Give Violence a Chance
By Edward Kim
Today Kim Jong Il apologized to PM Junichiro Koizumi for his country’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens over the last few decades to train N. Korean spies infiltrating Japan.
Make no mistake. This remarkable concession by North Korea’s dictator, along with the expulsion of Red Army hijackers from Pyongyang a few months ago, was not the fruit of Kim Dae Jung’s five year long “Sunshine Policy.”
Indeed, if anything, the event was a double-insult toward South Korea’s president. For one thing, Kim Jong Il has offered no apology to South Korea for the North’s kidnapping of South Koreans, hundreds more than the Japanese victims, or for that matter, for the bombing of South Korean airlines. And to add insult to injury, Kim Jong Il was able to garner an apology from Koizumi for Imperial Japan’s atrocities committed during World War II, a stronger apology than any South Korean president has been able to obtain from Tokyo thus far.
Some may simply dismiss what happened today as another one of Kim Jong Il’s crass efforts to get more money from Japan. True, but South Korea has for years been Pyongyang’s greatest donor of unmonitored aid. Suffice it to say, I have never had more sympathy for South Korea’s Kim Dae Jung, who is still waiting for a reciprocal visit from Kim Jong Il, or antipathy for the Dear Leader, until now.
But this is not my main point. I would like to explain the main reason for Kim Jong Il’s unprecedented apology to the one country on earth that no one expected would ever receive an apology from a North Korean let alone its leader.
For the first time in Kim Jong Il’s life he is afraid. George W. Bush’s credible threat of violence against regimes that harbor terrorists and that proliferate weapons of mass destruction has put the fear of God into the Dear Leader. Kim Jong Il’s recent actions then should not be so surprising. The threat of imminent death has a marvelous way of concentrating the mind.
Today another egomaniacal dictator, Saddam Hussein, not coincidentally, another member of the Axis of Evil put on notice, issued a letter to the United Nations, after years of defiance, unconditionally allowing weapons inspectors back into Baghdad. As with Kim Jong Il’s sudden change of heart, Hussein did not concede to UN inspections as a result of the peaceful, decades-long diplomatic overtures of the world community. No, it was out of earnest fear of one man whose middle name begins with W.
It is admittedly a strange irony, perhaps even a tragedy, that those who deserve Nobel Peace Prizes may be the ones who effect peace through violence. At the same time, those who have received Nobel Peace Prizes, Kim Dae Jung coming readily to mind, may have done the least to promote peace (which by definition is not merely the absence of conflict but the establishment of justice) through their non-violent efforts.
“But what about Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi?” proponents of non-violence will object. Surely they exemplify the truth that the best way to achieve peace is through non-violence.
No, those great men only demonstrate the truth that non-violent methods of civil disobedience only work effectively against regimes with functioning moral compasses. This truth was acknowledged by the German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer who participated in the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. Sometimes regimes can be so evil, that violence, or the credible threat of violence, is the only moral way of stopping their aggression.
Violence, or more precisely, righteous violence, that is, the killing of murderers to stop the killing of innocents, is what ended the Holocaust. It also halted rape camps operating in Bosnia. Some may still remember that the overbearing threat of righteous violence brought down the Evil Empire. More recently, it restored the basic human dignity of Afghan women (contrary to the strong opposition by supposed human rights advocates who warned of unavoidable famine and catastrophe should the US attack the Taliban). Soon enough it will bring freedom to millions of Iraqi citizens. And one day sooner than later because of it (or the threat of it), North Koreans will have the freedom to know God.
Some disdain the United States for its apparent self-appointed role as the world’s police man. I personally thank God that the U.S. currently has a leader who embraces the calling as if he were Gary Cooper in High Noon for reals. The world is no longer safe for evil tyrants.
Nevertheless, an important caveat must be made, and I close with the words of Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf from his seminal work, Exclusion and Embrace, to make it.
“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion - without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and imitate God’s love for him. And when one knows that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see onself in the light of God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.” (p.124)
