Embracing Hopelessness

Miguel A. De La de Torre

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506433417
• eBook ISBN: 9781506433424
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book will attempt to explore faith-based responses to unending injustices by embracing the reality of hopelessness. It rejects the pontifications of some salvation history that move the faithful toward an eschatological promise that, when looking back at history, makes sense of all Christian-led brutalities, mayhem, and carnage.

Hope, as an illusion, is responsible for maintaining oppressive structures. This book struggles with a God who at times seems mute, demanding solidarity in the midst of perdition and a blessing in the midst of adversity. How can the Creator be so invisible during the troubling times in which we live-times filled with unbearable life-denying trials and tribulations? The book concludes with a term De La Torre has coined in other books: an ethics para joder -an ethics that "f*cks with." When all is hopeless, when neoliberalism has won, when there exists no chance of establishing justice, the only choice left for the oppressed is to "screw" with the structure, literally turning over the bankers' tables at the temple. By upsetting the norm, an opportunity might arise that can lead us to a more just situation, although such acts of defiance usually lead to crucifixion. Hopelessness is what leads to radical liberative praxis.

1

Those Who Ignore History Are Condemned to Construct New Ones

Standing on a windy hilltop, some thirty-five miles north of Seoul, I gazed northward toward North Korea, overlooking the city of Kijong-dong. When the 1953 armistice was signed, bringing a precarious and continuous ceasefire to the Korean War (1950–53), a two-and-a-half-mile-wide demilitarized zone (DMZ) was established, snaking along the thirty-eighth parallel for 151 miles across the Korean Peninsula’s waistline. Within this no-man’s-land littered with some two million land mines (my military escort joked about the numerous three-legged boars), are two towns sitting about a mile opposite each other. These are the only inhabited towns located within the DMZ. Separated by the Seocheongang River, a small bridge—the Bridge of No Return—serves as the only ground link between the two towns and two countries. Since the armistice, this is the locale where prisoners of war are repatriated.

In the south there is a small farming village of about 225 residents called Daeseong-dong, which translates as “Attaining Success Village,” better known as “Freedom Village.” To the north lies Kijong-dong, which can be translated as Peace Village; although the US military personnel patrolling the DMZ refers to it as “Propaganda Village.” Whether it be Attaining Success Village, or Peace Village, both towns, in reality, are Propaganda Villages. Kijong-dong, which appears luxurious from the distant hilltop where I stand, is committed to peace. The city boasts that none of its inhabitants have ever fought in a war, shot a weapon, or committed any harm toward another human being. This amazing feat is possible because no one lives in this Potemkin village, even though North Korea insists that over 200 families call Kijong-dong home.

As I look through my binoculars toward Kijong-dong, I experience an eerie sensation similar to some Twilight Zone episode, of witnessing a well-manicured and -maintained ghost town devoid of human life. The multistory, brightly painted buildings are shells, absent of glass in their windows and subdivided interior rooms. Electric lights (a luxury in rural North Korea) are placed on automatic timers to flicker on during the night, giving the illusion of habitation. About fifteen to twenty maintenance workers are tasked with ensuring the illusion is maintained. On certain days, they can be seen sweeping empty streets.

In the center of the town, overshadowing the façades, is a humongous flagpole upon which a six-hundred-pound North Korean flag proudly waves. In 1980, when the South Korean town of Daeseong-dong raised a 323-foot flagpole upon which to wave its flag, the North Koreans, not to be outdone (pole envy?), raised a 525-foot flagpole. Such one-upmanship borders on the absurd. When the North constructed a two-story building in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom, the South responded with a three-story building, only to have the North counter-respond by adding another story to their building. During one set of negotiations at Panmunjom, no formal agreement was made to allow for biological breaks. Perceiving the use of restroom facilities to be a sign of weakness, neither side flinched. No bathroom breaks were taken by any of the negotiators during the eleven-hour meeting, thus the encounter was dubbed the “Battle of the Bladders.”

While overlooking Kijong-dong, propaganda messages (in Korean) were blasted over loudspeakers praising the brilliance of their leader, Kim Jong-un, and the horrors of Western culture. For entertainment, propaganda operas or patriotic marching tunes are played. Even though an agreement was reached in 2004 to end the twenty-hour-a-day loudspeaker broadcasts, on this day, I heard them blaring. One of the ROK (Republic of Korea) solders informed me the propaganda messages can be heard when tourists are present; but once the tourists leave, the South blasts their own propaganda northward, specifically K-Pop and Gangnam Style.

What brings me to this particular hilltop overlooking Kijong-dong is an attempt to understand how yesterday’s history is fabricated to justify today’s oppressions. Kijong-dong is a physical human construction to signify a narrative designed to justify current state authorities. It matters little if Kijong-dong is real. Empty physical cities are not the only masks for reality; narratives themselves—stories, or more specifically histories—also serve a purpose as persuasive and effective as Kijong-dong. Care in the construction of history is as crucial and painstaking as the construction of uninhabited villages. History creates, maintains, and sustains powerful social structures responsible for much of the world’s hopelessness. Just as a city rises from nothingness to reflect a certain reality, so too is history fabricated to correspond with that same reality.

PART I: The Ideological Construction of History

The question, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” is accredited to Napoleon Bonaparte. Whether he actually said it or not is unknown, and really unimportant. For the purposes of this first chapter, let’s agree on the fable that he did utter these words of wisdom. (Re)membering has little to do with what actually occurred; instead we (dis)member (his)story to serve whatever metanarrative we claim as universal truth. Writing history is a fable, a form of propaganda whose function is to serve the political agenda of those whom society privileges and to justify past atrocities implemented to serve the interests of previous generations. The fable we call history is, like Kijong-dong, a mirage. I write this chapter after standing on the arbitrary line where the Cold War of yesteryear continues to rage. As I gaze north from the DMZ border, I contemplate the history constructed for those on the other side of this line. Specifically, I ponder Koguryō.

The creation of the “Koguryō cult” testifies to how ancient history is rewritten to justify the current religious and political “Juché^[1] ideology” of North Korea. In the seventh century BCE, the Korean Peninsula was divided into three kingdoms: Silla in the southeast, Paekje in the southwest, and Koguryō in the north (which stretched into modern northeast China). These kingdoms constantly fought each other until the sixth century, when a recently unified China invaded Koguryō in the north as Silla invaded from the south, forcing Koguryō to unsuccessfully fight on two fronts. After Silla’s victory, it repelled the Chinese and unified, for the first time, the Korean state. This history is analogically problematic for the North because Silla (South Korea) with the help of the superpower of its time, China (like the USA today), vanquished Koguryō (North Korea). So, North Korea needs alternative facts. In their history books, Koguryō is reimagined as the most advanced kingdom on the peninsula, experiencing a perpetual golden age. Never fully conquered by Silla, Koguryō emerged in the tenth century CE, unifying the peninsula for the first time with power resting in the north (Lankov 2007: 43–45).

Supremacy for North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, required the existence of the city prior to the Koguryō kingdom. So archaeologists “discovered” Old Chosōn, the most advanced civilization humanity has ever known (according to North Korean scholars), which existed around present-day Pyongyang (even though most scholars believed Old Chosōn was located in northeast China on the Liadong Peninsula). When authentic archaeological evidence contradicted this official history, it necessitated the destruction of such artifacts. This occurred when the remains of two-thousand-year-old Chinese commandaries were discovered, indicating that Chinese occupation laid the foundation of present-day Korean culture and statehood. And when Kim Il Sung, in 1993, needed archaeologists to find the tomb of Tangun, the alleged founder of Old Chosōn and offspring of the she-bear, the tomb was immediately discovered near the nation’s capital, thus providing Pyongyang with five thousand years of history (Lankov 2007: 80–81).

Ancient and modern history must be creatively (re)membered. Not only does “might make right,” but might also makes truth. North Korea illustrates how the Kim Dynasty is able to impose what is true (history) and what is right upon a majority of their compatriots. Yeonmi Park, who fled North Korea as a thirteen-year-old girl, repeats what many defectors discovered—the history they were taught was false (2015: 22). Many North Korean defectors to the South still believe Kim Il Sung was a great hero. Defensive comments include: “[He] was not a bad person”; “Not a bad human”; “Can’t hate him”; “Everyone cried when he died” (Hassig and Oh 2009: 183–84).

Constructed history creates identity, beliefs, meaning, and purpose. To dispute history, to dispute what everyone says is truth, is not normal; in fact, it is quite abnormal. In his memoirs, Hyok Kang, who went through the North Korean education system, recalled:

And like all the others—even if today, with hindsight, I may give the impression of mocking [the Kims as demigods]—I can assure you that at the time I swallowed it whole. I was inspired by an unshakeable faith. Although my classmates were unaware of it, I saw reassuring lights glowing from the two Kims; they alone could light our way and improve our gloomy lives. They were fabulous, great-hearted, heroic characters without whom the “people,” all of us, were lost, destined to be cast into darkness of death. I was convinced that it was thanks to their endless love of the fatherland that we had managed to survive this far. (2004: 47)

Schoolchildren learn that Great Leader Kim Il Sung single-handedly launched the Korean Communist movement when he founded the Anti-Imperialist Union in 1926 at the age of fourteen (Lankov 2013: 52–53). Although Kim Il Sung did partake in some minor skirmishes against the Japanese colonial powers, he spent most of the 1930–40s period in exile at a Soviet Union military base in Boyazk, far from the ravages of war. His Soviet connection was rewritten in the 1960s when a schism developed between Pyongyang and Moscow, placing him instead at Paektu—Korea’s highest and most sacred mountain located on the border with China and the locale of centuries-old shamanist traditions.

Pilgrimages today are still made to witness the glass-encased kuho, “slogan trees,” where revolutionary sayings were supposedly carved by the camp’s guerrilla soldiers. Some of these slogans supposedly dating to the 1940s include references to Juché, even though the term is first coined and used by Kim Il Sung in 1955 (Lankov 2013: 39–40; Martin 2004: 48, 109; Park 2015: 22). From Paektu, Kim Il Sung single-handedly led his guerrilla forces to drive out the Japanese invaders (who occupied Korea from 1910 till the end of the Second World War); even though it was the US attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki along with invading Russian troops that expelled the Japanese. Nevertheless, North Korean history has Kim Il Sung defeating the Japanese with no participation by the Russians or Americans (Hyok 2004: 152; Jin-Sung 2014: 127).

When Kim Jong Il was tapped to be the political successor, even though he had no political credentials, North Korean history also placed him in Paektu fighting a guerrilla war beside his father, though he would have been three years old by the time World War II ended. Although born in the Soviet Union military base at Khabarovsk, one of the Paektu’s kuho serves as a marker to Kim Jong Il’s birthplace while others show where he studied and played (Lankov 2007: 39–40; Martin 2004: 390). By the time he turned eleven he was helping his father orchestrate the Korean War: “Sometimes he sat up all night together with Comrade Kim Il Sung at the table for mapping out a plan of operation, asking about the situation of the front, thinking of how to frustrate the intention of the enemy and learning Comrade Kim Il Sung’s outstanding commanding art” (Hassig and Oh 2009: 55).

Both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were not only portrayed as supreme humans but credited with magical powers able to transcend time and space. A 2006 Nodong Sinmun article titled “Military-First Teleporting” reported that Kim Jong Il was able to appear in one location and then suddenly appear in a different place, “like a flash of lightning.” His teleporting abilities were so quick, US satellites orbiting overhead were unable to track his movements (Hassig and Oh 2009: 55). He allegedly wrote 1,500 books during his three years at the university, and was also able to control the weather with his thoughts (Park 2015: 47).

According to the North Korean history textbooks, Japanese atrocities during the occupation of Korea pale in comparison to the Americans who have been trying to enslave Korea since the 1860s. Christian missionaries, according to the textbooks, have a history of participating in sadistically sacrificing Korean children. One textbook story recounts a starving Korean child who stole an apple from the orchard of a foreign missionary. When caught, the missionary etched the word “thief” in acid on the child’s forehead (Hyok 2004: 51). Today, Americans brutalize, oppress, and impoverish South Korea who look to the North for their hope and salvation (Lankov 2007: 47). The Korean War supposedly broke out when the US ordered South Koreans to invade the North; but they were repelled and within a few hours, driven back through a masterful counteroffensive directed by the Supreme Leader. The reality is the North invaded the South, causing a US counteroffensive that pushed Northern troops to its border with China only to incite Chinese troops to enter the conflict, pushing US and South Korean troops to the thirty-eighth parallel where today’s border between the Koreas is set. According to North Korean history, the war did not end with an armistice, but rather, with an outright victory led by Kim Il Sung over US imperialism (Jin-Sung 2014: 127).

Animosity toward the US can be detected in a typical math quiz that primary students are required to answer: “In a South Korean city occupied by the wolf-like US Army, 2884 school-age children cannot attend school. Of them, 1561 are polishing shoes, while others are begging for food. How many children are begging for food in the Yankee-occupied city?” (Lankov 2007: 47). According to Grace Ji-Sun Kim, who served as my conversation partner in the writing of this chapter, maybe North Korea’s animosity toward the US has less to do with ideology and more to do with the decimation of the Korean people during the war. In the course of three years, the US/UN forces flew 1,040,708 sorties in Korea and dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm (2007). General Curtis LeMay, responsible for the Korean incineration campaigns, remarked: “After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, over a period of three years or so we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population” (Rhodes, 1995: 53).^[2] This comes to about 8 or 9 million people. So maybe North Korea’s animosity has less to do with ideology, and more to do with a US military strategy that genocidally eliminated 20 percent of the population—men, women, and children.

According to Grace Ji-Sun Kim, North Korean acts of belligerence, like firing a missile into the sea, usually occur in April, around the same time the United States conducts military exercises. She believes the US, specifically its military, is probably a major impediment to unification. Nonetheless, South Korea’s own historical interpretation is engineered to foster the impression that everything and everyone from North Korea, because they are “red commies,” is evil, bad, and the enemy. Grace Ji-Sun Kim recounts a conversation once held with the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations in New York City, where she was hoping to press the government to release Kenneth Bae.^[3] She speaks of the sleepless nights leading up to the meeting, brought about by an anxiety rooted in years of indoctrination in which North Koreans were thought to kidnap and kill South Koreans. But as the conversation progressed, the apprehension vanished. North Koreans, she discovered, were like us—not the personification of evil. The people, she argues, should not be identified with a few leaders in the government. Grace Ji-Sun Kim does hope for eventual unification of the Korean peninsula, underscoring the advanced age and mortality of the more hardline older generation.

Historical despots of old relied on iron chains and brutality to constrain compatriots. Today, the more potent instrument of binding and restraint is that of story—the power of constructed ideas, worldviews, and historical interpretation. The chains of ideas prove a stronger link because they are made from what the compatriots believe are their own work, unlike shackles of iron or steel that fall victim to time and corrosion (Foucault 1995: 102–3). Imprisoning compatriots’ minds is not limited to totalitarian regimes run by despots; they can be just as effective within democracies.

We Are All North Korea

The construction of history is not limited to North Korea. In a real sense, we are all North Korea. In fact, the Western colonization of the world’s minds, specifically those of the subalterns, is more insidious because it coats global oppressive structures with a veneer of utopian high-minded-sounding terms like liberty, human rights, freedom, and democracy. Eurocentric philosophical thought and movements, regardless of how lofty they might sound, remain oppressive to those relegated to colonized spaces. Philosophical enlightenment contributions, such as the French Revolution’s battle cry for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité was never meant for her future colonies in Vietnam nor Algiers. Freedom is not for the “inferior” in need of civilization and chistianization. Even the US rhetorical end to our daily pledge of “liberty and justice for all” was neve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: The Order of Things
• Introduction
• Those Who Ignore History Are Condemned to Construct New Ones
• Believing Is Seeing
• There Is No God, Only Auschwitz
• (Race)ing toward a New Age of Ignorance
• F*ck It
• Poetic Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects