Steve Brinson
The possum is not OK. Neither are we.
- Location
- Brooklyn (originally Houston)
- Pronouns
- he/him
I've seen plenty of TLs featuring North Korea more or less as it is IOTL, and plenty of TLs that have it democratizing (and usually unifying with the South), but not many that have a North Korea more like Cuba or even Vietnam than its OTL self - still a more-or-less repressive single-party Communist dictatorship, but not a totalitarian monarchy cutting itself off from the world. I don't know why North Korea took the path that it did and the others didn't, so I'd like to pose the question to people who know more than me: when is the last time it was feasible for North Korea to be politically and economically more open than OTL while still remaining at least ostensibly Marxist-Leninist?
The most obvious turning point seems to me to be the Kapsan Faction Incident in 1967, an internal power struggle where other WPK members tried to challenge Kim's cult of personality and failed - but is it possible that the change could have happened later, perhaps even as late as the 6th WPK Congress in 1980, where Kim Jong-il was officially designated as his father's successor and Juche was made the official ideology of the nation? After all, it's easy to point to nepotism, nationalism, and the cult of personality as fundamentally undermining the project of a more open North Korean communism, but Cuba had all three (not to the same degree, of course - but on the other hand, that's easy to say in retrospect) and still managed to attain significantly different outcomes. Perhaps, for a PoD in between those two, Kim Yong-ju (Il-sung's younger brother and a more orthodox ML) could have come out ahead in the early-70s power struggle between the two? Conversely, does the fact that Kim and the cult of personality won both power struggles indicate that an earlier PoD would be necessary to root them out?
The most obvious turning point seems to me to be the Kapsan Faction Incident in 1967, an internal power struggle where other WPK members tried to challenge Kim's cult of personality and failed - but is it possible that the change could have happened later, perhaps even as late as the 6th WPK Congress in 1980, where Kim Jong-il was officially designated as his father's successor and Juche was made the official ideology of the nation? After all, it's easy to point to nepotism, nationalism, and the cult of personality as fundamentally undermining the project of a more open North Korean communism, but Cuba had all three (not to the same degree, of course - but on the other hand, that's easy to say in retrospect) and still managed to attain significantly different outcomes. Perhaps, for a PoD in between those two, Kim Yong-ju (Il-sung's younger brother and a more orthodox ML) could have come out ahead in the early-70s power struggle between the two? Conversely, does the fact that Kim and the cult of personality won both power struggles indicate that an earlier PoD would be necessary to root them out?
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