North Korean Freedom Is Good for Everyone
As dictators form alliances, ordinary North Koreans need the free world's support more than ever.
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This speech was delivered at the Unification Media Group Conference on Freedom of Information in North Korea, on October 8, 2024, in Seoul, South Korea.
I’ve changed the title of my speech, and I want to begin by telling you why. I was asked to speak about why the support of the international community is necessary to advance freedom of information and human rights in North Korea. While it is clear that the international community is critical in pushing for freedom in North Korea, the converse is less well understood: namely, that a free North Korea advances the vital interests of the members of the international community. Indeed, that community needs you and what you’re fighting for even more than you need them.
It’s now almost three decades since the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which I used to lead, initiated its focus on supporting human rights and freedom of information in North Korea. At the time, North Korea was arguably the most closed and isolated country in the world. It is still a closed society with a totalitarian government, but it is no longer isolated in the way it was back then, and it’s now a much greater threat to international peace.
Today North Korea has joined with China, Russia and Iran to form a political and military coalition of the world’s leading dictatorships that poses a formidable threat to the security of the United States and its friends around the world. The coalition doesn’t yet have a formal name. The Economist has called it the “Quartet of Chaos,” and a recent report on the alliance by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington is entitled “Axis of Aggression.” But there is general agreement about the goal of this new union of dictatorships, which is nothing less than the dissolution of the rules-based international order.
The alarming implications of this threat are explained in a U.S. congressional report issued in July by the bipartisan Commission on National Defense Strategy, which was established by senior Democrats and Republicans on both the House and Senate Armed Services committees. The report opens with the foreboding declaration that “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.” It explains that the new alliance of autocracies “creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multitheater or global war.” Walter Russell Mead, in an article in The Wall Street Journal summarizing the Commission’s report, said that “World War III is becoming more likely in the near term, and the U.S. is too weak either to prevent it or, should war come, to be confident of victory.”
Analysts are increasingly seeing parallels between the disturbing trends of the current period and the 1930s, when the West was also distracted and unprepared as the rise of bellicose dictators foreshadowed history’s most bloody war. The chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul said recently that “Putin, Xi, the Iranian ayatollahs and Kim Jong Un”—the strongmen leading today’s aggressive dictatorships—“are all in this together, in an unholy alliance which reminds me of my father’s war, World War II.” Like the old Axis powers—Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and fascist Italy—the new axis of autocracies represents a worldwide threat, and they are cooperating with and supporting each other on all fronts.
To say that these dictators pose a threat to the security of the U.S. and its allies does not mean that the struggle is simply a geopolitical contest between the U.S. and China, unrelated to democracy. In the current international context, it is not possible to separate the issue of democracy from the issue of security. Two of the members of the new axis of tyranny have already launched unprovoked aggression against democratic countries—Russia against Ukraine, and Iran (through its proxy Hamas) against Israel—while China, a third member, repeatedly threatens to attack democratic Taiwan. Just as the future and survival of democracy was at stake during World War II, democracy is the central and defining issue in today’s global struggle.
As Anne Applebaum notes in her new book Autocracy, Inc., the common enemy of the alliance of autocrats is the democratic world and the liberal ideas of constitutional government, the rule of law and human rights that inspire it. Undermining democracy is also the common interest of the autocrats, since the liberal values that they oppose threaten their hold on power.
North Korea may be a relatively small, closed and remote country, but it is nonetheless a fully-fledged partner with China, Russia and Iran in the alliance of autocracies, and it is playing a malign role in many distant and very dangerous conflicts. Its relations with Iran, for example, are particularly close, since North Korea has been a source of weapons for the Islamic Republic for many decades. According to both South Korean intelligence and the Israel Defense Forces, North Korean rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons have been used by Hamas against Israel in Gaza. With its historic expertise in building underground military tunnels, North Korea has also provided critical assistance to both Hamas and Hezbollah in the construction of the vast network of tunnels and bunkers that lie beneath the ground across Gaza and southern Lebanon, giving both terrorist organizations an important asset in their war against Israel.
North Korea is also providing ballistic missiles, rockets, millions of artillery shells, and other weapons to Russia to aid its aggression in Ukraine. Its assistance has rapidly escalated during the last year, highlighted by the signing of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty with Russia when Putin visited Pyongyang last June. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s chief of defense intelligence, said last month at the Yalta European Strategy (YES) summit in Kyiv that North Korea, not China, is now the biggest supplier of military aid to Russia. The U.S. and South Korea also suspect that Russia in return is helping North Korea develop its arsenal of nuclear weapons. When Putin visited Pyongyang, he also presented Kim with an $800,000 Aurus limousine, indulging the Korean dictator’s enthusiasm for foreign luxury vehicles at a time when almost half the North Korean population is near starvation, according to a U.N. report. The two despots took a spin around Pyongyang in the deluxe sedan to promote their new friendship.
Kim has firmed up North Korea’s ties with China as well. Beijing once supported U.N. sanctions against North Korea to contain Pyongyang’s nuclear program, but it now seeks to weaken the sanctions against North Korea, and last month, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries, it pledged to deepen “strategic communication” and cooperation with the DPRK. North Korea has reciprocated China’s friendship by strongly supporting Beijing’s aggressive stance against Taiwan, and there is concern in the U.S. that Kim might threaten to open a second front against South Korea to deter U.S. intervention should China attack the so-called “renegade province,” as it has said many times that it intends to do. Such a threat is credible: earlier this year Kim inflamed tensions on the Korean peninsula by pledging to amend the country’s constitution to make South Korea the North’s “primary and immutable enemy.” The danger of a region-wide conflagration increased when, during Putin’s recent visit, Kim and Putin signed a strategic-partnership treaty that commits North Korea and Russia to “immediately provide military and other assistance” to each other in the event of war, suggesting that Russia, too, could become involved in any conflict on the Korean peninsula.
This is the perilous context in which Kim is harshly tightening the regime’s controls over the North Korean people, especially in the area of information, which is the subject of today’s conference. His main concern is to cut off the influence of South Korean popular culture on North Korean youth, which is why the regime has adopted laws to prevent ideological laxity among youth and to prohibit the use of language tainted by South Korean colloquialisms. At a major national conference held last December, Kim tried to rally the country’s mothers to join the regime’s campaign to protect young people from becoming contaminated by K-pop music and South Korea’s permissive lifestyle, going so far as to urge the mothers to send their children to the “revolutionary universities” of military service and hard-labor construction where they could “cultivate the spirit of loving their comrades and the collective.”
This entire effort would be comical were it not so hideous. But it is also futile. As a North Korean defector told The Guardian newspaper, not even the harshest punishment, including long prison sentences for people who watch or listen to South Korean films and music and the public execution of anyone who shares such contraband with others, can block the spread of South Korea cultural influence, which the defector said is “unstoppable.” Kim cannot control popular taste and the flow of culture any more than the eleventh-century Scandinavian King Canute, sitting in his throne by the seashore, could command the incoming tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes.
It is North Korea’s sorry fate that its cultural wasteland, which is the inevitable by-product of a totalitarian system, sits right across the border from an open and culturally dynamic Korean society that has a powerful magnetic appeal to North Korean youth. The alienating quality of life in North Korea has especially affected the country’s elite classes that have the most contact with the world outside North Korea, which is why defections among diplomats and students have increased dramatically, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
The fact that UMG and Daily NK have been able to report on the Orwellian laws adopted by the regime, and to conduct surveys and interviews that reveal the anger these laws have generated among North Korean youth, shows that the regime’s attempt to shut down any opening to the outside world has been a failure.
North Korean defectors have been especially important in breaking down the wall separating the two Koreas. The efforts of defector journalists, artists and producers to create diverse and compelling content about their experiences living in a free society, and to have that content transmitted to people inside North Korea, is an extraordinary act of defiance against the regime. In addition to showing how North Korean-born people are actively working for a free North Korea, it sends a vital message to South Korea and other open societies, where so many people have grown cynical about the value of democracy, that freedom is something worth fighting and even dying for.
Despite all his international muscle-flexing, Kim and the closed political system that he oversees face an existential crisis of legitimacy that is inherent in the division of the Korean peninsula into two countries, one a democracy with a free culture and the other a harsh dictatorship reigning over a closed society. The people who are fighting for greater freedom within North Korea probably know nothing about the axis of tyranny in which Kim now plays such an outsized role. They’re simply fighting for their dignity and basic human rights. But if they succeed in gaining the freedom they are now denied, they will be striking a blow not just for democracy but also for international peace, since a more open North Korea would not be a member of an axis of tyranny, and this alliance of tyrants would be weaker as a result.
The members of the international community should support the fight for freedom and access to information in North Korea because it’s the right thing to do. But they also have a profound interest in the success of this struggle, which is not a fantasy but a real possibility, given the social and political dynamics at work on the Korean peninsula. They should do whatever they can to support the fight and give it the solidarity it badly needs and so richly deserves.
Carl Gershman is the Founding President of the National Endowment for Democracy (1984-2021).
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