I’ve been reading several books about North Korea, and it seems like a country burgeoning with a fiendishly hardworking, obscenely loyal peasant class. The Party and its henchmen have eyes and hands in everyone’s lives and they are brutally effective at maintaining control, perhaps even more so than the Nazis were.
If KJU decided to, could he utilize this same totalitarian system not to necessarily “modernize” the nation, because that would require freer access to the world’s integrated information and financial systems… but turn it into a benevolent, early Industrial, dictatorship?
The Nazis were able to turn Germany into an economic powerhouse using similar fear-based tactics, and that was despite focusing much of their productivity on the military. If the DPRK scaled back its militaristic ambitions, could it redirect all that output into its agriculture and domestic industries instead?
Could they change from a nation of starving, fearful farmer-soldiers into a nation of less-armed, better-fed farmers still obedient to the party gods?
In any iteration where Kim was not the absolute ruler of the nation who had the uncompromising support of the military and where his descent from a deity was in question would fail within weeks or months. For North Korea to remain under his control, there can be no loosening of reins.
Several reasons why:
[ol]
[li]China would not accept a scenario where 5-10 million North Koreans flood across the Yalu and Tumen Rivers into Manchuria - If Kim absolute rule was modified in any manner the number of people fleeing the country would increase exponentially. South Korea and Japan would be worried as well as it can be presumed that myriad economic refugees would flood their nations as well.[/li][li]The military wouldn’t allow it - The fiction of North Korea only "works if the military maintains an iron grip upon the populace. Any loosening could mean mass desertions from the military or even mutiny in the ranks. [/li][li]Relinquishing his grip on power could mean Kim’s death - Kim is old enough to have witnessed the fates of dictators in the last 25-30 years ( Quaddafi, Saddam, al-Assad,etc) who have loosened their grip on power. All were (or soon will be) removed from power; most of them violently. If self-preservation was not a core tenet in his personal beliefs, them he might consider it. Since it is however, he almost certainly will not.[/li][/ol]
North Korea is an artificial construct which cannot be modified into something more functional. If this were possible then the time to have done so would have been before the advent of the Internet, the World Court (its leaders could conceivably be tried for crimes against humanity) and the 24-hour news cycle. As it stands now, the only changes that will come to the nation will have to occur after Kim and his cronies are removed from power.
No. While it looks like an absolute dictatorship, it is not. Kim cannot rule-- or even survive the rest of the week-- without the support of the small but powerful ruling class. And since that ruling class is payed through the profits of corruption, any attempt to fix that corruption would quickly end in a coup.
It’s a problem that the Soviet Union and Red China faced.
You can’t have a “modern” society without education…and education gives people ideas about abstract things like truth, justice, rights, values, ethics, and freedom.
(Also faith.)
NK is pushing the very edge of the possible by having advanced nuclear and rocketry programs, using enslaved scientists. You can do this when you have twenty armed guards watching each scientist. As it is, the quality of the science is based on fear, not inspiration.
Who would dare to announce a revolutionary new scientific theory in a regime where independent thought is punishable by death? Technology can only barely exist in such circumstances; progress is more difficult.
But, yes, the regime could probably reduce the level of starvation and increase the overall level of happiness…by command. Some fundamental reforms wouldn’t undermine the absolute power of the dictatorship too much. NK is so paranoid, it can’t tolerate even such minimal reforms!
Define benevolent. It is my understanding from reading up on the country that the big club the government has to keep everyone in line is the prison camps and the fact that they will take 3 generations of your family to prison if you commit a crime. When the guy who crafted the North Korean Juche philosophy defected to south korea, I think the NK were rounding up 9 generations of his family. So distant cousins were sent to prison to be tortured and starved.
If NK shuts down the prison camps and stops punishing family members, that will probably make the country much harder to govern as the people are gaining more and more info about the outside world. It is one thing to give up your own life, but to see your children, siblings, parents, etc thrown into a starvation camp full of torture is something most people won’t risk. I think 20%+ have access to and listen to foreign media now.
Basically, the biggest trump card NK has for its legitimacy is its ability to commit evil. Both domestically with the prison camps and punishing family member, and internationally with threats of bombing SK and Japan. NK could not survive if it were not evil.
I have wondered if NK on some level attempts to retard economic growth though. I have no proof of that, but a poorer nation is a hungrier nation and hungry people are easier to control. Plus citizens tend to demand civil and political rights when their per capita GDP hits 5k or more. NK seems like they have very little to gain by economic growth.
NK is the last Stalinist State - the government was designed, the Kim family selected and trained by Soviet “advisers”.
Had the war started later or lasted longer, it would have been Khrushchev’s baby - who was busy de-Stalinizing the USSR - it is an interesting “what if?”.
The kid is at least paying lip service to “consumer” goods - there is now a jumbotron in the capitol, a new water park and ski resort (still trying to find somebody to sell you a ski lift, kid?). Of course, the average peasant can’t dream of having either the money or leisure time to use any of the toys, but they are symbols neither is father nor grandfather would have bothered with.
See 38North for intelligent news and analysis of the DPRK.