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As North Korea once again grabs global headlines, the Western media continues to completely ignore that the Hermit Kingdom has some very vocal domestic supporters in North America. The media has long dismissed these factions as an absurdity of fringe politics, newsworthy only insofar as a political circus on the far left and far right can be a macabre spectacle of little interest to a mature discussion of political realities. But if studying North Korea proves one thing, it is that the circus is now mainstream and everywhere you look, so that the circus that meets in our cafes and online discussion forums where our students get their ideas can no longer be considered too fringe to be seriously discussed in a credible holistic view of North Korea’s international influence and, dare we say, soft power.
As a child, I remember reading a report by a journalist who had been given a tour of a North Korean government building. At the risk of plagiarism, I confess that I do not remember the news article. What struck me was that one of the gifts to the North Korean government that the journalist described finding in the Pyongyang office building was from a small Canadian political party on the far left. As a teenager and later as a young university student, I was interested in who the rare Westerners were who were proudly featured in North Korean propaganda photos. Were any of them Canadians I met at the various academic conferences and protests I attended in my then-activist youth?
Well, that was over 20 years ago. Let us look at the Community Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). Have they changed their views?
No, they have further hardened those views, publishing articles on their website with headlines such as “Nefarious Parliamentary Defense Committee Meeting to Study Perceived ‘Threat’ from DPRK.
When I attended a conference of international socialists at Columbia University in New York in 2006-part of a summer spent working at a media company that produced progressive documentaries-I was told that the U.S. had a similar quirk on its far left. Several conference attendees took me aside and told me to avoid the leadership of one of the main fringe socialist political parties, who were handing out signs at local anti-war protests, calling them pro-North Korea and nicknaming their cult-like leader “Chairman Bob”.
As you can see, the far left has a self-policing attitude when it comes to pro-North Korea sentiment.
But what about the far right? One of the reasons I am a proud subscriber to The Diplomat magazine is that they alone in all the media seem to have asked such a question.
The Diplomat reports that there is a surge of American far-right figures claiming that North Korea is a far-right regime worth emulating. Although the journalists note that the North Korean regime has been more reluctant to embrace these groups than other autocratic regimes that have become their darlings, there have been examples in the past of a reciprocal relationship between the regime and U.S. far-right activists.
As someone who works with U.S. veterans’ charities on international refugee issues, groups that tend to be very conservative, I can say that, like the activist groups of my youth, there is a great deal of self-policing in the conservative movement. As with the mainstream far left, pro-North Korea groups and their ideas are seen as harmless kooks at best, and disturbing examples of suspiciously misplaced loyalties at worst.
I asked the Atlantic Council’s Jennifer Counter, an expert on countering disinformation, for her take.
“North Korea’s strength in many ways is its consistency of message and stances internationally since the Korean War days,” Counter replied. “The country comes first, abides by the established hierarchy, respects leadership, and resists outside ‘imperialist’ forces. From these core ideas come all North Korean propaganda which often overlaps with views of those who fall on far ends of the left-right political spectrum.”
“Most especially, the concept of ‘imperialism,’ specifically American imperialism is a concept that many anti-US groups espouse and can act as connective tissue between groups like the Korean Friendship Association, and its national chapters, and local Marxist or anarchist groups in North America and Europe,” Counter continued.
“For some, the shock value or the perception of rebelliousness earned by aligning with North Korea or the Kim family can make their group or activities stand out in a crowded world of anti-capitalist and anti-US organizations.”
In my firsthand experience, the bulk of neither the left nor the right at the activist level tends to see pro-North Korea sentiment as anything other than an unstable ideological deviation from their generally accepted norms. However, we live in a time when the political fringes are rapidly growing and teeming with a cesspool of aggressive and strange ideas. So pro-North Korean sentiment in the US may be harder to ignore in the future.
Edited by Robert Lauler.
Views expressed in this guest column do not necessarily reflect those of Daily NK.
January 15, 2024 at 01:30PM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)