“Rope selling” and “rope supporting” — Lenin’s lessons for South Korean and American politicians, Left and Right
Vladimir Lenin (Image: iStock/ Rendery)
Among the many absurd claims of North Korea’s propaganda in promoting the cult of the hereditary Kim dynasty is that Kim Jong-il, as a very young boy, had read and fully comprehended the works of Vladimir Lenin.
In spite of the unlikelihood that he had taken up Lenin at such a tender age, it is nevertheless certain that he would, as a young communist leader-in-training, have mastered the principles and tactics of Russia’s preeminent Bolshevik at some point during his education.
Regardless of when he, his father Kim Il-sung, or his son Kim Jong-un first imbibed the Leninist canon, however, in such areas as state and party structure, economic policy, foreign relations, united front work, and propaganda, Leninist tactics have long been incorporated into the North’s political playbook. The well-developed and consistently employed tactic of using pro-North “front groups” within the ROK and the U.S. to promote Pyongyang’s policy aims and manipulate public opinion is just one of many examples.
Lenin is often quoted as having once written or said something to the effect that “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them.” While the authenticity of the quote is in doubt, students of Soviet history, or the history of other communist states in various parts of the world, can’t deny that the principle implied by this statement, that non-communist states and private enterprises have often substantially assisted their sworn enemies in Marxist-Leninist regimes to survive and partially compensated for the failure of their socialist policies by means of trade, technology transfer, aid and other forms economic interaction. In the Soviet case, this phenomenon was well illustrated in the 1986 history of the USSR by Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich entitled “Utopia in Power.”
That supposed observation by Lenin also has a secondary meaning distinct from its implications in the realm of economics and trade.
The notion that Marxist-Leninists, both historically and with regard to the few remaining communist states and movements, can rely on witting or unwitting assistance from non-communist states or private entities applies in a more general sense to fields such as politics, international relations, and public opinion.
Unfortunately, it sometimes seems that certain decisions made by ROK governments and some private Korean organizations have had the practical effect of aiding their foes. Some of these policies were enacted based on reasonable premises with the best of intentions, but have nevertheless often proved to do far more harm than good to the ROK and the cause of liberal democracy. In fact, such bad decisions have had the net result of providing North Korea, as well as far-left anti-ROK elements, with the “rope” which they use in their attempts to “hang” the ROK.
On the macro level, American politicians, policymakers and private organizations have also been responsible for such “rope selling” to communists, including some which resulted in great harm to both the U.S. and the ROK. During the Second World War, for example, the U.S., under its “lend lease” aid program, provided the Soviet Pacific Fleet with large transport vessels known as “Liberty ships” which greatly expanded the USSR’s military transport capabilities in the Far East. The ships were loaned (but never returned after the war) for the purpose of assisting Soviet forces when they finally entered the war against Japan (with which they previously had a non-aggression pact), but were actually of little use in the USSR’s short campaign against Japan during the last week of the war.
As Professor Richard Thornton points out in his 2001 history of the origins of the Korean War entitled “Odd Man Out,” these ships eventually served to enable the North’s 1950 blitzkrieg-style invasion of the ROK. The large shipments of T-34 tanks which the Soviets supplied to Kim Il-sung’s forces in the months just prior to the North’s invasion are recognized by military historians as having played a decisive role in the speed of the North’s advance down the Korean peninsula, and it was by means of the U.S.-supplied transport ships that Stalin was able to provide these tanks rapidly and in avoidance of land transport.
The North Korean submarine which was grounded off the east coast of the ROK in 1996 while infiltrating commandos was found to have contained cans of food (with English labels intact) provided as aid to starving North Koreans by Christian charities in the U.S.
The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, which was founded by a wealthy Korean-American and funded by donations from churches in the U.S. and Korea (and to a lesser extent funded by the ROK government) and was intended as a showcase for so-called “academic engagement” with the North, has been a subject of great controversy. The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, has long pointed to increasing evidence that, rather than serving to help open the North to outside influences, the school is in fact helping to prop-up the regime through its tight ideological controls and a student body strictly limited to regime loyalists carefully selected from elite families.
To make this an even more egregious case of “rope selling,” conservative ROK lawmaker Yoon Sang-hyun revealed in 2010 that the university was using some of the funds it received (from Christian donors and the ROK government) to establish a research center promoting Kim, Il-sung’s Juche ideology and to build a monument to the Kim dynasty cult.
In the realm of technology, foreign trade with the North has for decades enabled the Pyongyang regime to enhance its military-industrial capabilities in ways which would have been virtually impossible without such outside assistance. In 2012, an independent investigation commissioned by the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) found that the WIPO itself had provided the North (probably in violation of the U.N.’s own sanctions) with technology ostensibly for use in upgrading a patent retrieval system, but which was actually of a “dual use” nature which could have easily been employed for military purposes.
Another U.N. report disclosed that the North Koreans had obtained British, American and South Korean components for one of the most important missiles in their arsenal.
Most recently, media reports have revealed that North Korea’s professional hackers, fraudulently posing as remote employees, have been getting themselves hired in order to steal their employers’ intellectual property and engage in ransomware attacks.
These are rather stark examples confirming the willingness of some non-communists to provide “the rope which will be used to hang them.”
On the micro level, in the US, this “rope selling” takes the form of financial support for and honors given to elements sympathetic to the North Korean regime and hostile to the ROK and the U.S.-ROK alliance.
Unfortunately, such support and encouragement has often been provided by the ROK government to individuals and entities in the U.S. that employ such assistance in ways certainly not intended by its providers, to defend North Korea and slander the ROK.
This support not only empowers anti-ROK forces in the U.S., including extremists bent on the destruction of the ROK’s liberal democratic order, but has the additional negative consequence of disheartening and weakening those in the U.S. who support the ROK, the U.S.-ROK alliance, and oppose North Korean influence.
While the provision of such support is motivated by the ROK government’s legitimate and laudable desire to promote Korean culture, enhance Korea’s positive image, the net results of such aid have sometimes not been positive and, on the contrary, have bolstered the influence of those opposed to the ROK.
An example of such “rope selling” by the ROK government in the U.S, which ROK officials should seriously reconsider, is the provision of “no strings attached” financial support to Korean Studies programs at certain major American universities. This is obviously a sensitive issue, because such support is a key aspect of Korea’s efforts to promote the study of Korean history and culture overseas and is intended to enhance greater understanding of and goodwill towards the ROK. However, it is crucially important that ROK authorities responsible for funding these programs understand that some of this support is being used by far-left U.S. academics in ways which were not intended, to slander the ROK government and in some cases to defend the policies and actions of North Korea.
This is not an appeal for draconian ideological litmus tests to determine which American universities and academics are worthy of funding by Seoul. It is simply a suggestion that the ROK government take measures to ensure that its support is not misused, as it has flagrantly been, for political attacks (thinly veiled or quite openly) on the ROK and efforts to promote North Korea’s foreign policy goals.
It seems reasonable that the ROK government, indeed any government, which provides financial or other support to an academic institution, while not being justified in obsessively micro-managing the uses to which such aid is put, would be within its rights and not infringing on academic freedom if it were to insist that the resources it provides not be used for extreme, ideologically-inspired political attacks or for invitations to non-academic political activists to engage in one-sided defenses of North Korea’s human rights.
Pursuant to this analysis, which will hopefully be taken as constructive criticism, it should be kept in mind that there are other lessons from Lenin that ROK’s new left-wing government would do well to ponder.
These lessons, really warnings from history, are related not to the phenomenon of “selling the rope” which one’s enemies will use to hang one, but rather to a statement which Lenin made with regard to the Bolsheviks’ relations with other non-communist forces on the left. In his famous 1920 work “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” Lenin explained what communist policy should be with regard to the leftist Labor Party of Great Britain, stating that British Marxist-Leninists could give their “support” to Labor against the British government and Britain’s Conservative Party, but that the nature of such “support” must be “as the rope supports a hanged man.”
Lenin was not prohibiting any form of collaboration between British communists and the Labor Party against their common foes, but used the analogy to emphasize to his disciples that any such cooperative effort must be of a purely tactical and strictly temporary nature, to be discarded once its short-term usefulness had been exhausted and to be pursued only if the non-communist left would agree to certain conditions.
He demanded that communists have full freedom of activity within the Labor Party, which Labor wisely refused, no doubt based on the justified suspicion that this would lead not only to the infiltration of their party but also to its destruction. He also insisted that communist work within non-communist groups such as the Labor Party must have the ultimate goal not of sincere collaboration, but rather of deliberate destruction of the Labor Party from within.
If philosopher George Santayana’s warning about history repeating itself is to be avoided by the ROK, both its new leftist administration and its conservative opposition should heed Lenin’s lessons regarding “rope selling and rope supporting.”
Lawrence Peck is a correspondent for NK Insider based in Seoul and Los Angeles. Having intensively researched and closely monitored the activities of pro-North Korea and other extremist groups and activists in the U.S. for over 25 years, he has been recognized in the U.S. and Korea as one of the leading American authorities on such topics, and has lectured, written extensively and been interviewed on such topics in the U.S. and Korea. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Juris Doctor degree from Loyola Law School of Los Angeles. He previously worked in Korea for several of the largest Korean business groups in the fields of intellectual property licensing and international business development. He also serves as an advisor to the North Korea Freedom Coalition of the U.S. Lawrence may be reached at the email address: lawrence.nkinsider@gmail.com
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