Kim Jong Un, aka Outstanding Leader, is still seeking to consolidate his hold on power in the horror state formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea-a quadruple irony, for it is really none of the above. Its current tyrant is busy conducting a classic purge of his rivals, or just those he suspects might be someday.
In his latest and most sensational move, the latest Kim in that dynastic line of Communist dictators had his own uncle denounced, stripped of all his titles, arrested and paraded out of a party conference in Pyongyang-all duly recorded by North Korean state television to be broadcast the next day. Whereupon he was dispatched without further ceremony.
There is a protocol in these matters. It was not enough that this once powerful official be executed. Any trace of him in official records had to be extirpated. Officially he is now lumped in with “anti-party elements,” his name unmentionable, his image airbrushed out of party annals, TV documentaries, wherever it might appear in North Korea’s authorized history, and there is no other kind in that prison of a country.
Comrade Jang Song Thak, once No. 2 in the regime’s power structure, isn’t even a face in the crowd any more. To use the newspeak of George Orwell’s 1984, he has become an unperson. Not only has he ceased to exist. Officially he never existed. Not just the man but any memory of him must be effaced. No wonder the regime’s elite is all a-tremble, not knowing who will be next, let alone why. That’s the very purpose of a purge: to terrorize.
A classic purge in a totalitarian society doesn’t portend fear and trembling just at home. It can be a sign the Fuehrer, Generalissimo, or Outstanding Leader is harrowing his ranks in preparation for war abroad. Just as Hitler’s night of the long knives and Stalin’s Yehovschina presaged a second world war. It’s a way for Outstanding Leader to ready his country for another strike at the other Korea, whose freedom and prosperity are a constant reproach to his own deluded rule. And this time his nuclear-tipped missiles might actually work.
It’s all so familiar. Anyone with
even a cursory knowledge of the
totalitarian state and state of mind will recognize what’s happening in North Korea today: a classic political purge. This is one for the books, specifically the various editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which were carefully edited to conform to the party line, whatever it might be at the time. Old bolsheviks, no matter how prominent they might once have been, had to be cropped out of history. Trotsky, Rykov, Zinoviev, Pietakov, Kaminev, Bukharin … all had to be purged.
The treatment of Nikolai Bukharin in successive editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is instructive. In the first edition, published in 1927, he was described as “an outstanding theoretician of communism, an economist and a sociologist.” By the second edition, there was no entry for Bukharin, Nikolai. There was no longer any such person, never had been.
Why these painstaking measures to erase any evidence of Comrade Bukharin and his like? Because the very existence of such people, let alone what they said or did or thought, might give others ideas. And in a totalitarian state, only the omniscient Party is allowed to have ideas. And official history must contain nothing to the contrary.
In the not so fictional 1984, poor Winston Smith spends his days rewriting history to make it reflect the party line. Why? Because history matters. Greatly. As it’s explained to Comrade Smith, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” What happens when history isn’t controlled? People might realize the Party isn’t what it says it is, and Big Brother-or in North Korea’s case, Outstanding Leader-may not be all-knowing and all-powerful after all.
All it may take to sow such subversive thoughts is one little detail somebody forgot to omit from the official record, one photograph somebody neglected to throw down the memory hole. Which is how Winston Smith got into trouble. He happened to run across a picture of three purged party leaders attending a party function when they were supposed to have been elsewhere plotting treason. Before he could consign it to oblivion, well-trained party man that he was, the photograph had stuck in his memory. And a seed of doubt was planted. Uh oh. It was a fatal error.
If you think these games with the past are safely confined to totalitarian societies, think
again. It can happen here. Back in 1998, Arkansas’ own Dale Bumpers delivered a valedictory address as he prepared to end a 24-year career in the U.S. Senate. It was an eloquent speech, as all of Mr. Bumpers’ are. But this one may be remembered not for what that distinguished and now elder statesman said, but for what he didn’t. It was something he said Harry Truman had once told him: “The only time this country ever gets into trouble is when there is some so-and-so in the White House lying to the American people. So, remember, always tell the truth.” In his televised address, the senator called his conversation with that plain-spoken president one of the Defining Moments of his life. It just didn’t define him when it proved inopportune. For it was edited out of the official record.
The quotation from the irrepressible Mr. Truman remains a jewel-a diamond in the rough, just as Harry Truman was in his finest moments. But when I went to look it up in the official version of Dale Bumpers’ speech in the Congressional Record,there it wasn’t. For that was just before Dale Bumpers was to return from retirement to defend a presidential client and fellow Arkansan named Bill Clinton against a charge of perjury in a celebrated impeachment trial. To have left that quote in the record would have been bad timing, to say the least. So it disappeared. And, hesto presto, history was erased.
It would take another decade before Mr. Bumpers would halfway confess that omitting the quotation from the official record hadn’t been the work of some anonymous aide, but that he himself had excised it. Conscience may sleep, and for the longest time, but it can stir back to life, too. Even after years.
The moral of this story: To blue-pencil history is to confuse what isn’t important with what is. It’s not the party line or the political fate of this or that public figure that matters so much, but the truth. Especially the historical truth. For without it, we are cast into the darkness without a glimmer of light, the kind of light only Clio, muse of history, can provide. We tamper with History at our peril, and our country’s. Which is why purging the historical record should not be dismissed as just a harmless little rhetorical device. It is a grave offense. And a continuing danger to a free country. No matter who does it.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial, Pages 16 on 01/08/2014