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 backs this diagnosis up. 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 the dominant
economic interests 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, one of 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.......
........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.
