Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Book

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most Americans think of North Korea as a wacky punchline, if they think of it at all. This is really unfortunate because North Korea has such a sad story, like Haiti-level sad. Of course, since North Korea is one of the most secretive societies on Earth, if not the most, it's difficult for anyone to really try to educate themselves on it, but Bradley Martin has done an astonishing amount of research, and if anyone qualifies as a "North Korea expert", it's surely him. The book begins with the story of Kim Il-Sung, the eventual Great Leader. It's common for countries to invent myths about their founders (think George Washington and the cherry tree, or Romulus and Remus), but Kim has whitewashed his past so thoroughly that it took decades of serious digging and discarding of propaganda to uncover even the most basic facts about his early years. Part of this seems to have been nothing but vanity (telling people he was born on Mount Paektu under a double rainbow and so forth), but part of it was due to the fact that he was more culturally Chinese than Korean, having spent the majority of his formative years there.

He seems to have started off as your typical Maoist revolutionary - a natural leader, skillful in choosing between valor and discretion, and above all fortunate to have survived the complete chaos of World War 2 in northern China. Once installed as the leader of the "temporary" state in the Soviet-occupied northern part of Korea thanks to some meetings with the head of the NKVD, he set about purging his rivals and fine-tuning the obsessively nationalist juche personality cult the DPRK would eventually become famous for. It's funny how the "workers of the world unite!" universalist ethos of Marxism is so flexible in the right hands. After his disastrous invasion of the south, Kim turned to rebuilding his shattered country, and I was interested to learn that until the late 60s, the north was actually much more developed than the south, thanks to endemic corruption in the south and the short-term benefits that the northern command economy brought.

Once South Korea pulled ahead, though, Kim's habit of building useless monuments to himself, maintaining a gigantic "defensive" army, and sidelining reformers in favor of his idiot son slowly dragged the country to the nightmarish poverty it's stuck in today. Did you know that during the early 90s famine, political prisoners received a grand total of 33 grams of food per day? An ounce is 28 grams. Just think about that. Thankfully a large portion of the book is interviews with defectors, so you get to hear fascinating details of everyday life, potentially biased though they may be. An especially interesting interview he conducts involves an exchange that captures one of the greatest tragedies of North Korea's unique brand of Marxism: a defector reveals that many people admired the meritocratic ethos of socialism, and were happy to move away from the often-suffocating Confucianism that characterized Korean society before and dedicate their lives to the regime's ideology. However, the leadership in general and the Great and Dear Leaders in particular were anything but meritocratic, and simply populated the upper echelons of DPRK society with the descendants of the original revolutionaries. So in abandoning the filial system, the people found neither family nor meritocracy, just an endless claque of Kims, and in shunning the chaotic but lucrative opportunities of capitalism for the safety and egalitarianism of juche, they got neither prosperity nor equality.

Overall it's an extremely depressing book, not merely because of the endless interviews discussing how horrible life there is, but also in the sections where Martin discusses diplomacy. The rest of the world never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to open up the DPRK, feeding the Kims' paranoia every step of the way. Hopefully the next 60 years will be better for the people of North Korea than the last 60.