{"id":17183,"date":"2013-04-01T23:13:31","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T03:13:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=17183"},"modified":"2013-04-01T23:13:31","modified_gmt":"2013-04-02T03:13:31","slug":"north-korea-not-crazy-but-very-misunderstood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2013\/04\/north-korea-not-crazy-but-very-misunderstood\/","title":{"rendered":"North Korea: Not Crazy but Very Misunderstood"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>
A North Korean soldier rides a bicycle beside a river crossing on the Yalu River near the North Korean town of Sinuiju. Mark Ralston\/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By\u00a0DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

BEIJING \u2014 It seems scary, even crazy: talk of a \u201csea of fire\u201d and an \u201carc of destruction,\u201d nuclear missiles slamming into distant shores. North Korea, an \u201cisolated state,\u201d as we\u2019re constantly told by media reports, hurls invective at the world while its people, abused, hungry and cold, are led by an apparently well-fed young man, Kim Jong-un, who sits in front of shabby-looking computers running nuclear programs that are going, literally, ballistic.<\/span><\/p>\n

But is it all true?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPublic discourse about the North in most of our enlightened world is crippled, condescending, irrelevant, and, like heartburn, episodic,\u201d says James Church, the pseudonymous author of a series of novels about the country, in an article titled: \u201cNK and Pluto.\u201d He insists on anonymity because of the nature of his past intelligence work.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the<\/span>\u00a0rhetoric ratchets up again<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0on the Korean peninsula with talk of mobilization, attack and counterattack, Mr. Church\u2019s view is deeply counterintuitive and very valuable. His authorial name is a pseudonym for a former Western intelligence officer who has been in the country dozens of times and now, retired from government, writes about it through the eyes of a fictional North Korean policeman called Inspector O. (Full disclosure \u2013 I have met Mr. Church and he is definitely real.) In fact, the novels offer a superb demonstration of the idea that fiction tells the truth better than fact.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are two snippets of what Mr. Church thinks, based on the article, written some time ago but sent to me this week with a note that said, \u201cGloomily, it still rings.\u201d Get ready for upending received wisdom:<\/span><\/p>\n

1. It is we who are isolated from North Korea, not the other way round.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf North Koreans inhabit the most isolated country on earth (hyperbole widely accepted as fact), then it must also be true that we are isolated from them. Isolation, after all, is a two-way street. In this case, however, the proposition is not symmetrical,\u201d Mr. Church writes.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s because North Korean experts \u201ctune in outside radio and television, read outside books and newspapers detailing our politics and society,\u201d while, \u201cTo learn about them, we pick through chicken entrails,\u201d he writes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The North Koreans reap tactical benefit from our ignorance.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe, on the other hand, have developed a fog of myths about them as a substitute for knowledge,\u201d he writes. \u201cThese myths, handed down from administration to administration, are comforting in their long familiar ring, but make it difficult for us to avoid walking in circles. The North Koreans move nimbly through this fog, like Drake\u2019s small ships among the galleons of the Spanish armada. Yes, at times they step on their extremities, but don\u2019t we all?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Stop obsessing about the nuclear thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

The North\u2019s strongest card is not nuclear. Its strongest card is its ability to \u201croyally annoy\u201d everyone, Mr. Church says. \u201cIts strength does not come from chemical weapons, arrays of artillery, or brigades of mobile missiles. This small, sad country\u2019s best weapon is not something stashed deep in a granite mountain or smuggled to a rusting port in the hold of a tramp freighter. To find it, no spies need be recruited, no costly, esoteric intelligence collection systems deployed,\u201d he writes.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe basis of the North\u2019s greatest strength is deceptively simple:\u00a0People who are irritated pay attention.<\/em>\u201d (The italics are in the original essay.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBehave badly \u2013 always careful to choose the time, always retaining control of the situation \u2014 and North Korea knows from experience that attention will be paid, even over the grinding of big power teeth,\u201d Mr. Church writes.<\/span><\/p>\n

What North Korea fears most is being swept away in the tide of big power history, says Mr. Church. So it is parlaying its few, weak cards as best it can. It seeks dialogue with the United States, which it fought in the Korean War, but that dialogue was virtually nixed after former President George Bush declared North Korea part of an \u201c<\/span>axis of evil<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u201d in 2002, as<\/span>\u00a0I\u2019ve reported before<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

As my colleagues Mark Landler and Choe Sang-hun report, there is a \u201cdisconnect\u201d in North Korea today. Despite the rhetoric of threat, \u201cWe are not seeing changes to the North Korean military posture such as large-scale mobilizations or positioning of forces,\u201d said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. \u201cWhat that\u00a0<\/span>disconnect between rhetoric and action<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0means, I\u2019ll leave to the analysts to judge.\u201d People like Mr. Church.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are signs of growing calls for a different approach to North Korea. A recent article on CNN was titled, \u201cKim Jong-un is<\/span>\u00a0not crazy<\/span><\/a><\/span>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, a former U.S. ambassador and C.I.A. station chief in South Korea, Donald Gregg, called for the United States to talk to North Korea and negotiate a peace treaty. \u201cAn<\/span>\u00a0increasingly dangerous confrontation is building<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0between the United States and North Korea,\u201d wrote Mr. Gregg.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe outrageous rhetoric pouring out of Pyongyang makes it difficult to do anything more than dismiss North Korea\u2019s leader, Kim Jong-un. But abandoning diplomacy would be extremely dangerous. The North Koreans are convinced that nuclear weapons are the only thing keeping them safe from a U.S. attack, and recent flights of nuclear-capable U.S. warplanes over the Korean peninsula only hardened that conviction,\u201d Mr. Gregg wrote. \u201cAs distasteful as it may seem, we need to talk directly with the North Koreans.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And Mike Chinoy, a respected commentator and author of a book on North Korea, wrote in the Washington Post recently, \u201cthe truth has to be faced: U.S. policy toward North Korea is not working.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What might work?<\/span>\u00a0Face-to-face discussions<\/span><\/a><\/span>, Mr. Chinoy wrote, to \u201cenable the United States to judge whether there is any hope of dialogue and revived diplomacy.\u201d President Obama should try that and \u201csend a high-level envoy to Pyongyang.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I have the feeling that Mr. Church\u2019s fictional hero, Inspector O, the North Korean detective, would agree.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fuente<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW BEIJING \u2014 It seems scary, even crazy: talk of a \u201csea of fire\u201d and an \u201carc of destruction,\u201d nuclear missiles slamming into..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,18,21,43,84,189,97,119],"tags":[322,197,226,345,266,351],"class_list":["post-17183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-international","category-media-culture","category-statements","category-us-military","category-us-news","category-war","tag-democratic-peoples-republic-of-korea","tag-imperialism","tag-imperialist-war","tag-reactionary-watch","tag-republic-of-korea","tag-world-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/02norkorrdv-tmagarticle.jpg?fit=592%2C394&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}