Monday, August 28, 2006

The Disturbing Message behind North Korea’s Darkly Humorous Vitriol – and the Distraction of Pussy-footing around with Iran


One of the few pleasures I had when it was my rotation to work the overnight desk for the Associated Press in Tokyo in the early 1980s was monitoring North Korea’s English language news wire. It was like tuning into comedy central.

Besides singing adoration for “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung and crowing that its Juche ideology of demented autarky was guiding the nation to prosperity, Pyongyang attacked the United States daily with the shrillest over-the-top rhetoric imaginable. It was more than mere propaganda. It was hilarious. Instead of offering tea leaves to read, the Korean Central News Agency entertained with ironic phraseology that paid homage to both George Orwell and Eugene Ionesco.

Later in my career I sent countless telexes and letters to North Korean officials asking permission to visit the country and hoping to meet some of the creative authors behind the absurd verbiage. Were they GIs who defected during the Korean War, enslaved as translators and sending illicit messages of regret and ridicule and dark humor? My timing was always out of synch with the erratic cycle of chance when the reclusive regime opened up to foreign journalists. But I never stopped being a fan of Pyongyang’s perverted political poetry.

The frightening thing is that North Korea is no longer a paper tiger. It has the bomb. Several of them. You don’t have to look very far to find a security analyst who will tell you that the regime of “Peerless Leader” Kim Jong Il, the late great leader’s son, could be paranoid enough set off a little mushroom cloud in a wild moment of panic, as suicidal as that may seem. North Korea’s strategic deterrent to rational diplomacy is far more mad than the relatively benign mutual assured destruction (MAD) doctrine of the Cold War.

Let’s hear what the KCNA wire is saying today:

In the top dispatch, it characterizes the Bush Administration’s threat of escalating economic sanction (an effort to get a recalcitrant Pyongyang back into six-party talks) as a “gangster-like act of gravely infringing upon the sovereignty and dignity of its dialogue partner.” Thin skinned as ever, but you have to wonder if the White House is still relying too heavily on the stick and letting the carrots rot.

The wire service ran an article from the official state newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, blasting the US imperialists for creating “clouds of war” on the Korean Peninsula with annual joint military exercises in South Korea, and planning a “preemptive attack” on the North “worked out by the Bush bellicose forces.” This may sound a little weird, but it's nothing new. In response to the 1983 "Team Spirit" exercizes, KCNA bellowed that a ''a semiwar state'' had been declared and that ''all the units of the Korean People's Army will get ready in full combat gear to smash in time the enemy's war moves. ''

Today's utterances are hardly the soothing words of diplomacy. They can be explained partly as aimed at mobilizing the local citizenry – who are still suffering from food shortages in a botched totalitarian society and are sneaking across the Chinese border in droves. They don't believe the propaganda and many are yearning for political assylum in the South, like the gang of 136 refugees trapped yesterday in a legal bind in Bangkok on their odyssey to Seoul. But there’s also method of childish distemper to this madness, crafted for external consumption. It is the rant of a dangerously frustrated, boxed in and decaying military state that considers itself the only legitimate government on the Korean Peninsula, and a martyr to the cause of rectifying its own glorious role in history.

Still, North Korea’s hysteria doesn’t excuse the fact that foaming-at-the-mouth neo cons in the Administration conned George Bush soon after his first inauguration into thinking that brinksmanship was the only way to contain the “nucular” threat from North Korea. Bill Clinton and his pals were wimps for thinking otherwise and trying to negotiate and cajole North Korea out of its missile tests, black market weapons sales, and plutonium dreams.

I’m left with the feeling that the people who act on behalf of the US government have met their match in their battle with North Korea’s propaganda machine. They are just as frustrated as their foe, crippled by their own rigid ideology, and incapable of defusing the time bomb ticking away in one of the world’s most dangerous hot spots. Dealing with the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran is a cake walk in comparison, although chances are they’re going to blow that one too. Why are they making this avoidable mistake, and why did they preoccupy themselves with Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction in the first place, when the smoking gun is branished by the other member of the "axis of evil" in East Asia?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home