Mankind at the crossroad. How are we dealing with global challenges?

Friday, December 1, 2017

North Korea seen through experience of Stalin's Russia

url   https://redd.it/7a9sly

I was ten years old when the Communists in 1948 carried out a coup in Czechoslovakia and established a totalitarian regime which lasted until 1989. I grew up, not under totality, but with it. Here I will share some insights stemming from that cohabitation.
Totality, like people, goes through stages. It starts young, full of enthusiastic energy and optimism. The Communistic anthem -'the Internationale' sings “NO LONGER POVERTY AND HUNGER” .. “Welcome BRIGHT AND GLORIOUS future”.
Dictators come to power promising to save their people. The outside danger the leader is saving them from or the humiliation they have been suffering from has to look real to at least some, at first. After an aspiring dictator manages to seize power, the second stage begins, when fear of the new regime joins the previous feelings of anger and humiliation. Naturally, there will always be those who will oppose THE GLORIOUS FUTURE and we – the Revolution -- have to deal with them first. Arrests, trials, concentration camps, executions, or jail mark this stage in particular. Later , totalitarian regimes grow old and tired. Disillusion sets in. That is the third stage. That is true for all of dictatorships, left or right, Stalin or Hitler, etc. But totalities do not age with the same speed and do not end with the same outcome; Communism in Russia died differently than Nazism in Germany.
When Communism was imposed on Czechoslovakia in 1948, not all people were against it. Czechoslovakia felt betrayed by its western allies, England and France. These "allies" had signed the Munich agreement in 1939, giving Hitler the western part of the country, which contained small version of the Maginot line, a potentially powerful deterrent to Nazi invasion. Both the humiliation and anger had survived six years of war. Then, the country was liberated, not by US army but by the Red army, due to an agreement between Stalin and Churchill which was at first kept secret from the Americans. Churchill's so-called "nasty document," considered by some "a second Munich," specified the agreed-upon spheres of influence, awarding most of Eastern Europe to Stalin. It was "just a piece of paper," both literally and figuratively, of course. Stalin already had his Red army in place all over Eastern Europe and had no plans to have only a percentage of influence. He wanted total control. In Czechoslovakia he got that through the coup of 1948; elsewhere, full control came later.
I am not judging Churchill nor do I doubt the necessity of establishing a line at which the western Allied armies and eastern Allied army, the Red army, would meet. As a child, I did not understand the situation, but I recall the emotions, both my own and those of the adults. I survived the occupation unscathed and did not consider the world around me strange. A bit confused sometimes, but it was all I had known.
At the end of the war, when I was six years old, U.S. planes had control of the air in Europe. The Russian front was moving toward our Nazi-held town. I recall the only time my father yelled at me was when he found me in the street during an air raid. We all knew the sound of the siren, but I was playing with my friend too far from the center and we did not hear it. My father explained to me, once we got to shelter, that in those planes are Americans, who are our friends. If they saw me in the street, they would shoot me with the machine guns they have in those planes. A bit confusing, but I accepted it as the world around me.
At the end of the war Czechoslovakia was liberated, not occupied, by the Soviet army. I felt that suddenly the adults stopped being afraid. I remember the flowers and tears of gratitude. The euphoria of liberation did not last long. Just few years after the Communist coup, Stalin started his usual series of show trials to institute the second stage of totality. People, my parents certainly, were afraid, again. I was 14 by then and just coming of age. The mechanism of fear did not work that well on members of my generation. Orwell in 1984 described very well how the generation reaching adulthood under totality grows immune from fear. Propaganda sounds like tinnitus, always there, loud but irrelevant. A lie repeated hundred times may become a "truth," but repeated a thousand times it becomes just boring, background noise to reality.
In 1968, my generation set the mood of the Prague Spring that year: the nonviolent and seemingly unstoppable call for the return to democracy. It required the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to stop. Or, with hindsight, to postpone it. When Gorbachev in 1990 was asked, "What is difference between your so called 'openness' and ‘perestrojka’ and the ‘socialism with human face’ they called for in Czechoslovakia in 1968?" he answered thoughtfully: "Twenty years." The same disease, just on different scale, which made Czechs tire of communism had spread into the Soviet Union itself. Gorbachev was wise enough to see that. Those who staged a coup to stop Gorbachev, to try to change the course of history, failed. There was no invasion army ready to stop the change. True, the fact that US and the West were strong and determined to defend themselves if necessary, was important. But it was not fear of Reagan's Star Wars which lead to the collapse of Communism. It was disillusion. The GLORIOUS FUTURE had not arrived but neither had the threat that "American imperialists" would try to destroy the country as Hitler had tried. So . . . why keep living under this life-sucking bureaucracy?
In the light of this history, how can we understand the posturing of the current dictator of North Korea? The rhetoric about hitting our mainland with rockets is not intended for us. He knows we are not that scared. The intended audience is the North Koreans, his subjects. To those who are asking themselves why they tolerate his rule, he says: "I am here to protect you from the evil USA which wants to destroy you." The memory of the Korean war of 1950 is a reminder of that, but a remote one. They need to hear that the threat is still there. Hear it from the horse's mouth. Therefore the reaction "We would destroy North Korea" is the worst possible response to Kim’s provocation, exactly what he wants his subjects to hear. In emotional affect, the word "would" is very close to "will." They think, "The only thing which can save us is Kim-un." Not a rocket man, just a skilled dictator.
A better, more effective response would be to ignore his posturing. When pressed we could say, "The North Korean people have the right to select their future. We wish them luck." Of course, we would continue working on our Missile Defense and maintain the sanctions. We may be forced to destroy North Korea, but we need not broadcast such an unlikely possibility. We should remove the uncertainty and proclaim that as long as North Korea stays withing the legal limits, which means no aggression outside its borders, we will tolerate its arsenal.
Let us not play into Kim's manipulation of the North Korean population. Let time work for us and bring the collapse of the regime.