Sic Semper Tyrannis
By Josh Manchester : 12 Oct 2006
John Kerry recently intoned a solemn lament on the US policy toward North Korea:
"While we've been bogged down in Iraq where there were no weapons of mass destruction, a madman has apparently tested the ultimate weapon of mass destruction."
How many times in the past 72 hours have you heard the words "madman," "crazy," "nutjob," or "insane" used in the context of discussing North Korea's admittedly unusual leader, Kim Jong Il? Quite a bit perhaps.
Kim Jong Il is not your average individual. Anyone who was raised to think of his father as a god is not going to fit in well at your average high school reunion. But persistent attempts to portray him as "crazy" in popular discourse are both inaccurate and dangerous.
They are inaccurate because "crazy" is not what Kim Jong Il is. Ruthless, with an insatiable lust for power - that is an apt description, and one that does not usually apply to those who are mentally unbalanced. The problem is that individuals such as Kim have the largest of appetites for those things that most of us normally never even experience. Self-worship is one. Totalitarian regimes like Kim's, or Saddam Hussein's for that matter, are not called personality cults for nothing. Another quality which Kim displays in spades is self-preservation, usually witnessed in the form of the brutal treatment used to smother any unorthodox behavior in his own regime. Consider a gruesome tale of misery in the London Times, describing the form of the manner in which North Korean troops handle their countrymen who have escaped to China and then been returned by the Chinese:
"'I've heard it a hundred times over that when we send back a group they stab each one with steel cable, loop it under the collarbone and out again, and yoke them together like animals,' said [a Chinese] army veteran with relatives in service."
Political philosophers once knew how to accurately characterize men like Kim: they are tyrants. The use of that term in the 17th or 18th century would have immediately had enlightened heads nodding in understanding - it is only natural that the absolute power given to a man in a regime such as Kim's would reduce the holder of that power to the worst forms of tyranny.
George Savile, the marquis of Halifax, was a contemporary of the essayist and philosopher Montaigne. He once composed an essay in which he considered "the glittering outside of unbounded Authority," and "nothing but poor and miserable deformitie within," noting that "by aiming to be more than a man, he becomes a Beast."
"And like some creatures that grow fat with poysons, he grows great by other men's miseries; an ambitious Ape of the Divine greatnesse; An unruly Gyant, that would storm even Heaven it selfe, but that his scaling Ladders are not long enough: In short a wild beast rich in trappings, and with all his pride, no more than a Whip in God Allmighty's hand, to be thrown into the fire when the world has been sufficiently scourged with it." *
Halifax's description of tyrants is certainly applicable to the leader of North Korea, and this is exactly why applying the epithet of "crazy" to him is dangerous: it is an inherent simplification of the complex yet twisted personality that tyranny creates.
To dismiss an adversary as "crazy," when in fact he exhibits the tyrannical behavior that Halifax describes, forces us to make and accept strategic arguments that we otherwise would not. The worst of these is to simply say, "to hell with him," assuming that nothing can be done except full-scale war. But there might be other errors as well. We might assume he is capable of acts that he is not capable of, even though he might like to be. We might assume he is incapable of responding to a variety of deterrents, though he might be as shrewd in calculating his own interest as any other actor.
Kim's regime is rightfully called the "hermit kingdom" because it is so closed to the outside world. For any other dictator, loads of experts of all stripes would leap in to describe in detail his every peccadillo. Instead, the discourse tends to portray him as insane. Perhaps the truth is that we know much less about him than we'd prefer, or that we know about many other leaders - Ahmadinejad, for example, has had a sit-down with Mike Wallace. Instead, we might do well to perform a more careful accounting of motivations, incentives, desires, and lusts when considering North Korea's Dear Leader, and we might find that we won't so easily mischaracterize, underestimate, or overestimate him in the coming months - even if we ultimately decide the world has been "sufficiently scourged" by him and he deserves to be "thrown into the fire."
Josh Manchester is a TCSDaily contributing writer. His blog is The Adventures of Chester (www.theadventuresofchester.com).
*As quoted in Paul Rahe's Republics Ancient & Modern |
