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“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Thomas Jefferson.
No, this is not another rightwing screed on what is wrong with President Obama. (Just google the “tree of liberty” quote and you will get plenty of those.) No, this is something far more prosaic inspired by the latest Good Friends North Korea Today publication.
The Good Friends issue contains several pieces about the alleged political scrutiny now being directed at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, the possible scapegoating of its minister, and possible purging of the staff. Amid the material documenting multiple systemic pathologies (who knows, maybe we’ll blog about that later) the following quote caught my eye:
“When the investigation starts, some of the officials will be inevitably banished from the Ministry,” one official from the ministry commented. Public Prosecutor’s Office and the National Defense Committee are jointly investigating Customs offices and trading companies including overseas representative offices of the MoFT. The official reason for the investigation is to crack down any government officials’ activities in espionage or bribery. The central government believes that, while officials are sent abroad to fulfill their duties for the country, they are in fact busy taking care of their personal interests.”
Admittedly, the penalty for being on the wrong side of a North Korean political dispute can be fatal, but set aside the North Korean specifics and just think about the situation in terms of the functioning of bureaucracies. Surely one of the most astonishing things about North Korea is how little personnel turnover there is. People don’t rotate—they are “banished from the ministry.” If the Six Party Talks get started again, some of the guys sitting behind the North Korean placards will be same people who negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework. Yes, institutional memory is a virtue, but there are ways that it can be achieved without freezing everyone in place. The downside—apart of lack of new thoughts, ideas, or perspectives—is that idiosyncratic irregularities perpetuate themselves—and grow over time. When everyone has something on everyone else, mutual assured destruction, not best practice, rules.
I don’t know if Good Friends reporting is correct or not. But the notion that the Ministry of Foreign Trade is hidebound and corrupt strikes me as completely plausible. As does the idea that as such it represents the state in miniature.
