North Korea – a Fascist State?

The UK TV show ‘Panorama’, part of the BBC Network’s programme schedule, aired a programme on the 15^th April 2013 called Panorama: North Korea Undercover. In the programme journalist John Sweeney went undercover as a London School of Economics history professor, along with a party of students. In reality he was there to capture the degradation and authoritarianism of the Communist regime. No stranger to controversy, having also been involved in a programme exposing scientology, he has also sparked a great deal of controversy once more with this programme, this time due to the potential threat he put the students under who travelled to North Korea with him, after the North Korean government threatened to expose the details of the students that travelled with John Sweeney if the programme is aired.

Unsurprisingly the programme was a disturbing affair, exposing the horrendous conditions that Koreans are forced to live under, whether it was electricity constantly turning on and off, people cleaning clothing in streams due to a lack of running water, hospitals totally devoid of patients, and most of all the effort that the government went through to present a façade of normality. The programme also turned out to be yet another excuse for leftists to continue with their perpetual revisionism absolving Marxism of any association with totalitarianism.

The morning after watching the programme my wife and I both awoke with accounts of how the programme made us feel uneasy during our slumber. My wife dreamt that she was forced off the bus that Sweeney and the students were ushered around in, told that she would have to stay. Most of all we both felt a similar sense of fear over the very thought of one day being the ones forced to live as the North Koreans do now. Seeing North Korea from the inside reinforced my own desires to stand against collectivism through raising awareness online, so useful idiots can’t cause yet more horrendous suffering. The potential of this suffering happening once again was made all the worse for me by one particular claim during the programme.

Close to the start of the programme a professor of “International Studies” (yes I know, any professor of a course with “studies” in the title is going to be a leftist nine times out of ten) by the name of Brian Myers stated that North Korea was a “far-right” regime because it had such a large military and a heavy sense of nationalism and racial superiority in the country. To say I was shocked that the revisionism on the BBC has become so brazen is an understatement. I struggled to contain my frustration over the Stalinist style orthodoxy that the BBC was airing.

The man who made this claim has an MA in “Soviet Studies” (there it is again) and wrote the book “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters” which insinuates that North Korea has a policy of racial purity, while the North is a liberating force that will free the South from foreign corruption. There is so much wrong with this description that it would take far longer than I care to spend explaining why this is yet more Marxist revisionism. However, I will focus on some key points.

What Korea is today is indeed a far more insular place than it ever was. Its old ally the Soviet Union has long since collapsed and its other major ally China is liberalising, seeing far more benefit in being a part of the world economic arena than isolating itself as it once did. This leaves North Korea more alone than ever, and the recent threats of force appear to be a combination of desperation to make other nations provide aid and a means for the new leader Kim Jong-un to show that he is a strong and capable leader. But this was not always where North Korea found itself.

Like all Marxist and communist regimes North Korea started with aspirations to centralise all control so that the workers could run the factories, and the technocrats could deal with day-to-day bureaucracy. It never occurs to leftists that this is a recipe for disaster. This centralisation of bureaucracy is a sure-fire way to provide psychopaths with a means to kill off competitors (often literally) and create a cult of personality based around them. This happens every single time communist revolutions occur. We then hear the excuses ad nauseum; the Soviet Union was state capitalism, Karl Marx had nothing to do with the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century claiming to be influenced by him, and now North Korea is “far-right”.

The biggest bee in the bonnet that destroys Brian Myers’ suggestions about North Korea being “far-right”, and leftists go insane at the very mention of, is that fascists are actually leftists, the term “far-right” is thus a red-herring in this context. But once again we get the excuses; fascists were capitalists because of the dominance of corporations and a strong focus on hierarchy, this in spite of the fact that corporations are a marriage of state and corporate central planning and cronyism. Leftists also ignore the amount of socialist subsidies and welfare that fascist regimes have traditionally been involved in. Most of all it’s when we use the accurate definitions of socialism that we can past the lies; communists are international socialists, unconcerned with race but very much concerned with eradicating class. Conversely fascists are national socialists, more insular in their policies by focussing on preservation of race.

While communism is a naive ideology that suggests that people can all be involved in decision-making without a leader naturally emerging, even if this does end up becoming a psychopath prepared to kill all those in their way, fascism does not try to dismiss the inevitability of hierarchy, actively fermenting it through central planning. Above all both fascists and communists do not believe that individuals can do a better job than the collective, however they believe this can be achieved. What matters most is that individual will and autonomy is crushed by these totalitarian ideologies, with all the trappings of utopian promises that go with it.

When people understand the similarities between national and international socialists they can then appreciate the nature of North Korea. What happened to North Korea is what happens to all communist regimes. When communist revolutions first occur this is far more optimistic than the isolated racial purity of even fascism. Dreams of all workers of the world uniting are what people strive to achieve. As the knowledge problem leads to failures of central planning, along with a battle for control by the most dominant personalities, the ‘people’s revolution’ becomes an Orwellian nightmare. If the regime is unable to expand, as the USSR initially did, its attention will divert ever more inward through the subjugation of its citizenry, so that leaders cannot be overthrown. As the regime inevitably grows threatened by ‘outsiders’ it becomes more nationalistic and racially driven, just as North Korea has.

National and international socialists often feed off one another through demonization of the other ideology, but have also allied together in the past, as in the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. Fascists and communists are certainly two sides of the same coin, and have often validated one another prior to World War Two, Hitler’s appreciation of Karl Marx for example. It is a blatant strawman to conflate military might with fascism or communism, as Brian Myers did in the BBC programme. Demand number eight of the communist manifesto establishes that industrial armies are a requirement and there is no mandate on their size. The origins of North Korea as a Marxist state are impossible to refute, even if this did end in disaster, albeit I don’t expect leftists to be honest enough to admit Marxist roots when presented with Kim Jong-sung’s ‘Juche’, Mao’s collectivised farming in China, Stalin’s orthodoxy based entirely around Marx’s historical materialism, or any other proof of Marx’s pervasive influence on totalitarianism. What you can bank on from leftists is more Marxist revisionism so that the mistakes of the past can be pushed for in the future.