North Korea and the Limits of Our Humanity

Abstract

When approaching a different society—one that is radically and fundamentally different from our own—any attempt to make it look more like ours has tangible effects, both in terms of morality and comprehension, that is to say, it humanizes the other. It is often the case, however, that we choose whom to humanize and when rather than universally adopting this approach. As such, we may occasionally experience feelings of surprise or even bewilderment when coming across unexpected signs of humanity in the most brutal and cold-blooded monster. One such moment comes when one encounters the words of Thierry Cruvellier, author of The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Cruvellier 2014). In this work, the author writes about the 2009 trial of former Cambodian schoolteacher Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, the mastermind behind a range of creative and excruciating forms of torture and assembly line-like mass execution at Tuol Sleng or S-21, the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge prisons, where more than fourteen thousand people were brutally tortured and savagely killed, including many children:

The humanity of individuals who become mass murderers like Duch is a repulsive notion to many people. I can assure you that the predominant reaction, regardless of social and educational background, is to say that they are not one of us. In fact, many people do not even understand how someone can go and defend them in court. When Duch’s lawyer, François Roux, chose to defend an accused man before the Rwanda tribunal, his many friends within human-rights organizations first took it as a betrayal.

Refusing Duch as one of us may give us peace of mind. It keeps us in the safe belief that if, God forbid, we happened to face extraordinary historical circumstances we would behave like heroes. But it doesn’t help us better understand how mass crimes develop and succeed through mass participation.

At the genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Duch’s victims are presented as victims, which they certainly were. But eighty per cent of them were themselves Khmer Rouge, and if they instead had been asked to be perpetrators the overwhelming majority would have obeyed. To accept that Duch tells us something about ourselves doesn’t mean we accept his crimes, and it doesn’t mean we risk showing him sympathy. It makes us think in more realistic terms about how mass murder operates and how it relies on people like us.(Cruvellier in Gourevitch 2014)

These are tough paragraphs to swallow. How can we even begin to accept that such a meticulous and cold-blooded torturer and executioner may have something in common with us? How can we fail to distinguish between victims and torturers? And, if the limits of our humanity are so fragile, how are we ever to know the truth—about S-21 as well as about other sites at which crimes against humanity have been perpetrated—including in the context of the current international understanding of North Korea?

At first glance, it would seem considerably easier to identify the human qualities of North Koreans than those of a mass murderer such as Duch. To begin with, we view most North Koreans as victims of a tyrannical dictatorship, rather than as perpetrators, as in the case of Duch. Attempts to humanize the North Korean people normally locate them in opposition to and contradistinction from the North Korean ruling elite, with Kim Jong Un at the apex. The presumed divide between the ruling and the ruled, therefore, constitutes the limits of humanity. This posits a conundrum. If, indeed, North Koreans are the victims of tyranny, how can they tell us the truth about their society? For, the victimhood that North Koreans are subjected to, in the eyes of the world, is often manifested in the form of mass brainwashing, culminating in the kind of national hysteria and grief that was witnessed, for example, in the immediate aftermath of the death of Kim Jong Il. The world, as it were, is made to witness the tears of people that are so deprived of the truth that they have no idea how far removed they are from the global reality.

Often, it is only after individuals have ceased to be victims that they are seen as conveyers of the truth, as can be seen in the case of defectors: after their defection, in the eyes of South Koreans and Americans, North Korean defectors are viewed as having emerged from darkness into the light of truth, finally understanding how bad things are back in North Korea and who is responsible. This type of understanding makes it almost impossible to posit North Koreans in North Korea as knowers or conveyers of the truth. In large measure, therefore, attempts to humanize North Koreans go hand in hand with a line of inquiry assessing the whereabouts of truth in North Korea and the extent to which North Koreans have access to the truth—how little they know and to what extent they are removed from it. True humans must know the truth, or at least, must have access to the truth. Thus, it is only after they get out of North Korea, as defectors in most cases, that they can testify to the world about the truly dehumanizing reality of North Korea. The absence of the access to the truth, as it were, spares us from the burden of having to make North Korea look like us, that is to say, having to humanize that society.

With the foregoing in mind, I would like to look at attempts to humanize North Koreans in a selection of recently published books on North Korea, and explore the relationship between this type of activity and the notion of the location of truth. I hope to show, borrowing Cruvellier’s phrase, that this very exercise procures us “peace of mind” while at the same time leaving unsolved problems in relation to furthering our understanding of the mechanisms of North Korean society, a society in which, like it or not, the masses are willing and often enthusiastic participants.