North Korea and the Opinion of Fascism: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Abstract

IntroductionRecently, an opinion has been in circulation that North Korea has something to do with fascism, the aggressive, imperialistic, and ultranationalist political doctrine and movement that grew out of the dislocations of the First World War and the Great Depression, manifesting in Italy in the 1920s, assuming the super-racist form of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s, and being implemented from above in Imperial Japan. Considering that fascism is imperialistic and that its extreme right-wing politics is violently anticommunist and antisocialist, the association of national state-socialist North Korea with fascism is frankly strange.The basic reasoning behind the fascist association is that Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945 and that Japanese fascist thought in the 1930s and 1940s carried over into Soviet Army-liberated northern Korea from 1945 onwards. The argument continues that many Korean intellectuals had been co-opted in the colonial-fascist era and that these individuals were incorporated into the North Korean cultural apparatus (North Korea became an independent state in 1948), leading to a fascist-rooted state ideology that celebrates race.1 The claim is superficial and impressionistic.Other than the fact that its empirical ground is insufficient, the real problem with the opinion of fascism is that it fixates abstractly on ideology (a servant of politics) and neglects the political perspective and economic structure of postcolonial North Korea. In this regard, it is necessary to briefly consider some North Korean political history; revisit the writings of the late leader Kim Il Sung, whose authority is preeminent in North Korea; and consider how fascism in action has been described in fascism studies and Japanese studies. What the evidence reveals is that the North Korean system is incompatible with fascism.Struggle against Imperial JapanAnti-Japanism and anti-fascism are two policy lines that go hand in hand in North Korea. Both constitute the locus classicus of the political regime, the legitimacy of which derives from the armed struggle of Kim Il Sung and the "anti-Japanese guerrillas," who fought the Imperial Japanese military and police in Manchuria, with some forays into Korea, from about 1931 to 1941. As Kim Han Gil's official Modern History of Korea states, the "anti-Japanese struggle" was poised against the "Japanese imperialists, the "Asian ' shock-troop' of international fascism," and their "imperialist colonial system."2North Korea identifies late Imperial Japan, along with Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, as a fascist state and holds a view of fascism that recalls the Stalininst Comintern in the 1930s. This is not surprising. Before northern Korea was liberated by the Soviet Army in 1945, Kim Il Sung, who became the leader of choice during the three-year Soviet occupation, had been a member of the Mao-led Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when it was a Comintern affiliate, a division commander in the CCP Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, and received military training in the Soviet Union, where he retreated and became a Soviet Army captain after his guerrillas were defeated in 1941.The North Korean definition of fascism is summarizable as a reactionary form of imperialism that pursues aggressive war as a means of delivering itself from economic crisis. The term "reactionary" means extremely conservative or right-wing in politics, while the term "imperialism" refers to a type of capitalism based on the domination of monopoly capital (or finance capital) and the international system of creditor states and debtor states (that is, colonies and semi-colonies). In the specific case of the "fascist tyranny and colonial plunder of Japanese imperialism," fascism manifested the following characteristics:* anticommunism* aggressive war* intensified tyranny* police information system* militarization of the economy3Kim Han Gil repeats Kim Il Sung's words from the February 27, 1936, Nanhutou Meeting that fascism was an anti-proletarian political movement that "appeared in many countries" and that the fascists employed the "means of sanguinary dictatorship and aggressive war" to "enslave not only the peoples of their own countries but also of all humanity and to fascistize the whole world. …