The two-faced tactics and time-tested tricks of tyrants
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The three dictatorships of the last century which diabolically mastered the black arts of political trickery and diplomatic two-faced tactics – Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Communist China – were often able to deceive their adversaries in the Western world into adopting policies of appeasement.
Today, particularly in the context of rogue regimes such as North Korea, this is euphemistically termed by its misguided advocates as “engagement.”
With the Nazis and the Communists, this has been the case since the beginning. Way back in 1933, Hitler’s right-hand man Herman Goring told foreign journalists it was a “lie” that the Nazi government was persecuting or planning to persecute Jews or indeed was in any way hostile to Jews.
When Lenin was accused of being funded by Imperial Germany after he returned to Russia in 1917 to try and overthrow the democratic government of Alexander Kerensky, he published strong denials using a printing press which his followers bought with funds provided by Germany.
After Mao Zedong announced his “Hundred Flowers” campaign, assuring intellectuals and others that they would be completely free to express criticisms of him and his regime, he then reversed course and mercilessly persecuted and eliminated those who had naively trusted his sincerity.
In late 1973, U.S. and British intelligence agencies learned of a policy speech given by then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, in which he told East European communist leaders that recent Soviet agreements with the U.S. and other Western nations, and the very concept of detente itself, were merely a tactic to deceive them.
The supposed policy shift of the Soviet rulers was actually a move to encourage the West to lower its guard at a time when the U.S. Congress was debating major defense spending cuts. The tactic was also meant to be temporary, in order to allow Moscow to increase its own strength while promoting the “ideological disarmament” of its Western foes.
A similar speech was made ten years later, in 1983, by Brezhnev’s successor, the longtime KGB officer Yuri Andropov, who told the East Europeans that he was proposing a “non-aggression pact” between the Warsaw Pact and NATO as a tactic to forestall the deployment of new American missiles in Western Europe.
In the case of North Korea, Kim Il-sung and his party, like Mao five years earlier and Lenin and Stalin twenty years before that, had promised Korean peasants in the North that land reform would grant them ownership of the land they tilled, only to strip them of it through collectivization. Kim’s new government also promised and enshrined in law, just as Stalin and Mao had done, supposed guarantees of freedom of expression and religious worship, which proved to be meaningless promises.
Prior to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea in June of 1949, North Korea had urged their exit, as they do today, on the grounds that the North had no intention whatsoever of invading. Then, in the months, weeks, and days leading up to its June 25, 1950, invasion, Pyongyang proposed phony peace initiatives and made calls for legislative talks.
In July 1972, the two sides agreed to an unprecedented Joint Statement, the first of several other such agreements that would follow over the years. It was just four weeks later, however, that a North Korean official informed his East German counterparts that Kim Il-sung had agreed to the statement merely as a “tactical move” for the purpose of furthering his plans to reunite the peninsula on the North’s terms by encouraging the withdrawal of U.S. forces and Japanese investors from the ROK.
When North Korea tried to assassinate then-President Chun Doo-hwan in Myanmar in 1983 and destroyed Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987 in a bid to dissuade its allies from attending the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the regime, as well as its supporters in the U.S., stridently denied involvement and even tried to claim that the South itself was responsible. Indeed, just prior to the 1983 Burma bombing, the North again made one of its fraudulent peace proposals in order to put the southern enemy at ease and promote a sense of complacency.
Later, in talks with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in 1994, at the very time when the North was proceeding at a rapid pace with its nuclear program, Kim Il-sung solemnly assured Carter that the North was not developing such weapons, had no intention of developing them, and would not do so in the future. Kim made the same promise in a meeting with diplomats and journalists that year, saying that the North would “never have nuclear weapons.”
Throughout 2018, in the lead up to and as a basis for the meetings between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore, and at the DMZ and in Hanoi in 2019, media reports were filled with the contention that Kim had agreed to “denuclearization without conditions” and that he was “willing to get rid of everything.”
But this time there was a major difference, which some noticed with a sense of unease and doubt, but which many others naively took at face value. That was that the media reports almost uniformly included the additional qualifying words “Moon says.” In other words, the reassurances were not being attributed directly to Kim or any other North Korean source. They were coming almost exclusively from the South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
As the actual negotiations unfolded, however, it soon became clear that none of these offers and assurances by Kim were his actual positions, and that either he had been lying, which would be no surprise, or that his “messenger” Moon had been either grossly exaggerating or even fabricating the supposed messages from Kim.
Even today, it is difficult to know whether Moon was simply a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy, being unwillingly or perhaps even willingly deceived by Kim, or whether he was deliberately misrepresenting Kim’s statements and positions pursuant to his own disastrously failed efforts at appeasement.
Of course, among political leaders, it is not only totalitarian dictators who lie or otherwise misrepresent reality, nor is it a new historical trend. The practice of deception has been used for both good and evil, as the Bible, the works of the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, and various Romans attest to. Nevertheless, it was Lenin, the earliest and most studied strategist of communism in actual practice, whose tactics influenced Hitler, Stalin, Mao, their master propagandists and negotiators and others who raised the deliberate use of calculated deception to new heights in the modern age.
”People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics and they always will be,” Lenin said. In order to take full advantage of that truth for his cause, he further instructed his comrades, as a matter of policy, that “We must be able…to resort to various stratagems, artifices, and illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges…”
The key question that free societies in general face, and which the South Korean leaders and people in particular face, is whether, as the philosopher George Santayana put it, they are willing to learn from the past or are destined to repeat it.
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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