The Wake

When viewed from above at night, North Korea is a black space in the highly lit and populated Asian continent. The majority of North Koreans—the workers and peasants—live in a Government immersed in figurative and literal darkness.

Whenever discussing his war on terror, President Bush names North Korea as an axis of evil. He paints the country as an outdated relict of the Cold War—an oppressive communist state that starves its people. Additionally, the Western world suspects and claims that North Korea’s government has nuclear weapons of mass destruction. This is the only information most Americans have on the struggling country. Consequently, North Korea is the enemy.

But should Americans only view North Koreans as a foe?

North Korea’s communist government is known as the Korean’s Workers Party. The organization’s philosophy is juche, which is based in self-reliance. Its ideas are routed in Marxism and Leninism, but departed from true socialist thought in the mid-1970s under late President Kim Il-sung, who is still referred to as the “Eternal President of the Republic.” Although Marx and Lenin’s words are no longer being used in North Korea, their concepts supposedly remain. However, Kim Il-sung deemed that the leader of the country could be the only person to interpret the principles of juche; therefore, the rule of North Korea is extremely centralized—negating communism, which in actuality should be a government of and for the people.

The occupants of North Korea are not godless commies with the bomb. Rather, they are hard working, aspiring and want the best for their children just like any American, French, Venezuelan or Iraqi. There is only one human race. This idea sounds cliché, but what government in this world acts like it is a government of the world?

Much can be said concerning the character and resolve that North Koreans have demonstrated in the past twenty years and throughout their country’s history. Starting in the 1990s, North Korea experienced a ten-year-long famine that killed more than one million people (sometimes estimated to be 3.5 million) out of its 23 million population.

The 22 million survivors did so without any aide from Kim Il-sung or current chairman and leader Kim Jong-Il. Seemingly the ideologies of juche, which are based in socialism, did not apply in the eyes of North Korea’s leaders to help its citizens survive. UN advisor Hazel Smith’s recent book, Hungry for Peace, maintains that in the place of government assistance, which would have undoubtedly happened in a true communist country, that North Koreans found help from each other. According to an interview on PBS’s “Foreign Exchange,” Smith said that “they [the North Koreans] didn’t survive because the State helped them; they survived because … they swapped, they bartered, they sold, they tried to get hard currency, and so from the mid-1990s you had a market economy that developed and people looked after themselves.” North Koreans have experienced conditions worse than America’s Great Depression and are surviving without any substantial assistance. Smith also said in the interview that the famine in North Korea is “… as if oil had suddenly run out in a modern industrial country and it had to cope on its own; most people in America and my country in the UK couldn’t do that. They’re not going to grow enough food in their back garden for themselves.” North Koreans, have been, among other things, doing just that.

North Koreans are not looking for Western intervention like the current American-induced quagmire in Iraq. If change is to come in North Korea and be successful, then the revolution must come from the people, something that the American failure in Iraq has proven correct. Due to the harshness of their winters, the extreme heat of their summers and the famine they have experienced, North Korean political action has been second to survival. Therefore when the United States turns its imperialistic eye from the Middle-East to North Korea, demand that the U.S. government send medicine in the place of soldiers and drop Red Cross care packages instead of bombs. Americans of the 1960s and ’70s said that another Vietnam should never happen again, but it did. Now, Americans have the chance to not let another Iraq happen again.

Tom McNamara is a Voices columnist and welcomes comments at .