【纽约客 11/12/19】金正日的身后事

满仓

【中文标题】金正日的身后事
【原文标题】After Kim Jong-il
【登载媒体】纽约客
【原文作者】Evan Osnos
【原文链接】http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2011/12/after-kim-jong-il.html




金正日没有死在逃亡过程中，也没有死在洞穴里、牢狱中和绞刑架上。他最后出人意料地比那些危害更大的独裁者们活得更久：卡扎菲、穆巴拉克和其他被今年觉醒的世人推翻的小暴君们。在国家电台播音员呜咽的话语中，他在平壤附近的火车上死于心脏病。我们被告知，他“为了建设一个繁荣富强的国家，在马不停蹄的一线巡查工作中，被巨大的心里和生理疾病”压垮了。

有关他的死，官方报道中透露的消息极为有限——没提到两年前的中风让他的健康开始走下坡路，只有一张令人将信将疑的火车上的照片，但这似乎就应当是他的风格。金正日的死与瓦茨拉夫•哈韦尔（译者注：捷克剧作家，前捷克共和国总统）前后相差几个小时，隔着半个地球遥遥相望。把这两个人联系起来，或许可以让我们对事实真相有深入的了解。David Remnick在星期天写了一篇文章纪念哈韦尔，其中令人信服地说明了为什么独裁制度必将灭亡，为什么独裁说到底并不是仰仗手里的枪和坦克，而是依靠世世代代的谎言，通过制造恐惧和习惯让人们感受到指出一丝不挂的国王要付出多么惨重的代价。1978年，哈韦尔在《无能的力量》中写道：“只有当谎言无处不在时，只有它包围、渗透进周围的一切时，人们才能忍受它。”这篇文章曾被译为多国语言，在全世界传播。

没有人比金氏王朝更有效、更恐怖地运作一个遍布谎言的国际机器了，这个国家现在还在生产只能接收一个电台信号的晶体管收音机。毛和斯大林都在他们心目中的伟大事业面前败下阵来，而金正日和他的父亲金日成则致力于营造一个可以完全控制的环境。Andrew Natsios在90年代曾经作为一家人道主义机构World Vision的官员，在大饥荒期间访问过朝鲜，他称此为“建造一个巨大的波将金村。（译者注：俄国女皇叶卡捷琳娜二世的情夫波将金，为了使女皇对他领地的富足有个良好印象，不惜工本，在“今上”必经的路旁建起一批豪华的假村庄。于是，波将金村成了一个世界闻名的做表面文章和弄虚作假的代号。）”后来，金根据战略需要，有选择地决定发布或者隐瞒它的核武器工厂信息。在处理饥荒问题上，他也采取了同样的策略——根据不同的情况来袒露或者隐藏人民死亡的信息。Natsios在《朝鲜大饥荒》一书中说，当救援人员到农村视察时，负责接待的当地官员已经把街道上“虚弱的灾民、遗弃的儿童、垃圾、废墟和尸体”清理干净。

金正日出生时的名字是尤里•日成诺维奇•金，这位伟大领导人来到这个世界的时候，他的父亲正在俄罗斯远东地区，日本人在朝鲜半岛悬赏捉拿这个游击队领导人让他逃到苏联。二战之后，金日成在斯大林的支持下建立了民主人民共和国，统治这个国家直到1994年。他的儿子没有任何革命斗争资历，长得又矮又胖，一成不变的头发梳在脑后。如果生在另外一个家庭，他或许可以在电影制作这个他真正感兴趣的行业上挥霍他的才华。他曾经在电影作品上花费了上千万美元，甚至在1978年绑架了韩国女演员崔银姬和他的丈夫——导演申相玉。（他们在金正日的指导下拍摄了几部电影——他们认为金“关注细节”、“非常聪明”——直到8年后他们成功逃脱。）

但是，他在1980年被任命为金日成的继承人，获得了“无畏的领导人”和“伟大的革命继承者”的称号。在这个没有任何理由可以维持下去的体系中，他被推着挤过一系列党政军的提拔道路。苏联的解体让朝鲜的优惠贸易条款荡然无存，加上洪水灾害和对计划经济的荒谬曲解，导致了一场大饥荒。官方承认，有25万人在1995年到1998年之间死于饥饿，一些独立调查团体认为实际数字是它的10倍。金和他的父亲之所以能够继续把持政权，部分原因在于他们所宣扬的神话论，以及让人民在半个世纪的时间里处于备战状态。（朝鲜和韩国从未签署任何和平条约，理论上仍处于战争状态。）

我在2005年去过朝鲜，那是一次受到严格管束的旅游。我和一位有过入伍经历的登山导游进行了一次谈话，他走着走着停下来，极为认真地问我美国核武器政策的问题：“我不能理解为什么你们要对伊拉克使用核武器。”他是被严格挑选出来接待外宾的人，可以穿上暖和的外套，或许也有机会接触一些机密信息。各种迹象都表明他相信美国对伊拉克动用了核武器（当然这也可能是他伪装出来的），我实在不知道还有哪个国家能如此有效地从上到下传达指示。我在想，如果他对使用核武器是这种理解，他还会相信什么？

金轮流扮演恐怖分子和狡猾的外交官的角色。1987年，朝鲜在一架韩国客机上安放了一枚炸弹，导致机上115人全部丧生。参与该事件的年轻特工金贤姬曾服下毒药试图自杀，但被救回性命，她后来说金曾亲自监控这个行动。2000年之后，金开始对韩国示好，与金大中的关系一度达到前所未有的和谐，首尔还提出了“阳光政策”（译者注：指金大中在就职演说中所提出的三大原则：没有并吞的意图、不准许军事挑衅、追求和平共存）。金在二十年里断断续续地从事核武器研究计划。2003年，乔治•W•布什把朝鲜定性为“邪恶轴心国成员”之后，金退出了核武器非扩散条约。在后来的几年，朝鲜在一系列耗费精力的谈判空隙，进行了核武器和导弹试验，时时吸引世界的目光。

随着年事渐高，他成为了世界上一个独特的标志：像任何一个独揽大权的国王那样任人嘲弄，但手中的力量让他极具危险性。金的态度甚至让他脾气最温和的盟友也难以忍受。北京的领导人曾经试图说法他走上中国的道路，不给人民自由同样可以实现繁荣。但他拒绝了，或许是觉得有太多的不确定因素。在最后的日子里，他丝毫没有退却的表示：击沉韩国军舰、透露铀浓缩项目、炮击延坪岛。金的死和他的生一样，自欺欺人让他胆量十足，剥削人民让他不慌不忙。当谈到“建设一个富强的国家”时，他却在12月17日星期日结束了生命，留下了一片空白和他自己制造的烂摊子。

他的死很突然，朝鲜人显然没有做好接受这个现实的准备。他在等待了14年之后才成为国家领导人，而他的第三个儿子金正恩只有20多岁，用了三年时间就爬到了政坛顶峰。前国家安全委员会成员、现任国际战略研究中心朝鲜事务主任的Victor D. Cha在金死后写道：“在目前朝鲜的局势下，似乎再没有别的因素可以让他放弃权力了。这是一个分水岭。任何一个专家都会说，引起朝鲜政权崩溃最可能的因素就是领导人突然去世，现在它真的发生了。”

中国被赋予了一项特殊的使命——阻止这样的事情发生。就像美国在冷眼旁观金氏帝国的覆灭一样，中国领导人几十年来都在担心有大批的难民从边境涌入。他们徒步走过图们江，这个季节江面上的冰层非常适于行走。中国将迅速采取行动避免这种现象：发送食物、燃油、武器和其他一切需要的东西。延世大学的朝鲜问题观察家John Delury在今天对我说：“我们完全了解中国会怎么做，他们将继续收紧怀抱，他们早就为此做好了准备。他们有便捷的方式，只要拿起电话拨几个号码。”

巨变也不一定真的会发生。当金日成在1994年去世的时候，外界广泛预测的政权崩溃后来并没有出现。目前来看，金氏家族及其受益者们依然控制着绝大部分的国家机器。任何变化或者企图，随之而来的不仅仅是难民危机，而且还有残暴的权力斗争和暴力行为。

有些人在推销一种观点，认为金的死会让朝鲜走上今天阿拉伯世界国家所发生的巨变道路。Delury认为，与中国相比，美国有另外一个选择。“美国可以在新领导阶层尚未成型时抛出橄榄枝。与让朝鲜继续保持孤立，让中国继续成为它与外界交流的唯一渠道相比，哪个更好呢？奥巴马总统或许现在应该主动伸出一只手。”




原文：

Kim Jong-il did not die on the run, or in a hole, or behind bars, or on the gallows. His final act of surprise was to outlast even those authoritarian peers who showed greater capacity for compromise: Qaddafi, Mubarak, and the other tin-pot potentates swept from power in this year of awakening. He died, in the words of the weeping state television announcer who delivered the news, of a heart attack, while riding a train near Pyongyang. He succumbed, we are told, to “a great mental and physical strain caused by his uninterrupted field guidance tour for the building of a thriving nation.”

There were few actual facts in the official account of his demise—no mention of the debilitating stroke two years ago that began his decline, just a cheaply dubious scene set on a train—but anything else would not have suited him. Separated by hours, and a cosmic distance beyond measuring, the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il illuminated the full spectrum of possibility about the nature of truth. David Remnick wrote Sunday about Havel’s life, which provided our most eloquent explanation of why totalitarianism must be total, why it depends, at bottom, not on the number of guns and tanks at the regime’s disposal, but on the consistent denial of reality, on the mixture of fear and ritual that raise the costs for any one person to dare to acknowledge that the emperor wears nothing at all. “Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal,” Havel wrote, in 1978, in “The Power of the Powerless,” an essay that now circulates in translation in closed societies the world over. “The principle must embrace and permeate everything.”

Nobody has engineered the apparatus of universal fiction more effectively, and catastrophically, than the Kim dynasty, which maintained control of a nation that still manufactures transistor radios built to receive only a single station. Where Mao and Stalin succumbed to the sheer scale of their undertakings, Kim Jong-il, and his father, Kim Il-sung, before him, addressed a more manageable canvas and “created one giant Potemkin village,” in the words of Andrew Natsios, who visited North Korea during the the famine years of the nineties as an officer of the humanitarian organization World Vision. Later, Kim would alternately reveal or conceal parts of his nuclear arsenal for strategic effect, and he used a similar approach in matters of starvation: laying bare or disguising the death of his people depending on the tactical priority. When relief workers received tours of the countryside, they were preceded by advance teams that ensured the streets were clear of “emaciated people, abandoned children, trash or debris, and dead bodies,” Natsios wrote in his book, “The Great North Korean Famine.”

Born Yuri Irsenovich Kim, the man who would be called Dear Leader entered the world while his father was in the Russian Far East, having escaped to the Soviet Union when the Japanese put a price on his head for his work as a Korean guerilla leader. After the Second World War, Kim Il-sung returned with Stalin’s backing, founded the Democratic People’s Republic, and ruled it until his death, in 1994. The son had none of the revolutionary credentials of the father; he grew to be small and portly, with a pompadour of unchanging color. In another family, Kim might have put his talents to work in the movies, his true passion; he spent tens of millions on his productions, and in 1978 he kidnapped a South Korean actress, Choi En-hui, and her husband, the director Shin Sang-ok. (They made films at his direction—he was a “micro-manager” and “very bright,” as the couple put it—for eight years until their escape.)

Instead, he was named Kim Il-sung’s heir apparent in 1980, earning the titles of “fearless leader” and “the great successor to the revolutionary cause,” as he was thrust through a series of military and Party promotions at the very moment that the system, by all rights, should have been collapsing. The end of the Soviet Union wiped out favorable trade deals, contributing to a famine that was compounded by floods and the farcical distortions of the planned economy. The state admits to a quarter of a million deaths from starvation between 1995 and 1998; some groups estimate the actual figure was ten times larger. Kim and his father maintained power, in part, by the force of their own mythology, and by keeping their people on a war footing for more than half a century. (North and South Korea never signed a peace treaty and remain, technically, at war.)

When I visited North Korea on a tightly managed trip in 2005, I was well into an hour of chatting with a local mountain guide, a former military man, when he paused and asked sincerely about a detail of American nuclear policy: “I don’t understand why you had to use nuclear weapons in Iraq.” He was a handpicked interlocutor for foreigners, with a warm coat and privileged access to information, and he was, by all evidence, convinced that America had nuked Iraq (or was willing to maintain the charade that it had). I had a hard time coming up with another closed society in which the words from the top had been so efficiently delivered to the bottom. If that’s what he thinks about the occasional use of nuclear weapons, I wondered, what else does he believe?

Kim was, by turns, a practitioner of terrorism and canny diplomacy. In 1987, North Korea planted a bomb aboard a South Korean airliner that killed everyone on board—a hundred and fifteen people. Kim Hyun Hee, the junior agent involved in the bombing, swallowed a suicide pill but survived, and later said that Kim had personally overseen the operation. But beginning in 2000, Kim also engaged in a thaw with the South that yielded an unprecedented summit with his counterpart, President Kim Dae Jung, and a “sunshine policy” from Seoul. Off and on for two decades, Kim pursued a nuclear weapons program. In 2003, after George W. Bush labelled North Korea a member of the “axis of evil,” Kim withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the years that followed, the North conducted nuclear and missile tests while maintaining the world’s fitful attention through a grinding cycle of negotiations.

As he aged, he became a singular figure in the world: as easy to lampoon as any mad king, but armed at a level that made him far more dangerous. Kim’s defiance angered even his most tolerant allies. In Beijing, Chinese leaders tried to sell him on their vision of prosperity without freedom, but he resisted, seeing, perhaps, too much uncertainty. In his final year, he showed little sign of retreat, as his forces sank a South Korean vessel, revealed a new uranium-enrichment program, and shelled the island of Yeonpyeong. Kim died as he lived, emboldened by his own deceptions and unhurried by the urgent deprivation of his people. When it came to “the building of a thriving nation,” he left, at his life’s end on Saturday, December 17th, the hardest work untouched, and wreckage of his own making.

His death was sudden, and North Korea was not visibly ready. He had spent fourteen years being groomed for leadership, but his chosen successor is his third son, Kim Jong-un, who is in his twenties, and had barely three years to vault up the political ranks. Victor D. Cha, the former member of the National Security Council, now Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote, after Kim’s death, “I could not think of less ideal conditions—in a North Korean context—under which he could be given the reins of power.” Cha added, “This is a watershed moment. Any expert would have told you that the most likely scenario for a collapse of the North Korean regime would be the sudden death of the North Korean leader. We are now in that scenario.”

China is uniquely positioned to try to prevent such an implosion. As much as Americans might glimpse the end of the Kim regime, Chinese leaders have worried for decades about a surge of starving refugees pouring over the border on foot across the Tumen River, which is frozen this time of year and perfectly suited for crossing. And now China will move swiftly to prevent that possibility, sending food, fuel, arms, and whatever else is needed. John Delury, an American Korea-watcher at Yonsei University, told me today, “We pretty much know what the Chinese will do: they will squeeze their bear hug tighter than they already have, and they are the best prepared for this. They have channels, they can pick up the phone and call people.”

There is no guarantee of change. When Kim Il-sung died suddenly in 1994, outside analysts widely predicted a collapse that never arrived. For the time being, the Kim family and its beneficiaries still have control over considerable mechanisms of repression. Any transition, or attempt at it, could be accompanied not only by a refugee crisis but by a brutal power struggle and great violence.

Some are pushing a scenario that does not include leveraging Kim’s death to push the country toward the kind of rapid change that has swept the Arab world this year. Delury notes that America has a different kind of power at its disposal than China does: “The United States has the option to reach out early to the new leadership group. Where is the harm in that—versus keeping them isolated, at arm’s length, and allowing China to remain their only portal to the world? This is a moment for President Obama to reach out a hand.”

滔滔1949

如果没有金正日做反面典型，有多少人会关注哈维尔的去世？