Mick Hartley

Another NYT piece on North Korea, this time a review of three new books on the Dear Leader's socialist paradise. The first, Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy, I've mentioned before. The other two are The Hidden People of North Korea by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, and The Cleanest Race by B.R.Myers:

North Korea is not an easy country to observe. Few foreign journalists are allowed in, and then only with official minders and strictly limited itineraries. To get a sense of how ordinary citizens live, writers must rely primarily on the accounts of defectors.

If we have trouble seeing North Koreans plainly, they cannot see us at all. Telephone use is severely restricted. (Even the telephone book is a classified document marked “secret.”) Postal service is spotty. There is essentially no e-mail. Television and radios receive only approved channels. The country’s citizens are force-fed a steady, numbing diet of state propaganda devoted to sustaining the personality cult of Kim Jong-il and savaging all things American.

How are North Koreans taught to think about us? Well, here’s one indication. Children learn a ditty called “Shoot the Yankee Bastards” in music class. One verse goes:

Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.

(The truly poignant words here are “with my own hands.”)

Myers believes that the familiar designation of North Korea as a Stalinist state is misleading, characterising its sustaining ideology instead as a "race-based paranoid nationalism". This from the preface to his book:

While ignoring North Korean ideology, the West has assiduously, almost compulsively, added to its pile of "hard" information on the country. Much of this has come from experts in nuclear or economic studies. Aid workers have also contributed accounts of their experiences in the country. An international network of Google Earth users is busily identifying structures visible in aerial photographs. Despite all this, experts continue to describe North Korea as "puzzling," "baffling," a "mystery" — and no wonder. Hard facts cannot be put to proper use unless one first acquires information of a very different nature. If we did not know that Iran is an Islamic country, it would forever baffle us, no matter how good the rest of our intelligence might be.

Unfortunately a lack of relevant expertise has never prevented observers from mischaracterizing North Korean ideology to the general public. They call the regime "hard-line communist" or "Stalinist," despite its explicit racial theorizing, its strident acclamation of Koreans as the world's "cleanest" or "purest" race. They describe it as a Confucian patriarchy, despite its maternal authority figures, or as a country obsessed with self-reliance, though it has depended on outside aid for over sixty years. By far the most common mistake, however, has been the projection of Western or South Korean values and common sense onto the North Koreans. For example: Having been bombed flat by the Americans in the 1950s, the DPRK must be fearful for its security, ergo it must want the normalization of relations with Washington….

In this book, therefore, I aim to explain North Korea's dominant ideology or worldview — I use the words inter- changeably — and to show how far removed it is from communism, Confucianism and the show-window doctrine of Juche Thought. Far from complex, it can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader….

And from Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh's book:

North Korean propaganda organs teach that if people are boundlessly loyal to the party and the leader, they can even "grow flowers on rocks if the party wishes them to." It turns out that people who ignore the party line and go to work for themselves are the ones who can perform economic miracles.

Since the Great Currency Confiscation, of course, that is becoming increasingly difficult.

[The title of the post is how some North Koreans, cited by Barbara Demick, describe themselves]