Pen/Insular_Notes

Can there be a silver lining to North Korea’s entry into the ranks of nuclear powers? Well, this might be a bit of a stretch, but it has produced quite a lot of interesting writing over the last week or so. A round up is in order I think.

First up, I’m very pleased to say that some of the people in All Together (다함께) have put together an English-language blog with translations of various Korean and Asian social movement-related articles. The site is called Counterfire and I’ve put a button in the righthand panel to direct people towards it. Even better, they have a translation of Kim Ha-yong’s article on the nuclear test from last week which you can read here. This is an excellent translation of a very good article, which means I don’t have to feel guilty about not having time to translate any of this stuff. A taste:

In the given circumstances, the Bush administration is likely to apply pressure on NK through UN sanctions first, and then wait and see how things develop, trying to figure out how to respond. An administration that has been incapable of devising a unified policy on NK for the last 5 years is unlikely to have suddenly found one in the course of a few days.

The progressive forces in South Korea must oppose UN sanctions as well as military action by the US, for the sanctions themselves could further de-stabilize the situation. We shouldn’t lend our support to the South Korean government’s plan to support UN sanctions. Sanctions will only make ordinary North Koreans suffer. The only way to stop nuclear proliferation is to force the US to quit threatening NK.

For more on the internationalist left in South Korea, there is this interview with Choi Il-bung and Kim Ha-yong of All Together in the latest issue of ISJ, obviously done before the latest developments on the peninsula.

Some other useful reading matter, generally from a left or strategic analysis perspective:

Gary Leupp’s piece at Dissident Voice assesses North Korea as a ‘religious state’ with interesting parallels with Japan’s state-sponsored shinto system set up in the Meiji era:

Growing up under Japanese occupation, Kim Il-song could have observed the usages of a state religion in the service of a hereditary monarchy linked to Heaven. Maybe these observations subconsciously affected the evolution of his thinking. Once in power in North Korea, from 1945, he increasingly built a personality cult, initially modeled after Stalin’s but by the 1970s plainly monarchical in nature. It integrated Confucian values of filial piety and obedience, and glorified the entire family of the Great Leader, including especially the crown prince Jong-il.

This was also an interesting, if fairly predictable insight into North Korea’s attitude to Marxism:

according to a Russian study in 1995, “the works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin are not only excluded from the standard [school] curriculum, but are generally forbidden for lay readers. Almost all the classical works of Marxism-Leninism, as well as foreign works on the Marxist (that is, other than [Juche]) philosophy are kept in special depositories, along with other kinds of subversive literature. Such works are accessible only to specialists with special permits.”

This PINR intelligence brief argues that although it has been sounding rather tough and somewhat peeved, China’s basic stance toward North Korea has not changed: it is an ally and it desperately needs it as a buffer against the US.

John Feffer’s piece at Foreign Policy in Focus from August looks at the bind in which the Bush regime finds itself.

Andrei Lankov points out the connections between instability in North Korea and China’s recent moves in the field of Korean historiography - AKA the ‘history war’ over the ownership of the ancient kingdoms of Koguryŏ Parhae and Kochosŏn. His argument (and I think it’s pretty feasible) is that this is the ideological preparation for a future Chinese takeover, to go along with its apparent military planning for this eventuality.

Dan Plesch in the Guardian argues that a universal disarmament policy is needed to deal with nuclear proliferation.

An in-depth analysis of North Korea as a ‘nuclear stalker’ from Peter Hayes of the Nautilus Institute.

And finally…. (former China correspondent) John Gittings reviews a load of books on North Korea for the Guardian.