Perhaps not the best feel-good title for my first posting and certainly not the usual New Year’s Eve admonition but it concerns the aspect of reality that urged me to blog in the first place. It is also just too horrible to pass on in the interest of New Year’s festivities.
There are many living hells in the world today but North Korea deserves a special mention. According to Anthony Daniels, one of the few journalists to have visited North Korea, no other regime comes remotely as close to annihilating the human personality as North Korea’s does.
Never in history have human beings been so dragooned into uniformity and blind obedience as in North Korea. The regime is one of bread and circuses: but attendance at the circuses is compulsory and the bread has been replaced by rockets.The North Korean ideal is an eternal marchpast of the Leader by millions of people, expressionless until they let out a howl of rehearsed joy when the leader raises his hand to them. I have seen it myself, and am glad to have done so: for it was absolute political evil, the ne plus ultra of inhumanity.
I know most people realise that North Korea is a ‘bad guy’ although Bush mentioning it as part of the Axis of Evil will certainly prompt some anti-American idiotarians into defending it. In some vague way, we know North Korean are oppressed by a Stalinist-type regime, have been starving for some time and now the North Korean leadership have hit the headlines with their nuclear weapons antics. But just as during the Cold War we didn’t know what communism really meant for the individual citizen in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, now we don’t know how exactly the North Korean variety of communism continues to crush human creativity, spirit and dignity.
It doesn’t help that an alarmingly high number of other useful idiotarians who have encountered the evil there either cannot or refuse to see it. The former US President Jimmy Carter managed to see in Pyongyang a second Manhattan. Anthony Daniels calls it not blindness, but hallucination. He concludes:
The only question, then, is how to destroy it once and for all: whether to let time take its toll (for all things pass); to offer little fat Kim a gilded retirement in Monaco watching the pornographic films that he is said to like; or to threaten war.
I know which option I’d take.
Couldn’t have put it better myself, Gabriel…
Quite so… this is the stark reality of collectivism’s end point. How could war be less moral than sitting back and letting the mass enslavement of a people go unheaded?
Indeed, paying him to go away and leave the Koreans alone would be a very elegant solution. He’d probably agree to it for less than South Korea’s yearly defense budget, nobody would die, the Koreans could stop spending all that money on a huge military, and we could bring home those 35,000 or so American soldiers.
Of course there’s no way of the South Korean or American governments actually going along with something that civilized.
Actually, the option I had in mind did not involve any money, porn or anything nice for Mr Kim.
No question, it is very easy to make a moral argument for making war on communist regimes. The corrupt leaders starve, loot, and murder their own people while they live in palaces fit for kings.
However, as much as the anti-war crowd fails in their moral arguments against war, they are on the mark in their consequential arguments against war. It has been said, and I believe it to be the case, that the people of a nation are only as free as they want to be. The Cubans have long had the power to overthrow Castro, but have simply chosen to live with him and the poverty he brings. Same with the Iraqis. As vile a creature as Saddam is, he would be out of power if the Iraqis were willing to make sacrifices for rebellion. Sure, the terror tactics used by Saddam (chopping up bodies and delivering them to homes in body bags, killing his own relatives, etc.) serve to scare the populace into submission. However, the power and the choice is there. What is needed is enough patriots to give their blood to plant the seed that will grow into tree of liberty.
The Iranians seem to be realizing this. There are actually true Iranian patriots willing to die for freedom. The roots of liberty are spreading within the hearts and souls of each individual Iranian. This is the best way to overthrow tyrants – from the ground up, not the top down. You can point to Germany and Japan all you want, but the tradition of freedom was already prevalent in their cultures prior to hijacking by fascists.
So my questions for Gabriel are this: suppose the US makes war with N. Korea and Iraq, and overthrows the communists and Saddam. Then what? Will that magically create freedom? Will the people recognize individual natural rights that lead to a spontaneous societal order? Will they realize the benefits that a respect for property rights brings?
Or will the N. Koreans simply create another socialist government, like the former Soviet republics have chosen to join the socialist EU? And will the Iraqis see the US not as the great liberator that saved them from oppression, but as the Great Satan, much like the ungrateful Kuwaitis see the US today?
Can armies and government, the very wellspring of statism, achieve a top-down conception of liberty?
A colleague at an inernational magazine I worked for was among a group taken on a carefully managed tour of N Korea by the regime. But she returned with an anecdote that sadly speaks volumes about the giant personality cult that an entire nation has become.
Puzzled by the fact that not a single adult male in Pyongyang had anything but the glossiest black hair (no grey at all), she askedn “ordinary” person they were taken to meet what the secret was.
He replied that the Great Leader had black hair; it would be disrespectful for people not to dye their own if nature couldn’t keep it that way. I don’t know how true this is, but it sounds all too likely. (I wonder if there are state wig shops too?)
The North Korean political system is based upon the so-called Juche philosophy of the eternal President Kim Il Sung (who by the way passed away back in 1994). The word Juche is often translated, in a manner of simplification, as ‘self-reliance’. Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il have emphasized that the human being is at the center of the Juche philosophy. Accordingly, the man is regarded as the master of the world, able and ready to control and manipulate the surrounding environment as he wishes. Thus, the concept of Juche does bear a great deal of similarity with the basic philosophy of capitalism and the classical liberalism in the way it looks at man as the master of universe.
If the Juche philosophy can be transformed by moving it from a collectivist level to an individualist level, a radical reform of the North Korean economic system does not have to result in a chaotic revolution of societal change. If the Juche philosophy can be understood and applied in a system characterized by democratic capitalism, North Korea could very well have the opportunity to become a flourishing market economy in the not so distant future.
In order for such a transformation to take place in a successful manner, the market economies of this world need to be looked upon as role models and good examples of alternative economic systems. By waging a war against North Korea I am afraid that the hatred against the United States and the misunderstanding of capitalism, that very much exists in the country, will be accelerated.
I have had the opportunity to go North Korea twice, and from what I have experienced North Korea is not just another communist country. It is a different planet. It is the twilight zone. The government runs all newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations. I was not even allowed to bring my cellular phone into the country, and a long distance phone call would cost me 80 USD a minute. There is no alternative information source whatsoever. To believe that the people of such a dictatorship would welcome US forces with open arms one has to be quite naïve.
There are already a number of European, Australian, American, Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean businessmen and women engaged in North Korea today. As a true believer in the power of individual human action, I am convinced that these entrepreneurs are much more efficient in transforming the North Korean system than any foreign army could ever be. In the aftermath of 9/11 some of us seems to have forgotten what capitalism is all about:
Make money, not war.
Fabian Wallen: Alternatively… exterminate the government and any who bear arms on its behalf, then organise trips down south.
My guess is ‘Juche’ and anything smelling even slightly of the old nightmare will be flushed down the toilet. South Koreans and their lifestyle will convince the North once the state has been smashed by force of arms.
The ironic part of your argument, Perry de Havilland, is the good old fact that the US army, as is the case with armies all around the world, is a government run organization. I sense a sudden respect for certain public monopolies returning to libertarians after 9/11, 2001, especially when it comes to issues concerning global security.
What about trying the good old capitalist alternative instead? Let profit incentives eat the system inside out.
Is Anthony Daniels Dr. Darylmple?