Anacapa Student Reports on Talk by Author Blaine Harden
Anacapa students spend a few moments with Mr. Harden after his presentation.
By Nike Cosmides (11th Grade)
Blaine Harden, author of international bestseller Escape from Camp 14, addressed the Channel City Club last week about his newest book, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot.
Harden spoke about of the origin of North Korea’s endurance as an oppressive and secretive nation, and the nature of its relationship with America. He described his book as “an attempt to make North Korea comprehensible to Americans, and give an adventure story at the same time.”
North Korea is unique in its persistence as a totalitarian controlled state, essentially unchanged since the death of leader Kim Il Sung in 1994, despite a historical precedence of such regimes falling, or fundamentally changing, shortly after the deaths of their respective architects.
“Why has North Korea lasted so long?” Harden began by asking. In response, he held that Kim Il Sung “in a sense still runs it.”
The Kim Dynasty has stuck steadfast to a Stalinist recipe for control that consists of concentration camps, forced political relocations and an authoritarian approach to everything, including the control of information. “All those things he did better than Stalin,” Harden remarked.
Most importantly, North Korea has an enemy. Enter America.
“All totalitarian states need an enemy,” Harden said. “They need a Satan to justify the hardships they put their people through.”
The opportunity for this came during the Korean War. Kim Il Sung had become much more than the puppet Stalin intended. He was a national hero. Full of ambition, he invaded the South, and drove the Americans down to a last foothold. The U.S. came roaring back with aerial warfare: B29s (like those used to firebomb Tokyo). Carpet-bombing was U.S. policy, and for three years the U.S. was bombing North Korea daily.
“The bombing of North Korea by the U.S. is a narrative we’ve never paid much attention to,” Harden said, but it is important for understanding the behavior of North Korea now.
The U.S. killed 1.9 million North Koreans, out of 9.6 million. An equivalent blow to America then would have meant 30 million dead Americans. For the Kim Dynasty, the bombing is a key to legitimacy. In 2013, the current leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung’s grandson Kim Jong Un threatened to nuke Austin, Southern California and Washington, D.C. Forced into some show of action, the Obama administration made the decision to fly a stealth B-2 bomber over North Korea. This was exactly what North Korea wanted: to prove the threat of a U.S. return was real, in order to maintain power over the citizens and convince them that oppression and hardship are the price of defending the country.
Though these “hardships” include major human rights abuses, Harden maintains that with China as a patron, there is “nothing the U.S. can do directly,” aside from the economic sanctions already in place. There was a U.N. inquest into referring North Korea to trial for crimes against humanity, but both China and Russia made their intentions to veto such a proposition clear.
Harden warned North Korea will “be in the news in a way that will trouble us all.” Either way, North Korea is likely not going anywhere anytime soon, and The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot conveys the North Korean-American sentiments near the center of the issue.