Cambodia: The Imposition of Socialism, 1975 to 1978

The nation of Cambodia, also called Kampuchea, emerged as an independent nation in 1953 after the dissolution of French Indochina. Its internal politics experienced various destabilizing factors over the next two decades as it attempted to establish itself as a constitutional monarchy.

One of the destabilizing factors was a series of corrupt and power-hungry individuals in various government leadership roles. Another factor was radical socialism, instantiated both in a number of domestic extremist groups and in covert political interventions from several other countries.

As a report by Mercury Radio Arts states:

In 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, often called the Khmer Rouge, emerged as the victor of the seven-year-long Cambodian Civil War. The Khmer Rouge was composed of avid Marxists who attempted to impose their radical ideas using brutal force.

To ensure the people’s compliance with the socialist system which Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) wanted to impose, it was necessary to indoctrinate the people with an absolute obedience to the state.

The CPK needed the people to be shaped by a value system in which the state was seen as the ultimate value. Any potential competing value had to be eliminated, or at the very least subordinated to the state. That meant getting rid of, or devaluing, alternative values like family, friends, faith in God, art, music, etc.

Under the Khmer Rouge’s ruthless leader Pol Pot, all previous loyalties were abolished and strictly forbidden. Cambodians were banned from keeping their religious and family ties. All civil liberties were taken away. Every Cambodian was instead required to make the good of the collective his or her primary focus. To indoctrinate all children with a Marxist ideology, every child aged eight or older was separated from their parents in 1977 and required to join labor camps, where they were trained to treat the state as their parent.

In a radical effort to eliminate income inequality, CPK dismantled large segments of Cambodia’s economy and civilization. In an effort to eliminate anything which might even seem like a class distinction, personal choice in most aspects of life was eliminated.

Implementing an allegedly scientific version of socialist economics, the CPK destroyed libraries and forbade the practice of modern medicine. The CPK undertook a wildly naive project of returning the entire nation to a romanticized version of an 11th-century agricultural civilization.

As the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust notes, the “Khmer Rouge ideology stated that the only acceptable lifestyle was that of poor agricultural workers,” so they forced millions of people from their homes in the city to work as farmers. “Factories, hospitals, schools and universities were shut down. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers and qualified professionals in all fields were thought to be a threat to the new regime. … Money was abolished and all aspects of life were subject to regulation. People were not allowed to choose their own marriage partners. They could not leave their given place of work or even select the clothes that they would wear.”

Estimates vary, but it is generally accepted that more than two million people were killed by CPK between 1975 and 1978. In addition, other people starved to death, or died from lack of standard medical care.

The shocking number of deaths is even more astounding, given the small population of Cambodia. At least 25% of the nation’s population was murdered, as the Mercury Radio Arts report notes:

Million of people across Cambodia were effectively forced into slavery - all in the name of building Marx’s utopian society. Anyone daring to speak out against the regime was imprisoned or murdered. Hundreds of thousands of others died from starvation or disease. During the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign, an estimated 2 million people perished as a direct result of the Communist Party’s policies.

In 1978, the CPK’s rule came to an end. The combined forces of the USSR and Vietnam invaded the country and removed the CPK from power. It is a measure of how bad the situation in Cambodia was, that the people were relieved to be invaded by two harsh socialist nations.

During the next few years, researchers and historians were able to compile accounts of exactly how brutally the CPK had terrorized the people.

In 2008, two surviving senior leaders of the regime, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were found guilty of genocide for their participation in the actions in Cambodia by a United Nations-backed tribunal.

Even decades after the atrocities which they committed, the CPK leaders spouted socialist rhetoric in their defense. Accused of genocide, they claimed that all their actions were done to promote socialism.

Did these men truly believe what they said? Or were they cynically deploying propaganda to defend themselves? An investigation of their private communications and personal lifestyles might shed light on these questions, but it may be impossible to get a definitive answer.

Nuon Chea, a Khmer Rouge leader and brother-in-law of Pol Pot, gave insight into the justification of the actions during their trial. “The CPK’s policy and plan were solely designed to one purpose only,” said Chea, “to liberate the country from the colonization, imperialism, exploitation, extreme poverty and invasion from neighboring countries.”

The CPK claimed that it wanted to liberate Cambodia from colonialism, as it has existed under the FRench, and from imperialism, as in Vietnam’s ambitions. But the Khmer Rouge inflicted far worse conditions on their own people than Cambodians ever suffered at the hands of the French or the Vietnamese.

“The CPK’s policy was clear and specific: it wanted to create an equal society where people were the master of the country … The CPK’s movement was not designed to kill people or destroy the country,” said Chea.

The Soviet Socialists and Vietnam jointly controlled the country from 1978 until 1992. Even though they imposed a brutal socialist occupational government, they were an improvement over the Khmer Rouge.

In 1993, the Cambodia’s king regained his throne, and a constitutional monarchy was organized.

China’s Brand of Nationalism

China has been a nation for centuries — millennia, even — but only recently has it come to be something like a nation-state. To investigate China’s move toward nationalism, it is first necessary to review the emergence and development of nationalism in Europe.

Nationalism has found a variety of homes over the centuries. Arising in Europe, it was originally a galvanizing resistance to Napoleon between 1800 and 1815: the bond of oppressed people against an invading oppressor.

In its next phase, nationalism was favored by political liberals, who saw it as the formation of an identity for the common people over against the aristocrats. The royal dynasties supported monarchies which were not necessary corresponding to the ethnic identities of their subjects.

This liberal nationalism saw itself as liberating and empowering people - Poland for the Poles, Russia for the Russians, Sweden for the Swedes, etc.

Metternich and the many of the nobles of Europe opposed this nationalism. Nationalism in this phase was opposed to the status quo, and was sometimes even seen as subversive or revolutionary.

That would change when nationalists obtained power.

In its third phases, nationalism ascendant gained power in many European countries, changing them from monarchies into nation-states. Once in power, nationalism became more authoritarian, moving further to the political left, skeptical of the free market.

Some consideration of vocabulary can clarify these notions of nationalism. A ‘nation’ is, for practical purposes, an ethnic group, bound by a common culture or language. A ‘state’ is a territory with a government. We can see that it is possible to be a state without being a nation, or to be a nation without being a state.

Poland between 1795 and 1919, for example, was a nation without a state. The Soviet Union, incorporating diverse groups like Estonians and Mongolians, was a state but not a nation.

When a country is both a nation and a state, we use the term ‘nation-state’ to describe it.

In its early phases, nationalism can be seen as a benign, and even healthy, patriotism: an affection for one’s native country and a cultural identity bonded to one’s fellow countrymen.

But an extreme nationalism emerged which would unleash evil and destruction.

As nationalism moved further into its third phase, its authoritarian disregard for the private sector increased. A malignant version of extreme nationalism glorified the state, moved to the extreme left of the political spectrum, and sacrificed the political, economic, and religious liberty of the individual.

This ‘national socialism’ endorsed the intervention of the government to regulate the economy and private life, and saw the individual as subservient to the state.

This dangerous form of nationalism is a value system: it asserts that the ultimate value is the existence, growth, and security of the nation-state. If that value is seen as ultimate, then logically other values can be sacrificed for it, including human life.

The word ‘Nazi’ is an abbreviation for ‘national socialism’ and embodied the idea that the government should not only regulate the individual, but should also provide for the individual - education, healthcare, etc. - thus making the individual into a creature of the state. The horrific atrocities which happened under the Nazis is the logical consequence of this type of ‘statism’ - a socialized and nationalized economy.

After 1945, central Europe learned to avoid this destructive form of nationalism, sometimes overreacting and also rejecting beneficial form mildly patriotic nationalism.

As nationalism developed through its good and evil phases in Europe, eastern Asia began to awaken to nationalism. Which forms would nationalism take in the Pacific Rim?

Mainland communist China presents as a nationalistic state: rejecting free-market capitalism for a state-capitalism, rejecting ideology for the simple guiding value of state power, and embracing a technocratic authoritarianism instead of a dynastic authority. Robert Kaplan writes:

The Chinese regime demonstrates a low-­calorie version of authoritarianism, with a capitalist economy and little governing ideology to speak of. Moreover, China is likely to become more open rather than closed as a society in future years. China’s leaders are competent engineers and regional governors, dedicated to an improving and balanced economy, who abide by mandatory retirement ages. These are not the decadent, calcified leaders of the Arab world who have been overthrown. Rather than fascism or militarism, China, along with every state in East Asia, is increasingly defined by the persistence, the rise even, of old-­fashioned nationalism: an idea, no doubt, but not one that since the mid-­nineteenth century has been attractive to liberal humanists.

Although founded as an ideological and doctrinaire Marxist state in 1949 by Mao, modern mainland China has drifted away from ideology as its main defining characteristic. While still in some sense socialist or communist, mainland China’s rulers have become more pragmatic than ideological.

Instead of an ideology, China seems to be running on a mixture of Machiavelli’s power politics and Bismarck’s Realpolitik. Whether or not one can call that mixture an ‘ideology’ is a question for those who define words precisely.

Nationalism in Europe during the 1800s denoted a moral community against imperial rule. Now the moral community for which intellectuals and journalists aspire is universal, encompassing all of humankind, so that nationalism, whose humanity is limited to a specific group, is viewed as reactionary almost. (This is partly why the media over the decades has been attracted to international organizations, be it the United Nations, the European Union, or NATO — ­because they offer a path beyond national sovereignty.) Yet, despite pan-­national groupings like ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), it is traditional nationalism that mainly drives politics in Asia, and will continue to do so. And that nationalism is leading to the modernization of militaries — ­navies and air forces especially — ­in order to defend sovereignty, with which to make claims for disputed maritime resources.

Both the good forms and the evil forms of nationalism were born in Europe. Bit by bit, through contact with the British Empire, and through the ideas of European political thinkers, China adopted aspects of nationalism.

In the Chinese civil war, from 1927 to 1949, both sides were influenced by concepts of nationalism which had come into China through the writings of influential political philosophers, from John Locke to Karl Marx, from Edmund Burke to Vladimir Lenin. Chinese nationalism was, and is, never quite the same as its European cousins.

Concepts of ‘nation-state’ and ‘nationalism’ found slightly different forms when they were introduced into China from Europe. Why did these ideas take on somewhat different forms? The reasons are many and complex.

Traditional Chinese culture may not have emphasized individualism to the extent, or in the way, that John Locke’s Enlightenment thinking did, and so Lockean tropes like the “consent of the governed” and “majority rule” played out different in China than in Great Britain.

Obviously, Karl Marx played a large role in shaping China after 1927, and especially after 1949. Mao, in attempting to shape China in Marx’s image, faced the paradox — faced by leaders in other nations as well — that Marxist Communism demands internationalism, but these leaders found some amount of nationalism to be a necessary ingredient in persuading people to make the great sacrifices required to build the Marxist utopia. Although doctrinaire Communism requires a rejection of nationalism in favor of internationalism, reality required some amount of nationalist spirit to motivate people to sacrifice for the Communist cause: “do this for the good of your nation.”

It was also necessary for Mao to invent a slightly different version of the “nation” for his version of nationalism. While the nationalisms of Europe worked to preserve the cultures and ethnicities of the nations — a devotion to, and adoration of, Polish ethnic culture, German ethnic culture, Italian ethnic culture, etc. — Mao did not strictly preserve, but rather altered, aspects of Chinese culture, so that the ‘nation’ in his version of Chinese ‘nationalism’ wasn’t a cultural artifact received from previous generations.

Suffice it to say that, when speaking of ‘Chinese nationalism,’ it is worth noting that it is different from the nationalisms encountered in European history.

Understanding North Korea: Inside the Mind of an Oppressive Regime

In a diverse world, nations all around the globe can still agree that North Korea is both a mystery and a problem, and cannot be successfully addressed in the usual diplomatic ways. Any attempt to understand North Korea must begin with its history.

In 1910, Japan had seized Korea, made it into a possession of Japan, and placed occupational troops into Korea.

During the final days of WW2 in 1945, Soviet Socialist troops invaded the northern part of Korea and seized it for the USSR. A few weeks later, American troops liberated the southern part. When Japan surrendered and the war ended, Korea was divided, and the Soviets sealed the borders, effectively isolating the northern part both from the southern part and from the rest of the world.

The Soviet Socialists found Koreans who were communists and placed them into positions of authority, forming a Korean civilian government which would be to the liking of the USSR. The Soviets installed Kim Il-sung as the leader of this new government.

Kim Il-sung was born in Korea, probably around 1912. The details of his life are not entirely clear, because they have been re-written by propaganda artists many times. Circa 1920, his family fled from Korea. He became a fervent communist, and joined the Soviet army. The Soviet Socialists brought him back to Korea in 1945.

In August 1948, the Republic of Korea (ROK) was officially founded in the south. In September 1948, the government and a written constitution were ratified, and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK) was officially founded in the north.

Kim Il-sung continued and amplified the brutal totalitarianism which the Soviet Socialists had built in the north, as Doug Bandow explains:

Kim brutally consolidated power, initiated war, and enforced uniformity. His government targeted faith in anything other than the Communist party. After the Korean War, according to Yoon and Han, “religious organizations were completely dismantled in the wake of relentless religious suppression, leaving no room for self-regulating religious activities or collective resistance.” Over time, Kim’s personality cult became utterly suffocating, leaving no room for independent thought.

So it was that one of the world’s harshest tyrannies was started. Kim Il-sung ruled with an absolutism that made France’s Louis XIV seem mild by comparison.

A major goal of North Korea was to obtain nuclear weapons technology, and to build delivery systems for those weapons, i.e., long-range missiles. The DPRK became gradually alienated from its fellow socialist-communist states: neither China nor the USSR had close diplomatic relations with North Korea after the first decade or two of Kim’s rule.

When the USSR collapsed and disintegrated in 1990/1991, the DPRK’s relationship with the new Russia was even more distant. North Korea’s relationship to China cooled as China adopted a policy of economic engagement with more nations.

The various nations of the world, however strongly they might disagree with each other, were united in the thought that the isolated totalitarian North Korean regime should not have nuclear weapons. Many different countries cooperated to build a diplomatic network to persuade the DPRK to abandon its effort to obtain atomic bombs, as Robert Wampler writes:

In 1994, the United States received new intelligence that North Korea, despite its commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency under the Nonproliferation Treaty, was moving to produce nuclear weapons. How to halt this program and secure IAEA inspection of North Korea’s nuclear facilities was the focus of intense but unfruitful negotiations during the first half of the year, and the potential failure of the talks led Washington to briefly contemplate military action. The crisis was only defused that summer, when former president Jimmy Carter engaged in personal diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

Kim Il-sung died suddenly in 1994, and his son, Kim Jong-il, became the dictator in what amounts to a hereditary monarchy.

North Korean propaganda is so extreme that it is no exaggeration to say that Kim Il-sung has been transformed into a deity, and that the Kim family in general is understood to be divine.

By early 2001, U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice inherited America’s relationship with North Korea. It became her task to manage the relationship, and it was clear that results of the 1994 negotiations were at best tenuous. North Korea was bent on resuming its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, as Rice explains:

The issue of North Korea, another rogue regime seeking weapons of mass destruction, came onto the agenda early as well. Days after the inauguration, South Korea requested a meeting for its president, Kim Dae-jung, with President Bush, forcing us to review where we stood on the North Korean issue.

During the campaign, we’d been critical of the Clinton administration’s Agreed Framework between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name. After North Korea turned away weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog group, and threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1993, the Clinton administration began on-and-off diplomatic negotiations with North Korea that would eventually last a year and a half and result in the 1994 Agreed Framework. Signed on October 21, 1994, the Agreed Framework aimed to eliminate North Korea’s ability to make nuclear arms. It called on North Korea to suspend the construction and operation of nuclear reactors suspected of being part of a covert nuclear weapons program in exchange for U.S. fuel aid and assistance in building two reactors that would not further North Korea’s ability to produce weapons. The two sides would then move toward full normalization of political and economic relations.

Starting in early 2001, then, the North Korean nuclear weapons program was a major concern for the U.S. government. It had been a concern prior to that, but had not been taken perhaps as seriously.

In 2003, a group of nations — North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, and the United States — formed a conference known as the “Six-Party Talks” which would continue to negotiate with, and put pressure on, North Korea in an attempt to get the DPRK to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

The Six-Party Talks continued until 2007.

In January 2006, Condoleezza Rice became Secretary of State. The North Koreans were working not only on developing atomic weapons, but also on developing long-range missiles with which to deliver those weapons. Condoleezza Rice was not the only person working on the North Korean situation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recalls what happened in July 2006:

I was expecting fireworks on Independence Day, but not at 2:30 in the afternoon and not from a despot in North Korea. The multistage Taepo-Dong 2 missile had been on its pad in the northeast corner of the ironically named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for several days. Overhead reconnaissance indicated it was being fueled and possibly prepared for ignition. Smaller, medium-range missiles were in place at other launch sites. We couldn’t be sure where any of them were aimed, when they might be launched, what types of warheads they were equipped with, or exactly how far they could go. Military and intelligence officials judged Alaska and Hawaii to be almost certainly within striking distance of North Korea’s long-range ballistic missiles.

By October 2006, North Korea had built its first atomic bomb. Nations around the world, but especially the nations of the northwest Pacific, now faced the troubling situation of an autocratic dictatorship in possession of nuclear weapons.

In the wake of the DPRK’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, the Six-Party Talks worked to persuade North Korea to stop its weapons program. President George W. Bush recalls the time period of late 2006 and early 2007:

With support from all partners in the Six-Party Talks, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1718. The resolution imposed the toughest sanctions on North Korea since the end of the Korean War. The United States also tightened our sanctions on the North Korean banking system and sought to deny Kim Jong-il his precious luxury goods.

The pressure worked. In February 2007, North Korea agreed to shut down its main nuclear reactor and allow UN inspectors back into the country to verify its actions. In exchange, we and our Six-Party partners provided energy aid, and the United States agreed to remove North Korea from our list of state sponsors of terror. In June 2008, North Korea blew up the cooling tower at Yongbyon on international television. In this case, no further verification was necessary.

As it turned out, the structure that the North Koreans destroyed, allegedly as a “gesture of good” faith to convince the world that they were serious about ending their weapons program, was an outdated bit of old technology, and did not constitute a significant reduction in the DPRK’s nuclear efforts.

After North Korea’s nice-sounding words, there was debate within the U.S. government. Steve Hadley had become National Security Advisor when Condoleezza Rice left that post to become Secretary of State. Alongside Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Hadley debated various potential approaches to North Korean diplomacy with President Bush and Secretary Rice.

There was not always unanimity. One option was to reward the North Korean government for its statements — even if the actions which accompanied those statements were meaningless — by removing it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

But others in the government favored tougher actions against Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, including economic sanctions. Vice President Cheney recalls:

As the October 9, 2008 meeting was drawing to a close, Steve Hadley tried to restore some orderliness to how we were proceeding. “Condi,” he began, “there are some questions that have to be answered here before we can go ahead.” One option we discussed was sending Chris Hill back to Pyongyang to get written assurances. If this agreement was so important, and if Secretary Rice was so confident in the North Korean assurances, why not get a proper agreement? She did not want to do that. And, it turned out, she didn’t have to.

The next day, October 10, 2008, I got word that the president had agreed to allow Secretary Rice to sign the document removing North Korea from the terrorist list, which she did on October 11. It was a sad moment because it seemed to be a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine and a reversal of so much of what we had accomplished in the area of non-proliferation in the first term. The president had been right when he had denounced the failed approach of the Clinton era. Now we seemed to be embracing it.

Kim Jong-il died in 2011, at which point in time the third generation in the person of Kim Jong-un took power.

The grandson of Kim Il-sung, the third ruler of North Korea was perhaps even more extreme than his two predecessors. He had been raised in the mythology of the divine Kim dynasty, and his grasp on reality is questionable.

It is difficult to know whether or not Kim Jong-un truly believes in his own divinity. But it is certain that he is quite casual about imposing enormous burdens on an entire nation, merely to see to it that his whims are satisfied and his ego inflated. He is in the habit of commanding, without any hesitation, the murder of individuals or groups of people.

Nations around the world simply don’t often know how to deal with Kim Jong-un and the questionable status of his mental health. For many different countries, diplomacy with North Korea has settled into a pattern of crises, which Kim provokes at regular intervals by demonstrating or testing missiles or atomic bombs.

By April 2013, Robert Wampler could write, “as the United States faces yet another crisis on the Korean Peninsula engineered by the vexingly erratic and disruptive North Korean regime,” one of the considerations was how China would play into the situation. China is certainly not an ally or friend of the DPRK, but it has probably the least problematic relations with North Korea of any country in the region.

In 2013, and again in later years, one question was: To which extent would China engage or intervene to persuade the DPRK to dial back its weapons programs?

Not for the sake of the United States, or the United Nations, but for its own sake, the Chinese government does not want a bellicose and armed North Korea destabilizing the region.

A second question was: How do concerns about human rights violations in the DPRK affect concerns about nuclear weapons? Some diplomats favored an indirect approach, arguing that if international pressure were brought to bear, and if in response the North Korean government began to allow some amount of human rights to its subjects, then the question about nuclear weapons might answer itself.

If the people of North Korea were given even a small amount of freedom, then they might begin to change the mental landscape of the nation, and slowly nudge the country away from the habit of saber-rattling. Frank Jannuzi wrote in April 2013:

As John Kerry makes his first trip to Asia as secretary of state, North Korea seems poised to welcome him with a flurry of missile tests, and in Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo, he will surely discuss how to deal with North Korea’s recent provocations. But Washington’s head-on approach to Pyongyang’s nuclear program has failed for decades, and the situation has only grown more dangerous, as shown by the new reports that North Korea may have developed a warhead small enough to fit on a ballistic missile. The best way to resolve the ongoing nuclear crisis is to stop talking about nukes — and instead focus on advancing North Korean human rights, reorienting global attention from the North’s plutonium to its people.

The egregious human rights violations which North Korea inflicts on its own citizens are paired with a brutal lack of economic opportunity. Those born into poverty in the DPRK will stay in poverty. Those born into wealth, if they are not murdered by Kim Jong-un in a fit of rage, will continue to enjoy a life of luxury.

In Pyongyang, a visitor will observe restaurants of the highest caliber: five-star establishments rivalling those of New York, Chicago, or St. Louis. North Korea is not the only poverty-stricken communist dictatorship to feature such elegant dining establishments, in contrast to its millions of starving or malnourished citizens.

In the past, the USSR featured such classy eating establishments, as has Cuba. But there is a difference: the USSR and Cuba had or have such expensive opulent eateries in order to persuade visiting foreigners to spend money. In Moscow and Havana, such dining was a way to generate income for the state-run economy.

But, as Edward Luttwak explained in April 2013,

But Pyongyang’s ultraprime eateries are not that. A few foreign tourists end up dining there by way of relief from grim hotel canteens, along with a handful of humanity-loving NGO workers (who never miss out on luxuries and thus frequent these places), but both groups are simply too small to matter. Most customers are North Koreans who fall into two entirely distinct classes. First: anxious, pinched, and pallid men (rarely women) in standard blue North Korean suits, visibly excited by the heady foreign luxuries on offer — members of midranking delegations from near or far that have wrangled or won access. The second class is the much better-dressed, better-fed singles and couples nonchalantly eating and drinking as if real coffee were an everyday pleasure for them. These are the likely parents of the children seen enjoying Pyongyang’s splendidly polychrome merry-go-round expensively imported from Italy. (And this being the land of the portly Kim Jong Un, these children of the rich and privileged are apple-cheeked and distinctly chubby in a land where most children are visibly underweight.) No, these nonchalant eaters are not the winners of the capitalist free-for-all, entrepreneurs, top corporate professionals, or sports stars; they’re high-ranking officials or military officers and their families, who support the Kim dynasty and win the perks of his favor.

Not only are the lives of ordinary North Koreans made miserable by bitter poverty, not only is this poverty made more painful by the sight of unobtainable wealth and luxury in their country, but they also deal with the harshest oppression on the globe.

People who are thought to harbor political opinions deviating from the official DPRK line are routinely placed into political prison camps. In these camps, nearly half of the prisoners die of starvation.

A final degradation inflicted onto the North Koreans is a lack of any religious freedom. All citizens are forced to worship the Kim family and Kim Jong-un in particular. Any religious activities not centered around the Kim dynasty are met with brutality, as Doug Bandow reported in August 2019:

Religious liberty is not just an abstract, theoretical right. Real people suffer as a result of persecution. “According to the outcome of an intensive survey on the level of punishment against those involved in religious activities, only 2.9 percent of those arrested are sent to labor training camps,” Yoon and Han report. By contrast, 14.9 percent are sent to prisons and an astonishing 81.4 percent to political prisons camps, the harshest level of punishment in North Korean society. This testifies how severely the regime punishes those involved in religious activities.”

Given the mental state of Kim Jong-un, and given the appalling barbarism with which the DPRK treats its own citizens, how can the other nations of the world interact effectively with North Korea?

Any approach will be complex, but two clues have emerged: China can be part of the solution, and the solution must include for the ordinary North Koreans some increase in personal political liberty and individual freedom.

When Spain Was Almost Annihilated: The Invasion of 711 A.D.

Spanish history rounded a gigantic turning point in the year 711 A.D., when Muslim armies landed on the beaches of southern Spain. The Umayyad conquest would terrorize almost all of Spain. Only in the northwesternmost corner of Spain did resistance hold out against the invaders.

The Islamic armies burned entire villages to the ground, and sold captured Spanish children into slavery. Spanish women were raped and enslaved, and Spanish men were executed or enslaved.

Who were the Spaniards in 711 A.D.? Until that year, a colorful diversity of people lived in peaceful coexistence on the Iberian Peninsula: Native Spaniards, who were mainly Celts; a few descendants of the Roman settlers who’d moved into the area centuries earlier; Jews of mideastern descent; and Visigoths, Germanic administrators who’d helped create a more complex urban society there.

All of these various groups would suffer under the military occupation which would control most of Spain for the next few centuries.

As historian Dario Fernandez-Morera explains, “Spain was conquered and colonized by the forces of the Islamic Caliphate” in 711 A.D., starting from the southernmost point of Spain, advancing northward, and spreading east and west. “The conquest was carried out by force.”

How did most of Spain fall so quickly and so easily? “The Muslim conquerors used force to defeat the resistance of the Christian Visigoth kingdom, a nascent civilization.” Spain’s government was too new to offer strong resistance; it was still in the process of formation.

The Spaniards who were not executed or enslaved had the option of “living in subaltern status in Islamic lands.” Such humiliation was more tolerable than facing “the consequences of resisting.” But even for those who chose to submit to the occupying Muslim armies, there “was always the threat of brutal force.”

After 711 A.D., Spain endured several centuries of “religious and therefore cultural repression in all areas of life and the marginalization of certain groups - all this in the service of social control by autocratic rulers and a class of religious authorities.” Islam oppressed and nearly extinguished Judaism, Christianity, and anything else in Spain that might not fit into the narrow confines of Sharia law.

It seemed as if Spain might be gone forever: as if its people and culture would be ground into the dirt under the marching boots of Muslim soldiers. But in northwestern Spain, a few brave resisters held out, and fought back over the next few centuries. They salvaged Spain. It is their magnificent achievement that today there is a Spain at all.

National Identity, and the Lack Thereof, in Central Europe: Cultural Excellence Does Not Entail Political Unification

The general pattern of history reveals that the concept of the modern nation-state emerged first in western Europe. Central Europe, which produced cultural attainments both in the fine arts and in the natural sciences — to say nothing of economics and pure mathematics — lagged noticeably behind western Europe in the formation of the nation-state.

Perhaps one reason for this delay was the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire. This loose coalition of central European kingdoms arose during the 800s and 900s in an ad hoc fashion to meet a need for defensive coordination.

As the old joke explains, the Holy Roman Empire was not Holy, not Roman, and not an Empire. It was secular, organized for the purpose of defending Europe against various waves of Islamic invaders. It was Germanic, not Roman. It was not an empire, but rather a confederation whose emperor was an emperor in title only. The Holy Roman Emperor had to beg rather than dictate. He was sometimes reduced to shuttling back and forth between various kings and princes in an attempt to get them to unify around some plan.

So it was that in central Europe, in contrast to western Europe and to England, that the smaller local kingdoms and principalities retained more power, and efforts to create a centralized government over a larger territory were not fruitful.

The modern and postmodern reader should not retroject any concept of ‘Germany’ onto Europe prior to 1871. ‘German’ denoted, at most, a language and culture, but not a political or governmental unity. Indeed, the Germans were as likely to fight with each other as to ally with each other.

Even the commonalities of language and culture were tenuous. The regional differences in vocabulary and pronunciation meant that the dialects spoken in northern cities like Hamburg and Bremen were largely unintelligible to the southern cities like Salzburg and Innsbruck.

This is in sharp contrast to the degree of national unity which was reached, e.g., in England, where the residents of Manchester and the residents of London understood themselves to be part of the same nation, as historian William Hagen writes:

In 1789 the German-speaking lands were, with few exceptions, encompassed within a sprawling geopolitical entity antiquatedly named the The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. They were, strange as it may seem, divided into some three hundred and twenty-five separate principalities.

If the Germans lacked political and national unity, then they also lacked leaders to whom they could commonly pledge allegiance. The habits of the Empire meant that dozens of local dynasties had a greater impact on daily life than the one imperial dynasty. These many regional dynasties naturally worked to keep the emperor and his royal family irrelevant.

Comparing Germany with France, England, or Spain, the question arises: why did the medieval and early modern German lands not evolve, as these and many other European countries did, from the condition of a loosely strung together medical feudal kingdom into a stoutly forged centralized “national monarchy,” such as that of France’s mighty Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century “Sun King”? Premodern monarchies on the French or British model created unitary frameworks for subsequent political democratization, such as preliminarily began in England with the Puritan and Glorious revolutions of the seventeenth century and in France with the revolution of 1789.

The lack of centralized power did not seem to harm the Germans: it was during these centuries that they produced the great cultural artifacts which are universally acknowledged and admired.

Decades before there was a territory on the map called ‘Germany,’ Beethoven, whose music was chosen to represent all of Europe as the anthem of the EU, composed his works.

The long list of poets, mathematicians, composers, painters, architects, physicists, chemists, and philosophers who constitute not only Germany’s great achievements, but rather also humanity’s great achievements — many of them, if not most, lived at a time when there was no Germany.

Consider: Wolfgang Mozart, J.S. Bach, Johann Walter, Caspar David Friedrich, G.W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, G.W.F. Hegel, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lucas Cranach the Younger, Hans Cranach, Augustin Cranach, Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and many others.

Perhaps the Germans were at their best without Germany. The lack of a nation-state did not harm them, and perhaps even helped them.

But the lack of a German nation-state was a problem for the rest of the world. German culture and German political influence spread slower, and didn’t spread as far as they might otherwise have, because there was no overarching nation-state until 1871.

In Africa, in South America, and in southeast Asia, German colonization was microscopic compared to the geopolitical impact of England, France, Belgium, and other European nations.

Those regions of the world were denied advancements in culture, technology, and natural sciences. The Germans were productive and creative without a nation-state. But because the German nation-state emerged late and then was hobbled for much of the twentieth century, the rest of the world was unable to realize much of its potential.

North Korean Narrative: Decades of Deception

When global observers began to draw hope from talks between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and the United State’s President Trump, it was the first time in many years that the world saw rational diplomacy with North Korea as possible. To understand the significance of those talks in 2018 and 2019, the reader will want to review North Korea’s actions during the previous decade or two.

From 1948 to 1994, the leader of North Korea was Kim Il-sung. Upon his death in 1994, his son, Kim Jong-il became the leader. In 2011, Kim Jong-il died, and his son, Kim Jong-un, became the country’s leader.

North Korea is now suffering under its third hereditary totalitarian absolutist dictator.

Having been born in the mid-1980s, Kim Jong-un has been treated as a near-deity his entire life. This may explain why other nations have difficulty conducting any diplomacy with his government.

For the neighboring countries of Japan and South Korea, the nuclear weapons possessed by North Korea constitute an existential threat. North Korea obtained nuclear capability during the reign of Kim Jong-il. It is typical of the Kim dynasty that observers characterize its behavior by comparing it to a toddler who tosses his dinner during a temper tantrum. President George W. Bush recalls:

On the Fourth of July 2006, Kim Jong-il threw his food on the floor. He fired a barrage of missiles into the Sea of Japan. The test was a military failure, but the provocation was real. My theory was that Kim saw the world focused on Iran and was craving attention. He also wanted to test the coalition to see how much he could get away with.
I called President Hu Jintao of China, told him that Kim Jong-il had insulted China, and urged him to condemn the launch publicly. He released a statement reiterating his commitment to “peace and stability” and opposing “any actions that might intensify the situation.” His words were mild, but they were a step in the right direction.
North Korea defied the world again by carrying out its first full-fledged nuclear test. President Hu’s reaction was firmer this time. “The Chinese government strongly opposes this,” he said. “We engaged in conversations to appeal to the North Koreans for restraint. However, our neighbor turned a deaf ear to our advice.”

The world had to accept the suboptimal reality that a third-generation hereditary dictator now had nuclear weapons at his disposal. This was a nightmare scenario for South Korea and for Japan. It was horrifying for the rest of the world.

North Korea had proven that it was willing to deceive. It had agreed to stop its efforts to build an atomic bomb, and yet continued to do precisely that. North Korea proved unrepentant when, four years prior to its first successful nuclear weapon test, the U.S. intelligence community presented evidence that the weapons program was well under way. At that time, the U.S. Secretary of Defense was Donald Rumsfeld, who later wrote:

By July 2006, well over a decade of U.S. negotiations with North Korea and its erratic leadership had yielded little benefit to the United States. North Korea continued to test and launch ballistic missiles, bluster about attacking South Korea, and develop nuclear weapons, detonating what intelligence professionals believed was a low-yield bomb in October 2006. We had confronted North Korean officials in 2002 with the fact that we knew about their clandestine uranium-enrichment effort, in violation of the Clinton Administration’s “Agreed Framework.”

Ever willing to present deceptive images to the world, North Korea, after having demonstrated its capabilities both in terms of building bombs and in terms of building delivery systems, proceeded to claim that it was going to disassemble its own nuclear production facilities.

In a visible and publicized action, the North Koreans demolished a nuclear facility. This action was, however, meaningless, as Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney writes:

On June 27, 2008, the North Koreans called in the television cameras and blew up the cooling tower of the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It was 1950s technology, a device they could easily afford to give up. By that point they had produced enough plutonium for a store of weapons, and, besides, as President Obama’s director of national intelligence would later confirm, they had a robust ongoing uranium enrichment operation that could also produce material for nuclear weapons.

In yet another about-face, North Korea again wanted to boast by displaying its advanced nuclear weapons technology. Two years after claiming to have destroyed their own nuclear capability, they bragged about a multi-year effort coming to fruition.

Around this time, the world grew both wise and weary, and learned that words and statements from the North Korean government were meaningless, and that the North Korean leaders were incorrigible and could never be trusted, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reports:

In 2010, nuclear physicist Siegfried Hacker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, would be invited to North Korea and shown an industrial-scale facility capable of producing enriched uranium. According to Hecker, the state of the facility demonstrated “without a doubt” that Pyongyang had pursued uranium enrichment for many years. We’d been right about uranium enrichment but unable to use diplomacy to confirm our suspicions or do anything about it.

By 2013, North Korea was clearly and unapologetically presenting itself as a nuclear power. Missile tests were performed, not to test the technology of the rockets, but as timely signals to the international community.

By that year, also, Kim Jong-un had become the national leader, following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il. The new leader demonstrates “increasing ruthlessness” against anything except immediate enthusiastic affirmation of his own ideas, according to a 2013 article in The Telegraph.

The ambiguous, sometimes friendly, and sometimes hostile relationship between the United States and China was and is pivotal in forming a global response to North Korea’s bellicose behavior. While North Korea has good relationships with no other nation on earth, its connection with China is as close as North Korea can come to working diplomatic relationship.

The U.S. has often requested Chinese assistance in dealing with North Korea. While China certainly doesn’t like or trust the Kim regime, it also is not willing to do or be anything which might make China seem like it is in any way helpful to the U.S.

Yet China has, at times, been willing to be strict with North Korea, as Robert Wampler wrote in 2013:

One key issue is how China might convince Pyongyang to dial back its provocations lest they escalate into military conflict. Although current consultations between Washington and Beijing are taking place behind closed doors, we do have a window into how the United States assessed China’s options during a similar crisis nearly two decades ago — options that included Chinese troops crossing the Yalu to secure its borders.

Also in 2013, analyst Edward Luttwak raised this question: could South Korea be enabling North Korea? As counterintuitive as such a question might at first seem, it makes a certain amount of economic sense.

South Korea has given, at various times, substantial chunks of hard foreign currency to North Korea — sometimes as a way to buy some peace in a sort of mafioso protection racket, sometimes in response to sheer bullying. Serious currency is one thing which North Korea both desperately needs and can hardly obtain.

The North Korean economy is so weak that it’s constantly on the verge of collapse — even as a few elite members of Communist Party live in luxury. South Korea seems oddly to be throwing a lifeline to the very nation which is bent on destroying it, as Luttwak writes:

All of North Korea’s varied and extreme economic dysfunctions converge in its crippling shortage of foreign currency. Once the bulk of it is used to import military components, supplies, and subsystems from China (including the erector launcher vehicles for its ballistic missiles), very little foreign exchange is left.

While the world’s diplomats focus on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, ordinary citizens around the world are perhaps more horrified by the human rights abuses which constitute domestic policy in the country. Frank Jannuzi argues that perhaps the diplomats should take a cue from people:

The best way to resolve the ongoing nuclear crisis is to stop talking about nukes — and instead focus on advancing North Korean human rights, reorienting global attention from the North’s plutonium to its people.

The question of atomic weapons and the question of human rights in North Korea intersect when one examines the ideology and psychology of the Kim regime. The world has seen any number of communist totalitarian dictators, but the Kims are another category altogether.

The Kim family takes — and expects other people to take — its deity seriously. The Kims expect to be worshipped, praised, and given credit for every good thing. North Korean citizens are expected to thank the Kims for good weather and for any recovery after a time of illness, as Doug Bandow reports:

In North Korea, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are demigod the father and demigod son; Juche is the political gospel. Writings of the Kims are treated as scripture. Which helps explain the North’s position as the world's worst religious persecutor.

It is difficult to understand, and difficult to believe, the mindset which pervades North Korea. If one can understand this mindset, and if one can believe that it is in fact firmly rooted both in the collective North Korean psyche as well as in the North Korean diplomatic corps, then one faces the question: Is it possible to negotiate with this nation? If so, how?

For this reason, many of the world’s diplomats — from a diverse range of countries — had and have more or less given up on any attempt at serious diplomacy with this country.

And that is why so many were shocked at President Trump’s greatly increased efforts at achieving diplomatic progress with this nation.

What will be the ultimate outcome of Trump’s efforts? What will be the fruit of his administration’s diplomatic overtures to North Korea? Time alone will reveal what Trump will or will not achieve: either a great accomplishment or a disappointing fizzle.

In any case, North Korea will remain an object of world attention for some time to come.

North Korea is characterized by a determined and incorrigible drive toward building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal; by a persistent and consistent violation of many human rights; and by a culture which has absolutized and deified the Kim dynasty.

The role of the Kim family in North Korean society exceeds, e.g., the role of the Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, the role of Louis XIV in 17th-century and 18th-century France, or the role of Stalin and Mao in the 20th-century communist dictatorships.

Diplomats from nations all around the globe, who can otherwise interface with the most monstrous regimes and with the most horrific tyrants, find it difficult to interact with North Korea’s unpredictability, irrationality, and incomprehensibility.

For this reason, among others, President Trump’s attempts to reach a working relationship with North Korea are fascinating.

Kidnapping China’s Leader: Chiang Kai-shek in Xi’an

In late 1936, China was defending itself against two lethal enemies. Externally, it was being attacked by Japan. Internally, it was being attacked by Mao’s communists. The leader of China, Chiang Kai-shek, had to make difficult decisions about allocating resources.

How many soldiers and how much equipment should be sent to fight against Japan? Likewise, how many soldiers and how much equipment should be sent to defend the country from the communists?

In December 1936, Chiang was in the city of Xi’an. Suddenly, two of his own bodyguards kidnapped him.

In return for the release of Chiang, they demanded not money, but rather a change in government policy. They insisted that China’s government use more resources for the defense against Japan, and fewer resources for the defense against Mao’s communists.

The net effect of the incident was that a temporary truce or ceasefire was declared between the Chinese people and Mao’s communists. The legitimate Chinese government and the communist terrorists would temporarily work together to fight against the attacking Japanese.

The two individuals who seem to have been most directly responsible for physically keeping Chiang Kai-shek under house arrest were his bodyguards. But the leading minds behind the operation were members of Mao’s communist gang.

One of the leaders of the operation, and one of the negotiators who presented the communist demands to the government, was Zhou Enlai. During the following decades, Zhou Enlai would rise with the communists, and inside the communist hierarchy, to be second only to Mao himself.

This made Zhou Enlai responsible for millions of deaths.

During Chiang’s captivity, he got to know Zhou. Suffering perhaps from a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, Chiang developed a trust in Zhou. Years after the incident, Chiang would indicate that he felt that Zhou was a trustworthy individual, as historian Jay Taylor writes:

In 1941, Chiang would tell Owen Lattimore that he considered Zhou “personally trustworthy although he was of course under Yan’an’s control.” Years later, Chiang, obviously referring to Zhou, wrote that at Xi’an he believed that the Communists, meaning of course Zhou, had “repented and were sincere.” Although sometimes Zhou echoed Mao’s cynicism about Chiang’s belief in his own sincerity, later events would suggest that Zhou did believe and would argue within the CCP that if Chiang lived up to his commitments at Xi’an, the Communists should give priority to fighting the Japanese under the broad but real leadership of Chiang Kai-shek.

Sadly, Chiang had confided this view with Owen Lattimore, who turned out to be a Soviet asset.

Historians debate about the ambiguous aspects of Lattimore’s status: Was he a paid operative for a Soviet intelligence agency? Or was he unwittingly manipulated into acting in ways that benefitted the Soviet Socialists? Was he an actual spy? Or did the USSR simply trick him, exploiting Lattimore’s socialist sympathies?

In either case, Chiang’s admission to Lattimore was doubtless quickly transmitted to Moscow, and from there to Mao’s communist roughians. Mao would exploit Chiang’s weakness for Zhou.

In any event, Chiang was in a difficult situation: to adequately defend the nation against Japan, he would need to reduce his defenses against Mao’s communist bandits; in order to adequately defend China against Mao’s communist raiders, he would have to reduce his defenses against Japan.

China seemed doomed.

Chiang did not know that when he spoke to Owen Lattimore, he was speaking to an agent working — wittingly or unwittingly — for the Soviet Socialists.

In the final outcome, it may not have made a huge difference: the communists seemed destined to dominate China.

This much is clear: when the communists, under the leadership of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, conquered China, the result was 20,000,000 deaths within the first decade, and several million more deaths in the next decade.

A note on spelling: because these names are transliterated into the Roman alphabet, alternate spellings abound: Mao Zedong is Mao Tse-Tung; Zhou Enlai is Chou En-lai; Chiang Kai-shek is Jiang Jieshi or Chiang Chieh-shih or Chiang Chung-cheng; Xi’an is Sian. Variations in spelling have no impact on meaning.