[KS] Gittings book review on North Korea in Guardian: due praise for BAKS luminaries!
Afostercarter at aol.com
Afostercarter at aol.com
Sat Oct 14 06:39:16 EDT 2006
Dear friends and colleagues,
Lest they be too modest to do so themselves,
might I draw attention to the praise rightly heaped
on four BAKS luminaries and stalwarts in this
very wise review by John Gittings in the Guardian.
(Thanks to Neil Drewitt for circulating this.)
I'm copying this also to our friends across the pond
and worldwide, who might not otherwise have seen it.
None of whom, I'm quite sure, need to be reminded that
BAKS is the British Association for Korean Studies.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/BAKS/
Best wishes, in grim times
Aidan
AIDAN FOSTER-CARTER
Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds University
Home address: 17 Birklands Road, Shipley, West Yorkshire, BD18 3BY, UK
tel: +44(0) 1274 588586 (alt) +44(0) 1264 737634 mobile:
+44(0) 7970 741307
fax: +44(0) 1274 773663 ISDN: +44(0) 1274 589280
Email: afostercarter at aol.com (alt) afostercarter at yahoo.com website:
www.aidanfc.net
[Please use @aol; but if any problems, please try @yahoo too - and let me
know, so I can chide AOL]
__________________________________________
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1920804,00.html
The cult and the crisis
John Gittings assesses current thinking about North Korea, a land where the
normal and the abnormal are inextricably intertwined
Saturday October 14, 2006
Guardian
Art Under Control in North Korea, by Jane Portal, 192pp, Reaktion, £22.50
Everlasting Flower: A History of Korea, by Keith Pratt, 256pp, Reaktion,
£19.95
Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World, by Gordon Chang, 352pp,
Hutchinson, £14.99
North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula, by Paul French, 323pp, Zed Books,
£17.95
Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-hwan & Pierre Rigoulot, 256pp,
Atlantic, £8.99
North Korea in the 21st Century, by James Hoare and Susan Pares, 192pp,
Global Oriental, £15.99
I landed at Pyongyang airport, on my first visit to North Korea 30 years
ago, feeling very ill: I had unwittingly caught pneumonia in the sand-laden
winds that sweep down from Mongolia to Beijing. I was driven along an empty
motorway straight to the main city hospital where the doctors conducted
various tests. As we waited for the results, my minders suddenly looked at
their watches, exclaimed in alarm and rushed me out of the hospital. An
angry doctor shouted after us as we drove off at high speed.
Ten minutes later I was being ushered into the front stalls of the Pyongyang
Grand Theatre, just in time for the start of The Flower Girl, an
interminable opera allegedly inspired, or even composed, by the Great Leader
Kim Il Sung. (Since his death in 1994 it has been ascribed instead to his
son and successor, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il.)
During its many intervals I sat in a huge reception chamber for
distinguished guests, empty except for a general of the Korean People's Army
in full uniform silently drinking tea at the other end.
After the show I was driven to a hotel and taken to my room, where three
doctors pumped me full of penicillin. I lay in bed for the next week,
receiving careful medical treatment - plus daily lectures on the Juche
doctrine of Kim Il Sung, delivered by a professor whom I labelled the High
Priest. No doubt I owed my recovery to this combination of penicillin and
philosophy.
My experience was a more rapid learning curve than usual in the first lesson
that everyone visiting the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, even
today, has to grasp: the real and the unreal, the normal and the abnormal,
are inextricably intertwined. An ability to separate out these conflicting
elements is essential for anyone seeking to understand the North Korean
regime and its people.
As the nuclear factor looms larger, getting this balance right may become a
matter of life or death. Korea, and especially the North, is now a
publishing item: the books before me - and these are only some recent titles
- include a polemic urging "obliteration" of the Pyongyang regime; a more
sober analysis of the "paranoid peninsula"; a full-scale history of Korea
from its mythical past up to the Seoul Olympics; a general guide to the
North by Britain's first diplomat there; a grim account of the northern
gulags; and the first ever study of North Korean realist art.
Let us start at the top (as one can't avoid doing) with the cult of the Kim
dynasty, father and now son. Pervasive is an understatement for a phenomenon
from which there is no place to hide. A painting in Art Under Control - Jane
Portal's fascinating study of the interface between art and politics in
North Korea - shows a little girl playing the accordion while a boy with
chubby knees sings that "We're the happiest in the world (because of the
benevolence of Great General Kim Il Sung)". I have seen 20 little girls with
accordions in the Pyongyang Children's Palace playing a similar song in
unison - and another 20 in the next room playing it on the cello. It is a
cult that consciously refers back to the dawn of Korean history. Kim Jong Il
is portrayed as inheriting the mandate of Tangun, the mythical founder of
Korea 5,000 years ago (whose mother was a she-bear impregnated by the god of
heaven). This requires Kim Jong Il to have been born on the slopes of the
sacred Mount Paekdu - where Tangun first appeared - although Kim's real
birthplace was in the Soviet Far East.
Keith Pratt, in his full and fascinating study of Korean history, cites
previous attempts in the imperial era to appropriate the Tangun myth: if
Korea were ever reunified in the future, he writes, "the implications of a
new 'semi-divine' birth on its [Mt Paekdu's] slopes would be obvious". In
1988 I was taken to see the wooden cabin where Kim Jong Il was supposedly
born deep in the forest during his father's guerrilla struggle against
Japan. Local officials told me that the site had only been "rediscovered"
recently. The cabin was brand-new, surrounded by a chain fence with a
decorative border of thousands of egg-shaped stones. I picked up one of the
stones, to our guide's alarm, as a souvenir: I have an awful feeling now
that they were shaped by prison labour.
The cult is both fascinating and horrifying (as well as being a huge
diversion of scarce resources), but the central question today lies
elsewhere: is Kim Jong Il a rational leader with whom the west can do
business, or a loose missile (perhaps, after Pyongyang's nuclear test, an
unguided bomb), to be neutralised before he destroys himself and possibly
the world? The second view, unsurprisingly, was the one favoured by the Bush
administration which, on first coming to power, aborted the dialogue with
Pyongyang begun under Bill Clinton, who in 2000 received a senior North
Korean general in the White House. Bush himself told Bob Woodward that he
"loathed" Kim Jong Il and wished to see him "toppled". Although the dialogue
was resumed through the Six Party Talks in Beijing, Pyongyang continues to
be painted as a "criminal regime", headed by an unstable leader, with which
Washington has been reluctant to talk directly.
Gordon Chang's Nuclear Showdown would do well on Bush's bedside table: Chang
regards North Korea as a rogue state that has put "all humanity at risk" and
depicts Kim Jong Il as a monster, recluse and lover of S&M videos who can
"barely say six words" in public. Chang's prescription for dealing with the
North is regime change, indeed "regime obliteration" through military force
if diplomacy should fail.
Even the deaths of "hundreds of thousands or even millions", says Chang
(hinting at the use of nuclear weapons), would be an acceptable cost for
"ending the existential threat posed by Kim Jong II". True, many South
Koreans might die in the conflagration but they would have only themselves
to blame - Chang shares the US neocons' loathing for the South's
democratically elected presidents Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo-hyun. Seoul seeks
to appease the North, he claims, and no longer "stands with Washington".
Chang's first book, The Coming Collapse of China, was much better researched
and argued in spite of its apocalyptic title. Now he seems to be bidding for
a bigger and more dangerous bang. Paul French's more balanced study of North
Korea today reminds us that Kim Jong Il, far from being tongue-tied, appears
"capable and knowledgeable" to those who have met him, including former US
secretary of state Madeleine Albright.
When Kim Jong Il met a delegation of senior South Korean media figures in
2000, at the height of Kim Dae Jung's "sunshine diplomacy" towards the
North, he did most of the talking - in fact he could not stop talking. No
subject was too large or too small, from the missile programme (which he
said was entirely his idea) to the excellence of French wine (his doctor had
told him not to drink too much). He spoke as a Korean nationalist: "The
smaller the nation, he declared, the stronger it must be to keep its pride."
But he added that no one need worry because it would be madness for North
Korea to launch "two or three" missiles at the US.
French's thesis is the exact opposite of Chang's and closer to that of the
two southern presidents: North Korea is "a failed state and therefore liable
to become unstable unless engaged enthusiastically and strategically". The
outside world ignored the North for decades, he argues, except at
intelligence levels, and "a little paranoia is perhaps forgivable". The 1994
Agreed Framework, which was supposed to reward Pyongyang for halting its
nuclear programme, was "never really taken seriously by Washington". This
longer historical view is essential, if one is to grasp not only what drives
the North Korean regime but what it shares (to the growing irritation of the
Americans) with the South.
"Nationalism is strong," says Pratt, "in both North and South Korea. The
world needs to understand it, though not necessarily to fear it." Koreans on
both sides of the 38th parallel (based according to Pratt on "nothing more
than a National Geographic map") are still acutely conscious that for them
the cold war has never ended. The memory of annexation by Japan - Koreans
were forced to bow before Shinto shrines and adopt Japanese names - still
arouses shame and anger. Yielding to a great power goes back to the age of
Chinese domination, when Korea was forced to adopt the policy of sadaechuui
("serving the great").
One of the secrets of Kim Il Sung's success (apart from his ruthless
suppression of opponents) was to condemn this policy as "flunkeyism" and
portray the South as in thrall to a new great master. His son's
missile-rattling refusal to "serve the great" may appeal particularly to the
North Korean military, on whom his regime relies heavily.
The appeal of the Kim cult to the North Korean people at large is less
certain. Hwang Jang Yop, the chief high priest and ghost-writer of the Juche
doctrine, defected to the South in 1997, and younger officials today cannot
even explain coherently what it means. The cult has increasingly become an
instrument for enforcing absolute obedience - just as Mao's cult became in
his later years - allowing the ambitious and unscrupulous to rise in the
hierarchy by denouncing others.
No visitor to North Korea, however keen-sighted, will glimpse a trace of its
gulags but they have never been a complete mystery. Amnesty International
published an account in the 1970s by Ali Lameda, a Venezuelan poet working
as a translator in Pyongyang, of his labour camp experiences. His crime was
unclear, though he was told that his poems were "bourgeois filth". Defectors
to the South, no longer manipulated as in the past by South Korea's KCIA,
tell credible stories of which The Aquariums of Pyongyang (now in a revised
edition) is the most accessible example. Kang Chol-hwan was sent to Yodok
camp at the age of nine with his family - under suspicion because they had
lived in Japan. He describes public executions, but it is in the main a
depressingly familiar tale of forced labour, hunger and brutality.
Hardest of all is to understand what life is like for millions of ordinary
North Koreans, apart from the fact that they have been desperately short of
food for more than a decade. Yet the occasional glimpse does reveal a more
complex society than might be supposed. I was amazed on my first visit to
see holiday-makers in a Pyongyang park playing blind man's buff and dancing
with traditional animal masks. (My minder, in a rare confidence, told me the
park was "a good place for making love".) Ten years later I observed farmers
sweeping the graves of their ancestors and burning paper gifts on the day of
Pure Brightness, just as they do in China.
Jim Hoare and Susan Pares, who have written an entertaining account of
setting up the new British embassy in Pyongyang, have a good eye for human
detail. North Korean society, they tell us, is becoming more differentiated
and unequal as the regime gingerly introduces market reform. There are golf
courses, pet dogs and even private cars; there has been a decline in
collective effort such as clearing the snow; and there are more pickpockets
on public transport and at markets. Public health made big improvements
until the 70s, but has since fallen away: there are sad stories of elderly
people dying alone in unheated apartments or on the stairs of high-rise
blocks. Women are more equal than in the past but must still "think of
marriage by 26, to avoid becoming an 'old slipper'". The authors met one
woman who complained bitterly of being "'one skirt' who had to look after
'four trousers'".
Hoare was for years the only British diplomat in Whitehall who tried to
understand the effect of the past upon North Korea. His colleagues would
grimace and roll their eyes at seminars when he argued that Pyongyang might
have a rational point of view. In any case, the official FCO line was that
the US State Department had 100% ownership of the North Korean problem, and
it would be folly for Britain to get involved. Even in the South Korean
capital, British diplomats insisted that they were "just a commercial
mission".
There was a patchy dialogue with the North in the 90s, but Hoare says the
atmosphere was often frosty "with minimum courtesy on the British side". Not
until 2000 - after Italy and Australia had already recognised Pyongyang and
US-North Korean relations under Clinton were improving - did Britain have
the nerve to follow suit. What an opportunity Britain missed. It is still a
long and difficult task to bring North Korea in from the cold, but one which
is vastly preferable to a nuclear showdown.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20061014/21c8e335/attachment.html>
More information about the Koreanstudies
mailing list