Tony Namkung is a throwback to a northeastern Asian region in the late 19th/early 20th century where Westphalian notions of sovereignty bowed to ideological opportunism, expansionism, and pure hatred. Koreans served both the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists, as well as forming guerrilla bands against the Japanese in Manchuria. A minority made a bargain with the Soviet Union. When the Soviets crushed the Kwantung army in Manchuria and drove down the Korean peninsula, these opportunists, inculcated with the briefest of an education in Marxism-Leninism, became the puppet rulers of a Korean state situated in the only part of Korea the Soviets or imperial Japan thought useful, the industrialized, mineral-rich North.
Kim Il-sung and his fellow opportunists developed a real talent for depicting themselves as the new emperors in the sinocentric world while recognizing the need to take any kind of economic aid from the Soviets, and later the Chinese Communists. Marxist rhetoric became the lingua franca of gratitude in this unhappy family of states each one of which believed itself to be the center of the region, the Marxist movement, and the world. The Cold War simplified this bizarre diplomatic fuzziness, by creating the good guys vs. the bad guys split, which rhetorically was a matter of where one sat, in Pyongyang or in Washington (or, Beijing, Seoul, or Tokyo). The end of the Cold War has prompted a reversion to the norm.
Enter Tony Namkung (via Choson Exchange).
Infidelworld 