Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992.

Green, Christopher

Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992. By Charles Armstrong. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. 328 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

Tyranny of the Weak is a history of what it has required thus far for a small, relatively weak nation--the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)--to sustain itself, and even to emerge victorious, in the brutal arena of international politics. It posits a framework of statecraft, one that the author believes is characteristic of the external relations of the anachronistic Kim family regime throughout its brief history.

The founder of the quintessential "guerrilla dynasty," Kim IIsung learned to generate tyranny from weakness in the hills of Manchuria. The future North Korean leader was an isolated figure: inevitably paranoid, rarely visiting local towns, and placing store in few but his closest comrades. He conducted armed raids and withdrew, focusing on the bread-and-butter activity of the classical guerrilla warrior, thus to incite the Japanese imperial machine into undermining itself in the eyes of the local populace.

In North Korean historiography, Kim thus came to symbolize the weak (the Korean people) overcoming the strong (imperial Japan, the United States). It is an image that persists. That Kim did not achieve half the things with which he is credited by North Korean academia, print, and broadcast media is a side issue; Suh Dae-sook already made that point, and, in any case, clashing with partisan charismatic mythmaking over issues of accuracy is a fool's errand.

As Armstrong amply proves, there is a sting in the guerrilla tale when it is used to explain North Korean policy over the decades. The liberal application of a strategic "fog," the main tool by which the Kimilsungist state manifests its devotion to guerrilla strategies in circumstances where the ordinary rules of that particular game don't apply, is clarified. Drawing on varied archival sources, the text lays bare through historical narrative why it is to North Korea's advantage for international actors not to understand, preferably not even to know, how and by what principles the state is run. Beyond the title there is a frustrating lack of framework to the text: fortunate, then, that the narrative is largely self-defining.

Armstrong shows how even North Korean acts of outreach have often been little more than strategic fog--stories that, given Kimist dominance over information flows, are impossible to falsify from abroad. Most interactions with external partners are shown to end in willful distortion for the sake of guerrilla dynastic imperatives; frequently this takes the form of historical revisionism in the pursuit of a coherent legitimating narrative, the prime goal of a state built almost exclusively on exaggeration, bravado, nationalism, and a soupcon, but not much, of Marxist dialectic.

To those who would criticize South Korea for not taking Kim Ilsung's "confederation" idea of the 1970s seriously, Armstrong cites former Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov. Kim informed his Bulgarian ally that confederation was a signal ruse designed to undermine the Republic of Korea. Asserting the impossibility of long-term coexistence, he commented that if the South Koreans "listen to us and a confederation is established, South Korea will be done with."

Similarly, and much to the chagrin of many in the upper echelons of East German power (albeit not leader Erich Honecker, who we are reminded stayed friends with Kim almost to the end), no sooner had East German engineers finished overseeing the ground-up rebuilding of North Korea's east coast industrial city of Hamheung after the Korean War than, in early 1961, the North Korean side blithely informed the Czech ambassador to the DPRK, "There have been two periods in the development of our country: the first period was in the last year of the war and in the following two years. Here the socialist brothers gave us a lot of help. We appreciate that. But in the period of the Five-Year Plan we have achieved everything through our own strength, without any foreign help."

In a text dense with broad-brush explanations of policy, Armstrong offers case after case of a similar hue. Thus, he arguably offers us not merely a guide to past tyrannies, but also indirect pointers to the future. Most tellingly of all, he recalls that Kim Il-sung instituted the first version of the "Byungjin line" in 1962 even though its fundamentals were surely "impossible," and points out that even though Kim knew South Korea was not going to attack North Korea, he built up the barricades anyway--a text for people feeling bullish about Byungjin, one might say.

Christopher Green

Institute for Area Studies

Leiden University