Are North Koreans nuts? Is their leader a certifiable wacko?
Those questions become particularly important during crises in the isolated country's relations with the outside world. Pyongyang last week triggered the latest such crisis by announcing that it possessed nuclear weapons and would not return to talks on the issue with Washington, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo and Moscow.
Outsiders have debated the sanity and rationality of rank-and-file North Koreans since it became apparent the father-son team of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il had brainwashed pretty much the entire population.
During my first visit to North Korea, in 1979, people robotically spouted memorized slogans in response to my questions. Many also showed the gentleness that Americans were accustomed to seeing displayed by members of true-believer groups. I couldn't help finding parallels to the Rev. Jim Jones' Peoples Temple cult, nearly 1,000 of whose members committed mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.
In March 1993, during the first nuclear weapons crisis, Kim Jong Il placed the country on a "semi-war" footing and held a rally in Pyongyang. Soldiers had shaved their heads to prepare for war. Sobbing, they sang: "Even though the world is overturned 100 times, still the people believe in Marshal Kim Jong Il."
One of those soldiers defected later to South Korea. He said North Koreans all believed that if war broke out with the United States and South Korea, "everyone would die -- North and South." Nevertheless, he said -- repeating what I was hearing from other defectors -- the people actively wanted to go to war and get it over with. They felt they had nothing to lose. "It's either die of starvation or die in war."
Popular hysteria peaked during the 1990s and probably has diminished somewhat. North Koreans who did not die as a result of food shortages focused their attentions on newfound survival strategies, such as trading and entrepreneurship. Still, there has been no letup in the incessant indoctrination that teaches people to blame their problems not on their rulers but on the U.S., Japan and South Korea.
To the extent that the world's most effective propaganda continues to produce fanatical obedience among young people, the North Korean population -- especially the military, more than 1 million strong -- remains a cocked weapon. If the people ever respond to an order from on high and march off to fight to their deaths, the result would probably be among the bloodiest wars in history.
