To most of us North Korea would be utterly unimportant except for two – and just possibly – three things. In reverse order they would be:
Tertius: They may have working crude atomic bombs and some really inaccurate missiles to carry them and may have been doing their level best to help other nogoodniks achieve the same ability.
Secundus: Like a pebble in a gearbox, North Koreans would be unimportant in themselves except they are caught in the junction where Russia, China, Japan, the real Korea and the interests of the US all coincide. Nobody can afford to ignore Pyongyang for too long.
Primus: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty retain a horrified fascination for the rest of us. This ossified Stalinist-personality cult driven nation; this wacky isolated cloud cuckoo-land; this ghastly little half-starved enclave of acute misery; this bizarre puddle of darkness in a sea of light; this conglomeration of lethal weirdness. What is it that so attracts our appalled gaze?
The funerary events for the late Kim II the Strangely Coiffured and the seeming accession of Kim III the Chubby Cheeked seems like a good excuse to ponder these mysteries.
On reflection, perhaps it is that North Korea lets us wonder about some little considered aspects of the human condition. Human beings are warped, regimented and moulded in North Korea in ways that exceed most of the other inhuman regimes that we know about. For the moment, let us consider close-order drill, feigned emotion and dwarfism.
Close Order Drill
Nobody is really sure if anyone marched into battle in lockstep formation before the Ancient Greeks. Art from Sumeria and Assyria suggests they did. According to the Classical historian Victor Davis Hanson, Socrates, Solon, Xenophon and all the rest of the men known to history from that period certainly practiced marching in step, and at least the Spartans did it to the sound of flutes. Men whose weapons and tactics require tight coordination and who are carrying long sharp heavy weapons – like Greek hoplites – can only manoeuvre safely if they are in formation and in step.
The battlefield superiority of the Roman legions depended on drill. Fighting men can only move from a march column into the checkerboard quincunx formation, or a Centuria of Hastati can swiftly assume the Testudo defence only if they were drilled in it, rehearsed it and every man knew what was expected. We are not sure if most medieval armies practiced drill but it was clear by 1500 that the push of pike required men who knew how to march in step again. A dense-packed formation of men, shoulder to shoulder and moving in a block while carrying heavy pole arms like Halberds and pikes have no choice but to march in step.
The many recreation societies around today have learned that the easiest pace for a formation of halberdiers or pike-men is a simple goose-step – walking with a straight leg. It enables someone in the ranks to keep pace by watching the rise and fall of the shoulders of the others in the formation. We also know that this was a common pace when flintlock muskets and bayonets ruled the battlefield – and this made close order drill the most important element of tactical proficiency again.
The importance of drill insured that displays of drill by soldiers became important as a means of showing their readiness for battle. Parades and reviews took on a new importance, which cleared a path for ostentation even as the ‘clockwork universe’ notions of efficiency took hold in the Enlightenment era of the 18th Century. Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, took the infantry of Prussia, and first taught the high-kicking stechschritt goose-step (with the leg kicking up straight to a 45 degree angle) that history has come to know so well.
A secondary function of drill has always been intimidation – one can think of the Zulu Impis stomping forward, beating their shields with their assegai stabbing-spears and chanting, or a line of Saxon Housecarles doing the same thing. Riot police often deploy nowadays while beating their batons rhythmically on their shields. The underlying messages of this display: “See, we’re emotionless and we move as one, we’re not human, so we’re really going to turn you into pulp.” The Prussian goose-step amplified that sense of intimidation. It also looked sharper and is more difficult to accomplish, which had the effect of making the men marching in the ranks feel more confident about themselves.
As an aside, the goose-step is a really efficient form of exercise, especially if one is singing while marching. One wonders if the bias of history will ever be dropped long enough for some of these ‘get-tough’ exercise programs to pick up the pace a little…
At any rate, the Prussian infantry developed an 18th Century reputation as the toughest battlefield opponents to be found in Europe and the goose-step helped. The problem was that as ceremonial drill, high-stepping goose-stepping made well-disciplined well-dressed soldiers look like robots, and there are people who employ soldiers who find that sort of thing to be a bit of an ego-boost. Tsar Paul I (1796-1801) brought the high kicking goose-step to Russia and is purported to have been exceptionally fascinated by drill and ceremony (he was also fascinated by fighting corruption, which may explain his early assassination). It may have been in Russia, where the goose-step took up its ultimate form with the leg kicked up straight to be parallel with the ground. The soldier looks like less of a fighting man and more of a clockwork doll.
In any event, close-order drill lost its importance as a battlefield skill as 19th Century firepower forced soldiers to disperse and concentrate on field craft skills instead. Even so, drill remains important to modern armies for ceremonial reasons and as a good means of starting to imprint military values and behaviour on recruits. For dictators who would refashion society or mankind itself, drill remains especially fascinating. Mass parades with goose-stepping soldiers remain symbolic of Italian Fascism, German Nazism and Soviet Communism.
Great military parades have been seen in the streets of Paris, London, New York and other Western cities too, but these have never been synchronized displays of dehumanization. Free men do not accept too much regimentation. They will march in parades and do so smartly enough, but their motivation is to display their pride in their regiments and themselves, not to display themselves as faceless robots. This is a subtle but important distinction.
It seems a reasonable assumption that dictators like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin enjoyed seeing masses of people moving as a syncopated unit, and imagined that all of the individuals in the bloc of goose-steppers were moving entirely at the will of the dictator. Individuals have become submerged in the machinery of the state becoming nothing more than cogs in the great design of whatever dictator was up on the reviewing stand.
North Korea seems to have gone further in this direction than anything choreographed in a Nuremberg Rally or May Day Parade. On the great occasions of the North Korean state, even the spectators seem marshalled in orderly ranks as great masses of highly regimented –virtually indistinguishable – individuals march past – high kicking in perfect unison. Soldiers, sailors, police, factory workers, farmers and so on, all goose-step by the reviewing stand in perfect harmony with not one flaw in their uniformity. Here, as nowhere else, human beings appear as nothing more than tiny elements of a machine, demonstrating to the leaders of the regime their total and perfect submission to the state.
We watch, appalled, as the most nightmarish vision of some of the great ideological dictators is made manifest and shown off.
Public Hysteria
“The North Korean authorities have completed the criticism sessions which began after the mourning period for Kim Jong Il and have begun to punish those who transgressed during the highly orchestrated mourning events.
“Daily NK learned from a source from North Hamkyung Province on January 10th, “The authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organized gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn’t seem genuine.”
“Furthermore, the source added that people who are accused of circulating rumors criticizing the country’s 3rd generation dynastic system are also being sent to re-education camps or being banished with their families to remote rural areas.”
— Choi Song Min, “Harsh Punishments for Poor Mourning“, Daily NK, January 11th, 2012.
The world was also agog with the displays of seemingly instant public grief after the death of Kim Jong Il. Television footage displayed masses of people, with their faces collapsed as they wailed and cried in a collective paroxysm of grief. As usual, viewers around the world asked themselves “Is this for real?” We don’t like to believe that our most private or powerful emotions can be switched on-and-off on command. Alas, they can indeed be so misused.
In George Orwell’s classic novel of life in a totalitarian dystopia, 1984, the main character, Winston Smith, takes the reader to the compulsory collective sessions of a completely ideologically driven society. This includes the daily Two Minute Hate, where Party Members are subjected to images of the dreaded enemy of the party, Emmanuel Goldstein, and work themselves into a frenzy of anger and fear. Smith can’t help himself; he knows his feelings are being manipulated, but within 30 seconds of the start of the daily hate, his hatred becomes real. His ultimately futile rebellion against the party begins during a daily hate session, when he discovers the means of redirecting his hate against other targets without letting his co-workers realize it.
A fictional example does not prove the reality or the sincerity of public mourning for Kim II. Yet Orwell’s example of behaviour in a totalitarian society is rooted in the reality of political life during Stalin’s purges. We have also seen the infamous video clip of Saddam Hussein taking a firm grip on the Iraqi Ba’ath party in 1979, when his grip on power was tenuous. He turned up at a Ba’ath conference with armed guards, announced he had discovered a plot against the regime, and started calling his critics out of the hall – where they were promptly shot. The Ba’ath party members turned incredulous and terrified: then each individual realized that his best chance of survival rested with a slavish display of devotion for Saddam and they strove to outdo each other in announcing their love for him.
There are plenty of other examples of feigned emotional states becoming real, especially under duress. Episodes of mass hysteria, such as those times when witch-hunting was underway, yield many anecdotes from Salem to South Africa. On the West Bank when Arafat was still alive, Palestinians by themselves were normally quiet and orderly but this was not the case when a ‘traitor’ or ‘Israeli spy’ (i.e. some hapless fellow who had been public in criticizing Arafat) had been unmasked; in those cases it was prudent to publically display your hatred towards the victim who could be literally torn apart by the mob as each mob member strove to display the sincerity of his hatred.
Put on a sham emotion and eventually it becomes real. Even in our society, schoolyard bullying will result in children feigning contempt for a designated oddball or outsider to avoid being selected as a victim by the opinion-leaders among them. The feigned contempt can turn all too easily into real contempt over time. Salesmen know the trick of being upbeat and positive, sometimes the artificial feeling of optimism is what gets them out of bed in the morning. Act angry and soon you will be angry.
In a totalitarian society, the beast of the internal security apparatus must be fed, and people will find any excuse to stuff somebody else into its maw. When the beast is especially hungry, everyday behaviour becomes stranger and stranger. Arthur Koestler once wrote of a time at the height of the Stalinist purges when the dictator’s name was mentioned in the theatre of some provincial city in Russia. The crowd rose as one and started cheering and applauding, and this went on, and on, and on… everybody feared to be the first to stop clapping and resume their seat as they would be likely to be arrested on principle by the NKVD and sent off to the Kolyma as some sort of Trotskyite wrecker and saboteur. Hands went red and numb, voices failed, and yet people went on hoping that somebody’s endurance would fail before theirs did.
In North Korea, the Kim was dead and it was not yet time to hail the new Kim; in the meantime act bereft and anguished… the Security Organs of the State were watching… closely. People acted out their grief, convinced themselves it was genuine, and yet – in some private corner of the minds – perhaps their real grief was for themselves.
The Dwarf People
Accurate statistics from totalitarian countries are hard to come by. The Soviets used to routinely falsify maps, let alone statistics – although the nadir of this condition was the 1937 Census that apparently revealed that the population of the USSR was at least 12 million people less than the authorities expected. The team running the census was purged and sent to the Gulag.
North Korea is even worse than the Soviets – or contemporary Wall Street Investment Bankers – for keeping unrealistic books at hand. Instead, NGOs and outside agencies must be expected to give a better picture of life in the Kingdom of the Kims.
Perusing the CIA World Handbook (which is an excellent and impartial source of statistics), North Korea tends to be among the most under-developed nations on the planet in terms of live births per 100,000, child mortality, maternal mortality rates and other demographic indicators. Statistics from the UN in 2010 indicated a drop in life-expectancy from 73 to 69 since 1993 and a steep climb in child mortality and maternal mortality during the same time. Despite this, North Korea’s overall population continues to grow, largely for the same reasons that this continues in sub-Saharan Africa. Also, the UN’s World Food Program found that by 2010, one third of North Korea’s women and children were severely malnourished, largely as a consequence of continuing food shortages.
Chronic malnutrition yields a staggering set of problems. The partial list of effects includes:
- Loss of height, even dwarfism
- Anemia
- Poor reflexes and coordination
- Poor mental development, particularly for perceptual-spatial recognition and motor skills
- Poor attention spans, more easily distracted
- Night blindness with attendant oversensitivity to light and glare
- Sensitive joints and fragile skeletons
- Children who are pale, listless, thin and easily prone to infections
What is even more telling is height and it is harder to hide the differences between North and South Koreans. After all, they are the same people in almost all genetic, linguistic and cultural ways. Occasional visitors in North Korea can take random samples, and defectors who manage to escape can also be measured against the average height for South Koreans of the same age and sex.
Ironically, North Koreans born in the 1930s tend to be taller than South Koreans of the same age – reflecting the fact that the North was better developed and more prosperous in those days. Koreans born in the 1960s tend to be about the same height. North Korean children who were born in the last decade tend to be markedly shorter – around 12.5 cm or five inches – then their southern counterparts. This is very telling evidence of chronic malnutrition.
However, it must also be pointed out that there is another trend in the opposite direction. Not only are North Koreans malnourished, but South Koreans are going through the same evolution – so to speak – observed among the British after nutrition improved in the early 20th Century, or among young Japanese as protein became cheaper and more available. South Koreans are getting taller than their parents and grandparents as a result of better nutrition.
Even so, when North Korea starts blustering about its military threat, it would be well to remember that its massive army is made up of some not very massive men. An army based on universal conscription tends to cream off the best educated for technical functions, the fittest for elite military units and the ones from the most reliable families for internal security functions. That doesn’t leave much for the infantry, artillery and tank corps.
Occasional whispers from North Korean garrisons and cantonments have it that the quality of conscript troops has dropped dramatically in recent years. An artilleryman needs a fair amount of upper-body strength to heft shells and wrestle his field gun into place; a tank crewman needs to be robust as well, not least because of the daily accumulation of bruises his calling inflicts as he is tossed about in his vehicle; whereas the life of the infantryman places a high premium on endurance. Yet strength, robustness, and endurance are required for all three tasks, as is a fair amount of intelligence, even with the simple weaponry of the 1960s that they are issued. One can suspect that the latest cohorts of conscripts have been quite sub-par.
Whatever else may be true of the North Koreans – and the well-fed court cadres around Pyongyang are not a fair representation of the entire population – one must pity them. They are a people who are being turned into stunted unhealthy goblins, condemned to be cogs in a machine run for the regime and who are expected to display their most intense emotions for the pampered princes or face severe consequences.
One shouldn’t wish ill of the dead but all the same, one hopes for bad luck for Kim I and Kim II, wherever they are now and a very short reign for Kim III the Chubby Cheeked. This is not the most diplomatic of hopes, but a people as abused and manipulated as those of North Korea deserve far better than they have received. The indignities heaped on the people of North Korea degrade all of humanity. One can only hope this condition will soon end.
PS. In the UN General Assembly on December 22nd, there was to be a moment of silence to mark the passage of Kim II. Instead, the Canadian delegation walked out, closely followed by the delegations of several other countries. Perhaps believing that this was some sort of diplomatic faux pas by Stephen Harper’s Conservative Government, reporters in Ottawa asked representatives of the NDP and Liberals what they thought of the gesture. They both strongly endorsed it. Well done all!
