Robert Kaplan and Abraham M. Denmark on North Korea's Demise

Robert Kaplan and Abraham M. Denmark, both of the Center for a New American Security, have co-authored an article for World Affairs (May/June 2011): "The Long Goodbye: The Future North Korea."

Robert Kaplan

Abraham M. Denmark

Their interest is in the possible collapse of North Korea, which they expect will be almost entirely unlike most of the collapses that occurred in Eastern Europe in 1989, but they did find one potential parallel:

[T]here is one lesson from Eastern Europe's example that does shed a chilling light on North Korea: the more repressive and artificially maintained the regime is, the more sudden and precipitous the collapse. Poland and Hungary, the most liberally administered Communist satellite states, with reformist factions tolerated inside the party apparatuses, had soft, velvet collapses that played out gradually over many months, beginning in 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall actually fell. But Albania and Romania, whose Stalinist regimes were heavily dependent on extreme cults of personality, unraveled at once and without warning. In the case of Romania, it took only ten days for a small demonstration about minority rights in the western city of Timisoara to mushroom into a nationwide uprising that culminated in the grim executions of tyrants Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Nobody should consider the future of North Korea without keeping in mind the Romanian example. It is not a coincidence that Nicolae Ceausescu was a close friend of Kim Il-sung, and considered North Korea a model for Communist Romania.

I recall stating a similar warning in 1995, but sufficient time has passed for me to steer clear of uttering confident remarks about North Korea's possible collapse . . . though I'll gladly quote the predictions of other individuals. The parallel to Romania is at least historically valid, for Nicolae Ceausescu modeled his own cult of personality on that of Kim Il-sung after a visit to North Korea, and I remember well what happened when the abrupt collapse struck, for a friend and I were in Switzerland listening to the BBC-reported events on his shortwave radio, and we had a bit of fun at Ceausescu's expense, though events were in fact quite serious.

Kaplan and Denmark don't exactly predict, but they do consider various scenarios for collapse, each one more unexpected and alarming than all of the others.

The article is worth reading for a reminder that none of us knows what the feck is going to happen in the Kingdom of the North . . .

When a writer is having fun...

"Genius of the Carpathians"
The Far-Seeing Leader
General Secretary Mihai
. . . er, Ceauşescu
(Image from Wikipedia)

As mentioned yesterday, I have recently received the rest of the novels in Olen Steinhauer's Cold War series on an unnamed Eastern European nation. I've finished reading The Confession and am now reading 36 Yalta Boulevard. I'm not ready to write a long review post yet, for I want to finish them all and think about them, but I do have something to report.

In a passage that expresses perfectly the insipid imagination of the party hack writers who used their literary 'gifts' to extol their party hack leaders, Steinhauer depicts The Funeral Procession for Secretary General Mihai as observed through the watchful eyes of Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar:

Children sobbed on fathers' shoulders; mothers clutched their heads whenever anything appeared on the cleared boulevard. Banners fluttered down from windows, announcing that MIHAI LIVES FOREVER IN THE HEARTS OF THE WORKING CLASSES and quoting him: "THE PATH TO FREEDOM IS TREACHEROUS, BUT WE ARE GREATER THAN MERE TREACHERY." His younger portraits hung from lampposts like Roman standards and filled shop windows. Magda grabbed my had as we were pushed forward. The motorcade began with white Militia cars, their aerials bound in black ribbons, then came the long hearse. Madga slipped as the crowd surged, but steadied herself on my arm. Bullhorns on the hearse's roof bellowed a slow dirge and a deep voice listing all his titles: Liberator of the Nation; Friend to the Young and Old; Fount of Imprenetrable Knowledge . . . . Seed of the Land; Thunderstorm in Times of Drought . . . . Academician of Worldwide Acclaim; Friend to the Animals of the Planet . . . . (The Confession, 296-297)

Steinhauer had to have been having fun inventing those titles. Or perhaps Steinhauer simply lifted them from a list of titles for General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party Nicolae Ceauşescu, who gave himself the title "Genius of the Carpathians," among other laudations in his personality cult (though Mihai would have been more of a Gheorghiu-Dej figure).

Ceauşescu, incidentally, may have gotten the idea for such titles from the North Korean titles for the great leaders there, for he visited North Korea in 1971 and was impressed by Kim Il-sung's juche philosophy, which Ceauşescu then attempted to apply in Romania, with predictably disastrous consequences of the sort that we continue to see in North Korea's failures.

Likewise, encountered in person, these great leaders always fail to live up to their great titles, as Steinhauer shows in Jan Soroka's memory of his youthful meeting with the great leader Mihai:

And then I saw Mihai himself . . . . Well, the photos and newsreels never really showed how short he was, did they? He was a head shorter than me. This was a shock, I can tell you . . . . Not just that he was short. He had a cold at the time, and whenever he breathed you could hear how hard it was for him. I was a kid, you know, and I couldn't imagine how such a great man could be like this -- short, snot-nosed, no better than the guy who sells vegetables in the market. And this was the head of our country? (36 Yalta Boulevard, 89-90)

Steinhauer does this bit of demythologization rather convincingly. A short, snotnosed leader who fails to impress up close. Some writer ought also do this with novels on Cold War North Korea.

Or has one already done so? Perhaps I need to read A Corpse in the Koryo by the pseudonymous James Church...