Posted July 07, 2017 19:39:04

Photo: The dynasty founded by Kim Il-sung "put Marx on his head and Hegel back on his feet". (Supplied: Matt Palsh/Flickr)

What does an obscure opera and a 19th century German philosopher tell us about the North Korean nuclear crisis? Everything.

Let me start with the opera, Sea of Blood. Yes, it is ominously named and deliberately so.

Here's the plot: Japan has occupied North Korea. A poor tenant farmer named Yun-Seop joins others to fight the invaders. All are soon killed, but Yun-Seop's wife raises an army of resistance and defeats the might of the Japanese forces.

Sea of Blood is revered in North Korea as the perfect representation of Korean spirit.

The opera was adapted from the play Blood Sea, written by North Korea's founding-father Kim Il-sung.

It is the artistic representation of what North Koreans call "juche".

You cannot possibly understand North Korea without grasping juche — it is the key to the hermit kingdom.

It was the guiding philosophy of Kim Il-sung and underpins every aspect of society — politics, economics, and culture.

It essentially means "self-reliance".

Under juche, individuals determine their destiny and the North Korean people are "masters of the revolution".

The North Korean regime used music to deliver this philosophy to the masses.

In a thesis for the University of Pretoria, Kisoo Cho looked at how the revolutionary opera became the embodiment of this idea.

"It is no exaggeration to say that all the arias and songs performed in the opera … contain political messages," Mr Cho wrote.

Indeed, Kim Jong-il — who inherited power from his father — said: "Music must work for politics and music without politics is the same as flowers without scent."

Ideas determine everything

Enter German philosopher Georg Hegel.

Korean scholar Hyun-Joo Lee studied the transformation of North Korean music and drew a direct link to Hegel's ideas of history.

"North Korean music cannot break the bounds of Hegel's philosophy," she wrote.

Hegel is many things to many people.

He is widely considered the philosopher most difficult to read, yet his ideas continue to resonate.

Analysts and officials have described North Korea as "unpredictable", but Stan Grant writes that the Kim regime is anything but.

American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously drew on Hegel at the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet empire to ask if the world was witnessing the end of history.

Hegel believed that history would deliver us to the "absolute moment".

For Hegel, world history was driven by the battle of ideas.

Dr Fukuyama believed the absolute moment was the triumph of Western liberal democracy over communism in the late 1980s.

This was history's zenith; the superior idea had won, history was at an end.

It was ironic because the father of communism, Karl Marx, was also a Hegelian.

Marx saw Hegel's concept of history — a beginning, a middle, and an end — as culminating in the "workers' paradise", with the proletariat having overthrown the capitalist bourgeoisie.

As one communist regime after another fell, North Korea remained — in the secretive capital Pyongyang, Dr Fukuyama's history did not prevail.

North Korean specialist Bruce Cummings has written about North Korea's take on Hegel and history.

"[The Kim dynasty] put Marx on his head, or Hegel back on his feet, by arguing that 'ideas determine everything'," Professor Cummings wrote.

Where Marx saw the overthrow of monarchy on his march to history, the North Koreans seized on Hegel's belief in the state as being "of one mind" — in this case, "the mind of Kim".

Juche, then, is a curious amalgam of Marxist-Leninist ideas, ancient Korean belief, and selective readings of Hegel.

North Korea: Brutal? Yes. Stupid? No.

How does this factor into today's nuclear stand-off?

North Korea is a state forged in war — liberated from the Japanese, carved out of the Cold War, and still in a state of enduring, unending conflict with the United States and its allies.

Juche, self-reliance, locks the North out of the West. It combines with "jawi" — self-reliance in defence.

A paranoid regime in a constant state of war determined to stand on its own, it is little wonder it has so relentlessly and provocatively pursued nuclear weapons.

Victor Cha, long-time North Korea watcher and author of The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future, once revealed that in nuclear negotiations with the United States and other countries in 2005, a Pyongyang envoy said:

"The reason you attacked Afghanistan is because they didn't have any nukes. And look what happened to Libya. That is why we will never give up ours."

It is convenient, unhelpful, and lazy to lampoon North Korea as a laughing stock.

Ignore the wacky hairdos and platform shoes.

The lonely, misfit leader depicted in the film Team America may get a laugh in Hollywood, but the stakes here are serious.

Any credible North Korea analyst will never dismiss the Kim dynasty as "irrational" or "unpredictable".

Brutal? Yes. The stories of defectors escaping the death camps are beyond frightening.

Petulant? No doubt. North Korea hates being ignored.

But the regime's rulers are not stupid.

Survival is all

Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans told 7.30 this week he believed North Korea may be murderous, but not suicidal.

It has nuclear weapons, but to use them would risk annihilation.

Current leader Kim Jong-un has learned the lessons of his father (the late "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il) and his grandfather Kim Il-sung: survival is all.

While he threatens to unleash disaster, a first strike would be truly mad.

Writing in the journal Foreign Policy after a nuclear test in 2013, Professor Cha said authoritarian rulers did not survive if they were truly out of touch with reality.

"If Kim moves beyond the political theatre of the past 60 years — chest-thumping, name-calling — actually risks a major military strike … he's putting his own neck, as well as his country's, on the line," he wrote.

North Korea has always sought one-on-one unconditional talks with the United States.

It wants a peace treaty to finally end the war that began more than half a century ago.

World leaders, led by Donald Trump, meeting in Germany at the G20 are looking to China to break the impasse.

Certainly China has clout. North Korea has been effectively a client state — Beijing is Pyongyang's lifeline.

Can China stop the music?

Although the countries have been previously described as being as "close as lips and teeth", there are real questions about just how much influence the Chinese still have.

Interviewed on ABC radio this week, Fudan University's Shen Ding Lee described relations between China and North Korea as "freezing" and contact between the leaders of the two nations as "non-existent".

Mr Kim is yet to even visit China.

Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd told 7.30 this week that China would not act until or unless the United States got serious about a military strike on the North.

Mr Rudd said that could be a dangerous miscalculation on China's part.

North Korea holds a nuclear gun to the world's head and negotiations, although they've failed in the past, may be "the only game in town", as Mr Evans says.

In the meantime, the music continues to play.

Like his father and grandfather, Kim Jong-un sees music as the language of the people, the path to indoctrination.

He has formed his own all-girl band, the Moranbong band, which scholar Mr Chu says "plays the role of spokesman for the Kim Jong-un regime".

It performs at all official functions, playing songs of war and victory perpetuating the philosophy of juche — self-reliance.

The world waits and wonders how or when this music will stop.

Topics: world-politics, opera-and-musical-theatre, philosophy, communism, government-and-politics, korea-democratic-people-s-republic-of