[KS] Re: first message

[Elizabeth Ten Dyke]

I am a novice at Korean studies.  I came to it through my anthropological 
interest in shamanism and spirit possession, but I am also driven my 
interest in empirical and theoretical parallels to Germany--both before 
1989 and since the (re) unification of the former GDR with the FRG.  In 
fact, you may place me in the camp of people who might be looking FORWARD 
to the collapse of the DPRK precisely for the fascinating comparison it 
will offer to the events in Germany in the last decade.

I am motivated to reply to this message for one simple reason--the end of 
the GDR came so rapidly, and so unexpectadly, that a generation of social 
scientists were left in the dust, scraping through their publication 
records for one article, one paragraph, one sentence to which they might 
point in order to claim that they had NOT been so profoundly unaware of: 
the extent of the GDR's dire economic/financial circumstances in the 
1980s; the profound alienation (and silent dissatisfaction) of the 
population from the state's official politics; the readiness of tens of 
thousands of East Germans to literally walk away from their homeland.  

Now, there are so many factors that I am curious about, as said, for 
possible eventual research on conrasts and paralles between the Korean 
and German case (including, for example, the extent to which members of 
extended families divided by the two nations are allowed to maintain 
contact with each other, the readiness of the South to accept immigrants 
from the North, the degree to which the North does or does not emply 
expatriation to the South of politically problematic individuals as part 
of the process of controlling dissent in the North, etc.).  BUT, I simply 
wanted to point out that as a novice at Korean studies, who relies 
primarily on the press for information about the state of the DPRK, it 
seems that circumstances there are pretty desperate--hunger, overwhelming 
emphasis on maintaining (at the expense of feeding the population) the 
ritual and ceremonial trappings of a state whose ideology must meet with 
profound cynicism among ordinary folk; not to mention the enormous amount 
of resources expended on military development and preparedness.

By the way--another thought: I was very interested by the recent series 
of postings on the publications of Choi Jang-jip and the attendant 
controversy.  Sounds awfully like controvery in Germany both before and 
after 1989 about the representation of history, and the political 
implications thereof.  

On Mon, 14 Dec 1998, David McCann wrote:

> Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 21:20:41 -0500
> From: David McCann <dmccann at fas.harvard.edu>
> To: korean-studies at mailbase.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: first message
> 
> Why would anyone be thinking that the DPRK regime is going to collapse
> soon?  What does that mean?  Who is telling that story?  Is it the folks in
> Washington D.C.?  Why aren't they busy debating impeachment?  How many
> years, now, has it been since the policy analysts started predicting the
> collapse of the North Korean regime?  The old question about the tree
> falling in the forest:  does it make any noise if no one hears it?  How
> about the noisy and noisesome  predictions that a regime is going to
> collapse?  No collapse, but plenty of  noise.
> 
> There is something not even subtly offensive about using the idea of the
> collapse of a regime as a  beginning point for speculation in a "final
> paper" about the reactions of other countries.
> 
> Let me ask, how many others out there are writing papers that begin with
> the premise of the collapse of the North Korean regime?  Is that an idea
> that appeals because  "collapse" is limited to  "regime," semantically? How
> about collapse of the regime and reaction of the North Korean people?  Or
> how about the reaction of the North Korean people to all these facile
> predictions and postulates about the collapse of the government?
> 
> What is this world of Korean studies coming to?  Must we push it along so
> thoughtlessly?
> 
> David McCann
> 
> 
> 


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