Socialism has directly led to millions of famine-related deaths in North Korea
North Korean policy is more attributable to socialism than to the whims of its dictators
Like other socialist tyrants, Kim Jong Il mixes politics with biology
It is difficult to believe that history just happens to throw up monsters every time an unusually powerful central government is created. What are the chances, really, that Kim Il Sung, the very definition of a monster in politics, would have an equally monstrous, if not more monstrous, son to whom to bequeath his empire? What are the chances that the great demon of the twentieth century, Vladimir Lenin, would have an equally wicked lieutenant, Joseph Stalin, to take over for him when he died? And what are the chances that Stalin would find his mirror image in Adolf Hitler, another monster who clawed his way up from the penumbras of politics at precisely the same moment in history?
There is much to be said about the private immorality of such men, but there is at least as much to be said—probably more—about the ideas they embraced. Ideas move the world. A political idea is what makes the difference between a common criminal and a genocidal tyrant. A political idea is what turns a bitter art student into Hitler, a petty bank-robber into Stalin.
One has to wonder: what kind of idea turned the father-son, tag-team tyrants of North Korea into the masters of an anachronistic, starving slave-state, an island of antique Stalinism in the sea of resurgent Asian capitalism? The idea has a name, and it is “Juche.”
On the occasion of the seventieth birthday of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong Il, a future dictator, published an essay on the “Juche Idea,” the guiding philosophy of his family’s socialist regime. It is a largely banal and bombastic document, but it is remarkable for its robust—indeed, fanatical—commitment to the idea of socialist central planning. The Juche Idea holds that man is the center of the universe and that his powers to transform the universe are, in effect, unlimited, so long as he has the right kind of political leadership and acts under the right principles. As another leader of an effort to fundamentally transform his society might have put it, the Juche Idea holds that “we are the change we’ve been waiting for.” Kim writes,
The Juche Idea is a new philosophical thought which centers on man. As the leader [Kim Il Sung] said, the Juche Idea is based on the philosophical principle that man is the master of everything and decides everything. The Juche Idea raised the fundamental question of philosophy by regarding man as the main factor, and elucidated the philosophical principle that man is the master of everything and decides everything.1
That kind of heroic, anthropocentric thinking will be familiar to students of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw the sovereign (in his case, an abstract sovereign: the “rule of law”) as a kind of vessel by means of which the “general will” is collected and channeled into the state, the cauldron in which it is boiled down into policy through means obscure. Echoes of Rousseau can be heard throughout the history of socialism, and it is no coincidence that defenders of the anti-democratic Hugo Chávez describe him, in apologetic tones, as a “Rousseauean democrat,” which is to say, no kind of democrat at all.
It is surely not any kind of familiar democracy that the North Koreans have in mind when they describe their state as the Democratic People’s Republic. If not through democracy, how is it that man “decides everything”? And what does Kim mean by the term? Helpfully, he explained his thinking:
That man is the master of everything means that he is the master of the world and of his own destiny; that man decides everything means that he plays the decisive role in transforming the world and in shaping his destiny.
The philosophical principle of the Juche Idea is the principle of man-centered philosophy which explains man’s position and role in the world. The leader made it clear that man is a social being with Chajusong [a peculiar Korean expression meaning, roughly “social consciousness”], creativity and consciousness.
Man, though material existence, is not a simple material being. He is the most developed material being, a special product of the evolution of the material world.
Man was already outstanding as he emerged from the world of nature. He exists and develops by cognizing and changing the world to make it serve him, whereas all other material lives maintain.
. . . Man cannot, of course, live outside the world; he lives and conducts his activity in the world. Nature is the object of man’s labor and also is the material source of his life. Society is a community where people live and conduct activities. Natural environments and social conditions have a great effect on human activity. Whether natural environments are good or bad and, in particular, whether the political and economic systems of a society are progressive or reactionary—these factors may favorably affect human endeavor to remake nature and develop society or limit and restrict that activity.
But man does not merely adapt himself to environments and conditions. By his independent, creative and conscious activity, man continuously transforms nature and society, changing as he desires what does not meet his needs, and replacing what is outdated and reactionary with what is new and progressive.2
What it means, then, is that reality is not reality, only the raw material from which the all-powerful MAN—by which Kim clearly means the all-powerful STATE—shapes a new reality according to the mandates of politics.
“Tens of thousands starved in the latest [North Korean] famine, from 1995 to 1997. Lee, who asked that her given name not be used, was a clerk in a government office who notarized the deaths in her town. She is a pretty young woman, 29, with tumbling hair curling to her shoulders and smooth, flawless skin that belies the hardships she has faced and struggles to explain. ‘We started seeing cannibalism,’ she recalled, pausing. ‘You probably won’t understand.’ She went on: ‘When one is very hungry, one can go crazy.’
“. . . ‘I can’t condemn cannibalism. Not that I wanted to eat human meat, but we were so hungry. . . . I witnessed a woman being questioned for cannibalism. She said it tasted good.’
“Massive international food aid gradually stemmed the famine after a death toll estimated at anywhere from 300,000 to 2 million.”
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Washington Post, 2003
There is probably no more dangerous idea than the belief that a society can be perfected, and that the men who reside in it can be perfected as well, that we can, at will, start “replacing what is outdated and reactionary with what is new and progressive.” Not that we haven’t tried: Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all found great swathes of their societies outdated and reactionary, and worked to eliminate them. Hitler was known to protest that “the Jew is not a socialist!” in explaining his anti-Semitism. But if you believe that it is possible to command all of the relevant knowledge in a society, that you can make rational decisions governing every aspect of life, and that you have a historical mandate to do so, then you must believe that you can create a kind of utopia, a political heaven on Earth.
However, when THE PLAN fails—and THE PLAN always fails—then it is time to find somebody to blame. Over the course of the twentieth century, political movements understanding themselves to be socialist were responsible for the deaths of some 100 million people.3 In China, in Cambodia, in the USSR, the belief in the perfectibility of society led not to heaven on Earth but to hell on Earth, especially for those poor unfortunates who found themselves labeled “outdated and reactionary” by socialist regimes applying the best “scientific” thinking they could muster to the management of human affairs.
Under the Juche Idea, that allegedly scientific thinking has three components. They are chaju, or independence in politics; charip, or economic independence (a concept not very different from Gandhi’s swadeshi ideology); and chawi, or assertive national defense. As for independence in politics, the thought that any typical North Korean should have any say in the affairs of the state is clearly anathema to Kim’s regime, and chaju, if it means anything, is shorthand for North Korean nationalism. Likewise, there is relatively little to say here about chawi: North Korea has been nothing if not assertive in its military operations, terrorizing its neighbors, torpedoing the occasional ship, and using its nuclear arsenal as a tool of blackmail. Nationalism and militarism are fairly common features of socialist states—particularly of the more comprehensively socialist states—but there is nothing uniquely socialistic about them. Kim’s charip, though—the Juche Idea’s philosophy of economic independence—is of interest, and is worth exploring as a strain of socialist economics.
Charip, like swadeshi, is a creed of self-reliance. As such, it rejects international trade and investment. At some level, it is inconceivable that a socialist state would fail to reject international trade with non-socialist economies. Believing that profit-oriented private enterprise is, by definition, an act of exploitation of the working classes, a socialist regime that partook of the fruit of that purportedly poisonous tree would be enriching itself at the cost of the very same workers whose liberation from capitalism is its reason for being. Under a comprehensively socialist regime, profits would not exist, inasmuch as profits are, under the Labor Theory of Value, evidence of a capitalist crime being committed. Without profits, of course, there is nothing with which to finance trade; socialists have always hoped to finesse that problem by achieving large surpluses of industrial and agricultural production, but of course socialist economies rarely if ever produce those kinds of surpluses.
As a result, socialist societies often resort to a crude form of economic nationalism, insisting that all that is necessary in life can be produced locally under socialist conditions. That kind of nationalistic rhetoric is fairly common in state-planned sectors in non-socialist countries, too; one can hear charip-style rhetoric in the speeches of American progressives who bemoan the country’s “addiction to foreign oil.” North Korea not only rejects dependence upon foreign oil, but upon foreign anything—in theory, at least. In practice, North Korea is supported by food aid from the West, by medical assistance and energy aid from South Korea, and by other forms of international humanitarian assistance.
“At 16, Myung Bok is old enough to join the North Korean army. But you wouldn’t believe it from his appearance. The teenager stands 4-feet-7, the height of an American fifth- or sixth-grader.
“Myung Bok escaped the communist North last summer to join his mother and younger sisters, who had fled to China earlier. When he arrived, 14-year-old sister Eun Hang did not recognize the scrawny little kid walking up the dirt path to their cottage in a village near the North Korean border, whom she hadn’t seen for four years.
“‘I can’t believe he used to be my big brother,’ Eun Hang said sadly as she recalled their early childhood, when Myung Bok was always a full head taller. Now she can peek over the crown of his head without standing on her tiptoes.
“The teenagers go through an almost daily ritual: They stand against a wooden wardrobe in which they’ve carved notches with a penknife, hoping that after eating a regular diet, Myung Bok will grow tall enough to reclaim his status as a big brother.
”. . . The World Food Program and UNICEF reported last year that chronic malnutrition had left 42 percent of North Korean children stunted—meaning their growth was seriously impaired, most likely permanently. An earlier report by the U.N. agencies warned that there was strong evidence that physical stunting could be accompanied by intellectual impairment.”
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Los Angeles Times, 2004
Juche and charip are written right into North Korea’s constitution, and the country’s decision to stand alone economically produced the inevitable consequences familiar to any student of socialism. As the journalist Mitchell Lerner reports, Kim Il Sung’s five-year plan of the late 1950s met with some measure of success. From dietary staples such as bean paste and soy sauce to Western-style consumer items such as beer and soft drinks, the socialist regime was successful in nationalizing almost all production, from 90 percent to 100 percent by most estimates.
But socialist regimes will not normally limit themselves to planning the soft-drink industry. Kim Il Sung embarked on a wide-ranging campaign to achieve massive and rapid industrialization, redistribution of land and agricultural resources, and similar large-scale projects of economic reorganization. Within a few years, Kim’s subjects were starving. Housing was in short supply, electricity nonexistent in much of the country and unreliable in the rest, water and sewer services were falling apart, and the country’s infrastructure was quickly decaying into ruin, where it remains today—except for the 500-foot-tall, gleaming white granite Juche Tower, a monument to Kim Il Sung composed of a granite block for each day he had lived until the tower’s construction.
Soon enough, famine struck, and millions died. Lerner relates a cheery state-run radio broadcast from the 1990s: “Today I will introduce you to tasty and healthy ways to eat wild grass.”4 At the famine’s worst, North Koreans were reduced to worse than that—reports of cannibalism made the rounds in intelligence circles and in the international press.
To many, all of this sounds like utter madness. Outsiders, particularly in the West, frequently describe Kim Jong Il as being “insane” or “irrational,” and characterize his government’s behavior as “bizarre.” “We don’t know much about North Korea and who this Kim Jong Il is,” California congressman Jay Kim once said. “I understand he is not a rational individual.”5
What they almost always fail to appreciate is that Kim is proceeding in accordance with the Juche ideology, a form of socialism that is eccentric, to be sure, but which ought to be familiar enough to us, from our experience with other expressions of socialism, that we can understand Pyongyang’s seemingly erratic behavior. North Korea is not the personality of Kim Jong Il spread thin across the land, but socialism spread thick upon it.
It often has been noted that Kim’s regime becomes most bellicose at precisely those moments that it is most vulnerable, when it is seeking assistance from South Korea and from the West. But Kim’s behavior is much less unpredictable in light of the mandates of the Juche Idea, which holds that North Korea has a mandate from history to achieve full socialism on its own terms, following its own interests (which are defined as being identical to the narrow self-interest of the governing regime), independent of outside influence.
Under Juche, North Korea rejects foreign values for precisely the same reasons that it rejects (in theory) foreign goods: because they are incompatible with socialism. If this is madness, it is madness of a catchy kind: Stalin suffered from the same disease. So did Lenin. So did Mao. So does Hugo Chávez today. The “madman theory” of world history sheds very little light on the behavior of such regimes; an understanding of socialist ideology, and its application to the messy realities of economic life as it actually is lived, is much more illuminating.
“I could not use a word like madman” to describe Kim, says North Korea specialist Kongdan Oh in an interview with journalist Laura McClure. “He is a very bright, very daring, very bold dictator who knows how to control his society and act strategically to shock his people and the globe. In that sense he’s no different from a person like Stalin or Saddam Hussein, and in many ways he’s actually been more successful. . . . The economy has been devastated since the early 1990s and yet the country is still standing together. Something is holding them together.”6
Oh believes that what is holding North Korea together is Kim’s iron fist, a government based on state terrorism, and the regime’s violent retribution against its critics. But it is as likely that what is holding North Korea together is the Juche ideology, which is interwoven into every aspect of North Korean life in a way that is difficult to appreciate for those who have never lived in an entirely closed, hermetically sealed society. As one North Korean defector put it, “I never thought that Juche was a closed or oppressive ideology. I simply believed it as truth. I could not imagine being disloyal to Kim Il Sung. When he died, I was sad—much as when my father died.”7
These lessons, unfortunately, remain lost on the modern Left, and on those who continue to romanticize socialism. Writing in the quarterly journal International Socialism, Owen Miller rehearses the familiar litany of socialist apologetics when it comes to regimes such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: what’s going on in Pyongyang isn’t “real socialism”—it’s “state capitalism.” It isn’t the fault of socialism, but the result of the malign influence of Joseph Stalin, whose agents dominated North Korea in its early days. It’s because North Korea is insufficiently democratic, superabundantly nationalist, inauthentically a “workers’ state.” In a bizarre exercise in moral equivalence, he writes that in its early days “the North Korean regime was a ‘puppet government’ of a variety not significantly different from the current regime in occupied Iraq.”8 But of course there is a significant difference: socialism.
“Twilight in the Evil Kingdom of the Hermit Midgets.”
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Mario Loyola, describing the crisis in the North Korean regime, National Review, 2010
North Korea is not the only state that has used hunger as a weapon of mass terrorism: Stalin’s “Holodomor” starved to death as many as 10 million Ukrainians, and untold millions died under Mao’s politically induced famines.
It is worth considering that the cause of all this suffering was not the presence of evil men, but the presence of mistaken ideas. When Americans look back at their Founders, they often marvel at how lucky they were to have present at the creation of the republic a group of men including the austere aristocrat George Washington, the democratic Thomas Jefferson, the practical Alexander Hamilton, the skeptical Benjamin Franklin, the idealistic Tom Paine, and the rest of the luminaries of 1776. And they were all great men, to be sure—but if the revolution had worked out differently, if it had gone the way of the French revolution and descended into terror, oppression, and repression, then our opinions of these men would be considerably different.
The American Founders were great men, but they were also working in the service of great ideas—namely, the skeptical Yankee belief that, given a modest republican government to defend the borders and hang thieves, people would be better off more or less left to their own devices. Similarly, the dictators of the twentieth century each looked uniquely evil—until his evil was matched or surpassed by the dictator next door. How likely was it that remarkably evil men would come to power, at roughly the same time, in Germany, Italy, Russia, and China? A more likely explanation is that, wicked as those dictators were, it was the ideology they followed, and not the peculiar moral character of the men involved, that was the decisive factor. Indeed, the ideology of central planning is itself an invitation to the exercise of dictatorial power and repression, as Hayek argued so ably in The Road to Serfdom.
But we do not need to reach back into twentieth century history to explore that question. In our own time, there remains in the world one truly, comprehensively, committed socialist enterprise: The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. Though it is largely cut off from the world, a fact that led to its being nicknamed “The Hermit Kingdom,” North Korea has done us the service of making its governing socialist ideology a matter of public knowledge. Kim Jong Il has published considerably on the subject, and Pyongyang even has clubs of admirers in Western capitals: The Juche Idea Study Group of England, to take one example, advertises itself as “open to those who (1) support the Juche Idea wholeheartedly, (2) want to apply the Juche Idea in England, (3) love the DPRK, the WPK, Kim Il Sung, and Kim Jong Il.”9 For the sake of England, let us hope that their numbers are small.
The Juche Idea takes the scientific pretense of socialism—the belief that all of a society’s knowledge can be known, organized, and deployed by a central authority—and extends it to its most extreme conclusion. Not only does the Juche Idea hold that running a society is a science, it suggests that it is a particular science: biology.
The misapplication of scientific theories to social life was a remarkably common and influential feature of twentieth-century intellectual life, and no scientific insight was more widely or more consistently misapplied than Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. While Social Darwinism, the most nefarious misappropriation of evolutionary thinking, is largely (if unfairly) associated in the public mind with various right-wing organizations and movements, there was a fair amount of Social Darwinism afoot on what we would now call the Left or progressive side of the political spectrum. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger—who envisioned planning family life very much the way Lenin imagined planning the world economy—was a notable exponent of the racial-eugenic variation of Social Darwinism. Aldous Huxley was another.
The Social Darwinists tended to see in the theory of evolution a guideline for the state’s interaction with the individual and with groups of individuals. Sanger wanted rigorous state intervention to prevent the birth of “unfit” citizens, an opinion shared by the iconic liberal Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes. (Years later, socialist Sweden would fall into scandal for its programs of involuntary sterilization and other eugenics-related activities.)
But for socialists, Darwin’s ideas also were thought to shed light on the evolution of entire societies. Marx himself believed in an iron law of socio-economic evolution, one in which feudalism was displaced by capitalism, which was itself destined to be displaced by a provisional form of socialism, which was to be replaced by fully realized socialism. Even today, socialists and other sympathetic anti-capitalists speak of socioeconomic evolution as though it were a punctuated equilibrium like speciation; they speak of “Late Capitalism,” “Financial Capitalism,” and, with hope in their eyes, of “Post-Capitalism.” Stalin was taking a very Darwinian view of political evolution when he wrote,
Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard the process of development as a simple process of growth, where quantitative changes do not lead to qualitative changes, but as a development which passes from insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes to open ‘fundamental changes’ to qualitative changes; a development in which the qualitative changes occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, taking the form of a leap from one state to another; they occur not accidentally but as the natural result of an accumulation of imperceptible and gradual quantitative changes.10
Elsewhere, Stalin expands on this evolutionary view of politics, arguing that the study of political history should yield “laws” comparable to those of the natural sciences—as though human beings, and their aspirations, were so many electronics in so many orbits around the nucleus of the almighty state:
Hence, social life, the history of society, ceases to be an agglomeration of “accidents,” for the history of society becomes a development of society according to regular laws, and the study of the history of society becomes a science.
Hence, the practical activity of the party of the proletariat must not be based on the good wishes of “outstanding individuals,” not on the dictates of “reason,” “universal morals,” etc., but on the laws of development of society and on the study of these laws.
Further, if the world is knowable and our knowledge of the laws of development of nature is authentic knowledge, having the validity of objective truth, it follows that social life, the development of society, is also knowable, and that the data of science regarding the laws of development of society are authentic data having the validity of objective truths.
Hence, the science of the history of society, despite all the complexity of the phenomena of social life, can become as precise a science as, let us say, biology, and capable of making use of the laws of development of society for practical purposes.11
As Hayek might have pointed out—or as Darwin himself would no doubt have observed—the difference between biological evolution and the socialist view of socio-economic evolution is this: nobody is in charge of biological evolution. Nobody plans biological evolution—it represents a kind of spontaneous order, resulting from the complex interaction of billions and billions of individual factors. That is to say, biological evolution much more closely resembles the market economy than it does socialist central planning. Ironically, given the secular leanings of most socialists, what their ideas really most closely resemble is the anti-Darwinian theory of “Intelligent Design.”
Stalin, for all of his shortcomings, benefited from the cleverness and the cynicism native to his youthful occupation of bank-robbing. He might have had philosophical essays published under his name (and may even have written them—who knows?) but he was, at heart, a simple tyrant. Even simple tyrants, however, have a set of operating ideas that guide them. The “politics as biology” theme that is implicit in Stalin and Marx becomes more explicit under the Juche Idea, which finds Kim Jong Il writing,
Since the leader is the center of the life of a socio-political community, revolutionary duty and comradeship must also be centered on the leader. . . loyalty to the leader and comradeship towards him are absolute and unconditional because the leader, as the top brain of the socio-political organism, represents the integrity of the community. It is only when the leader, the party and the masses are integrated that they can become an immortal socio-political organism . . . . Being at the center of unity and leadership, he plays the decisive role in shaping the destiny of the popular masses. This is similar to the brain of a man playing the decisive role in his activities.12
Kim’s language here ranges from the bombastic to the lifeless, though some of that may be an artifact of translation from Kim’s own eccentric Korean. But it is worth considering that North Korean socialism is only radical in its breadth and depth, not in its fundamental assumptions about the nature of society and the possibilities of governance. The North Korean communists are simply attempting to do to an entire country what political authorities have done to K-12 education in the United States: run it politically, through central planning under state authority.
The results, unsurprisingly, are the same: American government schools fail to produce educated students, while North Korean government farms fail to produce crops. The costs are much more dramatic and readily apparent in the case of North Korea—starvation is a shocking thing—though it is of course the case that there are many countervailing institutions in the United States that make the costs of the crumbling educational system less obvious.
“The North Korean state-sanctioned philosophy of Juche is the 10th-largest religion in the world with 19 million adherents, according to Adherents.com, a Web site that tracks world religions.
“It’s bigger than Judaism, bigger than Jainism, bigger than Baha’i. Sorry Tom Cruise, but it’s nearly 40 times bigger than the Church of Scientology.
“Not bad for a religion that isn’t even considered a religion by its followers.
“If you told a loyal North Korean that Juche (pronounced ‘JOOCH-ay’) is a religion, he might punch you in your shamelessly heretical mouth.
“‘Juche,’ he might say, ‘is definitely NOT a religion: We’re atheists, for heaven’s sake.’
“And then he might tell you how Comrade Kim Il Sung, Juche’s founder and Kim Jong Il’s dad, is laid to rest within the Sacred Temple of Juche, near signs that read ‘The great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung will always be with us!’
“If religion is a duck, says Tom Belke, author of Juche: A Christian Study of North Korea’s State Religion, Juche quacks big time. In an attempt to run away from religion, North Korea has run smack dab into it. ‘They have their holy sites, they have their ceremonies, they have their own exclusive belief system,’ Belke said. ‘It’s something that demands one’s all.’ ”
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Chicago Tribune, 2007
What is more surprising is this: the North Koreans in some ways are more open to reforming their system than are American educators. In 2010, while the Obama administration was shutting down the school-choice scholarship program that had allowed thousands of poor students in Washington, D.C., to escape from the capital’s horrific government schools, Kim’s regime was loosening restrictions on the private sale of food and essential supplies in reaction to the deterioration of the North Korean economy. Unfortunately, it is not clear how extensive this liberalization will prove to be or whether it will last: similar reforms were enacted in the 1990s after Kim’s catastrophic attempts at collective management of the North Korean agricultural economy produced famines that killed up to 2 million people.
But at least Kim eventually changed his policies in response to myriad disasters. In the U.S. public school system, the more disastrous schools become, the more teachers and education bureaucrats insist on expanding the policies—union power, lack of competition, ever-expanding budgets regardless of performance, prioritizing teachers’ and administrators’ length of service over merit—that made them that way. One thing’s for sure: when your industry makes Kim Jong Il look flexible by comparison, you’re not achieving good results.