North Korea: the rationality of evil

Abstract

After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the implosion of the Soviet Union (1990) and the collapse of the socialist camp, the Western mass media –influenced by American foreign policy– began to set their eyes, and stories, on the enigmatic Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). From then on, the objective was to generate a set of preconceptualized ideas and truths, around the danger that the existence of this outcast State implied for the so-called international community. This logic was strengthen into a media paroxysm, when –in February 2005– North Korea announced its nuclear capability. From this date on, the small Asian country became a substantial part and main protagonist of the “evil axis” (Bush, G.W., 2002). Thus, the North Korean problem and its geopolitical derivative –which at present seems to be always about to explode into a planetary nuclear war–, is fed daily through doubtful interpretations, Eurocentrist prejudices and rampant falsehoods.
However, this proposal –against the journalistic immediacy– will seek, based on the questioning of some questions, to reveal what is behind the North Korean myth. Is North Korea a threat to humanity? Will North Korean nuclear weapons destroy neighboring countries? Are the successive leaders and the North Korean military elites a group of lunatics who have the destiny of the planet at the mercy?
The hypothesis that we propose, in order to try to answer these and other questions about the North Korean course, is that after the North Korean nuclear policy, the warmongering discourse of its leadership and its hermetic nationalism, there is a rational reading and interpretation of the Korean history of the last five hundred years, to which the recent examples of American interference in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria are added.