Blue jeans are still subversive (if you live in North Korea)!

More zany news from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: Blue jeans are still subversive over there! Recent evidence of this is the censoring of a British television series about gardening that’s been pirated by the North Koreans to show on state television. The host of ‘Garden Secrets’ is Alan Titchmarsh, who is something of a household name in the UK, and definitely harmless in every way.  But when he’s seen wearing jeans, the DPRK censors do that bizarre digital blurring-out effect. This is what it looks like:

For a while a few weeks ago, the BBC had fun reporting the absurdity of this procedure.  As the news item put it: “Jeans are seen as a symbol of western imperialism in the secretive state and as such are banned.” Alan Titchmarsh was on record as saying: "It's taken me to reach the age of 74 to be regarded in the same sort of breath as Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Rod Stewart. You know, wearing trousers that are generally considered by those of us of a sensitive disposition to be rather too tight".

The subliminal message behind the story is clear: those North Koreans are definitely deranged and we (the Brits) are not. In fact, one of the perennial cultural roles of ‘exotic’ places located beyond the British Isles, especially those very far beyond,   is to serve as sources of amusement and self-satisfaction for us Brits. The underlying message is usually that the only people with any common sense are us. Elsewhere, people are want to believe in the most silly nonsense, and to behave in ways that are perverse, indecent, childish, dangerous, etc. etc.  In this way, the British status quo gets normalized as what’s ‘normal.’ As the public announcement says these days on the UK’s public transport system: ‘If you see something that doesn’t look right, call xxxxxx. See it. Say it. Sorted.’ Evidently, we are all supposed to automatically and unequivocally know what looks ‘right’ is. But how? Because we are habituated to a certain way of thinking and doing things. And for that to be possible, we need to be reminded regularly of the extra-ordinary. Which is where foreigners come in handy.

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As you almost certainly know, denim jeans were designed in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States as work wear. The inventor is usually credited as the German immigrant Levi Strauss, who moved to San Francisco during the ‘gold rush’ and patented the innovative design feature of riveted denim in 1873.

By the time I was ready to wear jeans in the late 1960s there were basically three brands on offer: Levis, Wrangler, and Lee, which were all American. As I became fashion conscious in my late teens in the mid-seventies, I decided for some reason (maybe it was something to do with Jack Kerouac and the Beats) that I could only wear Levi 501’s, the original, button fly, shrink-to-fit design (zippers were a standard feature by the mid-1950s). But there was nowhere in my hometown that sold these classic jeans, and so I would make a pilgrimage to nearby Brighton, where there was one shop that reliably stocked them. Once back home, I’d put the cherished (and rather expensive) item on, then lie in the bath watching the indigo dye turn the water blue as the jeans molded themselves nicely to the form of my lower torso and legs (or that was the goal, anyway).

And as they did,  it was as if by an act of magical anointing I became part of the great success story. I became part of the American Dream. For while jeans are certainly cheap, comfortable, and hard-wearing, much more was being worn by my younger self than just blue cotton denim. By this time, jeans were a very powerful cultural signifier.  What had started out in the west and mid-west of America as hardy workwear for cowboys, lumberjacks, farmers, and construction workers, by mid-twentieth century had morphed  into a style icon sought by the young throughout the ‘free’  world. Like Coca-Cola, hamburgers and hotdogs, pop music, and rebellious and sexy youth, jeans came to represent a freer, happier way of life based on the American Dream. 

First of all, American GI’s on service overseas – in Germany and during the Korean War and the Vietnam War in the East – wore them on leave, and they became  a potent symbol of the new causal look of the Pax Americana. But at the same time, 1950s movies starring Marlon Brando and James Dean made jeans look attractively rebellious, and on Marilyn Monroe they looked sexy.  So, jeans became increasingly a symbol of youth rebellion and anti-establishment attitudes. Many US schools in this period banned jeans from being worn by students.  By the sixities jeans were what pop stars wore, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, and they were established as one of the most recognizable signifiers of non-conformity, if not of outright depravity. When I put on my blue Levi 501’s, aged sixteen in the provincial England of the mid-1970s, I was unconsciously identifying with the dominant version of ‘success’ within my society.

By the late 1980s you could buy ridiculously expensive ‘designer jeans’. This demonstrates how a symbol of rebellion gets easily co-opted or recuperated by what erstwhile rebellious young people even today (the West, anyway) call ‘the System.’  Jeans where you and I come from are definitely not any danger to civic order. Who knows what brand Alan Titchmarsh was wearing when he shot his gardening series. I bet they weren’t Levi 501’s. Then again, maybe they were…

 My mum didn’t like blues jeans, either. I mean, back in the sixities and early seventies she didn’t like me to wear them.  We lived in a suburb of a small seaside town, and she insisted I didn’t wear jeans when venturing into the centre of town. But eventually she bowed to the heady winds of cultural change that blew through the early 1970s and gave up on the dress restrictions. I never ever, ever thought I’d be able to draw a straight line between my mum’s sartorial code from back then and those of the DPRK today.  But this yet more tragic proof that the DPRK is trapped in a time warp. Its animus against blue jeans belongs to the cultural values of the 1950s, not the present day. It quite simply hasn’t been able to progress beyond an ideological construct from the beginning of the Cold War. 

But the DPRK is not alone. What the others so-called  ‘rogue’ nations -  Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan - have in common with the DPRK is precisely the refusal to westernize, to fail to swim with the seemingly inexorable tide of neoliberal global culturalism. To  fall for the ‘American Dream” which has been exported to the ‘free’ world.

It’s worth spending a little time to consider just what this ‘dream’ is (or was).  One on-line dictionary says it is “the ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved.” But that seems a bit evasive. The website ‘Investopedia’ cuts to the economic chase: “The American Dream is the belief that anyone can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone.”

But that’s narrowing things too much. From an artistic perspective, the American Dream means  success equated with reward for the pursuit of extreme freedom of self-expression,  willingness to shock and offend, and to push creativity continuously towards the ‘new’. In fact, these radical values were  already part of the modern ‘Western European Dream’, but they were embraced and enhanced when they migrated to the ‘New World’, along with the useful additional assets of economic, military, and political power.  Which makes one wonder: just what is ‘success’? 

A more critical perspective is need. How about one applying a Marxist interpretation? Here’s something I found on the Internet: “When viewed through the lens of Marxism, the ‘American Dream’ is now more accurately described as a widespread fallacy than a meaningful goal to strive toward.”  This quote comes from a very interesting source: a text written in 2023 by a pair of Iraqi academics in the course of writing a critique of Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ (1949). This play is generally recognized as a searing indictment of the narrowly materialistic version of the ‘you-can-make-it’ ethos of the ‘American Dream’. (Just in passing, recall that, improbably, this same Arthur Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe, which means he could admire her figure in denim jeans at his leisure)  The Iraqi academics, Ali Khalaf Othman and  Fuad Sahu Khalaf, conclude:

What Willy  (Loman, the eponymous ‘salesman’ who commits suicide) seemed to forget or really, judging from his actions, lacked even knowing, and I would go as far as saying, most of the world lack in knowing this next information, is that meritocracy, which is the system that is advertised in America, the system that is so alluring it makes America the land of dreams for refugees, because as long as you work hard enough, you can do anything, right? Well, no, not really. Willy found out the hard way, his family found out the hard way, and I hope, actual people can learn from this play and know before they find out the truth behind the American dream, the hard way.

These authors know what they’re talking about. Iraq is definitely a nation that was offered the ‘American Dream’. In fact it was forced upon them down the barrel of a M14. Disaster followed. Afghanistan is another tragic failure of this ‘dream’. Iran stand as the pioneer of such refusal, when in 1978 it had its Islamic revolution. What’s happening in Gaza and in Ukraine are also in their very different ways versions of the same refusal..

I’m wearing Levi 503’s as I write this post. I’ve given up on the original button-fly model, but the 503’s still have the same classic cut but with a zipper fly (much easier to handle as you get older). I purchased my pair (and lots of other Levi’s clothes, as I have become a walking (and somewhat aged)  advertisement for this American icon)  at the Levi’s store in the Lotte Outlet in Paju Book City, near where we live. It’s just a stone’s throw from the DMZ.  I can imagine a North Korean border guard averting his eyes regularly, as across the narrow Han estuary he glimpses through high-powered binoculars South Koreans of all ages passing lewdly  by in denim jeans (including Levi’s, but also, no doubt, ones by Armani).

I’m in absolutely  in no doubt where I’d rather be living: somewhere I can were jeans whenever and whenever I like.

And to end, here’s the label from my current pair of Levi 501’s. Subversive stuff, indeed!

NOTES

The photograph at the top of the post is a screen grab from the BBC News website: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68664644

The dictionary definition is from: https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

Investopedia quote is from: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/american-dream.asp

The essay on ‘Death of a Salesman’ can be found at: https://www.iasj.net/iasj/download/29d6c8a71ed03d4b 

Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War?

‘Who wants an Americano?’ Ordering coffee, DPRK-style.

Today’s blog title is borrowed from a scary recent article (January 11th) by North Korea experts Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker on the respected website 38 North. In the first paragraph the authors write:

The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950. That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war. We do not know when or how Kim plans to pull the trigger, but the danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s “provocations.” In other words, we do not see the war preparation themes in North Korean media appearing since the beginning of last year as typical bluster from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

A key reason for the heightened concern was the 9th Enlarged Plenum of 8th WPK Central Committee, which met in late 2023 (shown in the photograph above). The Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party, reporting on the Plenum, announced the following:

For a long period spanning not just ten years but more than half a century, the idea, line and policies for national reunification laid down by our Party and the DPRK government have always roused absolute support and approval of the whole nation and sympathy of the world as they are most just, reasonable and fair. But none of them has brought about a proper fruition and the north-south relations have repeated the vicious cycle of contact and suspension, dialogue and confrontation.

If there is a common point among the "policies toward the north" and "unification policies" pursued by the successive south Korean rulers, it is the "collapse of the DPRK’s regime" and "unification by absorption". And it is clearly proved by the fact that the keynote of "unification under liberal democracy" has been invariably carried forward although the puppet regime has changed more than ten times so far.

The puppet forces’ sinister ambition to destroy our social system and regime has remained unchanged even a bit whether they advocated "democracy" or disguised themselves as "conservatism", the General Secretary [Kim Jong Un]  said, and went on:

The general conclusion drawn by our Party, looking back upon the long-standing north-south relations is that reunification can never be achieved with the ROK authorities that defined the "unification by absorption" and "unification under liberal democracy" as their state policy, which is in sharp contradiction with our line of national reunification based on one nation and one state with two systems.

The DPRK claims that as the goal of unification has been made impossible by the United States, and the South is merely its ‘puppet’, there is no point in pursuing it any longer. Since the Plenum, it has therefore formally abandoned unification for the first time. This is the worrying bit for Carlin and Hecker. It does seem to signal a new and dangerous low, especially when seen in the light of recent rapprochement between the two Koreas (and the United States). During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Inter-Korean relations had been gradually improving, despite occasional hickups. In 2000 there was an Inter-Korean Summmit during which the ‘June 15 South-North Joint Declaration’ was adopted. In 2007 another Inter-Korean Summit adopted the ‘Declaration on the Advancement of South-North Relations, Peace and Prosperity’. One tangible sign of this was the construction of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex, which we can see from a local (fortified) hill on a clear day. There, in a bizarre expansion of capitalist entrepreneurial spirit, South Korean companies were permitted to build factories and warehouse and employ cheap North Korean workers. In 2018 two summits in close succession took place, during which Kim Jong Un crossed the border into South Korea and the President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, successfully brokered the signing of the ‘Panmunjeon Declaration’. This led to an agreement to facilitate further advancements in inter-Korean relations and to establish permanent peace on the peninisula, which included a pledge by the North to aim towards denuclearization via the dismantling of a nuclear test site. There was also the first North Korea-US summit in Singapore with President Trump, who also visited Panmunjeon.

In retrospect, this whole chain of seemingly auspicious events seems to have been little more than an extended publicity campaign on both sides, or more charitably, a case of wishful thinking on the side of the South and the United States. For it seems clear that the North never intended to fulfill its ostensible pledges, or would only do so if the South and the United States went much further than they reasonably could towards ‘normalizing’ relations. For example, ‘denuclearization’ meant very different things for each side.

Over the past five years, North Korea has scrapped the entire agreement. A sign of the souring of relations was the fact that Gaeseong was closed temporarily by South Korea in early 2016 as a response to North Korean missile tests and then immediately permamently shuttered by the North. It’s now a ghost town. North Korean nuclear tests and its development of long-range missiles has grown apace. North Korea is now ignoring telephone calls from South Korea across the multiple Inter-Korean hotlines, which have been a key channel through which to defuse tension.. Key political changes outside the DPRK have also prompted its sea-change; in the South there is now a much more hawkish President who no longer sees any point in being accommodating to Kim Jong Un like his predecessor, and in the United States, Biden has reversed the (ludicrous) ‘buddy’ diplomacy initiated by Trump..

But it seems, fortunately, that not many other NK watchers agree with Carlin and Hecker’s dire, quasi-apocalyptic, warning. As an article posted on BBC online  (23rd January) informs us, other experts note that the country is apparently due to reopen to foreign tourists this month, and has also sold so many shells to Russia it is probably not in a strong position to launch a serious attack. Economically, the DPRK’s is a basket case; in 2022 its economy shrank for a third consecutive year, and the nation is classed as one of the poorest countries on earth (the ROK is the 10th largest global economy). Despite the display of fancy weapons during the numerous military parades, and the firing of of expensive missiles into the sea, the numerically huge North Korean army is poorly equipped and would be no match for the South Koreans and their American allies.

The bombastic rhetoric evident in North Korean media is primarily aimed at the domestic audience, and so obviously shouldn’t be taken at face value. If you read  Rodong Sinmum’s report on the Plenum one immediately gets the general idea. Here’s an extract from near the beginning of the very long article:

Thanks to the outstanding leadership of our Party and the indomitable efforts of our people intensely loyal to it, precious ideological and spiritual asset was provided to dynamically promote the development of the state in the new era, a scientific guarantee was established to definitely set the goal and direction of the new year’s struggle and accurately attain them and the mightiness and invincibility of our great state were strikingly proved by entities of the rich country with strong army.

In a nutshell, we achieved epochal successes in providing favorable conditions and a solid springboard for further accelerating the future advance in all aspects of socialist construction and the strengthening of the national power through this year’s struggle, not merely passing the third year of the implementation of the five-year plan that we had planned.

Years after the Eighth Party Congress were recorded with unprecedented miracles and changes, but there had been no year full of eye-opening victories and events like this year.

‘Epochal success’! It’s all total bullshit, of course. The disjunct between what is publicly pronounced by the only newspaper of the DPRK’s Workers’ Party and the grim reality is truly mind-bending, or gut wrenching.

*

Since the end of the Korean War, the term ‘unification’ has always been ambiguous. “Unified’ under which of the diametrically opposite systems? The Korean War began when the North invaded the South with the goal of unifying Korea by force. This has always remained its intention, despite claims to the contrary. Kim Jong Un says as much by protection his regime’s intentions onto the Republic of Korea by claiming its goal is “unification under liberal democracy.” But, actually, he’s right. How else could real unification happen except through political as well as economic union?

No one I’ve talked to in the South over the years – people of all ages – believe unification is a real option. It has long been a fiction neither side really believes in. It’s said that if the North’s regime collapsed and the South took over, like West Germany which absorbed communist East Germany after the end of the Cold War, it would swiftly bankrupt the South. The economic disparity between the two Koreas is far, far greater than between the two Germanys. But so too are the social disparities; South Korea has the fastest broadband connection in the world while North Korea doesn’t even have the Internet (for reasons of social control).

One prosaic reason for the North Korean announcement having less visceral impact than it would once have had is the fact that very few Koreans on either side of the DMZ remember a time when the Korean peninsula actually was united., and if they do, it was because it was a Japanese colony not an independent nation. Many of the graves around where we live are for Koreans born in the North who wanted to buried within sight of their homeland. My wife’s father escaped from Pyeongyang as a young man, fought in the Korean War, married a South Korea and never learned what happened to the family he left behind. Before his death, he tried and failed to find relatives during the family reunions organized since 1985 – the last one was in 2018. These reunions wer part-and-parcel of the thawing of animosity between the two Koreas. For his generation, the loss of ‘unity’ was felt as a very personal level. But Kim Jong Un was born in 1984, and so he has no direct experience of a time when there was one united Korea, nor do most North and South Koreans today.

*

In the United States it is also seems that, most obviously for MAGA supporters and QAnon conspiracy theorists, facts are of little importance in framing public and private discourse,. But at least there are alternative narratives within the reach of every citizen. But in North Korea there is just the one narrative. All any North Korean citizen knows is the fairy story the Party tells. Which is why the punishments for accessing alternative narratives, via South Korean tv show and music, for example, is punished severely, and there is no Internet. Human Rights Watch’s report for 2023 writes:

 The North Korean government does not permit freedom of thought, opinion, expression, or information. All media is strictly controlled. Accessing phones, computers, televisions, radios, or media content that is not sanctioned by the government is illegal and considered “anti-socialist behavior” to be severely punished. The government regularly cracks down on those viewing or accessing unsanctioned media. It also jams Chinese mobile phone services at the border, and targets for arrest those communicating with people outside of the country or connecting outsiders to people inside the country.

But the disturbing fact is that even in a country that enshrines freedom of speech in its constitution, people often seem more content when there is only one story to choose from. Anxiety and insecurity (and therefore the potential for change and self-transformation) come when doubt sets in and one questions what one hears and sees. Such doubts are a direct result of encountering alternatives and having to make choices. But the unprecedented access to information made possible thanks to the Internet has not led people to become more open to and comfortable with different narratives. Instead, it often makes them even more insecure. They are overwhelmed by a tsunami of varied and often contradictory narratives, and in defense are inclined to withdraw into ‘siloed’ information zones.. They wrap themselves beneath a comfort blanket comprised only of what conforms to the narrative which makes them feel secure..

Amazingly, it seems a fairy story can trump lived reality. Or, lived reality is all too often experienced through the fairy story. This is sobering evidence of the extent to which we humans exist not primarily in relation to the direct input coming ‘bottom up’ from our senses but to our ‘top down’ memories, prior knowledge, and social conditioning.. Understandably, we all crave certainty, and the role played by often uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or complicated facts in furnishing this state is, so it seems, only marginal.

*

And finally, to return to the likelihood of war here on the Korean peninsula, but also, potentially, on a much bigger scale..

As the authors of the 38 North article point out, it’s possible that North Korea will engage in some kind of specific provocation, like when they shelled Yeonpyeong island or sank the ROK navy ship Cheonan in 2010.  But as they also write, mad as it may seem, the regime could now be seriously contemplating a tactical nuclear strike. They remind us that ‘North Korea has a large nuclear arsenal, by our estimate of potentially 50 or 60 warheads deliverable on missiles that can reach all of South Korea, virtually all of Japan (including Okinawa) and Guam. If, as we suspect, Kim has convinced himself that after decades of trying, there is no way to engage the United States, his recent words and actions point toward the prospects of a military solution using that arsenal.’

Oh, dear.

Then again, Kim Jong Un and his cronies surely know that a nuclear strike would be signing their own death warrants, even if they have very deep shelters to hide in. They are not a death cult like Hamas and the Jihadists. They do not believe in Paradise. At least, not in one that transcends this world and awaits them when they die a martyr’s death. Kim and Co. already have their ‘paradise’ on Earth. It’s called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and you can read all about it in the Rodong Sinmun.

NOTES

The image is sourced from: https://m.en.freshnewsasia.com/index.php/en/localnews/44185-2024-01-03-03-18-17.html

The 38 North article can be read at: https://www.38north.org/2024/01/is-kim-jong-un-preparing-for-war/

The BBC article is at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68052515

The Human Rights Watch data is at: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/north-korea

 The Rodong Sinmun article, ‘ Report on 9th Enlarged Plenum of 8th WPK Central Committee’, is available at:

https://kcnawatch.org/newstream/1704027054-512008976/report-on-9th-enlarged-plenum-of-8th-wpk-central-committee/

The end of the year (or one of them)

North Korea’s Juche calendar for 2010.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche_calendar#/media/File:North_Korea_(5015886634).jpg

It's interesting to consider the similarities and differences between South Korean and British attitudes to the Christmas holiday that has just passed. As in my homeland, some Koreans will have celebrated it as a religious occasion, going to church and so on. After all, 28% are now Christian. Nevertheless, I’m sure even the faithful are likely to have embraced the event for what it now truly is:  a celebration of consumer capitalism. But one of the great solaces of living here is  that Christmas is a far less gaudy obstacle to surmount than it is back home. One has to endure the usual execrable Christmas-themed pop music in all the cafes, but life does not ground to a halt under the weight of Santa and his toy-and-commodity laden sleigh as it does in Great Britain.

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I’m living in a country when there are two New Year’s day each year.The latter is approaching fast, while the former isn’t until what in the former’s calendar is called February 10th. But last year it was on 22nd January. This is because the traditional Korean calendar is ‘lunisolar’, that is,  calculated in relation to the cycles of the moon not the sun.

It used to be that way in Europe too. The shift in the arrangement of time away from the moon to bring it closer to the more regular cycle of the solar year occurred under the Roman Empire in 46BC when it was mandated by Julius Caesar – hence its name, the ‘Julian Calendar’. In 1582, the “Gregorian Calendar’, named after Pope Gregory XIII, was introduced. This is still the one we use today. (The main change was in  the spacing of leap years to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, which even  more closely approximates the 365.2422-day of the ‘solar’ year.)  But it wasn’t until as recently 1752 that the beginning of the year was officially moved from March 1st to January 1st.

All this history pertains, of course, to Europe alone, or at least it used to. Pre-globalization, in pre-modern Korea as in  the other Chinese influenced countries of East Asia,  a lunisolar calendar was traditionally employed called the Dangun calendar. In South Korea, this still remains the basis on which the dates of  holidays and commemorative events are calculated, such as the Buddha’s birthday and Chuseok. So, South Koreans essentially live according to two significantly different  systems for organizing the passage of time over the course of a year. Like so much else, this reflects the nation’s efforts to absorb Western culture while maintaining ties with indigenous and regional tradition.

*

Also note that the universally agreed-upon conventions for calculating when to begin counting the years is welded solidly to Christianity. It’s 2024 next year because Jesus Christ was born 2024 years ago according to the Gregorian calendar.  Hence the fact that the convention is to date events as BC – ‘Before Christ’ – and AD – ‘Anno domini.’  This means that every time we use the normal system for structuring time, we are tacitly placing the Christian religion at the centre of our timekeeping. Critical awareness of this rather obvious bias is why we are now inclined to write BCE – ‘Before the Christian Era’ – and ‘CE’ – “Christian Era.’  But this subtle shift in nomenclature only very marginally decenters Christianity.

Whoever controls the measuring and naming of time, controls society, which is why those in a hurry to change it, also change the calendar. After the French Revolution  of 1789 AD (in the Gregorian calendar) a ‘Republican Calendar’ was adopted, the aim of which was to liberate the citizens of France from tutelage to the timekeeping of the royalist Ancien régime and the bane of Christian religion. But such was the chaos of the times that the leadership could never agree when Year 1 actually began, and so it was regularly amended! Once a convention as practical and vital for social interaction as the calendar is deep-rooted it proves impossible to uproot. Imagine the confusion if, say,  the critical race theorists or another so-called ‘wokeist’ factions sought to shift the organization of the calendar to better reflect their pressing concerns.

It was in a similar attempt to forge an independent and ideologically controllable timekeeping system that in 1997 North Korea adopted a calendar known as the Juche calendar. Year-numbering begins with the birth of the first leader, Kim Il Sung, which is 1912 in the Gregorian calendar, and so is called Juche 1 in the Juche calendar. This means that by my calculation we’re now living in Juche 123, and soon will be in Juche 124, although not until April 15th, Kim’s birthday.  The DPRK, at least officially, has therefore abandoned both the traditional lunisolar and the Western solar calendars. But in practice, there are 3 New Years every year, as North Koreans apparently recognize the Western New Year, the Lunar New Year, and the Juche New Year. This seems rather greedy. But whichever New Year it is they all begin with the same obligation: you must first lay flowers at the bronze statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il at Mansudae Grand Monuments in Pyongyang, and statues sited elsewhere throughout the nation.

We can assume with some certainty that the hope for a brighter or better New Year, according to all three calendars, is extremely slim for the children of today’s average North Korean parents,  or even those of the elite. However, through adopting a perverse version of historical consciousness that flattens the past to the mere dozens of years since  1912,  the regime instills in the people a model of history in which the Kim ‘dynasty’ assumes absolute power over past, present, and future. The goal is to  delude them into believing that their children’s better and brighter future is guaranteed – but only if they accept repression by the current regime.  For someone to actually believe this brutal canard must require an extraordinary level of cognitive dissonance. But probably only as elevated as the dissonance required for an American to believe Donald Trump should be the next President of the United States!

NOTES

For more on celebrating New Year (or Years) in North Korea, visit: https://www.uritours.com/blog/north-koreans-celebrate-new-years-3-times-in-one-year/

Boundaries, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial

A screen grab from the Guardian on-line (November 28th).  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

Recently, North Korea boasted that it had successfully launched a spy satellite into orbit. The Guardian newspaper on-line (November 28th) reports that it has ‘sent back “detailed” images of the White House, the Pentagon and US nuclear aircraft carriers that have been viewed by the regime leader, Kim Jong-un.’ The Guardian published the photograph at the top of today’s post. Hilarious, isn’t it? The T-shirts sported by the science wonks are priceless. I want one!  I imagine the piece of paper they’re holding shows Scarlett Johansson sunbathing beside her pool in her USD 3.88 million home in Los Feliz, recorded while the satellite was passing over Los Angeles.

It would be comic, except the news has now brought us one step closer to war. Again. Life near the DMZ has just gotten fractionally more insecure. Am I just imagining it, or are there more live fire-drills taking place? More troop movements? It may be a ruse. After all, they have already failed twice. But the suspicion is that Russia has recently provided much needed technological support, and in return, North Korea is providing Russia with thousands of artillery shells. What a diabolical marriage made in Hell!

*

I was struck by the chance juxtaposition in the media of this advanced extra-terrestrial surveillance technology with what’s currently going on in Israel/Palestine: the contrast between two relationships to the world - between attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil and having panoptic access to the entire world.

In Israel/Palestine what we see playing out in terrible  detail via the media is a crisis brought on by a fundamental human orientation to land and territory. Strife and war between humans have historically always been about appropriation of land.  A sense of being at home in a particular place is axiomatic. The securing of a particular area of land through migration, colonization, and conquest leads to the setting up of social order and the organization of economic life of society.  Only by dwelling somewhere do we feel truly human. This also meant that because societies are historically grounded in the occupation of a particular area  of land, the construction of boundaries is absolutely necessary.  

So, what is happening in Israel/Palestine is an ancient struggle for the appropriation of land, one that in spite of all the huge changes that have occurred over the past one hundred years remains central to human meaningful existence. Two peoples claim the same land as their own.

And yet, at the same time, thanks to globalization, a thoroughgoing deterritorialization of human existence has occurred. In fact, this process began long before the period usually described as ‘modern’. The uniquely iintimate link between being human and dwelling on the land was destroyed over 500 years ago when the oceans were systematically opened up.  From this point onwards, human society ceased being land-based and lost its status as the connection to specific area of the Earth.  Humans were no longer earth-bound. With the development of maritime technology - improved ship construction,  the  invention of the compass,  the science of mapping -  Europeans spearheaded the subjection of the entire planet to appropriation and control which had begun millennia before. when humans first developed boats that could carry them across the oceans. The general assumption became that by the end of the twentieth century, globalization meant the struggle between humans for the appropriation of land was over.  Humanity had spread all over the entire globe, across land, sea, and space, and there was nowhere else to go.

The North Korean’s launching of a spy satellite is in line with the logic of modernity in this sense. It is part-and-parcel of the process through which humanity has detached itself from its terrestrial bonds and manufactured a god-like view which bestows upon it immense power. It is this technologically-assisted extension of human perception that dominates our experience of the world – at least those of us who live in the developed world, and those who seek to maintain their security in relation to this world – nations like North Korea, for example.  To ensure a secure boundary for appropriated land entails the production of technologies that will deter others from making a grab for it. In this sense, the spy satellite is a contemporary standard form of boundary establishment generated on a global rather than terrestrial scale.

Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine boundaries of a more ancient kind were erected. Israel constructed a fence to pen in the Gaza Palestinians. But this fence proved catastrophically inadequate. This was not because of sophisticated technological subversion, however, but rather because of the violent invasion of land by humans.

In this sense, the conflict in Israel/Palestine brings together the pre-modern and modern, the post-terrestrial and the terrestrial. Israel’s folly has been to attempt to live like a globalized nation in a region that is still trapped in a feud over land, trapped in a way of dwelling on earth - of being human - that is ancient, and has been kept alive through the bungling of modern leaders.

*

But however awful the conflict in Israel /Palestine is, in a weird sense it is actually reassuring on a certain level, in the sense that it is enacting a very familiar kind of struggle over the appropriation of land based on historical precedent, religious justification, and political compromises. With climate change, the conflict between the global and the local will become even more tense. It is transforming the land upon which people dwell, forcing many of them to migrate and causing perpetual conflicts over dwelling rights. We will be seeing lots more violent struggles over land use because of the pressures of climate change, but they won’t be rooted in evident history like the one in Israel/Palestine.

As Bruno Latour writes in Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, , in order to effectively confront climate change we need “to be able to succeed in carrying out two complementary movements that the ordeal of modernization has made contradictory: attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other. Up to now…. such an operation has been considered impossible: between the two, it is said, one has to choose. It is this apparent contradiction that current history may be bringing to an end.’

NOTES

The Guardian article can be accessed at:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

The Bruno Latour quote is from Down To Earth. Poltics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity, 2018), p.12 

A view of the North

North Korea seen from the Ganghwa Peace Observatory..

I recently visited Ganghwado Jejeokbong Peace Observatory, which is in the northern area of the Civilian Restricted Zone that abuts the DMZ. From the observatory, you can see the Democratic People’s Republic just 2 km way across the estuary.  

The Observatory entrance.

A guide gives a talk in front of a model of the area.

Ganghwa is an island, and not far from where I live. But as you can see from this map it’s necessary to take a sizeable detour via Gimpo due to the  restrictions imposed by the DMZ. The blue pointer is the location of the Observatory and the X is where we live. The dotted line is the border. Note how close this is to Seoul!

There was quite a lot of fighting around Ganghwado during the Korean War, but there’s also an interesting back story, linking it to an earlier violent period, and one that serves to put things in a wider historical context.

Determined to force the Korean government to end its isolationism, an armed American merchant schooner named the SS General Sherman sailed for Korea in 1866. The owner was hoping to open Joseon to trade, just as another American, Commodore Perry, had successfully done in Japan in 1853. But the crew outraged the locals, forcibly breaching the promulgation made by the government that forbade any contact with foreigners.  The crew where murdered and the ship caught fire and sank after it sailed into the Taedong River  which flows through Pyongyang. 

In 1871 the so-called United States Expedition to Korea was initiated with the intention of finding out what had happened to the Sherman and to make a show of strength that would force Joseon into ending its ‘closed doors’ policy. The ‘show of strength’ was made predominantly on and around Ganghwa Island.    The American stormed the fortresses there,  and in the end over 200 Korean Soldiers were killed.  But if the United States had hoped this show of military muscle would persuade the Koreans, it totally failed. The governed refused to negotiate and even strengthened the policy of isolation.

But the writing was on the wall.  In fact, it was Japan that sealed Joseon’s fate. In 1868 the Meiji government had asked for diplomatic relations with Joseon, which were rejected. Like the United States,  Japan then staged in 1875 an armed protest using a warship , and then pressed the kingdom to open its ports. The Treaty of Ganghwa was signed in February 1876. By 1905 Japan had deprived  Joseon of its diplomatic sovereignty and made it protectorate. In 1910 it was annexed and became a colony. This tutelage endured until imperial Japan’s defeat in 1945.

American servicemen stand atop one of the forts on Ganghwa Island after its capture. 1871.

Not surprising, the North Korean regime milks the propaganda value of the sinking of the General Sherman, holding rallies in front of a monument dedicated to the killing of Americans and the ship’s sinking. The monument is close to where the USS Pueblo is anchored - the U.S. Navy intelligence ship captured while in the East Sea in January 1968.

*

I have to say North Korea looked rather bucolic from the Ganghwa Observatory. Very unspoilt.  Through a telescope you can even zoom in on farmers working in the fields and soldiers on patrol.  Perhaps because I’d recently been stuck in horrendous traffic near Seoul and obliged to drive at a snail’s pace along a polluted highways flanked by rank upon rank of ugly tower blocks, I was struck by a huge irony.

Ecologically speaking, North Korea’s carbon footprint is tiny compared to its competitor to the south. Carbon dioxide emissions are estimated to be about 56.38 million metric tons in 2021 in North Korea. Its GHG emissions peaked in the early 1990s, and according to UN statistics, have declined by roughly 70% since 1993. As a result, North Korean CO2 emissions account for only 0.15% of global emissions. In 2020, the greenhouse gases emitted in South Korea totalled 656.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. An average person produces 13.5 tons of greenhouse gases per year.

What does this suggest?  Is a totalitarian regime that brutally curbs the freedom of its populace, and due to basic energy shortages is obliged to turn off the lights at night, the kind of state best styled to ensure we reach the target of Net Zero in 2030?   Is North Korea a role-model for balancing greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere by removing them from the atmosphere? 

Of course not!  What the view from the observatory does not show us the fact that North Korea is suffering total environmental collapse. An obvious sign of this is the contrast between the densely wooded hills in the South and the barren one’s you can see across the DMZ.

The following is an account of a visit made by Western scientists back in 2013 when it was still possible to go there:

 ‘When ecologist Margaret Palmer visited North Korea, she didn’t know what to expect, but what she saw was beyond belief. From river’s edge to the tops of hills, the entire landscape was lifeless and barren. Villages were little more than hastily constructed shantytowns where residents wore camouflage netting, presumably in preparation for a foreign invasion they feared to be imminent. Emaciated looking farmers tilled the earth with plows pulled by oxen and trudged through half-frozen streams to collect nutrient-rich sediments for their fields. “We went to a national park where we saw maybe one or two birds, but other than that you don’t see any wildlife,” Palmer says.

“The landscape is just basically dead,” adds Dutch soil scientist Joris van der Kamp. “It’s a difficult condition to live in, to survive.”

Palmer and Van der Kamp were part of an international delegation of scientists invited by the government of North Korea and funded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to attend a recent conference on ecological restoration in the long-isolated country. Through site visits and presentations by North Korean scientists they witnessed a barren landscape that is teetering on collapse, ravaged by decades of environmental degradation.

“There are no branches of trees on the ground,” Van der Kamp says. “Everything is collected for food or fuel or animal food, almost nothing is left for the soil. We saw people mining clay material from the rivers in areas that had been polished by ice and warming their hands along the roadside by small fires from the small amounts of organic bits they could find.

Since 2013 things have only gotten worse., North Korea has seen its longest drought and rainy seasons in over a century. Kim Jong Un and his cronies make  appropriate noises,  calling for immediate steps to counteract the impact of climate change. But it’s hopeless. After all, they spend all their money on armaments.

Which is to all just to say that appearances can be deceptive. I hate the way South Korea’s race to become a modern ‘developed’ capitalist nation has devastated the country’s environment, brutally slicing it up with highways and herding people into tower block ghettos. But I’m certainly glad I live here rather than across that 2 km stretch of water that laps against Ganghwa island.

 NOTES

The archive photo from 1871 is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Korea#/media/File:Ganghwa_3-edit.jpg

The quote is from: ‘Inside North Korea's Environmental Collapse. Scientists who recently visited the hermit nation report the situation is dire’, by Philip McKenna. Nova. March 7, 2013, available at: 

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/inside-north-koreas-environmental-collapse/

‘A Nation of Racist Dwarfs’

The title of today’s post is lifted from Christopher Hitchens’ essay from 2010 which I mentioned in my previous blog. Catchy isn’t it? And not a little racist, which is rather rich in that The Hitch makes a special point of describing North Korean as racist and xenophobic. He writes with authority that “a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean”, and goes on to invite us “to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.”

This data is shocking because while North Koreans got shorter, South Koreans got taller. But six inches (15.24 centimeters)? Are North Koreans (Hitchens doesn’t specify if he refers to a male or female) really that much shorter? The simple answer is no.

They are defintely shorter, but not nearly so much as Hitchens specifies. In 2002, the South Korean Research Institute of Standard and Science used United Nations survey data collected inside North Korea, and found that pre-school children raised in North Korea were up to 13 cm (5.1 inches) shorter and up to 7 kg lighter than children brought up in South Korea. Commentators put this down to the famine of the 1990s, which left one in every three children in North Korea chronically malnourished or 'stunted'.  In 2006, the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed the physical condition of 1,075 North Korean defectors ranging in age from 20 to 39, and found that the average height of North Korean males was 165.6 centimeters (5 feet 5 inches), and North Korean females 154.9 centimeters (5 feet 1 inches). By comparison, an average South Korean man was 172.5 centimeters (5 feet six inches) tall and a woman 159.1 centimeters (5 feet 2.5 inches).  The cause was clear: North Korea suffered from food shortages and the collapse of its public health and medical care system. In an essay from 2009 Professor Daniel Schwekendiek from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul stated that North Korean adult men are, on average, between 3 to 8cm (1.2 to 3.1 inches) shorter than their South Korean counterparts. This is also the data on the BBC website (illustrated above) which says South Korean men are an average of 173.5 centimeters tall, and North Koreans are 3 to 8 centimeters shorter. But the most recent data I could find, at Wisevoter.com, puts the North Korean at 175 cm and a South Korean at 176cm. Just one centimeter apart! So, I really don’t know what the exact difference is!

So Hitchens was definitely exaggerating. But nevertheless, the height difference between North and South Korea is real and can only be put down to one thing: the political systems. In effect, the Korean peninsula is a tragic experiment in the impact on culture of biology.

This is what is called ‘epigenetic change’, which refers to environmental factors that impact on the human genome. The DNA sequence does not change but the organism's observable traits are modified. These epigenetic factors are typically described as external agents like heavy metals, pesticides, diesel exhaust, tobacco smoke, hormones, radioactivity, viruses and bacteria, or lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, stress, and sleep. One can also add political systems whose policies directly impact on what, how, when, and which people eat, what kind of medical care they receive, and what environmental agents people are or are not exposed to.

All these factors influence the expression of some genes, both positively and negatively. In the case of North Korea, mostly negatively. The variation of hieght is therefore graphic evidence on the most basic level of the regime’s abject failure. Maybe North Koreans are not ‘racist dwarfs’, but they certainly have paid a terrible physical price so that a vile clique can cling onto power.

To put the Korean statistics in perspective, here is some more data: an adult man in the UK is 178 cm average height, in the USA is 178 cm, and in France is 179cm (yes! taller on average that the Brits, which was shocking news to me, at least). The tallest human males in the world are Dutchmen at 184cm - an average 9 centimeters (3.5 inches) bigger than North Koreans.

*

Over the past two hundred years almost everyone in the world has been getting taller thanks to a better diet and medical care.   As in Europe before the modern period, during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) Koreans adults were significantly shorter on average than today’s Koreans - Northern and Southern. According to the first nationwide study into the height of Koreans, including Joseon era Koreans, average heights of both male have increased by 12.9 centimeters (5 inches) and female adults by 11.6 centimeters (4.5 inches) over the past century.

But just as on the Korean peninsular today, history also shows that the trajectory is not always continuously upwards. Here’s something interesting I found while surfing for this post at OSU.edu: Northern European men had actually lost an average of 6.3 centimeters (2.5 inches) of height by the 1700s , and this loss that was not fully recovered until the first half of the 20th century!

A variety of factors contributed to the drop – and subsequent regain – in average height during the last millennium. These factors include climate change; the growth of cities and the resulting spread of communicable diseases; changes in political structures; and changes in agricultural production.

"Average height is a good way to measure the availability and consumption of basic necessities such as food, clothing, shelter, medical care and exposure to disease," [Richard] Steckel said. "Height is also sensitive to the degree of inequality between populations."

"These brief periods of warming disguised the long-term trend of cooler temperatures, so people were less likely to move to warmer regions and were more likely to stick with traditional farming methods that ultimately failed," he said. "Climate change was likely to have imposed serious economic and health costs on northern Europeans, which in turn may have caused a downward trend in average height."

Urbanization and the growth of trade gained considerable momentum in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Both brought people together, which encouraged the spread of disease. And global exploration and trade led to the worldwide diffusion of many diseases into previously isolated areas.

"Height studies for the late 18th and early 19th centuries show that large cities were particularly hazardous for health," Steckel said. "Urban centers were reservoirs for the spread of communicable diseases."

Inequality in Europe grew considerably during the 16th century and stayed high until the 20th century – the rich grew richer from soaring land rents while the poor paid higher prices for food, housing and land.

"In poor countries, or among the poor in moderate-income nations, large numbers of people are biologically stressed or deprived, which can lead to stunted growth," Steckel said. "It's plausible that growing inequality could have increased stress in ways that reduced average heights in the centuries immediately following the Middle Ages."

Political changes and strife also brought people together as well as put demand on resources.

"Wars decreased population density, which could be credited with improving health, but at a large cost of disrupting production and spreading disease," Steckel said. "Also, urbanization and inequality put increasing pressure on resources, which may have helped lead to a smaller stature."

Exactly why average height began to increase during the 18th and 19th centuries isn't completely clear, but Steckel surmises that climate change as well as improvements in agriculture helped.

"Increased height may have been due partly to the retreat of the Little Ice Age, which would have contributed to higher yields in agriculture. Also, improvements in agricultural productivity that began in the 18th century made food more plentiful to more people.

And here to finish are some famous people’s heights:

Bonaparte = 168cm.

Hitler = 174 cm.

Kim Jong-eun =  168.9 cm.

Putin = 169cm.

Trump = 184cm.

Interestingly, Hitchens (who died in 2011) was 175 cm tall,. That is, the same height as an average North Korean male today.

NOTES

The image at the start of this post is from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41228181

Christopher Hitchens article is at: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/02/kim-jong-il-s-regime-is-even-weirder-and-more-despicable-than-you-thought.html

Daniel Schwekendiek essay is at: ttps://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/abs/height-and-weight-differences-between-north-and-south-korea/2EED5360F62997E3007425258C04A45A

The epigentics diagram is from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41440-019-0248-0

The data about Joseon era average heights is from: https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20120131000667

The quotation about average heights in Europe over the past three hundred years is at:  https://news.osu.edu/men-from-early-middle-ages-were-nearly-as-tall-as-modern-people/

My list of famous people’s heights is from: https://www.celebheights.com/s/Kim-Jong-Un-49758.html

Wisevoter.com data is at: https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/average-height-by-country/

‘North Korea: ‘a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right.’

This photograph (not taken by me, although I’ve been there) shows North Korean border guards strutting their stuff just a few miles from where I’m writing this post, at Panmunjom, the only place where the DMZ narrows and the two Koreas meet. The title of today’s post is a quotation from the British writer Christopher Hitchens, who in 2010 wrote about the North Korean system in a much commented upon article.   Hitchens began by recounting a visit to North Korea and how his minder had expressed racist views in such a way that it was obvious that these views were central to what for him was a quite normal and acceptable worldview. But his  article was specifically motivated by  reading the then recently published book by B. R. Myers entitled ‘The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters’. As Hitchens wrote, Myers described “the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian ‘military first’ mobilization, is maintained by slave labour, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.“ 

Since then, under Kim Jong-Ill’s successor, his son Kim Jong Un, things have only gotten worse in the DPRK, and many analysts would agree with Myers’ general prognosis. For example, it seems obvious that to persist in describing the country as ‘communist’ is very misleading, not least because the DPRK itself doesn’t use the word anymore! Ideologically, it prefers to refers to ‘Juche’ thought, which is usually translated as ‘self-reliance’ and is intended to be a specifically North Korean ideology - the one Myers’ set about describing. But it is interesting to consider how the term ‘communist’ was initially adopted and then discarded in the DPRK.

The North Korean regime was put in place by the Soviet Union, whose forces occupied the northern part of the peninsula at the end of World War Two. The first of the Kim dynasty, the former guerrilla fighter in China Kim Il-sung, was installed by Stalin as a counterpoint to the American candidate in the south, Syngman Rhee. This is an archive photograph from 1946 of people in Pyongyang parading with portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung:

Subsequently, two rival Koreans came into being in 1948. In 1950, Stalin gave Kim the ‘green light’ to invade the Republic of Korea. By that time, China had also fallen to the Communists. After the failure of the invasion and the stalemate of the Korean War, the DPRK settled into being a client state of the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent, China) until the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the abandonment of communism in Russia precipitated a humanitarian and ideological crisis in the DPRK. But by that time the country had already moved to established its own distinctly ‘Korean’ ideology of Juche. It is this ideology that Hitchens characterised as being on the far ‘right’ politically because its racist and xenophobic traits are not ones that could be associated with the far ‘’left’.

But to what extent is this ‘left’/’right’ polarity an accurate way of analyzing the reality of North Korea over the past thirty years?

*

Following the French Revolution in 1789, when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the old order sat to the president's right and those of the revolution to the left, it became customary in the West (and then internationally) to described politics in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’. In the nineteenth century Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described  ‘communism’ ’as a radical politics of the ‘left’ that recognized the historical inevitability of class war within capitalist societies leading to a revolution after which all property would be publicly owned and each person’s labour paid for according to ability and needs. It was therefore specifically cast as the antithesis to the ‘right-wing’ ideologies of the industrailized capitalist societies in which property was privately owned and labour rewarded unevenly and in relation to entrenched inequalities rooted in class and race. ‘Communism’ thus became the portmanteau term of the twentieth century for ‘leftist’ radical politics directed towards revolution from below, which, after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia 1917, was monopolized by the Soviet Communist Party.  

But for post-colonial Korea, ‘communism’ meant something very different. It involved adopting one of the only two route maps towards modernization provided by the globally dominant West. Under the guidance of the United States the Republic of Korea had chosen the capitalist map, while the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea chose the communist one. It should be noted that neither map included democracy in Korea at this initial stage.

In relation to the communist road map, it is important to consider that Korea was also very far from being an industrialized economy against which a Korean ‘proletariat’ (the actually almost non-existent factory workers) - could be seen to be struggling for freedom against their capitalist overlords. In other words, as also, indeed, in Russia in 1917 and China in 1949, the ‘communists’ ostensibly took power in countries that Marx and Engels would have considered economically and socially distant from the ripe and predestined moment of violent revolutionary transition. Nevertheless, the communist road map was the only one handed to the North Koreans by the Soviets. But soon enough, as in Russia and China, ‘communism’ had morphed into a Korean-style totalitarianism of the ‘left’, as opposed to the totalitarianism characteristic of the ‘right’, aka fascism. That, at least, was how the story was told.

We still basically see politics today in terms of the binary ‘left’ and ‘right’, which is why Hitchens could imagine only a choice between seeing North Korea as on the extreme political ‘left’ ‘(communism) or extreme political ‘right’ (fascism) As racism and xenophobia were part of the fascist package, they placed North Korea on the ‘right.’ But this shoehorning into familiar political polarities risks losing sight of significant specific characteristics - but also characteristics of importance more generally beyond North Korea. For it is increasingly obvious that these polarities inherited from the European nineteenth century, never did fit the Korean situation, but also no longer suffice to describe the current political situation more generally - in both the global north and south.

*

Back in the late 1940s some disenchanted former communists wrote a book entitled ‘The God That failed’, edited by the Englishman Richard Crossman (a former communist turned Labour Party Member of Parliament). Subtitled ‘A Confession’, it included the testimonies of, amongst others, the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, the French novelist André Gide, and the English poet and critic Stephen Spender. The book was a classic of the early Cold War. I remember that my father, a state school English teacher and life-long socialist and Labour Party voter, owned a copy of the English edition, and I read it as a teenager in the mid-1970s, and it probably helped me steer a moderate ideological course during the awful Thatcher years.

Koestler joined the Communist Party in  late 1931 and left in early 1938, and became a very vocal critic. He begins his contribution by writing: “A faith is not acquired by reasoning…..From the psychologist’s point of view, there is little difference between a revolutionary and a traditionalist faith. All true faith is uncompromising, radical, purist”.

Koestler’s analyses still seems spot on, because what we are witnessing today is an overwhelming tendency to adopt a position based not on reason but on ‘faith’, a position that is reassuringly ‘uncompromising, radical, purist”. We can see this trait on both the ostensible ‘left’ and ‘right’, and it suggest another polarity which offers a more accurate diagnosis of our current situation. The characteristics described by Koestler encompasses both extremes within our current ideological situation – ‘Woke’ radical race theory and nationalist populism - putting them not at opposite ends of a political binary of ‘left’ and ‘right’ but rather together within a binary comprised of ‘faith’ rather than ‘reason’ based politics. In this context, it’s not so much a problem of what one believes but whether such belief is ‘faith’ based intransigence – rooted in the desire to hold to the belief uncompromisingly, and so to adopt the most radical and pure possibility - or rooted in a reality that is recognized as inevitably ambiguous and uncertain.

Another work that made an impression on me as a teenager in the late 1970s – courtesy of my History teacher, Mr. Reid – was philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’. This two-volume study was written during Popper’s exile from the Nazis in New Zealand during the War and published in 1945. Popper’s discussion of the Western history of ‘closed’ societies from Plato to Hegel and Marx was way too sophisticated for my young mind, but his basic argument was one that I did understand, and also one that still seems to resonate. Popper wrote:

This book raises issues that might not be apparent from the table of contents. It sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization — a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humanness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind. It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or "enclosed society," with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism.

I recently read a fine book by the author and historian of ideas Johan Norberg called ‘Open. the Story of Human Progress’, which was published in 2020. Norberg credits Popper with defining a central class of values which he wishes to promote as a model for society today. He writes:

Openness created the modern world and propels it forwards, because the more open we are to ideas and innovations from where we don’t expect them, the more progress we will make. the philosopher Karl Popper called it the ‘open society’. It is the society that is open-ended, because it is not a organism, within one unifying idea, collective plan or utopian goal. The government’s role in an open society is to protect the search for better ideas, and people’s freedom to live by their individual plans and pursue their own goals, through a system of rules applied equally to all citizens. It is the government that abstains from ‘picking winners’ in culture, intellectual life, civil society and family life, as well as in business and technology. Instead, it gives everybody the right to experiment with new ideas and methods, and allows them to win if they fill a need, even if it threatens the incumbents. Therefore, the open society can never be finished. It is always a work in progress.

When read in the light of the regime now oppressing North Korea, what Popper and Norberg write provide useful insights. The regime is almost a caricature of the ‘closed’ society. But more broadly, they suggest that we should move on from the binary ‘left’ and ‘right’ and instead see the situation in terms of those who practice politics on the basis of ‘faith’ compared those doing it on the basis of ‘reason.’ Unfortunately, all too often a position based on dogmatic ‘faith’ is the more appealing option, as it means one doesn’t have to qualify one’s beliefs by taking into consideration conflicting attitudes, positions or information. In short, one can dispense with doubt. As Sam Harris puts it, ‘faith’ in this sense means ‘what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse - constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor.’ Harris was aiming to expose religious faith, but what he says could equally apply to extreme secular ideological faiths, too. Isn’t North Korea a system that has definitely achieved ‘escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse’?

Ultimately, what we should be striving for is a way of thinking about society that incorporates doubt and that turns away from the temptations offered by any models - religious or secular - that try to banish doubt and install certainty. The terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’ seem to me to be useful titles of more realistic road maps than ‘left’ and ‘right.’

*

Norberg is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, an organization that is often described as a hotbed of neoliberalism, and you can see how Norbert’s paean to ‘openness’ (like Popper’s) could easily be construed as providing a green light for capitalist free trade globalist maximalism.  For Norberg’s optimistic version of the ‘open’ society seems wedded to an ideal of progress coupled to western style capitalism-driven globalization at a time when we recognize that it is precisely this ambition that has precipitated the dire global ecological crisis.

What would an ‘open’ society be like that isn’t founded on capitalist globalization and an obsession with progress in material terms, and instead was based on responding to what the philosopher Bruno Latour calls the ‘Terrestrial’, that is, on a kind of ‘openness’ to the planet as a whole, rather than just on narrow human needs and aspirations.

In 2018 the DPRK emitted 44.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gas, while the ROK emitted 758.1 million tonnes! So this particular ‘closed’ society is a far less brutal ecological force than the ostensibly ‘open’ one with which it shares the peninsula. But obviously, such a small carbon footprint has not been achieved by benign design, rather it came about by complete chance, and as a beneficial side-effect of being an unapologetically racist and xenophobic society. Ironic, isn’t it?

NOTES

The photo at the beginning of the post is a screen grab from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/north-korean-soldier-makes-midnight-dash-to-freedom-across-dmz/2019/08/01/69da5244-b412-11e9-acc8-1d847bacca73_story.html

The archive photograph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1946-05-01_평양의_5.1절_기념_행사%282%29.jpg

Christopher Hitchens’ article:: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/02/kim-jong-il-s-regime-is-even-weirder-and-more-despicable-than-you-thought.html

B. R. Myers book: https://www.amazon.com/Cleanest-Race-Koreans-Themselves-Matters-ebook/dp/B004EWETZW

Johan Noberg’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Open-Story-Progress-Johan-Norberg/dp/1786497182

Sam Harris’ book ‘The End of Faith’: https://www.amazon.com/End-Faith-Religion-Terror-Future/dp/0393327655

The carbon footprint statistics are from: https://www.unep.org/explore-topics/climate-action/what-we-do/climate-action-note/state-of-climate.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMInsbXo4ng_wIVU4nCCh2UwgDbEAAYASAAEgKAQPD_BwE

Freeing the Mind, North Korea style

A North Korean with her smart phone.

Because I live so near to North Korea –  from my roof I can see its mountains on the other side of the DMZ - it’s difficult for me not to think often about that brutally repressive regime, a preoccupation reinforced by the fact that it is very skillful in keeping itself in the international news (most recently in relation to a failed attempt to launch a satellite).

One thing that especially interests me, and therefore has been the theme of several posts, is the extraordinary level of indoctrination the government of North Korea successfully engages in. The fundamental prerequisite for this success is the isolation of the nation.  This is both geographic and informational. Its closed physical and epistemological boundaries make possible a truly locally global control of the North Korean people’s minds.   

In this post I want to think some more about this mind control in the light of research coming from the neurosciences into the way we now believe the human brain works. This research draws attention to the astonishing - and not a little unsettling - fact  that our brains construct the perception we have of the self and of the world we inhabit. The success of the North Korean regime’s  crazy system of mind control is only possible because of something basic all humans all share.

*

What the brain does is figure out the causes of the sensory data in order to get a grip on its environment.  As the  multi-disciplinary researcher Shamil Chandaria, a recent guest on Sam Harris’ wonderful Making Sense podcast, puts it:  ‘most people’s common sense view is that we are looking out at the world from little windows at the front of our heads.  But in fact, we are just receiving electrical signals, and the brain has never seen reality as it actually is.’ In other words, we make inferences about the world.   We learn from all the data coming in, and infer what is going on, then generate internal simulations in the brain.

We simulate a picture of reality.  ‘If I think I am seeing a tree, I then simulate the sensory data  as if it was a tree’, says Chandaria.  The result is that the past shapes our future because the simulation is based on prior experience. We make “top down” predictions about our sensory inputs based on a model of how they were created.

Aa a result, ‘conscious experience is like a tunnel’, writes the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger in his book The Ego Tunnel. The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2010) :

Modern neuroscience had demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the on-going process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality. 

This ‘ego tunnel’ is a result of the need to adapt to survive in complex environments which required that humans evolved to limit and restrict the range of potential points of view or emotions, thereby restraining the endless possibilities of the senses. In other words, ‘tunnel vision’ is an intrinsic part of ‘normal’ conscious experience.

From the point of view of evolutionary success, we need information about our place within the environment and the likely outcomes of our actions. The principal goal of the brain is therefore to maintain homeostasis  - stable equilibrium within its environment. The most valuable states in terms of optimizing evolutionary adaptive success are therefore states that minimize surprise. It is vital for humans as adaptive agents to reduce the informational ‘surprise’ that is inevitably associated with our complex sensory engagements with the world, and reducing it enables the brain to resist the natural tendency toward  chaotic disorder (entropy).

The level of the surprise we experience, and our ability to limit it through making predictions about our sensations, depends on the robustness of the brain’s internal generative model or simulation of the world. The discrepancy between ‘top-down’ predictions and the actuality and accuracy of ‘bottom-up’ sensations is  called by neurologists ‘prediction error.’  These errors are minimized by converting prior beliefs and expectations, and these include not just what we sample from the world but also how the world is sampled.

The mental states that minimize surprise are those we most expect to frequent, and they are constrained by the form of the generative model we are using. In the field of neuroscience interested in what is know as ‘active inference’ , elements of environmental surprise are known as ‘free energy’. We minimize this energy by changing predictions and/or the predicted sensory inputs so as to resist the chaotic entropic forces suffusing the surprising. We revise inferences in the light of experience, updating ‘priors’ - memories - to reality-aligned ‘posteriors’, optimizing the complexity of our generative model of the world. ‘Free energy’ is thereby converted into ‘bound energy’.

The process through which we simulate past experience and ensure posterior beliefs align with newly sampled data is  called in probability theory ‘Bayesian inference’ (after the theorem of eighteenth century statistician of that name). The ‘Bayesian brain’ is understood as an inference engine that aims to optimize probabilistic representations of what causes any given sensory input. Prediction error in relation to input is minimized by action and perception. Acting on the world reduces errors by selectively sampling sensations that are the least surprising. Perceptions are changed by belief updating, thereby changing  internal states. The results are more reality-consonant predictions. If they are not updated, our predictions will not be consonant with reality. On an individual level, this failure may be caused by some trauma, for example, and can then manifest pathologically.  But reality-dissonance can also happen on a group and societal level.

*

In this context, the North Korean system of mind control can be understood as a pathological inferential system that has exploited the profoundly human desire for homeostasis – for minimizing surprise. It aims to massively limit or bind the flow of ‘free energy’. But this means the obviously orchestrated and systematic ‘derangement’ of the North Korea people is only a very extreme case of something that is basic to how all humans make individual and collective sense of the world. As Chandaria notes: ‘You want a simulation that is as close to what you would normally expect before seeing the sensory data’. In the case of North Korea, the simulation is biased towards what the people have been conditioned to expect by  the ‘top-down’ inferences disseminated by the regime’s total control of information.

When considered in this light, the recent Covid-19 pandemic was a ‘gift’ to the regime. It allowed it to greatly increase levels of isolation and restriction, closing off the country more than ever before. There has also been a major increase in crackdowns and punishments on foreign media consumption. For example, the 2020 anti-reactionary thought law has made watching foreign media punishable by 15 years in prison camp. But one can see why it is so vital that the regime keeps such a tight hold on the media. As a major conduit of ‘top-down’ information – ‘free energy’ -  it is a threat to the homeostasis that guarantees the regime’s survival, the feeling of security manipulated by the regime in order to main its grip on power. One could say that it aims to ensure that any ‘bottom-up’ sensory input coming from the environment is conformed to the priors which are tightly controlled by the regime.

The Kim regime will stay in power as long as it maintains this monopoly on information flow.  It is obvious, however, that this degree of global surveillance and control is quite simply impossible in a globalized and networked world. It is inevitable that the wall behind which the flow of ‘free energy’ is held will eventually be breached. And then what?  

NOTES

Thomas Metzinger’s book, The Ego Tunnel is published by Basic Books: https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3OCZZB2OB1HAG&keywords=The+Ego+Tunnel&qid=1686294457&sprefix=the+ego+tunnel%2Caps%2C242&sr=8-1

Sam Harris’ podcast with Shamil Chandaria is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXs0uQ6M5ow

For more on active Inference, ‘free-energy’ and the Bayesian brain’ see: Karl J. Friston’s essay: https://www.uab.edu/medicine/cinl/images/KFriston_FreeEnergy_BrainTheory.pdf

For applications of ‘free energy’ and the ‘Bayesian brain’ to psychology see: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00592/full

The photo at the top of this post is from the Liberty in North Korea website: https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/blog/foreign-media-in-north-korea-how-kpop-is-challenging-the-regime?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=LINK-Blog&gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw-IWkBhBTEiwA2exyOy0EHeTr-0GSGeyv5lme5qTpYicJtpGeILjqimauZJg53nMHkW4c1xoCdikQAvD_BwE

Police State?

A fresco painting from Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan’s exhibition, ‘Tulips’, Art Now, Tate Britain.

While I was in London I visited Tate Britain and saw an exhibition of recent fresco paintings by Rose Hastings and Hannah Quinlan. The works were pretty good, but I was put off when I read on a wall label that they were justified by the duo of artists as a reaction to living in Britain’s ‘police state’.

Really?  Britain is most certainly very far from paradise, but it is absurd to describe it as a ‘police state’.  The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose hazy mountains I glimpse in the distance as I walk my dog in the morning, is a ‘police state’. Do these feted British artists think the masters of a real ‘police state’ would permit them to show their work in a public institution and have it discussed in the media?  Of course not. Britain is a ‘police state’ only for those who has a very melodramatic sense of the dysfunctional nature of their local social reality.   Britain is a fuck-up in many ways – not least because of Brexit and increased policing powers -   but it’s also an extraordinary place in which people have a degree of freedom that is the envy of millions in less fortunate nations.

I also saw the wonderful Alice Neel exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery. Here is one of her works:

Alice Neel, ‘Rita and Herbert’ (1954).

I didn’t know much about Neel beforehand, and was surprised to discover that she was a paid up member of the American Communist Party.  In 1981 she was the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union, and in an interview in 1983 said,  ‘the whole 20th century has been a struggle between communism and capitalism’. Neel was a fantastically penetrating and empathetic portraitist but was clearly ideologically myopic. In this, of course, she was very far from alone amongst artists and writers.

This is what Picasso wrote in 1944, after having recently joined the French Communist Party:

I would have liked better to have replied to you by means of a picture’, he told us; ‘I am not a writer, but since it is not very easy to send my colours by cable, I am going to try to tell you.’ ‘My membership of the Communist Party is the logical consequence of my whole life, of my whole work. For, I am proud to say, I have never considered painting as an art of simple amusement, of recreation; I have wished, by drawing and by colour, since those are my weapons, to reach ever further into an understanding of the world and of men, in order that this understanding might bring us each day an increase in liberation; I have tried to say, in my own way, that which I considered to be truest, most accurate, best, and this was naturally always the most beautiful, as the greatest artists know well. Yes, I am aware of having always struggled by means of my painting, like a genuine revolutionary. But I have come to understand, now, that that alone is not enough; these years of terrible oppression have shown me that I must fight not only through my art, but with all of myself. And so, I have come to the Communist Party without the least hesitation, since in reality I was with it all along. Aragon, Eluard, Cassou, Fougeron, all my friends know well; if I have not joined officially before now, it has been through ‘innocence’ of a sort, because I believed that my work and my membership at heart were sufficient; but it was already my Party. Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow clearer-headed, freer, happier? Is it not the Communists who have been the most courageous in France as in the USSR or in my own Spain? How could I have hesitated? For fear of committing myself? But on the contrary I have never felt freer, more complete! And then I was in such a hurry to rediscover a home country: I have always been an exile, now I am one no longer; until the time when Spain may finally receive me, the French Communist Party has opened its arms to me; there I have found all that which I most value: the greatest scholars, the greatest poets, and all those beautiful faces of Parisian insurgents. (1)

Wow! Poor old Picasso. ‘Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow clearer-headed, freer, happier?’ What a dupe!  We should probably re-write this as: ‘Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow  less clearer-headed, less free, despairing?’ But Picasso was very far from alone in his delusion, as he himself noted.

I’m sure this essentially emotional response to injustice and the belief that the most powerful force struggling against this injustice was communism was also what lay behind Alice Neel’s commitment, which went back to the 1930s. It certainly wasn’t obvious in 1944, and still wasn’t in 1983, prior to the end of the Cold War, that the struggle that Picasso saw as between revolution and reaction, and Neel as between communism and capitalism was actually between the utopians who wanted change now, and the pragmatic social reformers who saw change as occurring one small step at a time. Of course, the former types seem much more glamorous and  dynamic. Slow social reform is so very dull. So very bourgeois.

If you reflect on the history of modern art, you soon get the impression that the artists we nominate as the progressive voices of our times are mostly in the revolutionary  ‘change now’ camp. They wanted things to get better immediately. This isn’t surprising, as there’s so much wrong in past and present society that the visceral response of any sensitive soul is bound to be one of deep disgust and the desire to right wrongs without delay. But the sad fact is that history shows that revolutionary radicalism never works in practice. In fact, it tends to make things worse not better, because it alienates so many people – for instance, all those justifiably anxious about the new, the unknown, the untested.  

As time went by, being a communist required more and more self-deception. Maybe being a communist before the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1939 was possible on the basis of a sound appraisal of available evidence. Maybe in 1944 it was possible because of the central role played by European communist parties in the struggle against Nazism. But after the Korean War of 1950 -53, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968? To still be a communist in the 1980s required a very high level of dissemblance, of ignoring many awkward facts.   But where faith is concerned, facts are of small importance.

NOTES
(1) Published in L’Humanité, 29-30 October 1944. https://theoria.art-zoo.com/why-i-joined-the-communist-party-pablo-picasso/

Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan, ‘Tulips’ is at Art Now, Tate Britain, 24 Sep 2022-7 May 2023. Image courtesy of Tate. https://www.newexhibitions.com/e/60066

Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is at Barbican Art Gallery, 16 February - 21 May 2023. Alice Neel image courtesy of The The Estate of Alice Neel.

https://www.barbican.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/2023-02/Alice%20Neel%20Hot%20Off%20The%20Griddle_Pre-installation%20image%20sheet_Feb%2023_0.pdf

The map and the territory

A trench line near my house.

These days, as I take my morning walk with the dog and traverse hills criss-crossed by trench lines and defended with bunkers and gun emplacements, my thoughts inevitably go to similar but much more deadly defenses that now exist in eastern Ukraine. The ones I pass have never seen active service, unless they have been maintained since the Korean War. 

Along with this sobering thought comes into my mind the Latin maxim I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion: Si vis pacem, para bellum – ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ I used to think this argument was too cynical, but now I don’t. Living near the DMZ and reading about Ukraine makes being a pacifist  seem much too dangerous. Then again, I can see we need pacifists to temper the bellicosity of human society, just as long as these pacifists recognize that its the people who are preparing to defend their country against belligerent neighbors who are giving them the peaceful luxury of being pacifists.

I’ve also been thinking about lying. One of the obvious differences between a democracy and a totalitarian regime is the power of the lie. In the latter, lying is perennial and efficacious,, while in the former, it is also perennial but will quite quickly be exposed. This is because in a democracy no one can monopolize the flow of information.

I’m thinking about lying because it seems the Russian people are, on the whole, behind or as least agnostic about the ‘Special Military Operation’. This seems remarkable, doesn’t it?  On the other hand, armed with the intellectual rigour provided by my readings in modern thought, and my copious experiences of mendacity in public and private life, I can counter that, actually, those in support of Ukraine are just as much buying into  propaganda – the stuff spun by the United States. As George Orwell wrote: ‘Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

In other words, it is tempting to demonstrate one’s intellectual robustness and worldliness by claiming there is basically equivalence between the two sides, that ethical relativism means both sides are constructing narratives.

But this is not at all what Orwell means, and to think it is is a terrible mistake. It is true that the ‘map’ is not the ‘territory’, that the language we use is not a reflection of reality but a sign-system we fabricate in order to make sense of the world. But there is a huge difference between recognizing that the map (language) is not the territory (the world) and claiming there is no access to the latter, which is what some influential contemporary thinkers seem to believe. 

There are objective facts, that is, what can be proved true or false, or can be known to have happened. A fact is the result of consensus, of  cooperation with others. Facts are the hard won consequences of moulding language so it points to  what has been  cooperatively ascertained as constitutive of the world.

This is why, as Sam Harris, perhaps the sanest man on the Internet , in his book Lying writes:, “Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.” The act of lying makes it clear that although language does not correlate exactly with what it refers to, that there is a significant bridge between the two, that the map isn’t a complete fabrication but can serve as a workable - that is to say, fulfilling - guide to the world. But that is precisely why lies are necessary.

Harris, again : “People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.”  

Lying  is official state policy in places like North Korea and China, and, as it now seems obvious, in Russia. These regimes are not interested in cooperation amongst its citizens to create a useable map. Far from it.   Their top-down models of governance require that only a small cadre are involved in making the map, and as a result, what they produce is not factual but blatantly sectarian. You could call a totalitarian regime’s relationship to fact as based on ‘performative truth’, in the sense that any information’s value lies not in being factual but in being useful to the regime.  It is based on the illusion of total control, that the ruling cabal is in charge.

Lying is necessary if a state believes that it can produce a map in which everything  about the territory is knowable, reachable, manageable, and useful. But that’s impossible.  China’s chaotic and dangerous  volte face concerning its  ‘zero-Covid’ policy, in the present context, can be seen as founded on the failure to recognize that uncontrollability is the nature of the ‘territory’, and that therefore, adaptive transformations in relation to these changes while making the ‘map’ are essential. But the Chinese Communist Party’s map to the social control of Covid was laughably at odds with the territory.

A liar believes that they can control the world through their fabrications, manipulating people so they satisfy their own needs and desires. But the desires of those they seek to hoodwink cannot be controlled, and events always run out of control. This is why big lies will always eventually be exposed. Sooner or later, people begin to notice that the diagrammatic  representation of the world they inhabit is misleading, that the wide straight highway they see on the only map they have access to is leading them - or, more likely, has already led them - over a precipice.  

The inevitability of change means a lie has a short shelf life, and once it is exposed, it will quickly undermine the rest of the epistemological edifice within which it has been nested because people will come to suspect more lies everywhere, even where there aren’t any. This is why totalitarian regime  desperately hold onto their big lies. They have to insist that their ‘map is the only map.

Orwell said: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ Unfortunately, it is also evident that people often want to hear only what brings comfort and a sense of security, and above all, what does not risk puncturing their convictions about themselves. A friend of mine spent the Christmas/New Year period in Thailand, and for a few days she was staying in a hotel next door to a young Russian woman. When my friend broached the Ukraine crisis, the Russian replied that it wasn’t her ‘fault.’

That’s true. But then, no one would want to claim that she, personally, is in any way directly responsible for the brutal invasion. However, we can justifiably argue that her unwillingness to hear what she doesn’t want to hear, to remain within a bubble of self-esteem, should certainly be criticized. Actually, I suspect she probably doesn’t believe Putin’s lies, but rather easily assimilates this recognition because she believes that the ‘West’ is also lying.

It is. But the lies are of a whole different order of magnitude.

 NOTES

Sam Harris, Lying (Four Elephants Press, 2013)

George Orwell, Orwell on Truth (Penguin Books, 2017)

 

 

North Korea’s Victory over Covid-19

So, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea did not collapse due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  This is what the excellent website 38 North said on August 15 :

‘Despite widespread concern that a COVID-19 outbreak in North Korea would be devastating, given the country’s weak health care system, limited access to medical equipment, supplies and medicines, and widespread malnutrition, Pyongyang appears to have stabilized the recent outbreak in record time with minimal deaths, at least according to the official government narrative. While North Korea seems to have avoided drastic outcomes this time around, its anti-epidemic efforts came at high economic and social costs, and the largely unvaccinated population remains a concern to global efforts to combat this virus. Building the country’s capacity to deal with epidemics and health crises should be part of a global health strategy to prepare for future pandemics.’ (1)

Of course, we are used to not taking anything North Korea says at face value. Officially, they say that on July 29, 2022, the number of what are called euphemistically ‘fever cases’ reached zero. Almost 20 percent of the population fell ill, but the number of deaths was only 74, a case-fatality rate of 0.0016 percent. As all the experts point out, this is impossible. The lowest country for case-fatalities is Bhutan at 0.035 percent. Other countries with vaccination rates above 80 percent, such as Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand, reported 0.1 percent.  

But whatever the actual numbers, even the most hawkish critics of North Korea accept that the crisis was handled. The regime did not topple. Life (such as it is) goes on.

 So, why? 38 North offers some answers:

‘North Korea’s health care system is founded primarily on preventative medicine, making disease monitoring and prevention the priority. As such, during the COVID-19 outbreak, local doctors and medical students were tasked with visiting 200-300 homes per day to facilitate disease surveillance.

Based on state media reporting about the pandemic responses, it appears that the North Korean government’s stewardship of the response to the outbreak has been effective and efficient. They declared a national emergency immediately after the first confirmed COVID-19 case, ordered a nationwide lockdown, and delivered medicine and food to houses while promoting the production of domestic medicine. State media has also reported the case numbers and provided medical information about COVID-19 daily.

With limited geographic mobility and domestic migration even before the pandemic, North Korean society is set up in a way that makes controlling the transmission of this airborne virus easier than in most countries. In short, North Korea was able to quickly stop community spread through aggressive public health measures, and as such, has not experienced a catastrophic situation. Furthermore, the first reported COVID-19 case was said to have been of the Omicron variant, which while more contagious, is less severe than the original virus or other variants.’

What this prognosis boils down is an interesting fact: the least ‘open’ society in the world proved to be one of the best at dealing with the pandemic, while the most ‘open’ societies proved the worst. 

In his book Open. The Story of Human Progress (2020), Johan Norberg writes that ‘openness’ is inextricably tied to globalization: ‘Present day globalization is nothing but the extension of…. cooperation   across borders, all over the world, making it possible for far more people than ever to make use o the ideas and work for others, no matter where they are on the planet. This has made the modern global economy possible, which has liberated almost 130,000 people from poverty every day for the last twenty-five years.’ Norberg also notes that ‘when China was most open it led the world in wealth, science and technology, but by shutting its ports and minds to the world five hundred years ago, the planet’s richest country soon became one of the poorest.’ Nowadays, however, China has sufficiently opened up to globalization to become prosperous again.

North Korea is an obvious example of what happens when a country is ‘closed.’ Interestingly, on this level it follows the policy of the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897) whose isolation earned Korea the named ‘The Hermit Kingdom’, and also made it a ripe pickings for Japanese colonial ambition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Japan, of course, did ‘open’ up – it was the first of the East Asian nations to do so, and the first to colonize another East Asian country (Korea in 1910) and to defeat a western power (in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05) . In this sense then, North Korea is a reversion to a former societal model, whereas South Korea, who has aggressively joined the ‘open’ global market, is following themodel first pioneered by its neighbor and former colonial master, Japan. It is obvious in pretty much all terms which of the Koreas chose the better path.

*

But the ‘openness’ of globalization is precisely what allowed the pandemic to happen. This is a fact that North Korea’s success highlights.  The downside of ‘openness’ is porosity of borders. As Jared Diamond points out in his classic Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies (1997): ‘The rapid spread of microbes, and the rapid course of symptoms, mean that everybody in a local human population  is quickly infected and soon thereafter is either dead or else recovered and immune. No one is left alive who could still be infected. But since the microbe can’t survive except in the bodies of living people the disease dies out, until a new crop of babies reaches the susceptible age – and until an infectious person arrives from the outside to start a new epidemic.’ (Emphasis added) The classic historical case of this viral invasion is the virtual annihilation of the indigenous peoples of north, central and south America by ‘white’ settlers who brought their infectious diseases with them – diseases for whom they had developed immunity but the indigenous people , having never been exposed to them, had not. Diamond gives several examples. Here’s one that is harrowing in its definitiveness: ‘In the winter of 1902 a dysentery epidemic brought by a sailor on the whaling ship Active killed 51 out of the 56 Sadlermiut Eskimos, a very isolated band of people living on Southampton Island in the Canadian Arctic.’

An ‘open’ society is bound to be prone to epidemics, while a ‘closed’ one is more likely to be able to control them. But it is also much more dangerously vulnerable if (indeed, when) the closed gate is breached.  This vulnerability explains why a ‘closed’ society will desperately fight to keep the gate closed. But it also explains why they are doomed to fail.

Living in societies that value ‘openness’ is not just about markets, however. It’s also about ‘openness’ to worldviews,  beliefs and behaviour, and this means a society will also be vulnerable to cultural ‘infection’. An ‘open’ society is perpetually being ‘infected’ by alien worldviews, and this inevitably causes tensions, and possibly conflicts. But as time goes by, the people of an ‘open’ society develop ‘immunity’ to these novel cultural pathogens. This is clearly what has happened as western societies have become more tolerantly multicultural. But the onslaught is continuous, and inevitably unsettling. Meanwhile, in a ’closed’ society like North Korea – in fact North Korea could be described as the archetype of a ‘closed’ society – cultural pathogens are not an immediate danger. They lie safely beyond the closed gate – in South Korea, America, Japan - but the dangers they potentially pose can be used to install fear in the populace.

Interestingly, the North Koreans claim that the Covid-19 virus entered their land via ‘alien objects’ found on a hillside. They elaborated by saying that these ‘objects’ came via balloons from Korea (the South Koreans have banned the sending of propaganda via balloons across the DMZ, but it still happens).  Much more likely is that the disease entered via illegal trading with China.

In other words, total closure of a society is impossible. It always has been, as humans are hard-wired to trade. Where societies are concerned, there’s no such thing as totally water-tight barrel. They will always be leaky.   Which is why an ‘open’ society is an inevitable advance on a ‘closed’ one. But this is especially true in an era of technologies that allow for ease and speed of travel.  In earlier times, when people could only travel by foot, horse, horse and cart, or by sail across the oceans, being ’closed’ seemed a viable option. Today it obviously is not.

So, even though North Korea stamped put Covid-19 with remarkable success, it is surely still doomed.

(1) https://www.38north.org/2022/08/north-korea-appears-to-have-managed-its-covid-19-outbreak-what-comes-next/

Image source: https://www.ft.com/content/4f82c57b-fb10-4945-b6ab-df9445c57715

Juche Realism and False Optimism

My interest the art of North Korea derives in part from a broader fascination in how the mass media create reality-proof delusions. This is especially interesting right now in relation to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how the Russian state has sought (quite successfully, so it seems) to control the Russian people’s perceptions of the war. To those outside the deception, it seems hard to believe that people can be so gullible. But as several commentators have pointed out, the alternative to existing within the reality manufactured by the state is too dangerous and harrowing, too radically at odds with the kind of reality in which people can bear to live. People prefer the delusion, which at least offers consolation and security, and allows them to continue to have a sense of self-efficacy and confidence.

The close links between Russia and North Korea in terms of shared ideology have been underlined by Kim Jong-un’s recent congratulatory message on Russia’s Victory Day. But in the case of North Korea, the disconnect between the reality as we on the outside see it and the one ordinary North Koreans perceive through being fed on a mono-diet of ‘Juche’  and racist propaganda is even more extreme. Nevertheless, the same basic psychological mechanisms are surely at work in the North Korean people as innate only other authoritarian regimes, but in democratic societies like the United States, where conspiracy theories are rife..

In this second post on North Korean Juche Realism, I consider just what thoughts and emotions the North Korean people  are buying into, and why.

A young Kim Il-sung contemplates the future. An example of Juche Realist painting.

Another Juche Realist masterpiece.

Juche Realism shares an important social function with religious art. It ensures social cohesion through images that rise above time and chance. It binds together through transforming the unspecifiable, pervasive, and uncontrollable state of existence into a specifiable, identifiable, and controllable state of named fears and offers the promise of protection.

Juche Realism is aesthetic experience manipulated to create a permanent condition of collective dispositional optimism. This is achieved through ritualistically ‘aestheticizing’ life, in the sense of keeping life’s inherent uncertain and fearful dimensions at bay through turning life into something idealized that can be safely viewed from a distance.  Optimism is channeled along four avenues indicated by psychologists. It aestheticizes the optimism that comes with feelings of social coherence by depicting the world as comprehensible. As a result, the North Korean people feel strengthened by being able to make total sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. It aestheticizes the optimism of social hardiness by depicting stressful circumstances and re-casting them only as opportunities for certain growth and strengthening. It aestheticizes social preparedness by focusing only on readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. Finally, it aestheticizes the optimism of self-affirmation. For example, many paintings depict the North Korean people as inherently superior, casting historical achievements of the pre-modernized Korean people and of the DPRK and its leaders in a manner that has not historical veracity but fosters a sense of confidence and pride in the present, thereby making decision-making more efficient and collectively directed.

Juche Realism is a ritualized fantasy space in which the three core positive life-goals are satisfied in the present: the desire for survival, the desire for attachment, and the desire for mastery. By depicting imagery of encounters with and management and self-regulation of fearful and potential despair-inducing situations, Juche Realism encodes collective feelings of trust, calm, safety, protection, and successful survival.

Through images of trust and openness, and total love of the leader, it encodes the confirmation of ‘sociopolitical’ bonds and attachments. Through signs of absolute efficacy, power, and control, it encodes ‘sociopolitical’ security and mastery, and implicit within this is the wish-fulfilling certainty of the DPRK’s triumph over time. Especially through faith in the skill, wisdom, and power of the leader, the North Korean people can adapt to circumstances in the present and to display a remarkable degree of social cohesion.  The regime uses three basic defences against the encroachments of a reality that would inevitably presents challenges to this positive illusion. It uses externalizing explanations by placing the blame for bad or failed outcomes on factors outside the DPRK, such as the United States, The Republic of Korea, or Japan. It uses variable explanations by casting setbacks or problems as temporary rather than endemic and likely to continue in the future. Thirdly, it uses specific explanations, in that it describes failure as occurring in only one context rather than as systemic.

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The brutality of the Japanese colonial era and the horrors of the Korean War set the stage in the DPRK for the emergence of a nation obsessed with national myths of persecution, suffering, and endurance. The state’s dogmatic intransigence demanded in the cultural sphere the rote reiteration of fantastical narratives. Juche Realism is a form of ideologically tailored visual illusion that breeds dependency and instils over-confidence in the level of control the Kim regime has over the past, present, and, above all, the future. It creates a ritualized virtual reality in which the world appears better than it is. In this sense, Juche Realism serves to artificially bolster self-esteem in a situation in which the people have actually lost all individual agency, all genuine social value. In the dystopic reality of the DPRK the ‘sociopolitical’ self is the happy hostage of the state’s absolute power.  All action is determined by externalized forms of interaction coordinated by the state. Juche Realism forces the North Korean people into supine and dependent roles which to those beyond its zone of hegemonic influence are reminiscent of the submissiveness of a child to a parent.  The Kim leadership is cast as all-powerful parent, capable of granting the wishes of the children who please them. But behind the façade of optimism constructed by Juche Realism lies the reality of a brutal totalitarian regime, and the North Korean people also know that any deviation from the allotted ‘sociopolitical’ role within the state ideology of delusional optimism will be ruthlessly punished by the all-powerful father. The marriage of art and power which obliges North Korean artists to work within the absurd and demeaning constraints of Juche Realism’s simplistic messages of optimistic edification places what is produced, however technically accomplished and expressive, at the antipodes of genuinely ‘real’ or ‘truthful’ art. Its ‘realism’ cannot be discovered beyond the works themselves. It cannot be described in terms that are not blatantly at odds with what anyone outside the DPRK knows about the world. Because the ‘truths’ of Juche Realism are not susceptible to present inquiry, any desire to have genuine knowledge about the outside world must be crushed. There can be no progress, because the regime would be incapable of surviving any change that progress brought. But, when a gust of contradictory reality somehow does finally find its way past the facade, and it becomes clear how greatly the leadership has failed to match its grandiose claims, the disappointment and disillusionment of the North Korean people will be rapid and devastating.

Kim, Father and son, do a bit of sailing.

NOTE: The images in today’s post are reproduced from (top to bottom) 1. Min-Kyung Yoon, ‘North Korean Art Works’, Korean Histories, 3.1, 2012; 2. and 3. Min-Kyung Yoon, “Reading North Korea through Art’, Border Crossings. North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection, ex. cat., Hatje Kantz/Kunstmuseum Bern, 2021, 72 – 95.

The Bully (Part 2)

Three bullies from the same Korean family.

There are two versions of ‘modern Korea’. One is ruled by the most autocratic dictatorship today - which makes Putinism look very amateurish - while the other has just elected a new President coming from the political party that had previously been in opposition. Two radically different systems developed, starting with the same circumstances and the same people.  One Korea seems to have used Nineteen Eighty-Four as its guidebook, while the other started out with an authoritarian regime but evolved into an American-style liberal democracy. This situation has nothing to do with intrinsic ‘Korean’ proclivities. How can it? The same ethnic and historically extremely homogeneous people have gone very separate ways, like identical twins separated at birth. 

One explanation of this bizarre and tragic siutuation is to see Korea not in isolation but as holistically connected to everything else going on in the world, and so to more or less random factors. Specifically, in 1945 Korea had the misfortune of being a colony of the defeated Japanese, and so was carved up by the two victorious forces: the Soviets and the Americans and allies. As a result of the Cold War  an Iron Curtain descended across the 38 Parallel. Two nations were created. War ensued. No definitive conclusion to the war was achieved – neither side was wholly vanquished - and so the two rivals Koreas remain to this day. And so here I am, writing my blog near to where the Iron Curtain still remains drawn and looks like staying into the foreseeable future. 

But chance factors also extend down from the macro to the micro level. Yes. Korea became a pawn in the Great Power’s struggle for world hegemony. But what happened was also due to individual players on the ground. Specifically, Korean leaders and their entourages. The first President of the Republic of Korea, Sygman Rhee,  the American choice, was no friend to liberal democracy. Ostensibly in order to protect the Republic from North Korean aggression (In 1968, for example, North Korean commandos almost succeeded in assassination Park, making their incursion to within a few hundred meters of the presidential Blue House in central Seoul), the South Korean leader, the former army General Park Chung-hee (who had taken control of the state in 1960),   suspended the constitution in 1972 declared martial law, and wrote a new constitution that gave him much increased executive power for life. The new constitution would remain in force until Park’s assassination (by his own bodyguard, not the North Koreans) during a military coup 1979, whereupon the military extended its powers of repression even further. In 1980, there was a popular uprising in the south-eastern city of Gwangju which was brutally put down, and most of the 1980s passed under authoritarian rule. However, finally, after the amendment to the constitution in 1987, a democratic presidential election was held for the first time, and since then, elections have been peacefully held every five years. 

Why was this possible? Critics will say the United States engineered the semblance of liberal democracy, making South Korea into a compliant a vassal state. But this can’t be true. The level of genuine democracy here cannot be imposed either from outside or above, by fiat. That much we know from history. It must grow from within and below. Which isn’t to say, like some apologist for democracy, that democracy is somehow inevitable. Is certainly is not. Which is one very good reason why democracy needs to be well defended. North of the DMZ, a very different political situation occurred. Things froze into totalitarian place, and this was largely due to the odious bully Josef Stalin and the equally odious bully Kim Il sung and his two progeny.  The bullies are certainly there  in the Republic of Korea. But the Republic of Korea, like other liberal democracies, devised ways to hem them in, limit the damage they can do. 

Steven Pinker marshals plenty of compelling evidence in books such as  the better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018) to show that history can be read as a narrative in which societies have become increasingly buttressed against the inevitably of zero-sum thinking by creating checks and balances to diminish the chances of a bully getting so much power that he or she can enslave us.  This has happened at all levels of society, especially over the past fifty years.

At my grammar school for example, which i mentioned in my previous post on bullies. In the mid-1970s the headmaster of Eastbourne Grammar School changed, and the new headmaster arrived with an updated education philosophy in which the aim was no longer to instil the necessary body of learning through intimidating, and, more profoundly, did not see life as a zero-sum game. There was now enough for everyone. Admittedly, by this time I was sixteen, so I was no longer at the bottom of the bullying pecking-order. But I’m sure what I perceived was generally felt  - even by the even-year-old squirts who made up the First Year. The ethos at my school went very quickly from the terroristic to the consensual. You could say it went from totalitarian state to liberal democracy in  less than five years. That is no trivial change, and was largely down to the revolution is how people thought about society that happened in the sixties. Obviously, bullying did not disappear. But it was no longer institutionalized, and so could do less harm. 

This same process has occurred on the level of nation-states. Look at Donald Trump. He’s almost a caricature of the bully. When he was a reality tv star doing The Apprentice, that was basically his role. And, yes, the show as a hit, because, yes, we enjoy watching bullies at work – as long as they’re bullying someone else. The zero-sum psychology is something like this: if I’m watching someone else getting bullies, then it’s not me. But when he was President of the United States, Trump the Bully - who was largely elected because he was a bully -  found he was unable to do what he needs to do as a bully, which is intimidate the vulnerable and keep all the pie for himself. The United States Constitution got in his way. What does this tell us? Yes. I know. The United States is very far from perfect, but it has a political system that is obviously more able to stop bullies than, say, Russia’s. Indeed, all liberal democracies have this in-built capacity. This is real progress, and we should be able to celebrate.  

Which leads me back to the point I’ve been making in previous posts:  in our eagerness to show how far our liberal democracies are from perfection, we progressives spend a lot of energy exposing their imperfections. In fact, this is precisely one of the main reasons why liberal democracy is the least bad political system: it makes room for criticism and opposition. It knows that if you don’t have freedom of speech and diversity of opinion, you don’t have the ability to stop the bullies. We can’t get rid of them entirely, because they are an aspect of being human. But we can make them less able to freely bully, to bully without consequences. The deeper problem is how to ween us of our primitive admiration for bullies. 

To do that, we would have to address a very deep predisposition. 

A few years back I was disgusted to discover that my Korean wife’s sister-in-law, who lives in the USA, had voted for Trump. When I asked her why, she replied it was because he was “strong.”

If we want to get rid of the cult of the bully, our acceptance of being bullied, and our collusion with bullies, we will have to change the whole idea of what human ‘strength’ is. 

Not easy!

Credits:

Kim photos: https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/kim-jong-un-kim-jong-il-kim-il-sung-why-are-all-north-korean-leaders-named-ki

Hope or Optimism?

North Korean ‘Juche Realism’. Hopeful or optimistic art? This painting is entitled ‘At the Site of the Bumper Pumpkin Crop’, and shows the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea walking around a pumpkin farm. A commentary on the work declares: “At the Site of the Bumper Pumpkin Crop, movingly transmits the Great Leader’s high communist virtues by capturing the Great Leader showing his kindness to a group of farmers during his visit to a pumpkin farm…… With a broad smile on his face, the Great Leader is locked arm in arm with an elderly farmer dressed in working clothes and holding his farmer’s hat respectfully, paying his respect to the Great Leader. Speaking freely with the farmers and asking about the number of pumpkins and their weights, and the amount of pumpkins required for feeding livestock, the Great Leader is actively developing a solution for providing sufficient feed for livestock. The Great Leader also recognizes the peoples’ loyalty, which is pure and clean as crystal, and is encouraging the hard efforts of the farmers. The painting glorifies the Great Leader’s noble communist virtues through his benevolent image. It reminds the viewers that the Great Leader is always one with the people and receives immense gratification from the happy lives of the people—the bliss and happiness increasing day by day.“

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Recently, I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about ‘hope’, with the intention of eventually writing a book on the subject, but in the short terms because I am writing an essay on North Korean art of the 1970s and 1980s (called Juche Realism) and the way it encodes optimism rather than hope, compared to the abstract art produced in South Korea during this period, known as Dansaekhwa, which i suggest encodes a kind of ‘radical hope.’ Here, I will simply make a few comments about what I think is different between hope and optimism.

Hope involves the enhancement of agency, while optimism is directed toward the enhancement or maintenance of self-esteem. As a result, hope is about  attuning to uncertainty while optimism is about grasping hold of certainty. Optimism is a rigid mental predisposition set within a binary whose opposing pole is pessimism, while hope is not in so much in a binary relationship with despair, but inherently non-binary, because it incorporates the reality of tragedy. “An optimist is…someone who is bullish about life simply because he is an optimist”, writes Terry Eagleton in his pointedly entitled study Hope Without Optimism (2017)  An optimist “anticipates congenial conclusions because this is the way it is with him. As such, he fails to take the point that one must have reasons to be happy.”   

As the philosopher Michael Milona summarizes, two general forms of optimism can be identified ‘dispositional’ and ‘positive illusion’ optimism. The former involves a general predisposition to expect things will improve, while the latter involves irrational beliefs about how much control one has over achieving goals, and is a distortion of reality so things appear better than they really are. In both forms of optimism, the goal is to approach every situation having already made a decision to shield oneself from the possibility of danger, failure, and loss. Optimists tend to explain events in ways that permit them to distance and limit their failures, and make various kinds of mental excuse to lessen the impact of failure – in the present and potentially in the future. This puts the optimist at a distancefrom the very real chance of a negative outcome, and as such, an optimist is more likely to fail to recognize that one will inevitably face major crises in life, and is usually less capable than the hopeful of overcoming obstacles when they inevitably appear. 

The psychologist Lisa Bortolotti argues that optimism works along four avenues. It communicates a sense of coherence, hardiness, preparedness, and self-affirmation.  But as C.R.  Synder emphasises in The Psychology of Hope (1996) these positive emotional states all come at a high price: “optimists have a style of explaining events so they distance and circumscribe their failures. In other words, optimists make excuses to lessen the impact of current and potential failures.” As Jonathan Lear puts it: “It is a hallmark of the wishful that the world will be magically transformed – into conformity with how one would like it to be – without having to take any realistic practical steps to bring it about….Symbolic rituals take over life or in the group activities of culture – and they become a way of avoiding  the real-life demands that confront one in the everyday.”

Effective hope, by contrast, arises from a realistic assessment of how much volatility and uncertainty can be handle before making a risky investment in a future outcome. It is the ability to trust that nature is somehow on one’s side, despite all the evidence suggestion the contrary. If goals are chosen intelligently, and the interest of the community and of nature are borne in mind, hopefulness makes it possible to find meaning  in the present moment, no matter how troubled that moment may be. Unlike the essentially wish-fulfilling focus of optimism, genuine hopefulness is about coming to terms with the uncertainties of life, its inevitable obstacles and failures, through the willingness to actively confront them. 

Metaphors for optimism and hope often overlap, and can include a correlation with something valuable, fragile, beautiful, or brightly coloured that can be searched for, given, lost, stolen, and retrieved.  They can be described as luminous and warm, as fire, gas, or liquid.  They can be conceived as containers in which we are located, or that are located within us, such as in the soul, heart, or eyes.  Hope and optimism are described as a cloud with a ‘silver lining’, which draws on the familiar experience of observing changing weather.   They can be described as food that is nourishing, a remedy or prescription, a protected area, a bridge – in the sense of a means, an intention that involves focused attention, a performance, and also a deception or illusion. People often describe optimism and hope as a movement - as something rising upwards, defying or working with gravity and elevating them above the baseline of the everyday.  Writing in the nineteenth century, the American poet Emily Dickinson described hope in zoomorphic terms as “the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words - And never stops – at all -”. Hope is a beautiful and persistent songbird. But Dickinson could also be describing optimism. Hope and optimism can be anthropomorphized, as when we say, ‘hope betrayed us’, hope or optimism is ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’, negative associations that remind us that both can be delusional and/or easily dashed. Summarizing current research. But hope metaphors differs from those of optimism in that they are often described in terms of a journey involving confrontation with recognized obstacles that may prove unsurmountable. Therefore, hope metaphors also acknowledge that hopes can be dashed. A primary optimism metaphor in English is that of a glass half-full (as opposed to a pessimism metaphor, which sees it as half-empty). This metamorphizes optimism as a way of assessing the amount of liquid filling a container, indicating its dispositional character.  Hope cannot be described in such broad terms.

In my next post I’ll talk about North Korean Juche Realism.

Notes

Lisa Bortolotti, ‘Optimism, Agency, Success’, Ethical Theory Moral Practice, 21 (5), 2018, 521-535.

Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017)

Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation ( Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2006)

Michael Milona, ‘Hope and Optimism’, John Templeton Foundation White Paper,  October 2020, 4-18.

C.R.  Synder, The Psychology of Hope (New York: The Free Press, 1996)

A small ray of North Korean hope

Some photographs presented on the BBC’s news website documenting the recent mass spectacle in Pyongyang have compelled me anew to comment on the utter madness of the North Korean state, which, I hasten to add, begins just a few miles north of where I write these words.

I suppose living so close to possibly the most dysfunctionally functional state in the world is a sobering experience. Basically, it helps me remember that humanity is far weirder than I can imagine.

One picture especially caught my eye. The picture above. And now look at this detail::

I wonder if this is an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ picture. Note the little girl staring at the camera. What is she thinking? is it too much to hope that she is seeing through the madness of the adults? Probably. After all, the system starts the process of mind control very early. But even so. This seems unscripted. I couldn’t help feeling that the little girl is shattering the surface of the collective delusion. And does that mean that the photographer is colluding? Even though this is an official picture aimed at consolidating the official narrative, can we see here a subtly resistant action? Doubtful. Because that would be much too dangerous. But nevertheless……

I was also given adequate evidence that the BBC and the system it serves, and within which I live, is also pretty damn nutty. Look at this:

A stupid advertisement lodged between stupid images. Perhaps we are just as mad in our way as these North Koreans…….

From ‘developing’ to ‘developed’

Development, South Korean style.

Recently (July 2nd), the Republic of Korea was elevated from the status of ‘developing’ to ‘developed’ nation by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD),  which reclassified it from Group A (Asian and African countries) to Group B (developed economies). This is quite an upgrade. It’s the first since the agency’s formation in 1964.  As the website KOREA.net explains: ‘UNCTAD is an intergovernmental agency with the purpose of industrializing developing economies and boosting their participation in international trade. Group A of the organization comprises mostly developing economies in Asia and Africa; Group B developed economies; Group C Latin American and Caribbean States; and Group D Russia and Eastern European nations.’ 

The South Koreans are understandably very proud of themselves. This is an unparalleled achievement. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953 the Republic’s gross domestic product  - the total value of goods produced and services provided in a country during one year - has leapt 31,000 fold!  One could say that the concept of ‘development’ is the nation’s mantra, which is enshrined in the commonly used phrase ‘dynamic Korea’.   

So what does development look like on the ground, so to speak? Everywhere you go in South Korea (except the remote mountainous regions) you see construction work going on – for massive elevated superhighways and high-speed rail links, or whole new cities comprised of clusters of giant apartment towers. Even here where I live, near the DMZ, where, because of proximity  to the frontier, infrastructural, commercial  and residential transformations are restricted, some kind of building work is constantly going on. For example, recently a construction company began slicing into a wooded hillside near us, first uprooting the silver birch trees growing there and then carting away tons of soil in  convoys of heavy-load trucks (mostly made by Volvo, so it seems) in order to create a terraced slope upon which, apparently, they will be building hanok-style housing. Hanoks are the traditional one-storey wooden houses of Korea, almost none of which have survived from  more than one hundred years ago, not just because of  accidental fires or the destruction of warfare but because of the nation’s commitment to a specific model of development. For the past seventy years the hanok has symbolized the ‘undeveloped’. In fact, one could not imagine a greater contrast in housing than between a hanok and an apartment tower, between old-style Korean living accommodation and the contemporary. This alone indicates that for South Koreans development is also Westernization.

a traditional Korean hanok.

But wait. The UNCTAD is concerned  only with development in terms of the economy and trade, but obviously the term has other resonances, that go well beyond the economic.  So before we start hailing the South’s triumph, here is another recent statistic: The Korea Development Institute announced just two months before the UNCTAD elevated the country to ‘developed nation’ status that South Korea scored 5.85 on a scale of 1 to 10 for the period of 2018 to 2020 on the U.N. World Happiness Index. This score is the third-lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). 

Oh dear.  The South Koreans are economically ‘developed’ but not very joyful ,satisfied, content or fulfilled.  But it might seem disingenuous of me to mention failure when the Republic of Korea has clearly achieved so much for its citizens, most especially when compared to what the North Korean leadership has done for its people. In 2019 South Korea’s GDP was 2 percent while North Korea’s was 0.4 percent, and the gap has widened even more since then thanks to sanctions and the pandemic. But I wonder what North Koreans would say if they were canvased about happiness. But of course, the rulers of North Korea would never allow any such survey to be made, and if they did it themselves the answer is a forgone conclusion, and anyone stupid enough to report that they were unhappy would almost certainly be bundled off to a labour camp, or worse.  But if such a survey did take place, done by external assessors, I suspect the North Koreans would still turn out to be at the very top of the happiness league. Why? Firstly, because of the indoctrination I discussed in my last blog entry. In fact, if you think about it, the entire North Korean propaganda machine is directed towards fabricating an aura of universal (I mean within North Korea) happiness. Take a look at these two North Korean posters. The text in the first translates as ‘Wear traditional Korean clothing, beautiful and gracious’, the second; “Working on Friday is patriotic’ (1): 

The worrying thought is that the North Koreans really are ‘happy’, in the sense that the word is forced to have within the ruling ideology.  But there is another reason. The Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen notes that people can internalize the deprivations of their circumstances so they don’t desire what they never expect to have. Such an ‘adaptive preference’ would be another  way of understanding a North Korean person’s subjective judgment concerning their well-being, and explains how it would be very different from a neutral observer’s perceptions.

But this is also an indication that we should in general be cautious about using subjective  opinions of well-being as valid criteria for assessing happiness.  Because just what is it? The indicators used for gauging national happiness levels in the UN World Happiness Index are these: GDP per capita, household income, healthy life expectancy, social support, generosity (in the sense of willingness to donate), institutional trust, corruption perception, positive affect/negative affect, freedom to make life choices. These criteria are partly based on the tiny but very wealthy  (thanks to oil reserves) nation of Bhutan, which pioneered its own Gross Happiness Index which subsequently become another transcultural indicator. It highlights the following: health, education, use of time, psychological well-being, good governance, cultural diversity and resilience, ecological diversity and resilience, community vitality, and living standards.

Obviously, as the disjunction between South Korea’s development status and happiness status shows, development cannot be reduced to mere economic terms. The trouble is that all to readily it is, and this is because development is the key driving concept behind modernization, and is closely linked to another key concept: ‘progress’. This is what the philosopher John Gray says in Enlightenment’s Wake (1995): ‘The idea of progress….is  the modern conception of human social development as occurring in successive discrete stages, not everywhere the same, but having in common the property of converging on a single form of life, a universal civilization, rational and cosmopolitan.’  Gray is a prominent critic from within the West (he is British) of what he sees as the calamitous consequences of this universalizing ‘Enlightenment project’, which has been foisted on the rest of the world by the West. Gray writes: ‘My starting-point is the failures of the Enlightenment project in our time, and their implications for liberal thought. The failures to which I refer are in part historical and political rather than theoretical or philosophical: I mean the confounding of  Enlightenment expectations of the evanescence of particularistic allegiances, national and religious, and of the progressive levelling down, or marginalization, of cultural difference in human affairs.  

A fundamental error of the ‘Enlightenment project’ was to assume that the progress it celebrated would be limitless, and also to link it excessively to economic growth. Now we know that this could be a fatal error for which the generations to come will pay the price. Development must be sustainable and based on much more than purely upward economic growth. Sen offers one way forward in his Capability Approach to development,  which stresses the relationship between development and ethics by focusing on the individual’s capability for achieving the kind of life they have reason to value.  This is different from  thinking in terms of subjective well-being or having access to the means for pursuing the good life. As the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it,  in Sen’s theory, ‘[a] person’s capability to live a good life is defined in terms of the set of valuable ‘beings and doings’ like being in good health or having loving relationships with others to which they have real access.’ In other words, the idea is to place development within a tangible and specific context based on the pre-eminence of sustainability. It thereby counters the slash-and-burn development concept behind the ‘Enlightenment projects ideal of progress.  

North Korea hitched itself up to an especially disastrous legacy of this Enlightenment project - communism. It got shipwrecked precisely due to the forces of Gray indicates. In fact, one could argue that North Korea is an exemplary example of ‘particularistic allegiances’. It is also the mirror image of South Korea’s version of development., and one could fruitfully analyze the two Koreas in terms of how they chose antithetical criteria for defining the idea of development.  For example, while the South adopted an essentially economic model of development founded on global commerce, which was borrowed from Western capitalism, the North chose first the communist alternative, and then what it calls ‘juche’, the ideal of self-reliance, in the sense of   development understood as autonomy and independence. Development for the North Korean state is therefore defined as remaining separate and distinct from the rest of the world, and  on being dependent solely on its own strength under the guidance of a godlike leader. But I wonder how many more South Korean hillsides will be carted away in trucks to construct more housing as part of the relentless drive to develop?  I imagine a speeded-up movie of South Korean’s development over the past seventy years would look like an earthquake of truly terrible proportions. 

(1) For more North Korean posters see: https://library.ucsd.edu/news-events/north-korean-poster-collection/

Brainwashed!

North Korean schoolchildren.

According to Google’s English dictionary, the term ‘brainwashing’ means ‘the process of pressuring someone into adopting radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible means.’ It dates from the early days of Chinese communism and the period of the Korean War (1950-53).  On March 11, 1951 the New York Times reported:  ‘In totalitarian countries the term “brainwashing” has been coined to describe what happens when resistance fighters are transformed into meek collaborators.’ But the word gained popular currency largely as a result of the experience of American Prisoners of War held by the Chinese during the Korean War, and in a previous post I mentioned the theory of ‘totalism’ developed by the American psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, a consequence of interviewing former American  PoWs who experienced Chinese ‘re-education’ practices. But Lifton used the more neutral-sounding term ‘thought reform’ rather than ‘brainwashing.’   

I recently came across this document, which is available on-line: a report commissioned in 1955 by the US Office of the Secretary of Defence, POW. The Fight Continues After the Battle. It directly addressed the experience of GI’s taken prisoner. On the topic of brainwashing or ‘thaught reform’ it stated:

When plunged into a Communist indoctrination mill, the average American POW was under a serious handicap. Enemy political officers forced him to read Marxian literature. He was compelled to participate in debates. He had to tell what he knew about American politics and American history. And many times the Chinese or Korean instructors knew more about these subjects than he did. This brainstorming caught many American prisoners off guard. To most of them it came as a complete surprise and they were unprepared. Lec­tures, study groups, discussion groups, a blizzard of prop­aganda and hurricanes of violent oratory were all a part of the enemy technique. 

A large number of American POWs did not know what the Communist program was all about. Some were confused by it. Self-seekers accepted it as an easy out. A few may have believed the business. They signed peace petitions and peddled Communist literature. It was not an inspiring spectacle. It set loyal groups against cooperative groups and broke up camp organization and discipline. It made fools of some men and tools of others. And it provided the enemy with stooges for propaganda shows. 

Ignorance lay behind much of this trouble. A great many servicemen were teen-agers. At home they had thought of politics as dry editorials or uninteresting speeches, dull as ditchwater.

But the report concluded:

The Committee made a thorough investigation of the "brain­ washing" question. In some cases this time consuming and coercive technique was used to obtain confessions. In these cases American prisoners of war were subjected to mental and physical torture, psychiatric pressures or "Pavlov Dogs" treat­ment. 

Most of the prisoners, however, were not subjected to brain­ washing, but were given a high-powered indoctrination for propaganda purposes. 

However, by this period the term ‘brainwashing’ was already being used in a more general sense to include such ‘high-powered indoctrination for propaganda purposes’, and the distinction the report makes is no longer so easy to sustain. Furthermore, the word was extended in the late 1950s to describe malign psychological influences in general, such as when consumers are duped through salesmanship and advertising into purchasing things they don’t need. This in its turn reflected the growing awareness of the power of the ‘hidden persuaders’ (the name of a bestselling book about advertising by Vance Packard, published in 1957) and the mass media to manipulate not just patterns of consumption but thoughts, attitudes, values and behaviour as a whole.

To bring the issue of brainwashing up to date, here is an extract from the memoir of the North Korean defector  Yeonmi Park, In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom (2016),  which I mentioned in  previous blog, where she talks about her experience at school in North Korea:   

In the classroom every subject we learned — math, science, reading, music — was delivered with a dose of propaganda.

Our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il had mystical powers. His biography said he could control the weather with his thoughts, and that he wrote fifteen hundred books during his three years at Kim Il Sung University. Even when he was a child he was an amazing tactician, and when he played military games, his team always won because he came up with brilliant new strategies every time. That story inspired my classmates in Hyesan to play military games, too. But nobody ever wanted to be on the American imperialist team, because they would always have to lose the battle.

………

In school, we sang a song about Kim Jong Il and how he worked so hard to give our laborers on-the-spot instruction as he traveled around the country, sleeping in his car and eating only small meals of rice balls. “Please, please, Dear Leader, take a good rest for us!” we sang through our tears. “We are all crying for you.”

This worship of the Kims was reinforced in documentaries, movies, and shows broadcast by the single, state-run television station. Whenever the Leaders’ smiling pictures appeared on the screen, stirring sentimental music would build in the background. It made me so emotional every time. North Koreans are raised to venerate our fathers and our elders; it’s part of the culture we inherited from Confucianism. And so in our collective minds, Kim Il Sung was our beloved grandfather and Kim Jong Il was our father.

Once I even dreamed about Kim Jong Il. He was smiling and hugging me and giving me candy. I woke up so happy, and for a long time the memory of that dream was the biggest joy in my life.

Jang Jin Sung, a famous North Korea defector and former poet laureate who worked in North Korea’s propaganda bureau, calls this phenomenon “emotional dictatorship.” In North Korea, it’s not enough for the government to control where you go, what you learn, where you work, and what you say. They need to control you through your emotions, making you a slave to the state by destroying your individuality, and your ability to react to situations based on your own experience of the world.

This dictatorship, both emotional and physical, is reinforced in every aspect of your life. In fact, the indoctrination starts as soon as you learn to talk and are taken on your mother’s back to the inminban meetings everybody in North Korea has to attend at least once a week. You learn that your friends are your “comrades” and that is how you address one another. You are taught to think with one mind.

 ………

In second grade we were taught simple math, but not the way it is taught in other countries. In North Korea, even arithmetic is a propaganda tool. A typical problem would go like this: “If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?”

But why do I mention ‘brainwashing’ now?  Because in today’s The Korea Herald there was an article by J. Bradford Delong, a former deputy assistant US Treasury secretary, and now professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley entitled ‘The summer of disaster.’ The ‘disaster’ Delong has in mind is not ecological. He referred to the COVID-19 pandemic and the devastation wrought by the new delta variant, but above all he was referring to what might be called a ‘cognitive’ disaster:  the impact of the brainwashing on large segments of the American population. Delong wrote:

 The message being blared by Fox News and most other right-wing outlets goes something like this:

‘Superman-President Donald Trump quarterbacked the incredibly successful Operation warp Speed project, which performed biotech mircales and created a highly effective vaccin against a disease that is just like the flu. But now, the vaccines are untested and unsafe. We should never have worn masks.

The virus is a Chinese bio-weapon funded bt Dr. Fauci, who constantly gave Trump bas advice about this gigantic hoax. The medical establishment is suppressing information about truly useful medications like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and hydrogen peroxide.’

As Delong continues:

If this conspiratorial word salad sounds crazy, consider the terrifying fact that around one-quarter of the Americn population apparently believes it (or at least some part of it). One-fifth of Americans think that the US government is using COVID-19 vaccination to implant microchips into their bodies. Tens of millions of Americans have found sufficient reason to un a 1 percent risk of death by refusing an extremely effective, extremely safe, widely available vaccine.

Consider the implications of this successful act of brainwashing. A country where malevolent, cynical media and political operatives can trigger such deep psychological fractures in a significant share of the population us extremely vulnerable to a wide range of threats. What will Americans fall for next?

As the official report into PoWs from 1955 quoted from above noted, the main contributory factor here is also ‘ignorance’, a lack of education, of the capacity for critical thinking.   But what Delong emphasises is the extent to which the powerful have a vested interest in keeping people ‘ignorant’, the better to manipulate them. The ‘high-powered indoctrination for propaganda purposes’ described by the 1955 report is very much in operation, and Delong specifically laments the role of the right-wing media.

Obviously, the extent of brainwashing in North Korea is far greater, and far more insidious and deadly, than anything going on in the United States. But Delong’s neat overview of the current  cultural polarization there, when seen in juxtaposition with Yeonmi Park’s memoir, should give us pause for thought, and remind us that if we want to get to the roots of brainwashing, or whatever you want to call it, it is necessary to go back well before people become viewers of Fox News or reach voting age.  In one way or another, the process of ‘high-powered indoctrination’ is in fact systemic in human society, in the sense that it pervades everyone’s life from the moment of birth, maybe even before, if one takes into account the impact of external influences on the unborn baby.   North Korea reveals this to a terrible degree, as Yeonmi Park’s story attests, but we should also turn spotlight around and see what is happening closer to home.

We can see very blatantly the important role played by  ‘ignorance’ in determining what people believe in the case of others – North Koreans, Republicans –  and easily forget how ‘high-pressure indoctrination’ also goes on in our own lives.  Now, I am by no means claiming there is some kind of parity between the trouble Yeonmi Park had at Columbia University - which I mentioned in previous posts - with what she experienced before her escape, although she was indeed led to ask whether she had simply freed herself from one form of especially cruel brainwashing in order to be exposed to another more insidious kind. Park’s confrontation with the ‘high-pressure indoctrination’ of of ‘political correctness’ or ‘wokeism’, or whatever you want to call it, of  experiencing a different  process  that involved being pressured into ‘adopting radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible means’, led Park to ask a very basic and tragic question: can we ever be free from these malign pressures to conform?  Of course, no one gets sent to a concentration camp for refusing to tow the politically correct line at Columbia. Maybe if they are a professor they will lose their teaching position. But we should surely be alert to the extent to which we are also brainwashed without being aware of it. We should acknowledge that when beliefs are  conducive to our own mindset we tend to be blind to where these beliefs came from and what they are doing to us.

*

So, why are we all so susceptible to brainwashing?

Consider the fact that for those who have brought into the narratives described by Park and Delong that for them this is reality.

In The Ego-Tunnel. The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2009) the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger sums up what we now know about the human mind: 

Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the on-going process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality.  

This means that essentially we exist in a ‘world simulation created by our brains,’ as Metzinger  puts  it. What does this ‘world simulation’ aim at?Because our minds have a limited capacity to process information we attempt to adopt strategies that simplify complex problems, and we are forever trying to conserve cognitive energy. This extends to all kinds of situations involving cognitive engagement. The dominant need at any time becomes the foreground ‘figure’, and the other needs recede, at least temporarily, into the background. For example, a person may be thinking about a particular relationship, which is then ‘figure’, but as soon as the focus is shifted to thoughts about a job, the job becomes ‘figure’.  Needs move in and out of the ‘figure - ground’ fields. After a need is met it recedes into the ‘ground’, and the most pressing need in the new gestalt then emerges from the ‘ground’ as a new ‘figure’.  In this way a particular need emerges, is met, and then directs a person's behavior. Normal, lucid consciousness is pre-disposed to accept a ‘ready-made’ gestalt, and generally, familiar configurations win out over the novel because cognitive value is understood to lie in repeatability and reliability. A ‘horizon’ of meaning limits what we can see, and what we can think.

In simple terms, this process aims to minimize fear and maximize hope. The Republican mindset is based on the awareness that hope is fundamental to the meaningful life, and  after their own fashion the fellow traveller has generated a ‘world simulation’ conducive to the expectation of a positive outcome. But obviously, hope  can all too easily be founded on  delusions, over-confidence, over-simplifications, errors of judgment, and  moral, practical, personal and collective failure.  A consoling narrative replaces the anxiety induced by random facts by the comfort of a coherent pattern, offering a solution to complex and intractable problems through flattening them into a clear narrative. The story requires only the most tenuous connection to actual facts in order to endure, and the  hope  it fosters is above all about assuaging anxiety and fear in the present, not about working towards credibly achievable goals in the future. The -  to us -  obviously delusional beliefs of many Republicans is ample evidence that hope does not need to be founded on a sound, reasoned assessment of the possibilities of a positive outcome. But they are an especially obvious and  worrying indication that nowadays it is becoming extremely difficult to feel hopeful through rational appeal to the facts in the ways that the ‘reality-based’ community considers essential.  

I mentioned ‘ignorance’ in relation to Republicans in a previous post, but perhaps a more apposite and neutral word to describe the dynamics of brainwashing is not so much  ‘ignorance’ as ‘narrative.’ For those of us located outside the compelling aura of  the stories described by Park and Delong it is easy to mock the naivety of the true believer. But aren’t we all in more or less in thrall to basically the same curious psychological deformation? Our mindset is usually based on a highly selective appraisal of available information, and on the very human capacity to overlook anything that risks challenging or contradicting the particular narrative of hope in which we have invested.  

42%

The lie that hides the truth.

The UN recently reported that 42% of North Koreans are undernourished. One in five North Korean children suffer from malnutrition. This puts the DPRK on par with places like Somalia, the Central African Republic, Haiti and Yemen. What makes the DPRK different from these other nations, however, is that just across the border there is another nation that only seventy years ago began with the exact same people, the exact same history, the exact same geography, the exact same material advantages and disadvantages, and yet today has the tenth largest GDP in the world!

How to make sense of such a tragic anomaly?

First of all, historically, it wasn’t exactly such a level playing field, but not in the way you might expect. For during the Japanese colonial period (1910 – 1945)  the focus was on the industrialization of the north of the peninsula  more than the south. Furthermore, the northern part has more natural resources, such as coal. In other words, from the moment of the establishment of the DPRK and the ROK in 1948, and after the Korean War  (1950 -53) - and despite the devastation wrought by the UN carpet-bombing of the DPRK -   it was the DPRK who was more economically advanced that the ROK until the 1980s.  This, however, was not simply because of innate infrastructural and material advantages. The DPRK also benefited greatly from the patronage of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries. Meanwhile, the ROK got similar benefits from its close alliance with the United States. The crunch came in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, at which point the DPRK the sudden withdrawal of material support threw the DPRK into an economic crisis, exacerbated by adverse weather conditions in the 1990s which led to a famine in which perhaps as many as 3.5 million people died.

This news about the numbers of undernourished in North Korea makes one see the power of ideology  over life. Ideology does not only determine what we think and how we behave, but also directly impacts on our bodies. The average North Korean kid is stunted in growth. The average height of a North Korean adult is between  3. 8 cm (1.2 – 3.1 inches) shorter than their South Korean neighbours! This means that the same  gene pool, the same ethnic group has within a very short period been physically manipulated by the social system under which people live. This is true of both Koreas, because South Koreans are now taller than seventy years ago due to the change in their diet. 

An image of the Pyongyang subway from Oliver Wainwright’s book Inside North Korea. The lucky 58%.

But the situation in North Korea is more complex than the statistics suggest. While 42% are undernourished, these citizens are almost entirely in the countryside, and not in the capital Pyongyang, where the regime ensures that residents have a higher standard of living in return for loyalty. For only those who have proved themselves complaint and obedient are permitted to live in there.. 

In a previous post I mentioned Yeonmi  Park, who escaped from North Korea. As a child living near the Chinese border, she endured the famine of the 1990s, and she graphically conveys the experience of malnourishment, which reduces life to a daily struggle to simply find enough to eat. Hunger effectively crushes any other dimension of human existence.

Park reminds us that pretty much all our thoughts are luxuries, in the sense that they are surpluses to the basic survival instinct. If I think of my own life, one in which I have never felt undernourished, I can see that the society in which I live and the social status I have within it, has permitted me to spend a very indulgent life, one in which I have been able to enjoy freedom of speech, and to explore at leisure the ‘meaning of life’,  love and affection, travel, art-making, writing, mentorship of students. My life, in short, has been one of enormous privileges that I more or less take for granted. 

As Yeonmi Park noted, outside Pyongyang keeping people hungry is a useful weapon, as it also keeps them too weak to protest.  Therefore, the mechanisms of power employed by the ruling Party functions on the level of both the mind and the body.  Brainwashing, on the one hand, and undernourishment on the other. This is not to say that the Party actively encourages food shortages and famines. But they clearly do not see it as an overwhelming obligation to make sure everyone under their control has enough to eat, because what is deemed of paramount importance is not individual citizen’s survival but the survival of the Party system. As a functionary recently announced, they reject aid from the United States because they observe that many countries ‘have undergone bitter tastes as a result of pinning much hope on the American aid and humanitarian assistance.’   This is true, in that, as they say, ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch,’ a sadly apt metaphor in this case.  But as the US State Department observed: ‘the DPRK has created significant barrier to the delivery of assistance by closing its border and rejecting offers of international aid, while also limiting the personnel responsible for implementing and monitoring existing humanitarian projects’. 

The North Korean concept of juche – self-reliance – isn’t intended to mean survival of the fittest. Far from it. The idealization involved in the concept means that the DPRK is said to guarantee succeed by  achieving national autonomy, independent development. But as history shows this is an absolutely fatal error of state policy. China and Japan tried it, as did Korea under the Joseon dynasty, which closed its doors to the rest of the world for centuries, and became known as the Hermit Kingdom. These countries all failed in their efforts to resist the forces of globalization spearheaded by the Western powers, and ended up being forcibly driven to sit at the table of world trade and Westernizing modernization. Japan capitulated first, and even copied the imperialistic agenda of the Western powers by annexing Korea in 1910  and Chinese Manchuria. Seen in this light, the DPRK’s stance can be seen as a throwback to before this fatal moment when East Asian countries encountered the West and eventually found that they had no choice but to succumb to their influence. 

The different decisions of the leadership in the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are instructive. The Chinese Communist Party eventually saw the writing on the wall,  and after the period of Mao, during which  an attempt at Chinese self-reliance proved disastrous, chose once again to engage with the rest of the world. The fact they  have spectacularly succeeded and maintained and even enhanced their control over China is testimony to the fact that today modernization no longer entails what the historian Niall Ferguson in his book Civilization. The West and the Rest (2011)   rather faddishly describes as  ‘downloading’ all the West’s ‘killer apps’, which include individualism and  democracy, and instead can mean only an obsessive focus on others of these ‘killer apps’ –  industrial productivity and consumerism.

Clearly, the DPRK is not ‘downloading’ any of the West’s ‘killer apps.’ By a tragic quirk of history, the Korean peninsula ended up being divided between the Soviet Union and the United States and  its allies in 1945, got partition along the 38th  Parallel (which is just a few miles north of where I write this post) as a pragmatic solution to an immediate problem, but thereafter tragically condemned one half of the people of the peninsula to a system that,  while for a while seemed a viable  rival to the West’s ‘killer apps’, remarkably quickly proved a  total failure. add to this the continuing dominance of the United Staes over global affairs, and we have this result: 42% of North Koreans are condemned to a life spent foraging for grasshoppers on the mountainsides just to stay alive. 

Picasso and Kim Il-sung in South Korea

 Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea, 1951, oil on plywood, 110 x 210cm. Musée Picasso, Paris

The contrasting fates in contemporary South Korea of a painting by Pablo Picasso and  works written by Kim Il-sung, the first leader of North Korea, throw an interesting light on how meaning and value intersects with form.  The Picasso in question is ‘Massacre in Korea’ a work from 1951 which is for the first time on exhibition in Korea at the Hangaram Museum in Seoul. The publication is Kim’s multi-volume ‘Reminiscences: With the Century’, his autobiography, which was first published in 1992.  

Until recently, both were banned in Korea. The furore over the publication of Kim’s book by a South Korean publisher without the necessary  approval from the government, followed by the ban on its sale and a police investigation, and yesterday (May 4th), the comments of a North Korean propaganda website (in English that even Google translate could have improved), that declares: ‘It is dumbfounded to see such impure forces’ reckless act to make a fuss as if a huge disaster happened and try to block their publication and distribution in a wicked way’,  indicates that Kim’s book is still just too ideologically controversial.  Not so the Picasso, apparently, which was also banned in South Korea once upon a time.

The National Security Act, which dates from 1948 was intended, as it declares, ‘to secure the security of the State and the subsistence and freedom of nationals, by regulating any anticipated activities compromising the safety of the State.’ While attempts have been made to annul the Act (for instance in 2004 by the Uri Party), it is still actively enforced. But the controversy over Kim’s memoirs has led to renewed calls for is repeal because of the obvious restriction it places on freedom of speech and information. Picasso’s painting also used to fall foul of the National Security Act. Its inspiration, which Picasso claimed was a massacre by US and ROK forces of civilians, made it too contentious for several decades in South Korea, and illustrations of it in books were censored.  But now, all and sundry can pay to see ‘Massacre in Korea’, and the media can reproduce it and make no attempt to hide its inspiration. 

What do the contrasting fates of these two works tell us? Obviously, they are not comparable on many levels. Kim Il-sung’s autobiography is written by the Eternal Leader Generalissimo of the DPRK, sworn enemy of  the ROK, and is therefore still a very loudly ticking time-bomb. Picasso was a Spaniard who joined the French Communist Party at the end of World War II, and he made this painting partly in order to show he agreed with the Party’s line on events unfolding on the Korean peninsula.

The Picasso is allowed to hang on the wall of a museum in Seoul, and a Seoul-based publisher is not permitted to print Kim’s book because the heat around the Picasso has cooled, while Kim’s autobiography remains too hot to handle. But  the point  I would like to consider here is not so much about the limits of freedom of speech and information. What strikes me as particularly interesting is what these two cases tell us about how information adheres to a medium – in this case to a painting and work of literature.  

We can say that the historical content that Picasso’s painting claims to embody is not ‘baked in’ to the work. It is added to it as a discursive level carried in a text. We cannot ‘read’ off the painting itself the fact that it is about the Korean War from just looking at it. Nothing about the look of the painting links it inherently to that historical event, let alone to a specific massacre by Americans and South Korean forces.  Indeed, Picasso seems to have deliberately fudged things so we cannot tell which army (or even which century) the soldiers belong to, or that the civilians are Korean. The relationship of the painting to the Korean War is an add-on, a verbal supplement provided by the title, and by other pieces of verbal information which serve to give it specific sources.  By contrast, Kim’s book inevitably has its relationship to the War and to the general crisis on the Korean peninsula  thoroughly baked into every page. It is inherent in the medium. We cannot separate the specific history from the way in which that history is referred to. In both cases the code in which the relationship to Korea is communicated is verbal language. But only Kim’s book actually carries this code within the medium itself. Picasso’s painting – like all visual art – has this level of coded meaning added. It is not part of the code of the painting as a painting. 

In fact, this is precisely why the communists didn’t like it. Their propaganda-concept of art demanded we see American uniforms and clearly depicted Korean civilian victims. But as a modernist, Picasso believed the meaning of his work should be communicated  visually -  through line, color, shape, form, texture, composition – through a language unique to the visual rather than one that borrowed from the language of words. The problem with the language of the visual is that it is less precise and more fluid than words. It isn’t easily pinned down. Ideologues see this as a fundamental weakness of the image. But isn’t it actually its fundamental strength?  No wonder the powerful are always trying to tag images to words, tying down the balloon of the imagination so it won’t float dangerously away.  

Picasso’s painting ‘Massacre in Korea’ is an artistic failure. This is obvious when we compare it to ’Guernica’ (1937).  But actually, ‘Guernica’ also suffers from the same basic problem I noted in relation to ‘Massacre in Korea’. If you take away the title and the surrounding historical information provided verbally, what do you see? A town in northern Spain bombed by German airplanes? Hardly. Nothing whatsoever in the painting directly links what we see on its surface to this specific event, or even to the twentieth century - apart from the lightbulb. 

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, 349.3 x 776.6cm Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.

But somehow it doesn’t matter. The inspiration of the painting in a specific historical event - what induced Picasso to paint it, and then made it useful propaganda for the Spanish Republic - cannot prevent  the painting from transcending such contingency to become a ‘timeless’ indictment of violence. ‘Guernica’ is quite simply a far more powerful work. Its style communicate on several levels the essential message which is the honor of war. ‘Massacre in Korea’ by comparison is lifeless, and the fact that Picasso drew on Goya’s great anti-war painting ‘The Third of May, 1808’ (1814) for the composition only goes to show how imaginatively bankrupt Picasso was.

But why was this the case, apart from the fact that even geniuses have off days? Actually ,it seems clear that the reason why ‘Guernica’ succeeds and ‘Massacre in Korea’ doesn’t is very much the result of the pressures exerted on Picasso by very contingent circumstances. With ‘Massacre in Korea’ he struggled to find  a way to fulfil his role as an advocate of communism through art while simultaneously remaining loyal to the fundamentally antithetical principles of modernist art, which stressed individualism and authenticity against the forces of ideological  conformity. Picasso found himself in an impossible situation in which he was obliged to artistically square the circle. The result? A weak compromise that at the time satisfied neither his fellow communists (not explicit enough) nor the supporters of modern art in the ‘free world’ (not abstract and difficult enough), and that has only gotten less convincing over time.

Which is maybe why it can be shown in South Korea today.  

I think these issues are worth considering because in a period when art is dominated by ‘identity politics’, we are seeing the revenge of ideology over the visual. We are advised, even coerced, into seeing images as ‘about’ something that can be conveyed clearly in words. We prioritize the clear and distinct properties of a verbal tag-on rather than give credit to the richly ambiguous potential of images. 

Panmunjom Declaration, three years later.

Today (Tuesday, April 27th, 2021) marks the third anniversary of the inter-Korean summit between President Moon Jae-In of the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea) and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea), which led to the Panmunjom Declaration. In all, the Korean leaders met three times. Two more times in 2018 - in May on the North side of the border village, and then in Pyongyang in September.

The Declaration was signed just ten miles away from where I write this blog now. The photograph above was taken a couple of days ago from the roof of my house, and shows in the distance the mountains of North Korea. Over to the far left somewhere lies Panmunjom, the only place where the DMZ shrinks to just the MDL - the Military Demarcation Line - which at Panmunjom is indicated by the raised line of bricks over which the leaders stepped back and forth on that momentous occasion. Whenever I gaze at these mountains I feel I’m getting a glimpse of a parallel universe.

I remember feeling really exuberant three years ago.The April summit was the first such meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas in 11 years, and in the Panmunjom Declaration they pledged to commit to the ‘complete denuclearization’ of the peninsula, to improve inter-Korean relations, and to officially end the 1950-1953 War (there is only a ceasefire, not an official peace treaty). It seemed this might be the start of a serious reconciliation. President Trump’s meetings with Kim, also at Panmunjom, and later in Singapore and Hanoi, were obviously just bluster and hype. But I thought the meeting with President Moon did seem to augur well for the peninsula.

Dream on!

The whole damn episode seems to have been bluster and hype. Today, we’re back to ‘business as usual’ which means no diplomatic business. Meanwhile, North Korea seems to be firing off missiles again, edging closer to dangerous nuclear capacity, and slumping further and further into poverty and isolation.

The emphasis of late from the leadership beyond the blue mountains I can see from my roof-top is on ‘self-reliance’. This builds on the single contribution of North Korea to communist ideology: juche. This officially means that North Korea must proudly shake off all lingering subservience, and the concept derives from a blending of communism and Confucianism mostly. North Korea must follow its own unique path, relying solely on its own strength under the guidance of the leader.

So, while we might think ‘self-reliance’ means ‘every man for himself’, or at least, that it is the community networks that will help people survive, in the absence off any possibility of the state being a source of material support, this isn’t really what the term means. The people of North Korea have been programmed to see the entire world through the eyes of the Party, to rely on it not so much for the kinds of things we in the ‘free’ world expect a state to provide, but more in the way a religious cult provides a water-tight reality within which to exist safely quarantined from the unpredictability and otherness of the world. This is what juche, self-reliance, means.

One of the saddest things about Suki Kims’ charming memoir of teaching elite boys in a school in Pyongyang, ‘Without You, There is No Us’ (2014), is how it reveals that even the mental universe of the privileged sons she teaches (and comes to love) is pathetically impoverished by the fact that they are wholly reliant on the web of lies spun by the Party in order to control all levels of society.

But what is even sadder is the fact that these boys seem to genuinely believe the nonsense.

This is especially clear evidence that we humans live through the coherent stories we believe in, not through facts, and that even a seemingly from the outside absurd story, like the one that has turned the Kim family into demi-Gods, can have a compelling hold. But we’ve also seen this truth in the ‘free’ world too recently, with the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory. What QAnon shares with North Korea is precisely the capacity to produce a plausible narrative - ‘plausible’ not in relation to objectively verifiable facts but rather in relation to its internally coherent plausibility. What is especially odd about such narratives is the extent to which for those outside their spell, they seem patently absorbed. But this, surely, is part of what makes them compelling to this under their spell.

As a result of de-briefing  American  POW’s after the Korean War an American psychologist named Robert J. Lifton developed the theory of ‘totalism’.  He argued that, on the evidence of what the Chinese attempted to do to the GI’s, any ideology - any set of emotionally charged convictions about humanity and its relationship to the natural or supernatural world - can be taken by adherents in a direction that Lifton termed  ‘totalistic’.  This tendency, he argued, is most likely to occur  in relation to ideologies that are most sweeping in their contents, and most ambitious or messianic in their claims -   like believing in a virgin birth, a classless society, or QAnon. And when ‘totalism' happens, you get  an exclusive cult. The important point, Lifton wrote in his book ‘Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. A Study of “Brainwashing” in China’ (1961) is that for ‘totalism’ to prevail a believer must have made a deep investment in their belief. They must have committed themselves to it heart and soul. Furthermore, they must exist within a shared community of the same beliefs, a community of intense social and psychological support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer can withstand the force of all the disconfirming evidence, but when this believer is a member of a group of similarly convinced people who give support  to one another, then their belief will very often be maintained. Indeed, against all the good evidence that may be amassed to contradict their beliefs,  the community of believers often responds not by giving up on their beliefs but by actively attempting to proselytize.

Lifton’s ‘totalism’ addresses the nature of the more extreme stories we live by. But surely we can’t exempt ourselves. We may not be ‘totalistic’, but we certainly live our lives in relation to the coherent narratives we adopt or weave, and not in relation to the kinds of objective facts science reveals to us.