Around the World, And Above, Part 2
THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE: SOUTH KOREA
[Hyungchol Choi, deputy director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, gestures to the dry, hilly, unremarkable landscape to our north. One might mistake it for Southern California, if not for the deserted pillboxes, fading banners, and rusting, barbed wire fence that runs to either horizon.]
Of course he interviews a South Korean spook from the fucking
KCIA about North Korea. Who else would you ask?
Note, if you would be so good, the rusting barbed wire, the crumbling pillboxes. This is important later, because some odd assumptions are made.
What happened? No one knows. No country was better prepared to repel the infestation than North Korea. Rivers to the north, oceans to the east and west, and to the south [he gestures to the Demilitarized Zone], the most heavily fortified border on Earth.
And they knew in advance; we know the pre-war Chinese military told them about the ghouls, hoping North Korea might be willing and able to distract whatever American forces were in South Korea whilst they went for Taiwan. This was before the Americans pulled out, of course.
You can see how mountainous the terrain is, how easily defensible, but what you can't see is that those mountains are honeycombed with a titanic military-industrial infrastructure.
The North Korean bunker network is surely extensive, but I can't imagine it is as vast as he tells the interviewer here, and it is mostly around a focal point at Pyongyang; old declassified South Korean documentation of the seismology imply that it sort of spiderwebs out from Pyongyang.
He must know this; there's no way Seoul has released information that is more sophisticated than the Deputy Director of the KCIA has seen.
Their population was heavily militarized, marshaled to a degree of readiness that made Israel look like Iceland. Over a million men and women were actively under arms with a further five in reserve.
I vaguely remember something about this; it fed into the Taiwan Strait crisis. North Korea had mobilised a chunk of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards and for a lot of people that cemented that China was gearing up for "the big one".
More important than this training, though, and most important for this kind of warfare was an almost superhuman degree of national discipline. North Koreans were indoctrinated from birth to believe that their lives were meaningless, that they existed only to serve the State, the Revolution, and the Great Leader.
There's a perception I get, from reading stuff like this and from speeches they give, from their general posturing around China… The South Korean government truly believes the North Koreans - certainly pre war - were, like… orcs? Barely human monsters, sworn to be eternally loyal to their Dark Lord.
North Koreans were mostly just people living in a dictatorship with a low-ish standard of living. The difference between them and the people of, I don't know, Equatorial Guinea, is that North Korea is
famous for being a dictatorship. But don't worry - it gets worse.
This is almost the polar opposite of what we experienced in the South. We were an open society. We had to be. International trade was our lifeblood. We were individualists, maybe not as much as you Americans, but we had more than our share of protests and public disturbances. We were such a free and fractured society that we barely managed to implement the Chang Doctrine during the Great Panic.
As the outbreak was beginning, the South Korean government, in the personage of the NIS - the intelligence agency which later returned to being the Korean CIA - arrested the leadership of the most prominent leftist party in the country for "plotting with the North".
This was the society that they believe was "too free". Nevermind that 10 companies made up 60% of their economy, and when Samsung said jump, their government said "Yes sir!"
The Chang Doctrine was Redeker again. It's always just Redeker again.
Free and fractured,
sure. Too many protests,
sure. God it's
gross how much time he spends interviewing spooks and generals.
That kind of internal crisis would have been inconceivable in the North. They were a people who, even when their government caused a near genocidal famine, would rather resort to eating children than raise even a whisper of defiance. This was the kind of subservience Adolf Hitler could have only dreamed of.
This is insane. They were people living in a dictatorship. They didn't "whisper defiance" because it would get them fucking
shot. You ought to be familiar - you were under military rule until 1993, and your own fucking intelligence agency was torturing domestic opponents until 1999.
If you had given each citizen a gun, a rock, or even their bare hands, pointed them at approaching zombies and said "Fight!" they would have done so down to the oldest woman and smallest tot. This was a country bred for war, planned, prepared, and poised for it since July 27, 1953. If you were going to invent a country to not only survive but triumph over the apocalypse we faced, it would have been the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
If you preface everything this guy says with the knowledge that his intelligence agency helped bring into power and
keep in power the daughter of South Korea's most infamous military dictator, then his insistence that the North Koreans are all murder robots primed to follow their leader off a cliff - as opposed to being
people who don't want to die? - makes a lot more sense.
But no the level of sacrificial suicide you are describing here is weird cult shit. I would've thought you'd know the difference? Military dictatorship is what South Korea does to its citizens, weird cult shit is what your president gets up to.
So what happened?
About a month before our troubles started, before the first outbreaks were reported in Pusan, the North suddenly, and inexplicably, severed all diplomatic relations. We weren't told why the rail line, the only overland link between our two sides, was suddenly closed, or why some of our citizens who'd been waiting decades to see long lost relatives in the North had their dreams abruptly shattered by a rubber stamp. No explanation of any kind was given. All we got was their standard "matter of state security" brush-off.
As far as anyone can tell, this was when Kim Jong-Un was informed by his agents in China that the Chinese government was serious about their plans to invade Taiwan once the outbreak took America's eye off the ball.
And like, in one of those cases where being a dictator of a small and precarious country was something of a disadvantage, Kim Jong-Un appears to have responded by freaking the fuck out. The North Korean leadership weren't
morons - they knew China was keeping a lid on their outbreak by far finer margins than they knew, and Kim Jong-Un knew that going for Taiwan actual would be a disaster; they'd have to move so much materiel and manpower around, outbreaks were going to go from being on the simmer to boiling over before anyone realised.
So he pulled out. Cut contact with South Korea, stopped following Chinese "advice" on foreign policy, and enacted North Korea's
absolutely monstrous take on the Redeker plan.
Unlike many others, I wasn't convinced that this was a prelude to war. Whenever the North had threatened violence, they always rang the same bells. No satellite data, ours or the Americans, showed any hostile intent. There were no troop movements, no aircraft fueling, no ship or submarine deployment. If anything, our forces along the Demilitarized Zone began noticing their opposite numbers disappearing.
North Korea started to pull back hard. They closed every border - which did their economy absolutely no favours, once they stopped being able to send workers into China - and started preparing.
We knew them all, the border troops. We'd photographed each one over the years, given them nicknames like Snake Eyes or Bulldog, even compiled dossiers on their supposed ages, backgrounds, and personal lives. Now they were gone, vanished behind shielded trenches and dugouts.
Our seismic indicators were similarly silent. If the North had begun tunneling operations or even massed vehicles on the other side of "Z," we would have heard it like the National Opera Company.
I find it amusing how he talks confidently about knowing the North Koreans were not engaging in exceptional amounts of tunnelling, and that the South would've easily spotted this.
You know, considering what he's about to peddle. The North Koreans did not all disappear into a tunnel network no one had ever discovered or imagined was the scale it would need to be. If I really wanted to, I could probably talk to a "North Korean" in, like, a month, tops.
We also saw a complete halt to human intelligence infiltration. Spies from the North were almost as regular and predictable as the seasons. Most of the time they were easy to spot, wearing out-of-date clothes or asking the price of goods that they should have already known. We used to pick them up all the time, but since the outbreaks began, their numbers had dwindled to zero.
Was the UPP entirely made up of North Korean agents and had to be dissolved, or were North Korean spies laughably out of touch and incompetent? Which is it, dude? It cannot be both.
But I mean, it can. North Korea is the archetypical "both strong and weak" enemy for South Korea.
What about your spies in the North?
Vanished, all of them, right about the same time all our electronic surveillance assets went dark. I don't mean there was no disturbing radio traffic, I mean there was no traffic at all. One by one, all the civilian and military channels began shutting down. Satellite images showed fewer farmers in their fields, less foot traffic in city streets, even fewer "volunteer" laborers on many public works projects, which is something that has never happened before. Before we knew it, there wasn't a living soul left from the Yalu to the DMZ. From a purely intelligence standpoint, it appeared as if the entire country, every man, woman, and child in North Korea, had simply vanished.
This both is and is not true. North Korea certainly would look empty on South Korean satellites by the end of this operation, but the "how" of it isn't exactly mysterious.
There's satellite footage - and testimonies - of the 18 million or so North Koreans considered surplus to requirements for the survival of the state being forced across the Yalu into Jilin and Liaoning. This included large portions of their military, though few of the upper ranks.
Most successful South Korean spies, so far as we can tell, were successfully able to argue their way into the remaining 5 million North Koreans who were not exiled.
This mystery only stoked our growing anxiety, given what we had to deal with at home. By now there were outbreaks in Seoul, P'ohang, Taejon. There was the evacuation of Mokpo, the isolation of Kangnung, and, of course, our version of Yonkers at Inchon, and all of it compounded by the need to keep at least half our active divisions along our northern border.
Their version of Yonkers. Right. Just like Yonkers. The only real difference being that in Korea, the intelligence services took a more forward role, and the military took the shaft.
But honestly I can see why they'd be spooked - North Korea was not acting rationally. The Chinese were spitting furious about it - the provincial party secretaries in Liaoning and Jilin were scrambling to deal with the influx, they had outbreaks cropping up unexpectedly, an early foreshadow of the nightmare when they went for Taiwan, and the entire rest of the North Korean population just disappeared.
The standing assumption I believe was that they were planning to uncan some sunshine over Seoul whilst the South Koreans struggled to contain their outbreaks.
Too many in the Ministry of National Defense were convinced that the Pyongyang was just aching for war, waiting eagerly for our darkest moment to come thundering across the 38th Parallel. We in the intelligence community couldn't disagree more. We kept telling them that if they were waiting for our darkest hour, then that hour had most certainly arrived.
The South Korean military has been more or less entirely brought under the domain of the KCIA since the war. The Ministry of National Defence was devastated by the ghouls, and then literally occupied by military units loyal to the KCIA as the war came to a close.
All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. This is why he frames the intelligence community as the rational sceptics in the room at the time - it was, so they claim, necessary for the security of South Korea against the ghoul threat and to avoid provoking the North Koreans, that they claim military authority.
Of course, now they're in charge, they're pretty gung ho about provoking the Workers' Republic, so.
Tae Han Min'guk was on the brink of national collapse. Plans were being secretly drafted for a Japanese-style resettlement. Covert teams were already scouting locations in Kamchatka. If the Chang Doctrine hadn't worked . . . if just a few more units had broken, if a few more safe zones had collapsed . . .
It is testament to how abjectly fucked the Russians were at this point that South Korea, in the middle of actually legitimately collapsing, was able to engage in covert operations on Russian soil. Hell, Japan was able to completely occupy Kamchatka, though the HRE might be thanking them for that now.
Maybe we owe our survival to the North, or at least to the fear of it. My generation never really saw the North as a threat. I'm speaking of the civilians, you understand, those of my age who saw them as a backward, starving, failed nation. My generation had grown up their entire lives in peace and prosperity. The only thing they feared was a German-style reunification that would bring millions of homeless ex-communists looking for a handout.
The wretched contempt for the North Koreans just bleeds through, doesn't it?
And why would they be homeless, anyway? They weren't homeless in the DPRK, so why would they be homeless after reunification?
I jest, obviously. They'd be homeless because all the housing stock would be purchased by South Korean Chaebols and they wouldn't be able to afford rent.
Anyway, they aren't stoking fear of North Korea because they're scared of the bunker rats we all have to assume are still living there. They're stoking fear of North Korea because the Workers Republic of Korea in Jilin has a similar population to South Korea but is, you know, not a complete fucking basket case run by a religious cultist. They're terrified.
That wasn't the case with those who came before us . . . our parents and grandparents . . . those who lived with the very real specter of invasion hanging over them, the knowledge that at any moment the alarms might sound, the lights might dim, and the bankers, schoolteachers, and taxi drivers might be called to pick up arms and fight to defend their homeland. Their hearts and minds were ever vigilant, and in the end, it was them, not us, who rallied the national spirit.
Love some veneration of older generations (who lived under a military dictatorship) and therefore had the vigilance to rally the national spirit, unlike the young, weak of heart and mind.
Just adore how open the fascism is, honestly.
I'm still pushing for an expedition to the North. I'm still blocked at every turn. There's too much work to do, they tell me. The country is still in shambles. We also have our international commitments, most importantly the repatriation of our refugees to Kyushu. . . . [Snorts.] Those Japs are gonna owe us big-time.
Would you believe Japan and Korea don't get on now? I'm shocked. Shocked!
They play nice because America makes them play nice, but as it becomes clearer and clearer that America isn't going to come roaring back to prominence on the world stage, the claws are starting to come out. I give it a year before they're skirmishing over Tsushima and the Liancourt Rocks.
I'm not asking for a recon in force. Just give me one helicopter, one fishing boat; just open the gates at Panmunjom and let me walk through on foot. What if you trigger some booby trap? they counter. What if it's nuclear? What if you open the door to some underground city and twenty-three million zombies come spewing out? Their arguments aren't without merit.
These are not the arguments used. The arguments used - the arguments that keep the South Koreans below the DMZ and the WRK above the Yalu - are that for either to enter North Korea, they're violating the claimed territory of the other. Forget about the DPRK. For either South Korean or Jilin Korean forces to enter the northern half of the Korean peninsula would represent an invasion of their opposite number.
We know the DMZ is heavily mined. Last month a cargo plane nearing their airspace was fired on by a surface-to-air missile. The launcher was an automated model, the type they'd designed as a revenge weapon in case the population had already been obliterated.
Another argument is that the DPRK is clearly still kicking, if only just. Something's clearly gone wrong - you can't imagine they intend to stay in their bunker complex forever - but there's absolutely no fucking chance that any of their automated defences are still working after 20 years without maintenance - they can't even keep a pillbox or razorwire functional for 20 years without replacement parts, and you expect us to believe their SAM turrets are just ticking over fine?
Conventional wisdom is that they must have evacuated to their subterranean complexes. If that is true, then our estimates of the size and depth of those complexes were grossly inaccurate. Maybe the entire population is underground, tooling away on endless war projects, while their "Great Leader" continues to anesthetize himself with Western liquor and American pornography.
The bunker complexes must be larger than anticipated, sure, but they aren't as large as he pretends to believe they could be; he would be able to tell!
But the official position of the South Korean Government on the WRK in Jilin is that it does not exist, and if it does exist, it is Chinese propaganda, and contains no ethnic Koreans. As such, they have to claim no North Koreans were exiled, and as such… they have to pretend to believe that Kim Jong-Un retreated into the bunker complex with the entire population of North Korea.
And we know more than they hint. A couple of years into the crisis, when South Korea was looking at its most dire, there was a broadcast from Pyongyang calling for South Koreans to rise up against their government, promising that the Korean People's Army would cross the DMZ in force to defend them against the living dead and their government both.
This broadcast told us an awful lot about what was going on down there, because it was delivered by Supreme Leader Kim Yo-jong.
For Kim Yo-jong to be the ruling member of that family - given she was only 28 at the time - something terrible must have befallen her siblings, without substantially altering the attitude of the North Koreans in the bunker complex towards them. To me, this screams
ghoul. An outbreak in the highest levels of their bunker complex could've easily killed or turned her older siblings without having resulted in substantial broader concerns.
So far as "how" the infection got in - I think it was probably the South Korean spies. Recall that this was before the outbreaks had really gotten going; only China and North Korea knew, at this point. If a South Korean spy got through the initial screening to get into the "let us all become mole people" meeting, they'd be assumed to be clean of the zombie taint. If they'd slipped out a side exit to try and contact Seoul, though… Been bitten by a homeless person whilst doing it? Do you think they'd tell anyone in the bunker? People would ask questions, like "what were you doing out there". So they didn't tell anybody, and then eventually they turned within the bunker complex.
There have been no broadcasts since that one, either - no uprising in South Korea was forthcoming, either, but the South Koreans don't like to acknowledge the broadcast at
all, because it caught them completely by surprise, and set them into a tizzy where they deployed units to the DMZ and lost about half their remaining enclaves in two months.
Do they even know the war is over? Have their leaders lied to them, again, and told them that the world as they know it has ceased to be? Maybe the rise of the dead was a "good" thing in their eyes, an excuse to tighten the yoke even further in a society built on blind subjugation. The Great Leader always wanted to be a living God, and now, as master not only of the food his people eat, the air they breathe, but the very light of their artificial suns, maybe his twisted fantasy has finally become a reality.
My view, personally, is that the North Koreans thought everyone would fuck it up. They didn't think any other governments would survive - China knew it was coming and was still planning to fuck around and find out, they must've thought everyone else would do worse.
And once everyone else did worse, North Korea could open their bunkers and come out armed and ready to liberate the people of South Korea, Japan and so on, and become hegemon of the Sea of Japan, if not further. But then the other governments didn't collapse - indeed, some of them are stronger than ever, and filled with antipathy for the Kim dynasty, and they realised the difficulty they would face if they ever opened up. So they haven't.
Maybe that was the original plan, but something went disastrously wrong. Look what happened to the "mole city" underneath Paris. What if that occurred in the North on a national level? Maybe those caverns are teeming with twenty-three million zombies, emaciated automatons howling in the darkness and just waiting to be unleashed.
Maybe they all died. Maybe there are 5 or 6 million ghouls locked up down there. Or maybe some parts of their network are flooded, and others still work, still allow them to repair and maintain their defences. Or maybe they're fine down there - as fine as you can get under the circumstances.
Whatever the truth is, it has nothing to do with why he's not allowed into North Korea.
I'll be covering Japan next. Looking forward to
that.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE].
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Argentina will be free! Donate to the cause [HERE]. This link might be illegal in your country, be careful.
AN: Did you know in 2013 South Korea was ruled by a cult? Did you know they declared a major-ish political party of being spies for the North and outlawed the party?
Such a normal, individualistic country. It is also weird how frequently he just… describes fascism. Next up we have some extremely cringe inducing japanese stuff.
