In the latest edition of the New Yorker, Ian Buruma reviewed both Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty and Jasper Becker’s Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea, and added some thoughts of his own concerning the North Korean gulag state. It’s a great read and well worth your time. To give you a small sample of what we’re dealing with:
North Korea in the nineteen-nineties was, in Martin’s somewhat peculiar choice of phrase, “a nightmare by human-rights standards.” Farmers were not allowed to relieve their hunger by growing their own food and selling it, for, Kim observed, “Telling people to solve the food problems on their own only increases the number of farmers markets and peddlers. In addition, this creates egoism among people, and the basis of the Party’s class may come to collapse.” If things were bad in “normal” life, the conditions in the vast North Korean gulag are difficult to imagine. Even here Martin’s struggles for “balance” come across as slightly otiose: “While more and more inmates died as a result of malnutrition, the political prison camps continued to be run more as slave-labor and slow death camps than as instant death camps. It may seem a small distinction, but it shows that in this regard at least Kim Jong Il was no Hitler.”
Jasper Becker is less inclined to make these fine distinctions. As a result, his book, though much slighter and less detailed than Martin’s, is the more intelligent. Becker wrote the classic book “Hungry Ghosts,” about Mao Zedong’s man-made famine in China, and has interviewed many Korean refugees who managed to stumble across the Chinese border. The highest-ranking defector from the North was a man named Hwang Jang-yop, Kim Il Sung’s chief ideologue, and both Martin and Becker rely heavily on his accounts. According to Hwang, about a million people starved to death in 1996 alone.
Like I said, be sure to read the rest on your own. Although if you’re a member of European Union Chamber of Commerce, you might be somewhat taken back by this account:
Meanwhile, there are enough carpetbaggers around the Korean Peninsula to encourage this notion of capitalist seduction. Among the more striking suggestions is one from Jean-Jacques Grauhar, the secretary-general of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in Seoul, who urged Club Med to open a resort in North Korea. He told Martin that changing the system “shouldn’t be the objective of foreign investors.” The objective, it would seem, is to make money out of vacationing foreigners while Koreans starve.
Ouch!
Coincidentally, the Dong-A found the accompanying cartoon interesting.
5 Comments
the secretary-general of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in Seoul, who urged Club Med to open a resort in North Korea.
It looks mind control from north Korea works really well in south.
Too funny…if a Korean political cartoonist draws George W. Bush, does any U.S. media outlet carry that as a news item? Unbelievable.
“Kim Il Sung, the son of pious Christians, was a great admirer of the Eastern Learning school. Like Hong Xiuquan, Choe Che-u, and, indeed, Chairman Mao, Kim Il Sung wanted to be seen as a messiah and not just a Stalinist dictator. Becker convincingly places the Kim cult in a Sino-Korean tradition of millenarian priest-kings, autocratic sages, and holy saviors. It’s a tradition in which the source of power is also the source of virtue, spiritual wisdom, and truth??hence the total intolerance of any heterodoxy or dissent. The same idea prevails, in a milder form, in South Korean, and Japanese, corporate life, where workers must learn the ??philosophies?? of their company founders. It has also spawned such cults as the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.”
The history of the Korean peninsula in a NUTshell.
I sent the following letter to The New Yorker complaining about Buruma’s use of misquotations to lie shamelessly about my book:
Ian Buruma repeatedly plays fast and loose with quotations in assembling his malevolently creative summary of ??Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader?? (??Kimworld,?? August 22). Several such instances seem to involve a disgraceful effort to gin up evidence backing his theme of gullibility among foreign observers with whose views he differs. To imply that I saw the rulers?? charisma as somehow offsetting evil deeds, he lifts a phrase, ??there might be two sides to the story,?? from my argument against unnecessary demonization of Kim Jong Il. This he mendaciously juxtaposes with a remark about Kim Il Sung??s personal magnetism, which appeared nearly 500 pages earlier in the context of the elder Kim??s pursuit of women. So that he can cluck that it is ??na??ve?? not to realize that a ??warm handshake will not explain why an entire people submitted,?? he deceptively paraphrases the middle of a sentence in which I wrote that Kim Il Sung??s engaging presence was one factor that inspired loyalty. Deleting ??one,?? so that this appears to be the only factor, he ignores my chapter-length exploration of other factors including the biggest, the indoctrination system. As for Buruma??s suggestion that I struggled too hard for ??balance?? (the quotation marks are his) in evaluating the Kims?? regime, I actually wrote, ??There was precious little on the positive side of the ledger page to balance the horrors?? of the gulag. Ultimately Buruma, objecting to my refusal to frame the history of North Korea as a simple morality tale, seeks to portray me as a pushover for smooth-talking despots. Nothing doing, Ian. Pointing out the danger of being taken in by a Great Schmoozer, I observed of the Japanese politician Shin Kanemaru that Kim Il Sung ??charmed his pants off.??
Buruma also distorts my reference to Andrew Holloway??s description of Pyongyang residents?? kindness and modesty, leaving readers to imagine that Holloway??s was a recent observation. That enables the reviewer to offer a glib contradiction??-although in fact, as I noted, Holloway lived in Pyongyang almost two decades ago. In the very next paragraph I wrote that the subsequent famine severely tested North Koreans?? altruism, and in a later chapter I wrote that by the late 1990s their ??fierce struggle for survival?? required them to replace collectivist morality with self-interest. At Louisiana State University I??ve been teaching students that writers who refuse to let the facts get in the way of a good story are the bane of the journalistic trade. Buruma could do with matriculation, but I imagine he??ll have to pay out-of-state tuition. In any case, I want a correction.
Bradley K. Martin
Nagano, Japan
I believe that cartoon is taken from French-Canadian artist Guy Delisle’s new graphic novel, entitled “Pyongyang: A Journey In North Korea” (Drawn Quarterly). Delisle spent two months in North Korea working for a French animation studio. I have an advance copy of the book and it is worth the read. No heavy political commentary, but some insight into NK.