Extraordinary adventures
of some very ordinary lives in North Korea. If one can read through this slim volume of
less than 300 pages at one go, one has to be detached to an extraordinary
degree. I couldn’t.
As Barbara Demick
pitilessly adds on one grim detail after another, your cringe, the book drops
from your hands, and you tend to hold your head in your hands. No this can’t be
happening in the 21st century, in the age of globalization. All this
could be wretched American propaganda, you might like to tell yourselves, as
you resume reading.
By all accounts North
Korea is easily the most repressive and secretive in the entire world. By
comparison even Saudi Arabia could be more liveable. May be the ISIS could
provide some stiff competition, and that is some commentary on a
self-proclaimed Marxist state.
The western media does
report on the country off and on, especially when there is some great famine or
some development on the nuclear front, but not very intensely.
Even the Tibetan miseries
get more play. True the west seeks to puncture China for various reasons, but that
is only one part of the story. The Tibetans are fairly widespread in the world,
and they can be accessed for stories anytime.
But North Korea is almost totally
closed, one doesn’t get much of an opportunity to get anywhere near the
suffering people of that blighted state, or their representatives elsewhere.
Anyway where is the peg? So then their stories are heard much less than they
actually are.
In the circumstances this
work, by a correspondent of Los Angeles Times, is a welcome reminder of how
grim the scene is.
No contact with the
outside world. No e-mail, no internet, an indifferent but heavily censored postal
service, it is very much an Orwellian world where lovers can denounce each
other. And what is there to offset it all? Barring the showcase of Pyongyang,
the capital, elsewhere virtually nothing, it looks like. And there is an acute power
scarcity, even today. It was macabre in the nineties, it seems.
North Korea as seen
through the lives of six defectors over a decade and more, in all its horror,
this book shouldn’t be touched by the much too soft-hearted.
The sheer brutality of it
all, especially when one sees it manifested in times like famine, can leave
you
aghast for days. Whatever be the cause of the famine, to leave people to fend
for themselves and worse, to seek to extract work from the hapless when they
were leading near-animal-existence, when scrounging for daily food becomes one
hell of a struggle, that calls for extraordinary inhumanity indeed.
“He killed rats, mice,
and frogs and tadpoles. When the frogs disappeared, he went for grasshoppers
and cicadas.” He also trapped sparrows and an occasional dog. But they too
became scarce anyway.
And this from another
account of the times: “Because of long-lasting famine, it was very competitive to find anything edible. When you went out to the
mountains, plenty of people were already competing to dig out some edible
herbs. Farmland was another battlefield to dig out the rice roots remaining in
the soil... People dug out the rice roots that remained
after reaping, and they ground them into powder and made porridge or maybe some
noodles. Though not as good as the fruits, the roots still have some useful
nutrients inside. Food made from rice root tasted so awful, though, that for
the first time in my life, I realised that some food is tasteless even for
starving people.”
Barbara Demick herself
notes, “An estimated 600,00 to two
million North Koreans died in the famine, as much as 10 per cent of the population…exact figures
would be nearly impossible to tally since hotspitals could not report
starvation as a cause of death,” The regime accepted only selectively foreign
aid and sought to keep out aid workers, while the military personnel could sell
away aid received in the black market.
Eventually the country climbed out of it all, not through any policy
measures, but simply because there were less mouths to feed."
And right through
children had to repeat endlessly,
“Long live Kim Il Sung
Kim Jong Il Sun of the 21st
century
Let’s live our own way
We will do as the party
tells us
We have nothing to envy
in the world
Our house is within the
embrace of the Workers’ Party
We are all brothers and
sisters
Even if a sea of fire
comes towards us, sweet children do not need to be afraid,
Our Father is here
We have nothing to envy
in this world…”
Nothing to envy is the
title of the book, you might have noticed, friends.
To go through a most
traumatic time just to survive and still be grateful to those responsible for
it all, that should have been a truly horrific experience.
It is possible that Demick exaggerates a bit, vilifies a
little and can’t see beyond a western perspective, wherein being political
freedom could override everything else. But most accounts agree on most
essentials.
"North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better
than its continuing survival against all odds. A living political fossil, it
clings to existence in the face of limited resources and a zombie economy,
manipulating great powers despite its weakness. Its leaders are not ideological
zealots or madmen, but perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics
that can be found in the modern world. Even though they preside over a failed
state, they have successfully used diplomacy-including nuclear threats-to
extract support from other nations."
(
Andrei Lankov:
The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia,
published in December last.)
According to the
Ploughshares Fund World
Nuclear Stockpile Report, North Korea possesses less than 10 nuclear weapons of
the 16,300 worldwide that are predominantly held by Russia and the United
States. That might sound a bit reassuring, but remember the country invests
approximately $8.7 billion -- significantly higher than the $570 million
Pyongyang claims -- or one-third of its GDP in the military,
perhaps the
highest in the entire world.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the division of
Korea by the United States and the former Soviet Union. Still both the Koreas
are in a permanent state of war, the North a lot more so, the South living
under the protective umbrella of Uncle Sam anyway. The latter’s progress to
democracy has not been all that smooth, still life is a lot more relaxed over
there, in any case they are a lot more prosperous, notwithstanding the inequalities
typical of a capitalist economy.
By this blog I just wanted to stress that such a virtually barbaric system has not received any strong
condemnation from Marxists elsewhere, and that speaks volumes of their
concerns.
Anyone looking for more information, can look up the
following:
