December 18, 2011

There are a few things I can’t let pass without comment this weekend.

The defection of a squad of armed North Korean soldiers — if true, as the compulsory caveat goes — could open a new chapter in the Kim Dynasty’s erosive dialectic. This sort of defection can’t happen on a mass scale despite the forceful suppression of the two fascist regimes that border the Yalu, but it does suggest that when North Korea eventually devolves into something like what Syria has become, there will be a political base for something akin to the Free Syrian Army in some North Korean units.

Have you ever seen one image that instantly simplified a question of great moral complexity? I submit that this photograph does us this service regarding the question of food aid to North Korea. Every discussion of that question ought to begin with a contemplation of all that this photograph reveals about it:

[Reuters]

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Another North Korean camp survivor has escaped and lived long enough to tell her story.

Two years after the passage of UNSCR 1874 and five years after the passage of UNSCR 1718, the House has passed a sanctions bill that would freeze the assets of companies — the overwhelming majority of them Chinese — that are still selling prohibited goods to North Korea. You can read an executive summary of the new bill here. If it becomes law, the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Reform and Modernization Act of 2011 would compliment the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act. Most significantly, the new bill would allow for the freezing of assets of companies that sell conventional weapons to the North Korean regime.

How sad that (1) time and time again, it is foreigners and not other Koreans who are left alone standing up for the humanity of North Koreans, even in Korea itself, and (2) that when female foreigners assume this burden, they’re forced to tolerate the publication of unserious and irrelevant questions about their personal lives. Why is it that most South Koreans, who’ve distinguished themselves in so many ways for their brilliance and their fearless gall, are so persistently overcome by stupidity and cowardice when some impudent foreigner (or artillerist) turns the topic to North Korea?

Two men who have inspired me died this week. One was Vaclav Havel. When I visited Prague in August of 1990, less than a year after the Velvet Revolution, he was certainly the most genuinely, sincerely beloved political figure I’ve observed in any place or time. It wasn’t just that his picture seemed to be on the wall of every shop — after all, one could say that about Kim Jong Il and Hafez Asad, or at various times, about Ceausescu, Saddam, or Khaddafy. But if you’ve ever had a conversation with strangers in a Czech beer hall, you will understand me when I say that “pious” and “idolatrous” are not words that even remotely describe the character of the Czech people, and that in those times, the afterglow was real. I will give you a quote from Mr. Havel:

The number of people who sincerely believe everything that the official propaganda says and who selflessly support the government’s authority is smaller than it has ever been. But the number of hypocrites rises steadily: up to a point, every citizen is, in fact, forced to be one. …

If every day someone takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny himself in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of dignity.

On the contrary: even if they never speak of it, people have a very acute appreciation of the price they have paid for outward peace and quiet: the permanent humiliation of their human dignity.

Here’s a dare: name a person who didn’t vehemently disagree with at least one-third of the things Christopher Hitchens said. I think he often said things for the sheer joy of provoking others. Contrast, for example, his blasphemous rewriting of the Ten Commandments against his reverence for the language of the King James Bible. Even when I disagreed with Hitchens, and especially when I didn’t — “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox” — I found him more fun to read him than any other author, living or dead. I couldn’t choose just one favorite quotation, so I chose the ones I couldn’t help quoting here. First, on British royalty:

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.

, where I think Hitchens overlooked the socially stabilizing and altruistic aspects of some religions:

[Religious belief] is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you – who must, indeed, subject you – to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life – I say, of your life – before you’re born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I’ve been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He’s not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It’s a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It’s one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!

If nothing else, I owe Hitchens a debt for his contributions to this blog: some of the inspiration, and the image for my masthead. Hitchens never wanted to make a sympathetic figure of himself, but I can’t help feeling especially terrible for his wife and young daughter right now.