How Does the North Korean State Survive?

Insightful Q&A on the survival strategies of the North Korean government. Fascinating stuff and relevant in the context of the torpedo strike that killed 40 South Koreans. In short, something's got to give that will force a change in North Korea. Either some kind of economic shock in China or some sort of outright conflict is very likely here.

More Here and excerpt below:

To go back a little bit to a point you made about the race-based nationalism of North Korea, this is not something much talked about, I find, even in material about the ideology of North Korea. Why have so few before you focused on the specific racial element of North Korean ideology?

It's an undiplomatic point to make, but the inconvenient truth is that most North Korea-watchers in the United States don't speak Korean and don't read Korean. They're not able to read even the legend on a North Korean propaganda poster. So they, for decades, have had to depend on secondary sources of information, primarily in English. When they read North Korean materials, they have to read the so-called Juche Thought, because the regime has been careful to put this pseudo-ideology, this sham ideology, into English. So when foreigners want to read about North Korean ideology, they have to turn to these books on Juche thought, which really decoy them away from the true ideology.

Juche Thought is a jumble of humanist cliches like "Man is the master of all things." This fake doctrine has absolutely no bearing on North Korean policymaking. While people are wasting their time trying to make sense of Juche Thought, the regime is propagating this race-based nationalism. Another problem we have in the United States, a little bit, is political correctness, inasmuch as we are uncomfortable attributing racist views to non-white people.

It seems, in the book, you talk about it as designed to be un-figure-outable, to an extent, just kind of a vortex someone hopeful to understand North Korea in the West can fall into and fail to figure out?

That is exactly what the point is. The regime does not want to confuse its own people either, by having two ideologies on the intellectual marketplace, so to speak. It deliberately writes this Juche Thought in as unreadable, as repetitive and as dull as way as possible so that nobody actually bothers slogging through it. If you talk to your North Korean minders and guides and people like that when you go to North Korea, they know as little about Juche Thought as anybody else does.

Yet the outside world, even very respected Korea scholars like Bruce Cumings, have taken these Juche Thought claims at face value and simply concluded that Juche Thought is incomprehensible to a foreigner. In face, it's incomprehensible to the North Koreans too, but it serves its function very well. The main function of Juche is to enable the claim that Kim Il Sung is a great thinker, that he's just as great a thinker as Mao Tse Tung was. In that sense, it has been a success.

I was going to ask you about that line in the book about how, if you ask your minders in North Korea, they'll be confused and try to sort of hedge the issue. Do you speak from experience there? What do they say back to you?

The last time I was in North Korea was in 2008. I went to visit the city of Kaesong, which is near the DMZ. I got into a conversation with my minder — they're always very curious when a white man is able to speak Korean — and I started to talk to him about Juche Thought. At first he was very proud and very pleased that I had heard about Juche Thought, but as soon as he realized that I had actually read those texts and that I expected him to answer some questions about them, he said, "Isn't it time for you to get back on your bus?" He was very uncomfortable.

This is in stark contrast to what I experienced as a young man in East Germany, when I traveled from West Germany. If you talked to a member of the communist party there, he was able to give you a pretty good summary of Marxism/Leninism. He knew what he was talking about. The North Koreans are able to tell you the race-based nationalism also very well. It's this fake ideology which they don't understand either.