[KS] even literature types

[David McCann]

Even literature types like me get asked about what's going on in Korea; and
especially, what's up with the North; etc.

In desperation, I ask those who want to know, what do you think is going
on?  And my interlocutors wonder, why hasn't the regime collapsed?  W and
his crowd seem to assume that it will, they add.

Well, there you have it!  What more needs to be said, either way?  The W
House either knows or doesn't.  Who are we to be perplexed by difficult
amiguities?

It could be added that people have been assuming the very same thing for
fifty years, ever since economic and political embargos were put in place
against North Korea at the end of the Korean War.  That's what such
embargos are designed to do; starve a regime into collapse. Or maybe as a
literature type I don't understand what an embargo is really meant to
accomplish.

Observers held their collective breath when Kim Il Sung died.  Gotta happen
now, they seemed to be thinking.  If Poindexter's little parlor had been
operating then, what a spike in the betting we would have seen!
Predictably.
And just a short while ago, during a 'state' visit to Seoul, one of the
White House terriers was barking about the North Korean regime .

So?  If the Washington types think the collapse is going to happen,
prompted perhaps by the yapping of some minor official, and the think tank
types do too, why not?  Here's where the literature type wanders off into
reflections on, of all things, history.

The later kings of Choson:  we have forgotten their example.  Regime
collapse was constantly just around the corner, what with military
ineptitude, fiscal chaos, and the debilitating factional wars.  But with a
deep and wide bureaucratic state apparatus, and an officialdom trained and
indoctrinated to see state service as the highest good, there were none of
the internal structural contradictions that would lead to a collapse of the
regime.

It all ended remarkably quietly when Japan started pushing from outside, in
the last decade of the nineteenth century.  We recall, though, that the US
failed to make good on  promises to come to Korea's aid when Japan began to
pursue its colonial ambitions on the peninsula in earnest.

Ah well, now I am in a muddle.  But I wonder if there are historical
examples, with a longer more complex narrative that might help to explain
either the puzzling resilience of the North Korean state, or the failure of
outside observers and policy-makers to frame their questions and plans in a
meaningful or productive way.

Regime collapse?  That's what some dictionaries would define as
apocalyptic; an apocalyptic vision imposed from the outside.  It seems to
be, If the North Korean state collapses, then the US will lift its
embargos, and health will return to the body of the population.  One
contradictory aspect of the idea is that it provides a very handy cause to
blame for all the internal difficulties in the DPRK--  namely, the United
States.  It is contradictory because it helps to support the very regime,
in terms of North Korean public opinion, that it is intended to hamper and
weaken.

What sort of response follows from the North?  Apocalyptic, but in terms of
nuclear weapons.

Are the W House pronouncements, locally or abroad, just rhetoric?  Might
there be efforts underway to avoid Armageddon?  One hopes so, encouraged at
the moment by North Korean willingness to dismiss the barking dog and get
back to discussions of multilateral talks.