Murderous keys to history

The bomb shelter in our village near the DMZ.

Recently (November 14), BBC News on-line ran an article headlined ‘South Korea fears Hamas-style attack from the North’. It began: ‘On Sunday, when South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol hosted US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at his home for dinner, he urged Mr Austin to be vigilant against any type of North Korean attack, including surprise assaults "resembling Hamas-style tactics".’

We who live near to the DMZ like to joke that people living and working in Seoul are more endangered by North Korea than we are, that we’ll watch the missiles flying high over our heads, aiming at targets in the densely populated metropolis. And anyway, as you can see from the photograph at the start of today’s blog, there’s a handy bomb shelter just one hundred meters from our house.  But this shelter probably wouldn’t be much protection against marauding North Korean soldiers if, for some extraordinary reason, all the many South Korean soldiers garrisoned around here took their time arriving to project us. But in such darkly ‘propitious’ circumstances, would the North Koreans set about wreaking in our village such ghastly vengeance on me, my wife, and all my neighbours – the children, pregnant women, elderly, their pets -  as Hamas did in Israel? This is more than just a macabre thought-experiment, because it helps foreground what is specific about the worldview of Hamas. These North Korean soldiers will certainly have been conditioned to hate South Koreans (and a British citizen whose nation supported the Republic of Korea during the Korean War and has done so ever since),  but will they act with such extreme and calculated savagery as the Hamas militants did in Israel?  Will they record their deeds on social media? Does the ‘alternative’ reality which the North Korean soldiers inhabit also put them beyond the rules of war respected by open societies and inscribed in UN charters?

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Hamas and the North Korean Communist Party are vastly different political organizations, but both are variants of totalizing forms of ideology. Increasingly, however, in Israel/Palestine two rival and implacably hostile totalizing religious ideologies confront each other: Islamic fundamentalism and Zionist settler fundamentalism. These ideologies offer to believers a reality tailored to  achieve the illusion of absolute control of time - the past, present, and future –  and of space - both physical or profane and sacred.  As Hannah Arendt observed in the late 1940s in relation to what she called ‘totalitarianism’, this kind of ideology “differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man."  

Absolute faith in possessing the ‘key to history’ is what unites the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and the Zionist settlers with the so-called ‘communist’ system of North Korea. They all share the belief that they have been empowered to see the inescapable future. They believe they possess the secrets of prophecy. Totalism breeds and sustains a mindset founded on the wilful absence of alternatives, on the compulsory, the single-minded, and on autosuggestion, in that the prophesy is apparently self-fulfilling.

Let’s stop for a moment to consider how we - by which I mean those of us lucky to be able to say in public that we are liberal free-thinkers - differ from these fanatics. What do we take for granted when we reflect on the relationship between the past, present, and future?

Unlike members of Hamas, Zionist settlers, or card-carrying members of the North Korean Communist Party, we assume that life is ambiguous and multi-layered. We accept that any potential actions we take respond to meanings that exist on several historical dimensions.  More or less articulately, we think about the short- middle- and long-term. The short-term involves the succession of the before and after that constrain our everyday actions, which means any prognosis we might make about the world is bound situationally. The middle-term turns our attention to trends deriving from the course of events into which enter many factors beyond our control or that of our group or ‘tribe’ as acting subjects.  This means we take into account transpersonal conditions.  On the long-term plane we factor in ‘metahistorical’ duration, that is, certain anthropological constants that resist or elude the historical pressures of change, and so do not respond to immediate political pressures in the present.

The believer caught in the iron grip of a totalizing system does not see the world like this at all. Emboldened by faith in the capacity to prophetically foretell the future, they willingly accept the absence of alternatives and work to conform events to their prior belief-system. This means they reject any view of their situation based on an understanding of short-term succession that constrains everyday actions. They do not see themselves as bound situationally. They also reject middle-term trends. The only transpersonal conditions they believe in are those that conform to the shape of the prophecy.  This prophecy also determines the structure of the long-term plane of anthropological constants; in a religious ideology, human destiny is uniquely tied to the demands of a deity, or in non-religious ideologies, in deity-like humans, such as the Kim dynasty in the DPRK who rule by a kind of supra-human ‘divine right’.

But, of course, there is a fundamental difference between the ideology of Hamas and Zionism on the one side, and the DPRK on the other: the influence of monotheistic religion.   But while the religiously centered worldviews of Hamas and Zionism share these common roots in religious tradition, Hamas is far more radical. Like other Islamic fundamentalist movements, such as ISIS, Hamas believes in violent jihad – Holy War. Followers consider that the teachings of Islam contained in the sacred texts legitimize, indeed glorify, attacks on non-believers, and that the only just future goal is the global establishment of the Islamic caliphate. As such, all means justify the achievement of this single future. In fact, there is no limit to the actions permissible in the present in order to reach this desired end, which also entails the greatest of rewards for those who take up jihad: a believer who dies during jihad is cast as a martyr who goes directly to paradise – Jannah.  The ‘infidels’ they slay, meanwhile, have been rewarded with what God wants for them:  eternal damnation in Hell - Jahannam.

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As many commentators on the left indicate, the state of Israel is in danger of becoming what they call an ‘apartheid’ nation governed by Zionist totalizing ideology. But for the time being, at least, it remains a democracy within which, during the vengeful assault on Gaza, attempts are credibly (and often futilely) made to act according to the rules of war. In his ‘Making Sense’ podcast Sam Harris proposes we try a sobering thought-experiment.  We know that Islamic fundamentalists are willing to use their own people – other Muslims – as human shields.  In some senses, this is precisely what Hamas is doing now in Gaza. What if Israel tried the same tactic?  What if their soldiers rested their gun barrels on the shoulders of Israeli children or set up a command post under a hospital? What would Hamas fighters do? The answer is as obvious as it is terrifying: all the Israelis would be massacred. However dreadfully compromised Israel’s position is today, it’s leadership – even the extremist Zionists - still find using human shields to be beyond the ethical pale.  Hamas and other Islamic fundamentalist movements do not.  

Back in the late 1940s, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism was limited to political ideologies. In that period, religion really did seem to have lost its influence over politics. But since the end of the Cold War it has become obvious that religion definitely remains a significant and divisive force. This is a fact that commentators on the left seem reluctant to acknowledge. But now we are being forced to recognize the limits of the secular mindset in understanding glabal conflicts. Treating the struggle in Israel/Palestine as primarily about  ‘decolonization’, about an ‘apartheid’ behemoth crushing a defenseless and displaced people,   is to apply an optic that is  dangerously narrowly secular and Western. For example, the slur ‘apartheid’, derives from the racist and secular system imposed for a period by whites on blacks in South Africa.  Historically, that system did not entail religiously motivated racism or establish itself on a global and radically exclusionary vision of society.  Its a critical template that seems viable to a secular culture, but it fails to recognize the significance of the religious dimension to the conflict.  

As Sam Harris emphasizes, it is almost impossible for secular Westerners to grasp just how different this worldview of the jihadist or Islamic fundamentalist is, and how totally the true believer embraces its core tenets. Harris notes that especially we liberals on the left often bend over backwards to try to rationally analyze these people’s beliefs and actions according to the narrow humanist criteria bequeathed to us by Western humanist sociology and anthropology. What we fail to understand is how totally their worldview is at odds with and premised on the total rejection of our own worldview.

This is why calling the brutal assault by Israel on Gaza ‘genocide’ fails to describe that is taking place. ‘Genocide’ is defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of people of an ethic or national group. Israel isn’t deliberately killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But there is no doubt that its thirst for revenge has made it insensitive to the costs its revenge entails, and blind to the seemingly obvious fact that violence will always be met by more violence.

The situation in Israel/Palestine is so tragically complex that making any kind of  valid prognosis on the basis of the short-term is almost impossible – for example, a political solution is essential but, right now, it looks impossible. The mass protests against Israel taking place worldwide - including in Seoul - are mired in seeing the crisis only in the short-term view. But things look bleak on the mid-term level; so many interpersonal and impersonal agents are involved – not just the Israelis and Palestinians and their intertwined histories.  And if we attempt to rise above the bloody fray and take in the long-term view, what do we see?  Unfortunately, nothing very encouraging. Just the tragic truth that eventually implacable rivals who are trapped in the spiral of revenge lose the will to fight and learn to co-exist in peace.  

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Which brings me back to the chances of us, here near the DMZ, being gruesomely tortured before being killed, Hamas-style, by marauding North Korean soldiers. One thing for certain, the North Korean invaders wouldn’t be sharing their vile actions on WhatsApp and Facebook using our phones, for the simple reason that they won’t know how to use the technology, and anyway, no one back home could answer their calls.  But to end on a less facetious note;  the ideology within which the North Korean soldiers live and breathe may be repellent to the values of the open society, but it does not glorify sadistic violence against  religious non-believers and those of us who have rejected religion entirely. Jihadist violent antipathy to the world makes the so-called Juche ideology of the DPRK seem relatively – I stress ‘relatively’ - anodyne. It is familiar, and not so hard to encompass within our own Western worldview. Jihadism, by contrast, is wholly other. But more than that: it is a self-consciously adopted position premised on the destruction of its own other, which is not just we liberals but anyone who doesn’t share their extreme interpretation of Islam.  Co-existence is therefore not an option. This is why a ceasefire isn’t a viable option.

North Korean soldiers do not believe that when they commit atrocities and then die fighting that  they will  be rewarded for their crimes by going straight to Paradise. That any children they murder, because they are innocent in Allah’s eyes have been fast-tracked to paradise, and that I and everyone else they get their murderous hands on, will roast for ever in Hell.  This, I suppose, is some kind of cold comfort.

NOTES

The BBC article can be read at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67411657

The Hannah Arendt quotation is from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

Sam Harris’ excellent Making Sense podcast on this subject can be heard at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBm8nQ2aBo

I draw for my discussion of short- mid- and long-term thinking about time and history on Reinhart Koselleck’s  The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, translated by Todd Samuel Presner and Others (Stanford University Press, 2002) Chapter 8.

Fences

A DMZ fence (actually, two fences).. Photographed from my car while driving along a stretch of the ‘Freedom Highway’ not far from my home where the DMZ’s southern limit borders the South Korean mainland.. Across the Han estuary is North Korea.

I live near a fence - actually, several fences - that have been erected to defend South Korea from North Korean aggression. People have asked if the current terrible escalation in the conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel, which began when Hamas forces breached the fence dividing Gaza from Israel, has provoked in me any specific reactions concerning the wisdom of living near a border separating sworn enemies - in close proximity to what Bill Clinton once called “the most dangerous place on Earth”.

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Obviously, there are major physical, contextual, historical, and ethical differences between the Gaza fence and the DMZ fence. For example, the Gaza fence isn’t a national border. It’s a stop-gap measure first devised by Israel in 1994 to serve as a security barrier, and is one physical dimension of the wider confrontation with Palestinians seeking their own state. Specifically, the 60 kilometer-long fence was erected to protect Israeli citizens from Hamas attacks,  the militant faction of the Palestinian leadership that controls the Gaza Strip and has declared itself willing to do whatever it takes to reclaim all of Palestine from Israel. The Korean Demilitarized Zone was also a stop-gap measure created in 1953 at the cessation of hostilities between the two belligerent versions of modern-day Korea. As a peace treaty wasn’t signed, the DMZ was intended to make a new invasion by either side as difficult as possible, thereby guaranteeing a higher degree of security for the citizens of both Koreas, who belong to states that are rival claimants to the legitimate rule of the entire Korean peninsula.

Physically, there are major differences between the two fences.  The latest and most formidable version of the Gaza fence, the so-called ‘Iron Wall’, was completed in 2021. As the Washington Post wrote on October 10th:

The project was publicly announced in 2016 after Hamas used underground tunnels to attack Israeli forces in the 2014 war. It required more than 140,000 tons of iron and steel, according to Reuters, and the installation of hundreds of cameras, radars and sensors. Access near the fence on the Gaza side was limited to farmers on foot. On the Israeli side, observation towers and sand dunes were put in place to monitor threats and slow intruders.

Disastrously, however, as we now all know, on October 7th this ‘Iron Wall’ was rather easily breached at 29 points, and Hamas fighters encountered little resistance from the IDF once they were through because most of  its units were deployed  to control unrest on the West Bank, and so were able to go on a murderous rampage.  Israel was obviously far too confident that one 20-foot-high fence with a concrete base, observation towers, obstructive sand dunes, and advanced surveillance technology would offer sufficient protection for its citizens. As the Washington Post reported, Matthew Levitt, director of the counter-terrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, remarked sanguinely: “It’s still just a fence. A big fence, but just a fence.” The Israelis were well aware that a proportion of the people on the other side of this fence were committed to extreme violence to achieve their goal, which is nothing less than the annihilation of the state of Israel. Furthermore, the fence effectively turned Gaza into an open-air prison, thereby inevitably stoking the fires of anger, frustration, and resentment. It was clearly wishful thinking on Israel’s part to believe a fence would provide viable security, and a massive strategic blunder that has had tragic consequences.

At 248 kilometers long, the DMZ possesses the world’s longest barbed-wire fence.  But if it was only one tall and long fence – even a fence augmented by watchtowers and surveillance technology -  people in South Korea wouldn’t feel as secure as they do and for so long. In fact, there are multiple fences on both sides of the official border, which is called the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) that runs down the middle of a  wide buffer zone no-man’s-land between the two Koreas. This is four kilometer wide – 2 kilometers on both sides - and neither the North nor the South Korean armies are permitted within this zone, which is patrolled by the UN, who cautiously avoid stepping on or driving over the one million plus landmines buried within.  Sometimes, due to natural topographic barriers, such as bodies of water – for example, on Ganghwa Island, which I mentioned visiting in a recent post, or next to the highway along which I was driving in the photograph illustrating this past - the width of the DMZ narrows. Some areas, like near where we live,  have double or triple fences and layers of concertina wire. But this isn’t all: there’s also the Civilian Control Zone (CCZ), a stretch of land that lies between the DMZ and the Civilian Control Line (CCL) which restricts public access in areas  of South Korea adjacent to the DMZ. In some areas, the CCL stretches 10km south of the MDL. On the other side of the border, North Korea has similar multiple layers of defense.

The DMZ. Note how close Seoul is to the border. The photograph at the beginning of this post was taken in a region to the northwest of Seoul, next to the sea. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#/media

But even with this impressive barrier in place, intrepid people from both sides have still tried to get through – or under – the DMZ since 1953. There are four incursion tunnels dug by the North which South Korea know about, but it is believed there are as many as twenty more undiscovered ones! The so-called Third Tunnel is quite near us. It was located in 1978 in an incomplete state and is 1,635 meters long. Perhaps because it’s so close, I haven’t visited it, but I have gone down the Second Tunnel, which is  further north-east near the town of Cheorwon. Here, because the tunnel is very cramped, you must wear a protective helmet, and as I’m tall  it was quite a squeeze for me. For North Korean male soldiers, who (as I mentioned in a previous post) now have an average height that is as much as 8cm shorter than their South Korean counterparts, it would  no doubt have been somewhat easier going. This tunnel was revealed in early 1975 by  South Korean guards  who heard the sound of explosions deep underground. The total length is 3.5km. 

But amazingly, people can even successfully cross the DMZ above ground. Not so long ago, a North Korean soldier defected by swimming one stretch. On February 17th 2021 the Korea Herald noted:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) announced, Tuesday, that the North Korean was caught in the Civilian Control Line (CCL) in the eastern border town of Goseong, Gangwon Province, earlier that day…… The JCS added that he likely swam south near the Unification Observatory and passed through a drainage tunnel located at the bottom of an iron fence on the inter-Korean border.

Even though surveillance cameras spotted the North Korean multiple times after he came ashore, the military failed to take appropriate action, while the drainage tunnel was also poorly equipped to prevent infiltrations. The North Korean was taken into custody following a three-hour manhunt after he was first spotted by surveillance cameras at a checkpoint. He is currently being questioned by investigators. The man in his 20s reportedly expressed an intention to defect to the South.

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The DMZ and the Gaza fence are present-day descendants of historical physical obstructions or barriers that were erected in attempts to secure and maintain regions of peace in times of endemic and internecine war. The most famous of all is, of course, the Great Wall of China, which is over 21, 000 kilometers long and was began over 3000 years ago.  Its function was to keep out miscellaneous ‘barbarians.’ In Britain, in the north of the country bordering what is now Scotland, we have the remnants of Hadrian’s Wall, which is approximately 140 kilometers long and was constructed about 2000 years ago to protect the inhabitants of the Roman province of Britannia.

Like these ancient walls (back then, metal fences weren’t an option),  the Gaza fence and the DMZ are ostensibly defensive. They have been built to increase the possibilities of peaceful existence for the builders and the people under their jurisdiction in situations where neighbours are regularly intent on violent incursion or full-scale invasion. The Gaza fence was meant to protect Israel against militant insurgencies from Gaza, while the DMZ defends citizens of both North and South Korea against attack.

But the situations are actually more complex in both instances. As already noted, an additional consequence of the Gaza fence was to turn the Gaza Strip into an open-air prison for those living on the inside. The tragically fatal flaw that led to the  breaching of Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’ was that it is actually also offensive, a weapon of destruction in the form of an obstruction. The DMZ, meanwhile, has permitted the leaders of North Korea to turn their country into an open-air prison for its citizens. In fact, for some time now, the DMZ looks more like a barrier erected to  prevent the free movement of North Koreans -  like the Berlin Wall was for East Germans – rather than one that protects North Korea from invasion.

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Thanks to Hamas barbarism and now Israel’s vengeful response, we’ve all be reminded that given the chance, homo homini lupus est: man is wolf to man. Which is one way of explaining why, unfortunately, we will always need long tall fences.

NOTES

The Washington Post article can be read at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/10/how-hamas-entered-israel/

The Korea Herald article can be read at: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/10/113_304191.html

The map of the DMZ is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#/media

For my previous blog post on Ganghwa Island and the DMZ, see: https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/a-view-of-the-north

For my previous blog post on the average height of Koreans, see: https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/a-nation-of-racist-dwarfs