‘Kim the Bulletproof Tank Engine’

As a child in the sixties I enjoyed reading a series of books about Thomas the Tank Engine. In colourful illustrations and simple words they told of the charming antics of anthropomorphized locomotives as they criss-crossed Britain.. Thomas and his locomotive friends remain classics, and the series is very much still in print, and I couldn’t help thinking of Thomas and co. when I read the news about Kim Jong-un’s visit to Russia, which is still on-going as I write this post.

For the tin-pot despot has his own personal bulletproof train that is so heavily armoured it can travel no faster than 37 mph. It’s a rather natty dark green with yellow trim. Here it is shown chugging through North Korea:

And here is Thomas the Tank Engine:

By coincidence Thomas first appeared in the second book in the series, published in 1946 (the first came out in 1945). That means it was published the same time that in far away Korea Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Kim Il Sung, was put in place by Stalin to eventually become, in 1948, the ruler of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It therefore seems oddly appropriate that a regime that’s essentially stuck in a time-warp back in that epoch should be using such a characterful locomotive so evocative of those times in the 2020’s.

I think it would be nice to write an up-dated locomotion story called Kim the Bulletproof Tank Engine. But I doubt it would have the kind of happy ending to make it a children’s classic, although maybe today’s children are inherently more cynical than my generation. I don’t believe that for a minute, by the way! Thankfully, children are always born optimists and stay that way for a remarkably long time..

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The news that Putin and Kim were meeting in Vladivostock led me to wonder yet again about their people’s credulity and compliance - their willingness to support or at least tolerate despotism. As I’ve already discussed in previous posts, an obvious explanation is fear. Protest carries a very high price, especially in North Korea. But it seems wrong to believe that the citizens of Russia and North Korea all live in abject fear. The evidence suggests they do not. One explanation is that a sufficient number are given a small bite from the cherry of power. The residents of Pyongyang, for instance, have a relatively secure standard of living. The story is very different in the provinces. But as long as the cadres close to the leadership are seduced into loyalty through adequate material, cognitive, and emotional rewards, their obedience is guaranteed without brandishing a cudgel. The same seems to be the case in Russia. Another important explanation is the obvious fact is that most people are not heroes. All they want is to live their lives protected from the possibility of unbearable uncertainty, and it doesn’t really matter how the uncertainty is assuaged.

In fact, people will believe in the most ridiculous things in order to achieve the cherished sense of security. It might even be the case that the more ridiculous the belief is, the better. Both historically and today, millions believe in nonsense, and it certainly seems to make them less insecure. It might even be the case that the more a belief departs from what can be factually verified, the more secure people feel in embracing it. In other words, the leap of faith is a way of minimizing uncertainty.

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The meeting between the two tin-pot dictators was a great media event. In fact, maybe that was its primary function. During the parts that were made public, they both spouted the usual bullshit.

But, really! How can Putin get away with calling the Ukrainian regime ‘Nazi’ or Kim talk of his regime as as ‘democracy’? It seems obvious to us in the ‘free world’ that these are grotesque lies. But apparently, many Russians and North Koreans believe. They believe because they are lies based on a historical truth.

What Putin has done by invoking Nazism is to draw on the collective and traumatic memory of real events and spun it into a web within which to capture Russian people’s fealty in the present.

This is possible because, as neurologists show, our minds deal not with the direct processing of stimuli but in predictions. That is, we deal with what we already believe to be the case. We draw on ‘priors’ - memories, habits, and social consensus - to make sense of the uncertainty of unfolding experience. Whenever something unfamiliar presents itself we feel it as a ‘prediction error’, and this is uncomfortable and potentially fear inducing. We reduce the force of this negative affect and emotion by doing one of three things: we bend the meaning of the stimulus so its conforms to what we already know; we ignore it altogether; or we struggle to adjust our prediction to accommodate the stimulus. The last option involves imaginative growth, experiential development, openness to surprise. The other two are instinctual responses that totalitarian regime lean on in order to maintain their grasp on power. They know that humans will either adjust a new experience so it conforms to experiences already safely processed, or that they will ignore the experience altogether. Either way, the result is to guarantee a remarkable level of social conformity rooted in very deep seated fear of existential uncertainty.

But there is an ultimately optimistic possibility to draw from the fact that Putin brandishes the ‘Nazi’ slur and Kim talks about ‘democracy’. It is that, seemingly paradoxically, even these monsters recognize that people are fundamentally good. People live with positive values that prioritise the desire for personal freedom and the flourishing of society. That’s why even when they are perpetrating crimes against humanity they are obliged to wrap their heinous deeds in noble attire. It is therefore unlikely that anyone will publicly describe their barbaric acts as barbaric.

However, the despots nevertheless end up naming their crimes through accusing their enemies of what they are themselves responsible. We can therefore hold the words despots speak up in a mirror so they are reflected back upon them. For, in accusing others of being, say, ‘Nazis’, Putin is actually very accurately naming his regime’s own crimes.

Try the mirror trick. This is text from a speech made by Putin when he ordered troops into Ukraine on February 24rd, 2022:

“Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous, bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.”

And now, let’s hold these words up in the mirror, where it becomes something nearer to the truth:

“Its goal is to subject the people of Ukraine to bullying and genocide. And for this we will strive for the militarisation and nazification of Ukraine, as well as refusing to bring to justice those who committed numerous, bloody crimes against civilians.”

NOTES

The images of Kim’s train are sourced from : https://www.npr.org/2023/09/11/1198781448/kim-jong-un-vladimir-putin-meeting-north-korea-russia

The image of Thomas the Tank Engine is sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Tank_Engine#/media/File:Thomas_the_Tank_Engine_1946.webp

For more on the mind and ‘prediction” see, Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty. Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016), available on Amazon at::

https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-Uncertainty-Prediction-Action-Embodied/dp/0190217014

The Putin quotation is taken from: https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/in-putins-words-why-russia-invaded-ukraine/