[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



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