Desiring Machine

Interesting documentary about North Korea.

The apotheosis of a head of state is a difficult concept for us in the west to get our heads around. The whole spectacle of it is surreal. The American religious and political traditions are so fractured and splintered it is difficult to imagine a single political leader to ever achieve the same level of devotion. The closest examples may be Abraham Lincoln on the right and in the 20th century John F. Kennedy on the left. But even in the case of JFK, there is a latent cynicism widely recognized. I grew up with pictures of JFK in my grandfather’s basement, not unlike pictures of the “Dear Leader” you might find lining the apartment walls of an average Pyongyang citizen. But even as one looks up admirably at JFK, one does’t forget that he was human like the rest of us. He had his mistresses, his folly in Vietnam, and other limitations. This is universally recognized by admirers and detractors. Go back further and even the giants of American civilization don’t escape scrutiny. Even the schoalrship around someone like Thomas Jefferson doesn’t shy away from the unseemly facts of his incestous relationship with his slave/half sister. So it is in this tradition that we can hardly understand the apotheosis of a “Dear Leader”.

A couple salient points about the documentary that stick out to me. First the wall that South Koreans have built to keep the North Koreans out. A wall that is conspicuous to solidiers in the north, and mostly invisible from the vantage point of the south. A clear symbol that South Korea is not inclined or prepared to absorb the massive potential refugee crisis that is the failed state of North Korea. Also, while there is an understanding that reunification is nearly inevitable, it seems that the South Koreans are not eager to absorb economic realities that a full scale unification of the Korean pennisula would entail. I find it very telling that the political advisor is eager to avoid the German model of reunification through absorption. He is pretty bald face about it as well, stating that the Korean elite have seen how things have gone badly in Germany, and that they do not want that, and even more forcefully assert that it will not happen in a Korean context. At the end of the day this seems to be a symptom of greed on the part of the South Koreans. A major political shift in the North and concerted reunification effort with the South will invariably lead to a massive refugee crisis. The people who are so isolated in the North would understandably create intense demands of socio-economic justice once they learn of the immense prosperity of the South.

This economic schism seems insurmountable in the short term. It appears that neither the South Koreans nor us in the west have any inclination to speed the process along. This dynamic is not too disimilar to internal tension within China between the relatively prosperous urbanized populations and the dramatically destitute rural populations.