promising to do just that.

Indeed, it could be said that Washington agreed to remove north Korea from the list precisely because the move was symbolic and would not, therefore, weaken US efforts to topple the Communist government in Pyongyang. North Korea would remain the most sanctioned country on earth, whether it dismantled its nuclear capabilities or not.

So, if Washington’s removal of north Korea from the terrorism list was symbolic, then re-instating north Korea to the list must also be symbolic, and therefore hardly a means of ratcheting up real pressure.

Instead, the move seems to have everything to do with reinforcing the recent steps taken to return north Korea to its accustomed role as bogeyman of US foreign policy, a role it occupies rhetorically for reasons related to its supposed belligerence and in reality for its challenging US hegemony, interfering with US geopolitical aspirations, and denying the US a clear sphere of investment and export opportunity on the northern half of the Korean peninsula. Demonizing north Korea allows Washington to mobilize public opinion to support whatever non-symbolic measures it deems necessary to truly ratchet up pressure.

Clinton’s looking to see whether “there’s recent evidence of (north Korea’s) support for international terrorism” is the Obama administration’s equivalent of Dick Cheney looking to see whether there was evidence of Baghdad hiding weapons of mass destruction and forging ties to al Qaeda. The point is not to formulate foreign policy to accommodate the facts, but to accommodate the facts to a pre-determined foreign policy.

There can be little doubt that if Washington sets out to find “evidence” of north Korea supporting international terrorism, it will find something, no matter how flimsy, to satisfy its demand. Given Washington and the Western media’s transformation of north Korea into a looming threat from its reality as an impoverished country that has been beleaguered by embargo and continually harassed by the United States for over fifty years, there is little doubt that whatever contrived evidence Washington discovers will be seized upon as further evidence of the need to ratchet up the pressure.

1. Peter Finn, “US to weigh returning North Korea to terror list,” The Washington Post, June 9, 2009.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2008.
5. The New York Times, July 6, 2008.

Colin Powell said we would…turn north Korea into a ‘charcoal briquette,’ I mean that’s the way we talk to north Korea, even though the mainstream media doesn’t pay attention to that kind of talk. A charcoal briquette. (1)

By Stephen Gowans

The following South Korean government statement appeared in the New York Times on May 28, 2009.

“If North Korea stages a provocation, we will respond resolutely. We advise our people to trust our military’s solid readiness and feel safe.”

Inclined to depict south Korea as provocative and belligerent, a headline writer may have written the following to introduce the story:

“South Korea threatens military strikes on North.”

Instead, The New York Times introduced the story this way:

“North Korea threatens military strikes on South.”

In covering north Korea’s latest nuclear test and missile launches, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other the Western media have presented a set of facts, without necessary context. Through critical omissions, north Korea has been portrayed as “provocative and belligerent,” following the official US account offered by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In this, as always, the US media have operated as an extension of the US state. That the US media mimic, amplify and justify official US foreign policy positions is an inevitable consequence of the interlocks between the mass media, business and government.

Rather than being provocative, belligerent, irrational and unpredictable, north Korea’s recent behavior has been, on the contrary, defensive, rational and completely predictable. It is not north Korea that has provoked and threatened war; it is the United States, and its client regimes in south Korea and Japan that have played the role of Mars. North Korea’s reactions, are sane, defensive and exactly what would be expected of a country that prizes its fiercely won independence and has no intention of surrendering it to international bullying.

The provocations and belligerence of the US and its allies are to be found in their rejection of north Korea’s overtures of peaceful coexistence. Where north Korea has sought to normalize relations with its neighbors and the West, the US and its allies have talked of getting tough and punishing north Korea for its “bad behavior.”

South Korean president Lee Myung-bak reversed the previous government’s policy of rapprochement. Rather than providing aid and collaborating on economic projects, Lee has emphasized a get-tough policy to bring north Korea to heel. From Pyongyang’s perspective, south Korea has “opted for confrontation” and denied “national reconciliation and cooperation.”

And all had seemed to be going well. North Korea had agreed to disable its nuclear facilities, provide a complete declaration of its nuclear programs, and reaffirm its commitment not to transfer nuclear materials, technology, and know-how.

Talks ground to a halt when the US, south Korea, Russia, China and Japan, either failed to honor their side of the bargain, or renounced it altogether. Japan opted out, refusing to deal with north Korea until it came clean on the kidnapping of Japanese citizens. While north Korea acknowledged the crime, Japan insisted all had not been disclosed. This galled the north Koreans, who bristled over Japan making a cause celebre out of the kidnapping of Japanese citizens whose numbers represent an infinitesimal fraction of the number of Koreans who had been transported against their will to Japan as laborers and “comfort women” over the course of a 35 year Japanese colonization of Korea. Whether the Japanese are taking a genuinely principled stand, or merely feigning principled outrage, it is clear Tokyo has placed the kidnapping issue far ahead of normalizing relations. As Korea specialist Bruce Cumings points out, “The Japanese seem to think eight people are more important than finding a solution to north Korea’s atomic bomb.” (2) For Japan, which had dominated, exploited and oppressed Korea, confrontation, not conciliation, is the main point of departure of its DPRK policy.

By July of last year, north Korea had dismantled 80 percent of its nuclear facilities. Pyongyang was keen to complete its end of the bargain. Doing so would relax its decades-long US imposed isolation. The country stands to benefit enormously from normalization of relations and north Koreans were eager to facilitate the process. The necessity of maintaining a permanent war footing to guard against the potential aggression of the United States (which had threatened to turn the country into a charcoal briquette) has meant severe distortions in north Korean society. A sizeable chunk of the country’s limited resources has had to be plowed into the military, denying the country resources for much needed productive investments. US sanctions block north Korean exports and limit access to credit and foreign investment, further stifling north Korea’s economic development. If north Korea’s economy is in trouble – and it is – it’s not so as a consequence of central planning and public ownership (a canard long favored by anti-Communists), but largely because it has been strangled economically by a hostile United States and forced to squander resources on military preparedness. Pyongyang has beseeched Washington repeatedly to formally end the Korean War and sign a lasting peace agreement, only to be rebuffed on every occasion. Talks held out hope – though slim — that north Korea would finally secure some measure of relief from US harassment.

By July of last year only 40 percent of the energy shipments promised by the US and other parties to the talks – intended to compensate for the loss of energy from closing the Yongbyon reactor — had been delivered. Disturbingly, this appeared to portend a repeat of the Clinton administration policy, worked out in connection with an earlier deal, of endless delay, counting on sanctions and embargoes to bring down the government in Pyongyang before US commitments had to be honored. The Clinton administration had promised north Korea fuel oil shipments and light-water reactors in return for Pyongyang shuttering its Yongbyon facilities. North Korea had used the reactor to produce fuel for a nuclear weapon, but only after the US announced it was re-targeting its strategic nuclear weapons on north Korea following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since north Korea had been flattened, literally, by the US Air Force during the Korean War, the north Koreans had reason not to take the threat lightly. Developing nuclear weapons seemed to be the best way to bring about a stalemate and preserve north Korea’s hard-won sovereignty.

On top of falling behind on fuel shipments, the Bush administration refused to honor its promise to remove the DPRK from its Trading with the Enemy Act. Bush assured anti-DPRK conservatives that despite the deal with north Korea a wide array of US sanctions would remain in place for a long time. Normalization was not in the cards.

Washington justified its failure to meet its obligations by adding a new demand, and then announcing it couldn’t move forward until Pyongyang complied with the new conditions. The conditions, however, were never talked about by US officials as if they were new; instead, Washington acted as if north Korea had agreed to them all along, and that it was Pyongyang, not Washington, that was reneging. Now, in addition to making a full declaration of its nuclear program, north Korea was expected to submit to a verification protocol that would allow US inspectors to go anywhere they wanted in north Korea, sizing up military installations and nosing about defensive positions. Pyongyang countered by demanding unfettered access to south Korea, to verify that the US no longer stored tactical nuclear weapons on Korean soil. Washington insists it doesn’t, but Pyongyang remains sceptical. The US refused, so the DPRK called an end to the talks, having no intention of sacrificing national security. By this point, the US, south Korea and Japan had made clear they had no real commitment to normalization. The talks were simply a way of luring north Korea down a path of surrendering the one thing that kept it from the fate of Ba’athist Iraq – its weapons of mass destruction.

Months later, north Korea would launch a satellite on top of a rocket. Inasmuch as this represented a step forward in the development of a rocket technology that could be used to launch a nuclear warhead, the US persuaded members of the UN Security Council to censure the DPRK. Pyongyang pointed out that it was perfectly within its rights to launch a satellite, and that whatever punitive measures were taken were unjustifiable.

North Korea has never taken military action outside the Korean peninsula. The danger of rocket and nuclear technology in north Korean hands is not one of aggressive war but of north Korea being able to defend itself against the US and Japan, countries with long and bloody histories of waging wars of aggression, on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere. As Bruce Cumings explains,

“The context, going back to the Korean War, for north Korea is that we have targetted north Korea with nuclear weapons since 1950. We are the only power to put nuclear weapons into the Korean Peninsula from 1958 to ’91. And when you look back at Don Rumsfeld’s antics in 2003, when he throught we had won the Iraq war around May or June of 2003, he was asking Congress for new bunker-buster nuclear weapons to go after Kim Jong-Il and the north Korean leadership.” (3)

North Korea’s development of nuclear and rocket technology creates two dangers for Washington and Tokyo: the danger of self-defense against Powell, Rumsfeld and their successors; and the danger of becoming an example to others if it can develop economically outside the strictures of capitalism and imperialism.

Reading about north Korea’s nuclear test in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other Western media, I have been struck by the similarities in coverage. What one newspaper says is pretty much what every other says, as if reporters read each others’ copy and simply repeat what the others have written. There are benefits to doing this. How can you be taken to task over what you’ve written, if what you’ve written agrees with what everyone else says? Of course, there has to be a starting point. The ideas that journalists swap and pass around and mimic have to come from somewhere. But where? The US State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations are two places journalists look for guidance on foreign policy matters. What officials of these two bodies say are regularly echoed in major media, and in train, by opinion leaders, including university professors. Jeremy Paltiel (4), a professor of political science at a university in the city in which I live, offers a serviceable summary of the ideas journalists have been bandying about on north Korea’s latest nuclear test. Let’s look at them.

Paltiel characterizes north Korea’s underground detonation as a “clear provocation” which tests “the resolve of the international community,” without saying how the detonation is a provocation or what he means by the international community. The world has tested 2,054 nuclear devices, only two of which were north Korean, and most of which belonged to the great powers – the countries which make up the permanent membership of the UN Security Council. These are the countries Paltiel implicitly refers to when he speaks of the “international community.” So, countries of the nuclear club are upset that another country has challenged their cozy monopoly.

“The stakes are high,” writes Paltiel, “not just because Pyongyang’s provocations undermine security in northeast Asia, but also because a crucial issue facing the United States is nuclear proliferation to Iran.” We might ask whose security in northeast Asia is being threatened, and how? The United States has targeted strategic nuclear weapons on north Korea – and did so before north Korea had a nuclear weapons capability. Indeed, it is because it has been targeted, that north Korea acquired a nuclear weapons capability in the first place, as a deterrent. The reality of US missiles trained on north Korea surely threatens north Korea’s security, but Paltiel doesn’t label this a provocation. Somehow, north Korea, with a rudimentary nuclear weapons capability, is provocative, while the United States, with hundreds of nuclear weapons aimed at north Korea, 27,000 US troops on Korean soil and 40,000 in nearby Japan, is not. No one with an unprejudiced mind seriously believes that north Korea is an offensive threat to anyone. With south Korea and Japan under a US nuclear umbrella, the first strike use of a nuclear weapon by north Korea against its neighbours would guarantee its immediate annihilation. This truth is not lost on north Korea’s leadership.

As for nuclear proliferation to Iran, it’s not clear whether Paltiel is referring to Iran’s building of a civilian nuclear power industry, in which case it is incumbent on him to explain why Iran, a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, should be uniquely denied the benefits of nuclear power or forced to depend on the great powers for access to nuclear fuel (access they could turn off to extort Iranian concessions.) If he is treating as fact the unsubstantiated allegation that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, then he has ventured into the field of political fiction. Even the US intelligence community says Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program. But if Iran did, could it be blamed for seeking a means to deter the frequent threats of war directed its way by Israel and the United States? Some will say, but these are threats of preventive attack, responses to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to wipe Israel off the map. The problem is, this is a deliberate misinterpretation of what Ahmadinejad said. What he said was that Israel qua Zionist state would eventually disappear, in the same way South Africa qua apartheid state disappeared. There was no implication in Ahmadinejad’s words of nuclear attack or physical destruction. Besides, the US threatened an attack on Iran before Ahmadinejad uttered his misconstrued remarks, when the Bush administration listed Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” and then attacked the first country on the list, Iraq. It’s not Ahmadinejad that invites Washington’s hostility to Iran.

Paltiel carries on in this vein, arguing that it is a short hop, skimp and jump from north Korea being allowed to keep its nuclear weapons to the destruction of Israel. “Should [n]orth Korea acquire the status of nuclear-weapons state, any effort to prevent the nuclearization of Iran would lose validity,” he writes. It’s news to me that this effort had any validity to begin with. He continues: “And the prospect of a nuclear Iran would unravel U.S. Middle East policy, threatening the survival of Israel as well as the security of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf oil-exporting states.” All of this is very vague. It’s not clear how a nuclear Iran would unravel US Middle East policy, or how an unravelling US Middle East policy would lead to the destruction of Israel, unless Paltiel is suggesting that without US support, Israel qua colonial settler state, is dead. If so, this could hardly be something to dread; since it would represent the defeat of a racist ideology, it should, on the contrary, be welcomed as a gain for humanity.

Paltiel’s next step is to explain why north Korea detonated a nuclear device. His argument has been repeated in all major media, or, to put it another way, Paltiel repeats an argument all major media have made. That is that north Korea’s acquisition of a nuclear-weapons capability has nothing to do with the US’s, south Korea’s and Japan’s confrontational stance; nothing to do with the great powers stepping up sanctions on north Korea over the DPRK exercising its right to launch a satellite; nothing to do with US strategic nuclear weapons being targeted on north Korea; nothing to do with the provocative war games exercises the US and south Korea recently held on north Korea’s borders; nothing to do with the tens of thousands of US troops stationed nearby; nothing to do with the need to deter the US, a country which has demonstrated repeatedly that it is prepared to launch aggressive wars, and once did in Korea; in fact, none of these things Paltiel mentions, though they’re surely all highly relevant. Instead, Paltiel attributes north Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons to “the Kim family dynasty’s determination to secure its survival.” If ever there was a violation of Occam’s Razor, this is it. How does the acquisition of nuclear weapons secure the Kim family’s survival? I’m sure Paltiel could weave an elaborate tapestry of arguments to explain the connection between the DPRK’s nuclear test and the Kim family’s leadership aspirations, but why do so when a simple, compelling, explanation of why north Korea tested a nuclear device is close at hand? The reason why is because attribution of north Korea’s development of a nuclear deterrent to the personal qualities of its leadership, rather than to situational factors, deflects attention from the real reasons for north Korea’s behavior. This sets the stage to mobilize public opinion for action to “liberate” north Koreans from Kim’s “power-hungry” and “reckless rule.”

That Paltiel is about five steps removed from reality becomes plain when he frets about “US President Barack Obama’s dream of a nuclear-weapons-free future” evaporating “into a mushroom cloud.” Earth to Paltiel: Obama may dream of a nuclear-weapons-free future, but the chances of the US leading the way by relinquishing or even seriously reducing its nuclear arsenal are about as good as the chances of Kim Jong Il playing opposite Jennifer Aniston in a romantic comedy. Were Obama truly interested in a nuclear-weapons-free future, he would reverse his country’s targeting with nuclear weapons of non-nuclear states – the very reason for nuclear proliferation to north Korea – while renouncing the United States’ addiction to conquering weaker countries. If he did these things, the necessity for threatened countries of acquiring a nuclear weapons capability to protect themselves against US aggression would be eliminated. That’s the route to a nuclear-weapons-free future.

Paltiel’s article was written before south Korea announced it would join the Proliferation Security Initiative, a US-led program to intercept north Korean ships on the high seas, to inspect their cargo for so called contraband goods, the rockets north Korea sells to other countries to earn much needed foreign currency. Pyongyang pointed out correctly that this amounted to a declaration of war, since interfering with another country’s shipping is an act of war. Commit an act of war against us, warned the north Koreans reasonably, and we’ll retaliate. Paltiel, we can be assured, would have joined in the clamor that met north Korea’s warning, by characterizing the warning as a belligernet and provocative act against south Korea. The accustomed practice in journalistic circles has been to declare that north Korea threatened to attack the south, the journalists only later acknowledging that the DPRK did so only after the south threatened to commit an act of war against the north. Indeed, south Korea threatened north Korea, which then threatened to retaliate. Belligerent and provocative or self-defensive?

None of this is clear from the stories carried in Western newspapers, because these stories critically omit context and surrounding events. The facts are correct, but they’re organized within a framework that defines north Korea as provocative and belligerent. It is the purest political fiction, in which black becomes white, night becomes day, and self-defense becomes provocation. “If you’re not careful,” warned Malcolm X, “the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”…and believing the aggressors are the threatened.

1. Bruce Cumings, “Latest North Korean provocations stem from missed US opportunities for demilitarizaton,” Democracy Now!, May 29, 2009.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Jeremy Paltiel, “Chimerica must rise to Kim Jong Il’s challenge,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 25, 2009.

Tim Beal and Don Borrie challenge the view that north Korea’s recent economic difficulties are attributable to mismanagement, pointing to new sanctions as the likely cause of economic contraction after seven consecutive years of growth.

One of the advantages of sanctions for US foreign policy, they write, is that its effects, “those malnourished babies – can be blamed on the Koreans, which in turn is produced as evidence that the sanctions are desirable and necessary.”

See the Pyongyang Report

By Stephen Gowans

“Che Guevara visited Pyongyang around (1965) and told the press that North Korea was a model to which revolutionary Cuba should aspire.” [1]

North Korea is a country that is alternately reviled and ridiculed. Its leader, Kim Jong-il, is demonized by the right and — with the exception of Guevera in 1965 and many of his current admirers — mocked by the left. Kim is declared to be insane, though no one can say what evidence substantiates this diagnosis. It’s just that everyone says he is, so he must be. If Kim had Che’s smoldering good looks he may have become a leftist icon, leader of “the one remaining, self-proclaimed top-to-bottom alternative to neo-liberalism and globalization,” as Korea expert Bruce Cumings puts it. [2]

Instead, the chubby Kim has become a caricature, a Dr. Evil with a bad haircut and ill-fitting clothes. The country he leads, as befits such a sinister character, is said to be a danger to international peace and security, bent on provoking a nuclear war. And it’s claimed that years of economic mismanagement have reduced north Korea to an economic basket-case and that its citizens, prisoners at best, are starved and repressed by a merciless dictator.

While many people can recite the anti-north Korea catechism — garrison state, hermit kingdom, international pariah — they’ll admit that what they know about the country, apart from the comic book caricatures dished up by the media, is fuzzy and vague. But this has always been so. As early as 1949, Anna Louise Strong could write that “there is little public knowledge about the country and most of the headlines distort rather than reveal the facts.” [3] Cumings dismisses US press reports on north Korea as “uninformative, unreliable, often sensationalized” and as deceiving, not educational.” One of the reasons the headlines distort, even today, especially today, can be summed up in a syllogism. World War II, as it was waged in the Pacific, was in large part a struggle between the dominant economic interests of the United States and those of Japan for control of the Pacific, including the Korean peninsula. Japan had occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, until it was driven out by the Korean resistance, among whose principal figures was north Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific war. After Tokyo’s surrender, the US tried to assert control over Japan’s former colonial possessions, including Korea. Kim’s guerilla state upset those plans. The corporate rich and hereditary capitalist families that dominate both US foreign policy and the mass media recognize north Korea to be a threat to their interests. The DPRK condones neither free trade, free enterprise nor free entry of US capital. Were it allowed to thrive, it would provide a counter-example to US-enforced neo-liberalism, a model other countries might follow, a model revolutionaries, like Che, have found inspiration in. The headlines deceive, rather than educate, because north Korea is against the interests of those who shape them.

My perspective is not that of the mainstream or of the investors, bankers and wealthy families who, in multifarious ways, define it. I am not for subjugating north Korea, nor for sanctions or war or forcing north Korea to disarm, and I am certainly not for what John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN, once called Washington’s policy toward north Korea. Asked by the New York Times to spell out Washington’s stance toward the DPRK, Bolton “strode over to a bookshelf, pulled off a volume and slapped it on the table. It was called ‘The End of North Korea.'” “‘That,’ he said, ‘is our policy.'” [4]

I do not believe that Kim Jong-il is insane. The insanity slur is a way of giving some substance to the perfectly ludicrous claim that north Korea is a danger to the world. It is not. The only threat north Korea poses is the threat of a potential self-defense to long-standing US plans to dominate the Korean peninsula from one end to the other.

Pre-WWII roots of conflict

Japan colonized Korea in 1910. For the next 35 years Korea became a source of immense profits for Japanese industrialists and financiers, extracted in the blood and suffering of Koreans. Numberless Koreans were forcibly shipped to Japan as forced laborers or as sexual slaves known as “comfort women.” But Japan could not plunder the peninsula alone. It had the help of wealthy Korean landowners and industrialists, who, just as they had found favor with their Japanese masters, would find favor with the US occupation government and later fill key positions in the south Korean state.

While Pearl Harbor marked the formal beginning of armed hostilities between Japan and the United States, the two countries were locked in conflict well before Pearl Harbor. Both sought to dominate the countries of the Pacific Rim, to secure their riches, on a monopoly basis. Tokyo followed an aggressive and expansionary foreign policy, backed by the gun, to drive other imperialist powers from the region. The US, already with a dominant position in the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and Samoa, sought an open door for its exporters and investors in China. With both sides seeking a dominant role, it was inevitable they would sooner or later come to blows.

Once formal war broke out, Washington was faced with a tantalizing prospect. If Japan were defeated, its colonies would pass to the United States, perhaps not as outright colonies, but as territories in which the US would have a dominant voice. In other words, a successful conclusion to the war would present the US with everything it had sought before the war.

Soon after Pearl Harbor, the US State Department began toying with the idea of establishing a post-war trusteeship in Korea. Debate raged over whether a trustee arrangement would give Washington enough influence in post-war Korean affairs. The idea of a multilateral trusteeship of Korea was presented to the British and French in 1943, but both countries declined, fearing the arrangement would weaken their own empires.

An American-authored division

It wasn’t Koreans who bisected the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel. It was the Americans. On August 10th 1945, with the Soviets having crossed into the Korean peninsula from the north two days earlier, two US Colonels, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, were ordered to divide Korea into two occupation zones: one American and one Soviet. They chose the 38th parallel as the dividing line. It would give the US control of the capital, Seoul. The Soviets accepted the division, demanding a Soviet occupation zone in the north of Japan, upon Tokyo’s surrender. The US refused.

A government organized by Koreans for Koreans, headquartered at Seoul, was founded within weeks of Japan’s surrender. It called itself the Korean People’s Republic, born of the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, and the People’s Committees rooted in the countryside. Despite its pretensions to be a champion of democracy, the United States refused to recognize the government and actively worked to repress it. For the Americans, the Korean People’s Republic had two strikes against it: (a) it wasn’t answerable to Washington; (b) it had strong communist influences.

Instead of allowing the newly created indigenous government to flourish, the United States established what it had been planning from 1943: a US military occupation regime. The government, which lasted until 1948, was overwhelmingly opposed by local residents, who were tired of foreign occupation and wanted an independent, unified Korea, not an artificially bisected one occupied in the south by a foreign power that was going to insist on having a major voice in Korean affairs.

Unwelcome guests

Three months into the occupation, the US military governor, General John Hodge, noted that resentment against the Americans was growing, and that the south Koreans wanted their independence — not later, but now. “Pro-American,” he said, had become a byword for “pro-Japanese,” “pro-traitor” and “pro-collaborationist.” While regrettable, the Koreans’ anti-American resentment would have to be ignored. The south was fertile ground for communism, Hodge warned. And increasingly, the Koreans were looking to the Soviet Union for inspiration.

Hodge’s views were echoed by Edwin Pauley, a friend of US President Harry Truman. Truman sent Pauley to Korea in 1946 to scout around and report back on what he found. Pauley was alarmed. Communism “could get off to a better start [here] than practically anywhere else in the world,” he told Truman. Unlike the Soviets, who had to go through a painful period of industrialization to transform a runt industrial economy into an industrial colossus, the communist-leaning People’s Committees could expropriate Japanese built factories, railways, public utilities and natural resource industries and run them for the benefit of everyone, from day one. An industrialized economy in the hands of the communists would serve as a potential testament to the merits of socialism, but more importantly, would deprive US investors of access to these same assets. What was the point of routing the Japanese, if you couldn’t enjoy the spoils of war?

Japanese colonialism without the Japanese

The US spent the first year of its occupation suppressing the locally formed People’s Committees. Hodge recruited Koreans who had served in the Japanese Imperial Army to staff an English language officers’ school. By 1948, a south Korean army was in place, comprising six divisions, led, to a man, by officers who served in the Japanese Imperial Army. One of the officers, Kim Sok-won, had been decorated by Hirohito for leading campaigns against Korean guerillas in Manchuria. Hodge also put together a police force, 85 percent of whose personnel were former members of the colonial police, and set them to work in smashing the government of the locally formed Korean People’s Republic. After Mussolini was toppled in Italy, the Americans installed a collaborator who carried on many of Mussolini’s policies. The Italians called the new, American-installed regime, fascism without Mussolini. Likewise, in the south of the Korean peninsula, the Americans had ushered in Japanese colonialism without the Japanese.

Rebellion in the south

A wide-spread rebellion soon followed, along with a significant guerilla movement. By 1948, most villages in the interior were controlled by the guerillas, who enjoyed wide-spread popular support. In October 1948, the guerillas liberated Yosu, sparking rebellions in other towns. The People’s Committee was restored, the north Korean flag was raised, and allegiance was pledged to the north. A rebel newspaper called for land redistribution, the purge of Japanese collaborators from official positions, and a unified Korea. While the US military government nominally allowed membership in left-wing organizations, the police regarded rebels and leftists as traitors who were best imprisoned or shot. In 1948, the draconian National Security Law was used to round up 200,000 Koreans sympathetic to the north and communism. By 1949, 30,000 communists were in jail, and 70,000 were in concentration camps, euphemistically dubbed guidance camps. The south, in its repression of leftists, was beginning to resemble Italy of the 20’s and Germany of the 30’s. The resemblance would soon grow stronger.

A crackdown on the rebellion was organized by the US, whose formal control over the south Korean military had, by this time, been ceded. However, by secret agreement, command of the south Korean military remained in US hands. Even today, command of the ROK military remains with the US in the event of war.

Korea had been a severely class divided society, with a small landed elite, that collaborated with the Japanese occupation, and a large population of poor peasants. The United States intervened on behalf of the landed elite and against the majority of the population, perpetuating the elite’s privileges.

The CIA noted in a 1948 report that south Korea had become divided by conflict between a “grass-roots independence movement, which found expression in the establishment of the People’s Committees” led by “communists who based their right to rule on the resistance to the Japanese,” and a US-supported right-wing that monopolized the country’s wealth and collaborated with Imperial Japan.

Owing to the right-wing’s unpopularity, it was impossible to put forward its representatives for election. So the US looked to non-communist exiles, whose absence from the country had allowed them to escape the taint of collaboration. The fiercely anti-communist Syngman Rhee was eventually brought to power. Rhee had lived in the US 40 years, earned a Ph D from Princeton and married an American wife, a background very different from that of Kim Il-sung, north Korea’s founder, who was active from the early 30s as a prominent leader of the resistance to Japanese occupation. Cumings notes that “for nearly four decades (south Korea was) run by military officers and bureaucrats who served the same Japanese masters that Kim and his friends spent a decade fighting in the 1930s.” [5]

The maximal guerilla leader

Kim scorned Korea’s inability to resist foreign domination. The Japanese regarded him as a highly able and dangerous guerilla leader, going so far as to establish a special anti-Kim insurgency unit to hunt him down. The guerillas were an independent force, inspired by a desire to reclaim the Korean peninsula for Koreans, and were controlled by neither the Soviets nor Chinese. While they often retreated across the border into the Soviet Union to evade Japanese counter-insurgency forces, they received little material help from the Soviets.

Unlike the US, which imposed a military government and repressed the People’s Committees, the Soviets took a fairly hands-off approach to their occupation zone, allowing a coalition of nationalist and communist resistance fighters to run their own show. Within seven months, the first central government was formed, based on an interim People’s Committee led by Kim Il-sung.

Contrary to popular mythology, Kim wasn’t handpicked by the Soviets. He enjoyed considerable prestige and support as a result of his years as a guerilla leader and his commitment to national liberation. In fact, the Soviets never completely trusted him.

Eight months into the occupation, a program of land reform was begun, with landlords dispossessed of their land without compensation, but free to migrate to the south or work plots of size equal to those allocated to peasants. After a year, Kim’s Workers Party became the dominant political force. Major industries, most owned by the Japanese, were nationalized. Japanese collaborators were purged from official positions.

The DPRK was proclaimed on September 9, 1948, three weeks after the Republic of Korea was founded in the south. By the close of the year, Soviet troops were gone. By comparison, there has been an unbroken US military presence of either advisors or combat troops in the south from 1945. Today, some 30,000 US troops remain on Korean soil.

The Soviet influence on the DPRK was never strong, and was balanced by Chinese influence. It’s estimated that the number of Soviet advisors in the north totaled no more than 30 in 1947. And the participation of Korean guerillas on the side of Mao’s peasant army in the Chinese civil war created important links between the north and China.

By contrast, the Republic of Korea was run by Japanese collaborators, a comprador elite, and a president hand-picked by Washington for his ardent anti-communism, whose connections to Korea were 40 years out of date. Rhee’s attractions to the US were two-fold: (1) He was free from collaborationist taint, and therefore more acceptable to the Koreans than the other right-wing candidates it favored; (2) His anti-communist credentials were impeccable. The US had simply picked up from the Japanese as overlord, employing Rhee as their strongman, in the characteristically American imperialist mode of exercising control through a local elite.

The Korean War, 1945 to 1953

Conventional histories of the Korean War mark the war’s beginning as 1950. But when Hugh Deane wrote his history of the war, he titled it “The Korean War, 1945-1953.” “For Americans,” wrote Cumings, who Deane quoted at the beginning of his book, “the war began with a thunderclap in 1950. For Koreans, it began in 1945,” the year the Americans arrived, and began to smother the nascent local government. [6]

Both sides wanted war, but for different reasons. For the north, war was simply the next step in the struggle for independence and liberation from foreign domination. War had begun in 1945 when the US landed at Inchon and began to repress the newly formed Korean People’s Republic. Or, to put it another way, the war had started in 1910 with colonization by the Japanese. 1945 simply marked a change in the occupation regime. For the south, the reason for war was to drive to the north, to rollback the encroachments Kim’s Workers’ Party had made on the traditional elite, and to bring the whole of the peninsula under US suzerainty (the project that had stretched back to the pre-war years when the US and Japan had locked horns over the question of who would dominate the Pacific.)

Both sides had launched incursions across the artificial dividing line the Americans had drawn, and the Soviets had accepted, at the 38th parallel. But to say these represented violations of an internationally recognized frontier would be absurd. Could Koreans invade Korea?

Richard Stokes, the British Minister of Works, pointed out the absurdity in a letter to Ernest Bevan.

“In the American Civil War the Americans would never have tolerated for a single moment the setting up of an imaginary line between the forces of north and south, and there can be no doubt as to what would have been their reaction if the British had intervened in force on behalf of the south. This parallel is a close one because in America the conflict was not merely between two groups of Americans, but was between two conflicting economic systems as is the case in Korea.”

The conflicting economic systems comprised one, based in the south, which perpetuated the wealth and power of a tiny class of landlords, compradors and Japanese collaborators, and another, based in the north, which launched far-reaching reforms on behalf of the vast majority. To reduce the conflict to one between competing economic systems, however, is to miss part of the story. It was also a conflict between national liberation and neo-colonialism.

As soon as the war reached a new phase in 1950, with the push of the northern forces into the south, Kim Il-sung called for the restoration of the People’s Committees. The north’s forces met no popular resistance. When Seoul fell, the People’s Committee was quickly re-formed, led by residents of the south. People’s Committees sprang up everywhere, as they had five years earlier, and began embarking on the project of radical land reform.

The liberation of the south lasted only a short time. With the Soviet Union boycotting the United Nations in protest over the latter’s refusal to give China’s Security Council seat to the Red Chinese, the US managed to secure UN backing for a “police action.” By 1953, some three million Koreans were dead in fighting, and every structure over one-storey in the north was in pieces, razed by US bombs. The survivors lived in caves.

It’s significant, though rarely remarked upon, that the aerial bombing of civilians has been the characteristic mode of warfare employed by imperialist powers, and since the Second World War, by the United States. The first significant use of aerial bombing was by the British Labor government in 1924, against Iraqi villages. [7] The Nazi’s bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War ushered in the massive bombing campaigns of Germany, Britain and the United States in World War II. And since World War II, the United States has dropped ton after ton of explosives on civilian areas. During its “police action” in Korea, the US dropped more bombs than all the bombs dropped in Europe during World War II on both sides. And US warplanes dropped more napalm on Koreans than they did later on Vietnamese.

Fighting eventually bogged down around the 38th parallel, and a ceasefire was agreed to, but not before the US razed irrigation dams that provided water to 75 percent of the north’s agricultural production, a blatant war crime. A formal end to the conflict was never declared, and the US and the north remain technically at war. Pyongyang has importuned Washington on many occasions to normalize relations, but its overtures of peace have either been rebuffed (then US secretary of state Colin Powel told north Korea in 2003 that “We won’t do nonaggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature,”[8]) or have been agreed to, but ignored. Washington left a deal worked out between the two sides in 1994 to gather dust, failing to establish an embassy to the DPRK and declining to end its formal state of war with the country, despite its pledges to do so.

North Korea’s economy steams ahead

Laying aside the war years and the three-year period of recovery that followed, north Korea grew at a faster pace than the south from the 1940’s to the mid-60s. So impressed was Che Guevera after a visit to Pyongyang, he declared north Korea to be a model to which Cuba should aspire.

Industry in the north grew at 25 percent per annum in the 10 years following the Korean War and at 14 percent from 1965 to 1978. US officials were greatly concerned about south Korea’s economy, which lagged far behind, raising doubts about the merits of Washington’s right-wing, pro-capitalist, neo-colonial project in Korea. By 1980, the north Korean capital, Pyongyang, was one of the best run, most efficient cities in Asia. Seoul, on the other hand, was a vast warren “of sweatshops to make Dante or Engels faint,” complete with a teeming population of homeless.

Eager to present the south’s economic system as superior to the north’s, Washington allowed the ROK to pursue a vigorous program of industrial planning behind a wall of tariffs and subsidies, while, at the same time, offering south Korean industry access to the world market. To help matters along, huge dollops of aid were poured into the country. Japan delivered $800 million in grants and loans as compensation for 35 years of colonial domination, at a time south Korea’s exports were only $200 million. And in return for dispatching 50,000 soldiers to fight on the US-side in Vietnam, Washington handed over $1 billion in mercenary payments from 1965 to 1970, equal to eight percent of the south’s GDP. South Korean engineering firms were given contracts with the US military, and Vietnam soaked up almost all of the south’s steel exports (produced by an integrated steel mill built with the $800 million aid injection from Japan.)

At the same time, the north was hobbled by miscalculations. Pyongyang angered the Soviets in the early 60s by siding with China in the Sino-Soviet split. Moscow cut off aid in retaliation. While Soviet aid had never been as generous as the aid the US and Japan had showered upon the south, it had made a difference, and its interruption (it was later restored) slowed the north’s economic growth. Then, in the 70s, Pyongyang ran into debt trouble when it began buying turnkey factories from the West.

As a result of the south’s industrial planning, its import-substitution model, its high-tariff barriers, and injections of aid from the US and Japan, the ROK economy was steaming ahead of the north’s by the mid-80s. Still, while growth had slowed in the north, the difference in standard of living between the average south Korean and the average north Korean was never as great as south Korea’s backers would have you believe. And the north had its attractions. While consumer goods were scarce, daily necessities were available in abundance at subsidized prices. Cumings points to a CIA report that acknowledges (almost grudgingly, he says) the north’s various achievements: “compassionate care for children in general and war orphans in particular; ‘radical change’ in the position of women; genuinely free housing, free health care, and preventive medicine; and infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the most advanced countries until the recent famine.”

South Korea: The strong (fascist?) state

The south had as strong a left-wing, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist movement as the north did. The only difference was that the Soviets allowed it to flourish in their occupation zone, and grow into a state form, while the US, and the puppets it kept in power in Seoul, actively worked to suppress it. In fact, the history of politics in the south through most of the post-war period can be understood as the politics of keeping the left down, by the same methods Mussolini in the 20s and Hitler in the 30s used to roll back challenges from the left in their own countries.

Syngman Rhee was forced to flee after university students and professors rose up in 1960. Following his departure, Western-style elections were held for the first time. By this point, the north’s economy was surging far head of the south’s and Kim Il-sung was calling for a confederal Korea. His proposal commanded considerable popular support in the south and leftism, after Rhee’s repressions, was once again on the rise and threatening to topple the collaborationist-tainted, pro-US neocolonial regime.

A year later, Park Chung Hee organized a military coup to put leftism back in its cage, inaugurating a three-decades-long military dictatorship to keep the south safe for the economic system the US backed and the comprador class it doted upon. The elected government beseeched the US to put down the coup, but its cries for help fell on deaf ears. Rather than intervening, Washington immediately recognized the new military regime, and showered it with aid.

Park banned all political activity, closed the parliament and adopted a truculent official anti-communism. An anti-communist law was promulgated and all socialist countries, the DPRK most especially, were declared to be enemy states. This harkened back to the old anti-Comintern Pact of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and militarist Japan. So extreme was the regime’s anti-communism that censors were ordered to blot out photos of north Korea’s leader that appeared in international editions of Time. At the same time, a program of anti-communist indoctrination was begun in the schools, aimed at inoculating future generations against communist and DPRK-sympathies. The north, its leaders, and its political system were demonized. Commented the New York Times in 2005 on south Koreans working with north Koreans at a south Korean owned industrial park at Kaesong: “Some south Koreans say they may have…trouble working with the North Koreans…because South Korea’s fiercely anti-Communist education taught them for decades that North Koreans were dangerous and evil. In North Korea, by contrast, government education programs taught that while South Korea’s government was an American puppet, its people were brothers and sisters.” [9]

In the north, there was emphasis on pro-social solidarity with Korean compatriots of the south, as well as free housing, free health care and equal rights for women; in the south, there was no health insurance, no social safety net, the longest working hours in the industrial world, miserably low wages, and indoctrination into a cult of hatred and fear of Korean compatriots of the north. In the north, the landlords and Korean lieutenants of the Japanese occupation had long been purged from positions of power; in the south, the same class of collaborators that had served the Japanese was still on top. In January 2005, Roh Moo Hyun, the ROK president, could complain of the south being unable to rid itself “of the historical aberration that the families of those who fought for the independence of the nation were destined to face poverty for three generations, while the families of those who sided with Imperial Japan have enjoyed success after three generations.” [10]

The north’s economic troubles

The collapse of the north’s export markets with the demise of the socialist bloc, a series of natural disasters, Washington’s unremitting economic stranglehold, and the diversion of scarce resources into the military, have severely weakened the DPRK economy since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Under Gorbachev, the Soviets pursued a foreign policy that sought an accommodation with the US. Part of the accommodation involved abandoning old allies. Soviet trade with north Korea was cut in half from 1988 to 1992 and shipments of oil were severely cut back in 1991.

With Gorbachev’s wrecking-ball policies disrupting the economies of the socialist states, the socialist bloc was plunged into chaos, and eventually, oblivion. The north’s export markets dried up, depriving Pyongyang of the foreign exchange it needed to import coal and petroleum. With insufficient petroleum, farm machinery was idled and the country’s chemical industry suffered. With the chemical industry on the skids, fertilizer production suffered. Agriculture was hit hard and food scarcity became a problem, worsening when a series of floods and droughts hit in the mid-90s.

Cut-off from export markets — a problem exacerbated today by UN Security Council sanctions and maneuvering by Washington to isolate north Korea from the world’s financial system — the DPRK became a major exporter of ballistic missiles, to earn foreign exchange to pay for essential imports.

With farm machinery idled and factories running below capacity, Pyongyang struggled to meet the demands of mounting a credible defense against unremitting threats from the US. The Pentagon had introduced nuclear weapons into the south after 1953, stockpiling them for use in the event the Korean conflict heated up. Tens of thousands of US combat troops remained on the Korean peninsula and tens of thousands more were stationed in nearby Japan, readily deployable to the Korean peninsula if needed to wage war against the north. American warships patrolled the waters outside the DPRK’s territorial limits, nuclear bombers practiced simulated bombing runs and spy planes menaced north Korea’s airspace.

With the end of the Cold War, the threats increased. Colin Powell, then the United States’ top soldier, complained that he was running out of demons. He was down to Castro and Kim Il-sung, he said. Under the weight of incessant US threats, Pyongyang was channeling a crushing 30 percent of its budget into defense.

The nuclear crisis of 1993

In 1987, the north built a 30 megawatt nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. The idea was to substitute nuclear power for coal and imported oil, relying on the north’s substantial uranium deposits. The south and Japan were building nuclear reactors too, and were also seeking to reduce dependency on oil imports. For half a decade no one in Washington expressed concern — until the Soviet Union exited the stage as the chief US demon, leaving north Korea and Cuba to be promoted to Powell’s rogues’ gallery. Both countries were now to provide the pretext needed to keep the US military bulked up and on an unflagging war footing.

“For Americans,” observes Cumings, “the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula came in March, 1993, when Pyongyang announced it was withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But for the North Koreans, it came in February 1993, when Lee Butler, head of the US Strategic Command, announced he was retargeting weapons meant for the old Soviet Union on North Korea. ” Pyongyang’s alarm heightened when James Woolsey, head of the CIA, declared north Korea to be Washington’s gravest concern. Matters weren’t helped when, in March, tens of thousands of  US combat troops took part in war games along the north’s borders, complete with B-1 bombers, B-52s and warships carrying cruise missiles. It was then that Pyongyang decided that if it was going to be Washington’s new foreign policy bete noir, it had better pull out of the non-proliferation treaty, and think about how it was going to deter the United States from launching a nuclear strike.

Washington immediately set to work to undermine Pyongyang’s plans. Just as Israel had launched a bombing raid to destroy the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981 to prevent Saddam Hussein’s government from developing nuclear weapons, the United States would dispatch bombers or launch cruise missiles to take out the Yongbyon facility. Not only would the north be prevented from acquiring the spent fuel it needed to make a nuclear device, Pyongyang’s plans to redress its vulnerabilities in energy production by operating a civilian nuclear energy capability would be scuttled. One strike would achieve two goals: (1) north Korea would be weakened economically; (2) Pyongyang would be deprived of an effective means of self-defense.

The trouble was it was unlikely that the destruction of the north’s nuclear facilities would be met by north Korean quiescence. The north would inevitably strike back. With its extensive deployment of heavy artillery along the 38th parallel, not only would Seoul be devastated, the casualty rate among the 40,000 US combat troops stationed in the south would be intolerably high.

In the end, the crisis was averted when former US president Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang to work out a deal with Kim Il-sung. The deal, called the Agreed Framework, would see the north re-enter the non-proliferation treaty and shut down Yongbyon, in return for the US pledging to normalize relations, build two proliferation-safe light water reactors, and, in the interim, provide shipments of fuel oil to tide the north’s energy requirements over. While this seemed like a workable basis for a long-term peace, the agreement offered a respite only. Washington had no interest in a modus vivendi with north Korea. US officials believed it was only a matter of a few years before the accumulated effects of its economic sanctions, Pyongyang’s crippling defense expenditures, and the collapse of the north’s export markets, would bring the Korean experiment in anti-imperialist self-sufficiency crashing down. According to the CIA’s projections, north Korea would be toast by 2002. [11] If the US could drag its feet, it wouldn’t have to honor its side of the pact.

Washington’s machinations were revealed in the New York Times. “The belief that the North Korean economy was collapsing helped shape White House thinking in 1994 when it promised to deliver light-water reactors to North Korea by 2003 in exchange for Pyongyang” signing back onto the non-proliferation treaty. “Senior Clinton administration officials said privately at the time that they did not expect Mr. Kim’s government to be in power by the time the United States had to make good on its pledge.” [12] But with the clock ticking down on the agreed completion date for the reactors, Kim’s Workers’ Party was, against all expectations, still in power, and there were no signs of an imminent collapse. Recognizing an implosion in the north wasn’t about happen, Washington simply invented an out. Pyongyang, US officials charged, was secretly operating a nuclear weapons program in violation of the pact, and the deal would have to be called off. Delivery of fuel oil, practically the only part of the agreement the US had lived up to, was terminated, plunging north Korea into another energy crisis, and making the re-opening of the reactor at Pyongyang necessary if the north was to deal with its energy woes.

US policy remains the same

With no collapse forthcoming, Washington turned up the heat, borrowing a page from its Cold War playbook. Robert McNamara, president of Ford Motor Company, and later Kennedy’s and Johnson’s secretary of defense, explained that Washington’s analysis of the Soviet options in the years following WWII envisaged Moscow pursuing three goals, in order of most to least important: (1) to rebuild its war-shattered economy; (2) to rebuild its greatly weakened military, to protect itself from a stalking capitalist world; and (3) to make friends in Eastern Europe and the Third World. If Washington could force the Soviets to elevate the second goal, such that it took precedence over the first, the Soviet march to communism would be blocked. Economic development would be slowed, the Soviet people would become disillusioned, and attachment to Marxism-Leninism would be weakened in the Kremlin itself. The key was to ratchet up the military threat, forcing the Soviets into an escalating arms race that, at the very least, would create major distortions in the Soviet economy, and possibly bring the whole Soviet experiment crashing to the ground. [13]

Following 9/11, Washington declared war on an “axis of evil,” Iraq, Iran, and the DPRK. North Korea had been included as part of the axis at the last minute, said Bush speechwriter, David Frum, because the Bush administration wanted Pyongyang to “feel a stronger hand.” [14] To ensure the pressure was felt intensely, the Pentagon prepared a new nuclear strategy, which endorsed the targeting of non-nuclear states, and reserved the right to launch preventive attacks. North Korea was singled out. Next, John Bolton, at the time undersecretary of state for arms control, used the occasion of the US invasion of Iraq to issue a warning that north Korea (and Syria and Iran, too) should “draw the appropriate lesson.” [15] The US was exercising a renewed, unabashed, military imperialism and the DPRK should either capitulate or watch out. Felix Greene pointed out that the publicly pronounced policy of the US has always been to destroy revolutionary governments. The US has sought to do this by imposing embargoes, and pressuring other countries to abide by them. It arms and finances the enemies of communist states, harasses their borders, threatens them with nuclear war, and blares anti-socialist and pro-capitalist propaganda at their populations. Having spared no effort to disrupt these countries’ efforts to build non-exploitative, prosperous and independent societies; having blocked essential goods from reaching them; and having imposed upon them the necessity of shouldering crippling defense expenditures, they present the inevitable economic difficulties as proof of mismanagement and the inherent inadequacies of revolutionary socialism. [16]

A product of its history

North Korea is the product of its history, of its colonization by the Japanese, the guerilla wars of the 30s, its attempts to unify the country and drive the post-WWII occupation regime out the south, the holocaust the United States delivered upon it under a UN flag in the early 50s, and its daily struggle with the United States for survival, now intensified in the wake of the dismantling of the Soviet Union and Washington’s quest for world domination.

North Korea has fought for, indeed, has formalized, what those on the left profess to hold dear: economic justice, equality, rights for women, freedom from domination by outside powers. But it has, every inch of the way, had to face the determined resistance of the United States, and has often done so without the support, indeed, frequently in the face of the open hostility, of the greater part of the left in the advanced capitalist countries.

To many on the left, north Korea is disreputable and repugnant, its failings, both real and imagined, misunderstood to be immanent features of the country’s economic and political system, without connection to surrounding events. Slurs hurled at the country seem to mesh neatly with longstanding prejudices. Pyongyang’s recently being accused of drug smuggling and counterfeiting fit expectations that follow from the reprobate status handed the country by the Western media. But it’s unclear whether these charges are true. They may be, but they are often considered free from context and are invested with an instant credibility their source (the US government) does not warrant.

Consider context. If you block a person from earning a living legitimately, he will have no choice but to turn to illegitimate means to survive. US efforts to cut north Korea off from legitimate trade with the rest of the world may, indeed, have forced Pyongyang into drug smuggling and counterfeiting as a means of survival. On the other hand, it’s strikingly easy to alienate a country of outside support by hurling false accusations at it. Damning charges made by the White House are guaranteed to be trumpeted instantaneously throughout the world by the mass media. Given an undeserved instant credibility, they will, in short order, become received truths. Washington could make perfectly absurd claims about Iraq possessing caches of undeclared weapons of mass destruction, despite a decades-long inspection regime, and have those claims treated as beyond doubt by commentators on both the right and left in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. That they were later acknowledged to be untrue was too little, too late. Turning north Korea into an ugly, disreputable house of horrors, which no sane person would ever think of uttering a kind word about, is firmly within the competence of Washington’s masters of propaganda. Failing to recognize that any government that seriously challenges capitalism or imperialism will be subjected to an unrelenting campaign of vilification by “reputable” sources and “serious” commentators, leaves one vulnerable to manipulation.

Common interests

It’s clear why north Korea’s fight for sovereignty and economic rights is opposed by the ruling class-dominated foreign policy of the United States. The interests of the two clash. But there is no comparable clash of interests between north Korea and the bulk of people who live in the advanced capitalist countries. The coolness, if not outright hostility, of the greater part of the left in these countries, requires explanation. Patriotic intoxication and lack of class consciousness — the idea that we have more in common with the ruling class that dominates foreign policy in our own country than with Koreans, of the south and north, who fight for sovereignty and economic justice — is part of it. So too is the regular, law-like propensity of the leaders of the soft left to barter away principle for votes and respectability, to sacrifice fundamental goals for immediate gains, a reason for self-defeating coolness toward the DPRK.

Ignorance is a part of the explanation too, both of the history and of the government in the north, but also of the distorting, unpleasant and dystopian effects of the policies of war, intimidation, and economic strangulation the United States has pursued to bring an end to north Korea. It’s not pleasant to have too little to eat, to be conscripted into the army for an extended period of your life and to be forced to live your whole life under a nuclear sword of Damocles, but these are not conditions north Koreans have freely chosen for themselves. They have been imposed from the outside as punishment for striving for something better than what is offered by colonialism, capitalism and imperialism.

Those striving for the same elsewhere, at the very least, owe north Korea some understanding. It’s clear why Che Guevara, and other revolutionaries, considered north Korea of the 60’s, 70’s and even early 80’s, to be an inspiration. Emerging from the womb of the guerilla wars of the 30s, the north had fought two imperialisms. It had won against the Japanese and held the US to a standstill. It was building, in the face of unremitting US hostility, a socialist society that was progressing toward communism. The country offered free health care, free education, virtually free housing, radical land reform and equal rights for women, and its industry was steaming ahead of that of the south. By contrast, the neo-colony Washington had hived off for itself below the 38th parallel was a vast warren of sweatshops reminiscent of England’s industrial revolution. People lived harsh, miserable, uncertain lives, in incessant struggle with a military dictatorship backed by the US, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to Europe’s pre-war fascist regimes.

Would Che be inspired by the north Korea of today, an impoverished country that struggles with food scarcity? Probably. What have changed are the circumstances, not the reasons to be inspired. The projects north Korea has set for itself — sovereignty, equality, socialism — have become vastly more difficult, more painful, more daunting to achieve in the face of the void left by the counter-revolution that swept the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and China’s breakneck sprint down the capitalist road.

Would Che have soured on north Korea, because the adversity it faces has grown tenfold? I doubt it. A revolutionary, it’s said, recognizes it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. North Korea has never lived on its knees. I think Che would have liked that.

1. Bruce Cumings, “Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (Updated Edition),” W.W. Norton & Company, 2005; p. 404. All historical references and unfootnoted quotations come from Cumings above or Bruce Cumings, “North Korea: Another Country,” The New Press, 2004.

2. Cumings is the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of History at the University of Chicago.

3. Anna Louise Strong, “In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report,” Soviet Russia Today,
New York, 1949.

4. “Absent from the Korea Talks: Bush’s Hard-Liner,” The New York Times, September 2, 2003.

5. Bruce Cumings, “We look at it and see ourselves,” London Review of Books, December 15, 2005.

6. Hugh Deane, “The Korean War: 1945-1953,” China Books & Periodicals, San Francisco, 1999.

7. R. Palme Dutt, “Problems of Contemporary History,” International Publishers, New York.

8. New York Times, August 13, 2003.

9. New York Times, February 8, 2005.

10. New York Times, January 5, 2005.

11. “In ’97, U.S. Panel Predicted a North Korea Collapse in 5 Years,” New York Times, October 27, 2006.

12. Ibid.

13. Bahman Azad, “Heroic Struggle, Bitter Defeat: Factors Contributing to the Dismantling of the Socialist State in the USSR,” International Publishers, New York, 2000, p. 138.

14. David Frum, “The Right Man: An Inside Account of the Bush White House,” excerpted in the National Post, January 8, 2003.

15. Cited In Workers World, October 9, 2006.

16. Felix Greene, “The Enemy: What Every American Should Know About Imperialism,” Vintage Books, New York, 1971.