Long a North Korea watcher, lately I’ve come to see the problems within, and emanating from, that isolated half-a-nation in a different light.  Maybe I’m just watching too much “Game of Thrones” but the concept of Kim Jong Un as a self-styled King in the North may not be the most inappropriate of depictions. 

Okay, stay with me on this one.

Let’s start with the Machiavellian methods he’s taken to consolidate his position as both familial and national leader.  You’ve got to admit that using an anti-aircraft gun as a means of execution is pretty brutal.  But having your brother killed by female assassins while he’s lying low in a foreign country?  Executing senior members of the government by . . . what was that . . . oh yes . . . feeding them to dogs.  None of this rings a bell to any GOT fans?  Kim Jong Un has gone above and beyond the admittedly nasty methods exercised by either his father or grandfather in securing the reins of national power.  And there are no real indications that his reign of terror will come to an end any time soon.

What about an apparent willingness to risk the destruction of his country in order to achieve the survival of his regime.  Sound familiar?  Both the Targaryen and Lannister regimes proved themselves willing to stage explosives under the city of Knight’s Landing to destroy it rather than hand it over to an enemy.  In North Korea, the people starve while their government spends the little money available to a failed economy on ballistic missile and nuclear weapon development.  Mind you this isn’t a country without natural resources, North Korea is incredibly rich in iron ore, an industry they just can’t seem to develop.  Or rather, an industry the regime is unwilling to invest in as this would detract from other, “more pressing” concerns like ensuring the Great Leader continues living in the lap of unbelievable (even by Hollywood standards) luxury.  Oh, and let’s not forget those crucial state-sponsored dinners for Dennis Rodman!

Finally, let’s examine a form of government that absolutely baffles the West.  We want so badly to put North Korea in a neat little box that we can understand.  “Communist” is a useful label for that, we can grasp the basics of that ideology.  Marx was a Western European after all.  “Dictator” is another label that makes sense to us.  Americans fancy themselves the great rebel society and take pride in the number of world dictators we’ve deposed or helped eliminate.  Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, these are names that every American knows, because the thought of one person having absolute power without any check or balance is simply not acceptable to the American psyche.  Europe has likewise long-since taken power out of the hands of hereditary monarchs and turned to more representative forms of national government.

But in North Korea, a cult of personality has been built around the Kim family that is difficult for anybody growing up in . . . I don’t know . . . the rest of the modern world, maybe . . . to comprehend.  It’s a government based entirely on the personality and exploits (both real and contrived) of one individual.  This is not so different in concept, perhaps, to that created by Daenerys in GOT, whereby if you remove her from the equation, the system fails.  The form of government she’s established is inseparable from her physical being, and so too is the North Korean system of government tied to the existence of its royal family, the Kims.  Note that subtle difference, however, as the North Korean personality cult wraps itself around a family, not an individual.  More on that in a bit because it’s important.

To better understand this modern phenomenon, we must remove our own biased lenses and strive to see it through a more culturally relevant point of view.  I can’t promise that looking at it from the North Korean perspective will make it any less distasteful to the average Westerner—raised as we are on a steady diet of personal freedoms and unlimited fast food choices—but it might make a little more sense. 

Our biggest obstacle to understanding anything we observe in Asia is we don’t generally search for root causes far enough back in history.  I’ve mentioned it in previous blog entries, but we’re talking about REALLY old societies here, going back thousands of years.  We in the West often act as if Asia just sort of popped out of the ground in recent history, but, believe it or not, this simply wasn’t the case.  China, Korea, and Japan all bore demonstrable indicators of distinct civilizations well before the Roman Empire coalesced.  It’s hard for us to conceive of a history that makes that of Western Europe look young by comparison, but there it is nonetheless.  These civilizations in their youth were concurrent with those of Babylonia and Assyria . . . you may have heard of them, they feature prominently in the Bible’s Old Testament.  That’s how long ago this part of the world began its cultural and institutional memory.

The reality for North Korea is that those events of the past hundred and fifty years that we generally assume had the most influence on making that country what it is today occurred within a relative blink of the historical eye for them and may not be as influential as we’d like to think.  North Korea’s brush with communism in the form of Soviet occupation lasted from 1945 to 1950.  Five years.  Korea’s experience as an annexed part of Japan—essentially a colonial possession—lasted from 1910 to 1945, with a period of Japanese control that went back a bit further, to 1876.  That’s another sixty-nine years, though half of that was still nominally under a ruling Korean monarch.  Before that, Korea, at the time called Joseon, was ruled by the Yi Dynasty.  That dynasty was established in 1392.  You read that right!  The Yi Dynasty is considered one of the longest-running, single-family periods of national rule in world history.  Before that, Korea was called Goryeo, and ruled by the Wang family from 897 to 1389.  Beginning to see a pattern here?  If not, I can go back further, at least to the first century B.C. when Korea’s Three Kingdoms, of which Goguryeo constituted what is today North Korea, established themselves as separate polities.

You see, Korea has a history, a very DEEP historical experience, of long-running, ruling families.  As anywhere else in the world, some leaders were more competent than others, but unlike other places, the tenets of Confucianism prevented—or at least strongly discouraged—rebellion against the ruling monarch.  Why was this not the case in China where Confucianism was born, yet experienced tremendous turmoil as dynasties were overthrown with disturbing regularity?  It can easily be argued that the Koreans took to that philosophical concept much more strongly than ever happened in its place of origin.  Perhaps because a people surrounded on three sides by water were easier to control than those populating the vastness of China.  Maybe because other competing ways of thought like Daoism or the various sects of Buddhism interfered back home.  Who knows?  But Ming Chinese records repeatedly called out Joseon government officials for their knowledge of and adherence to Confucian tenets, at a time when such behavior was noticeably lacking amongst leaders in China itself.

Regardless, it’s easy to imagine then that the Korean experience with national leadership is all of one type for nearly two thousand years before any significant change was forced upon them.  The experiences of the late 19th and early 20th centuries shouldn’t then be the lens through which we view North Korea’s odd form of government.  The events of those fifty years make up only a small fraction of that nation’s cultural and institutional memory.  The vast majority of Korean experience with national government was something much more akin to what we see in North Korea today.

This realization should cause you to question what happened to South Korea, then?  Why has the Republic of Korea not fallen back on that shared historical trajectory and re-established a King in the South?  One word—and you’re going to love this—information.  Relatively unimpeded access to information, through the United States and other trading partners, has changed the traditional Korean model of government, at least in the south.  This is an advantage North Koreans, associated with the information-miserly Soviet and Maoist Chinese states, neither had nor have still today.

Not to say it was a smooth transition, mind you, as the first South Korean Presidents were pretty dictatorial, as were the military governments that followed.  Still, through access to the broader experiences and ideas of the world at large, and yoked to a strong national work ethic backed by a Confucian-instilled thirst for education and knowledge in general, the southern half of the Korean peninsula has established a thriving, democratic form of government that is responsive to the welfare and desires of its people.  Truth be told, some now question whether or not the South Korean form of democracy has become too responsive to the sometimes fickle whims of its population.  Yet the government of the Republic of Korea remains a photo negative, nearly an exact opposite, of its estranged sibling to the north.

The ROK has been so successful, in fact, that the world probably hasn’t been so affected by the goings on of such a small country since the height of Dutch trading power in the Age of Discovery.  Face it, Korean phones, cars, and ships—to say nothing of music and television dramas—are fast becoming ubiquitous in any country that freely trades, and even some that don’t.  That said, these are unmistakably South Korean physical and intellectual products.  The choice to pursue free speech and democracy seems to have really paid off when the easy-to-compare alternative is considered. 

So what does all this say about Kim and how we should deal with him and the problems he’s foisted upon us?  That’s really hard to say.  No government has had to deal with what is essentially a divine and absolute monarch in full control of a country in a very long time.  Still, I think approaching the problem from the Korean viewpoint—specifically North Korea with its cultural, Goguryeo Kingdom roots in Southeastern Manchuria—is far more instructive than treating him like any other world despot.  A malignant character who can be neatly removed from the picture to solve all our Northeast Asian problems. 

Why is North Korea different?  Because unlike Daenerys, if you kill Kim, another family member—or potentially “family member”—will take his place and the people will not only accept it, they’ll howl for the blood of those who prematurely snuffed out the life of their Great Leader.  This governmental institution, one featuring long-time, single-family rule, has enormous legitimacy in North Korea, and will preclude any type of national uprising that many Western analysts think must be inevitable.  Simply put, the North Korean people will starve, go to prison camps, and if so ordered, march off to suicidal war at the whim of their Great Leader. 

After all, he is the King in the North.

M. G. Haynes