North Korea Through the Looking Glass

by Kong Dan Oh, Ralph C. Hassig

Fifty-five years after its founding at the dawn of the cold war, North Korea remains a land of illusions. Isolated and anachronistic, the country and its culture seem to be dominated exclusively by the official ideology of Juche, which emphasizes national self-reliance, independence, and worship of the supreme leader, General Kim Jong Il. Yet this socialist utopian ideal is pursued with the calculations of international power politics. Kim has transformed North Korea into a militarized state, whose nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and continued threat to South Korea have raised alarm worldwide. This paradoxical combination of cultural isolation and military-first policy has left the North Korean people woefully deprived of the opportunity to advance socially and politically. The socialist economy, guided by political principles and bereft of international support, has collapsed. Thousands, perhaps millions, have died of starvation. Foreign trade has declined and the country's gross domestic product has recorded negative growth every year for a decade. Yet rather than initiate the sort of market reforms that were implemented by other communist governments, North Korean leaders have reverted to the economic policies of the 1950 mass mobilization, concentration on heavy industry, and increased ideological indoctrination. Although members of the political elite in Pyongyang are acutely aware of their nation’s domestic and foreign problems, they are plagued by fear and policy paralysis.North Korea Through the Looking Glass sheds new light on this remote and peculiar country. Drawing on more than ten years of research—including interviews with two dozen North Koreans who made the painful decision to defect from their homeland—Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig explore what the leadership and the masses believe about their current predicament. Through dual themes of persistence and illusion, they explore North Korea's stubborn adherence to policies that have failed to serve the welfare of the people and, consequently, threaten the future of the regime.Featuring twenty-nine rare and candid photos taken from within the closely guarded country, North Korea Through the Looking Glass illuminates the human society of a country too often mischaracterized for its drab uniformity—not a "state," but a community of twenty million individuals who have, through no fault of their own, fallen on exceedingly hard times.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2000

Reviews

[T. Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a decent primer for some of the issues that arise when talking about North Korea. Some of the information here is outdated because of how things have shaped up in the decades since, but a lot of the core issues are still core issues. There are still concerns over North Korea's weapons development programs for instance, and over the state of its economy. It's also still a hermetic kingdom with an authoritarian regime.

While it is a decent primer, some of the conclusions it reaches are on shaky ground. For instance, in the chapter dealing with North Korea's military, the authors assume that due to the size of its armed forces, the amount of its budget spent on weapons development, and the known deployment of its forces, the end goal must be an armed reunification of the Koreas.

I don't think this is warranted. I think a lot of the circumstantial evidence surrounding its military suggests that North Korea's actual intent with its military spending is actually defensive. While for propaganda purposes, most of its forces are always going to be situated between Pyongyang and the Demilitarised Zone, one of the key takeaways North Korea would have taken from incidents like the Hungarian revolution in '56 and the Prague Spring in '68 is that even a key ally like the Soviet Union could turn on them if they thought it convenient. Surrounded by enemies to the south and east, and backed by allies that may only be fair weather friends to the north and west, it wouldn't be unreasonable for the North Korean regime to take steps to make sure any invasion of it would be so costly as to not be worth it.

I also feel like the authors are overly eager to assign the entirety of the blame for North Korea's economic failure in the '90s on the Kim dynasty alone. They are correct to point out that both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were poor economic managers and that there was always going to be a point where their economic ineptitude would have seen diminishing returns, but I think they're overly eager to assume this was the only major factor for North Korea's economic downfall in the '90s.

The fact that the Soviet Union had just fallen and that they were still faced with huge embargos led by the United States would have always been major factors, too. If, for instance, the European Union were to become embroiled in some huge economic catastrophe and fall apart, that would have huge economic ramifications for the United States in the same way the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact had huge ramifications for North Korea. I think it's silly to pretend that this isn't the case when North Korea was so clearly a part of that economic bloc during the Cold War.

I think it was also a mistake to assume that the economic embargos it faced were ineffectual as well. Embargos tend to work a lot better than most people give them credit for. Ironically, the authors point out an area where embargos had been effective over the course of this book. They point out that during the Cold War, one of North Korea's main trading partners had been the Soviet Union, which they characterise as having been technologically backwards.

The Soviet Union's technological backwardness was one of the results of the US-led embargos, especially during the last decade or so of the Cold War. US law heavily restricts what kind of advanced technologies can be exported to hostile nations because of the possibility that they can often have both civilian and military applications, a lot of the computer equipment developed by American companies during the '60s, '70s, and '80s weren't able to be sent to the Soviet bloc. And because the kind of authoritarian regimes in the Warsaw Pact tended to not lend themselves to developing competing versions of this technology organically, these countries ended up falling behind technologically.

This is a good example of how a combination of embargos and a regime's economic mismanagement can result in poor results. It isn't always just the regime's poor economic management, and it isn't always the embargo (especially when talking about a competing economic bloc), but the combination of the two can make things much worse. They can also have much worse effects going forward, as we saw in North Korea in the early post-Cold War years.

Overall though, I feel like this book is fine as an overview of some of the issues that North Korea faces and while I don't agree with a lot of its conclusions, it does make sense given what was known at the time and the general political zeitgeist in the late '90s. I think it's a decent read, so long as you're willing to take its conclusions with a fairly large grain of salt.

[Davis Florick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dated, but very good.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

A decent primer on the broad history/structure of the DPRK, but full of Orientalist tropes, American exceptionalism, and smug condescension (I guess that should be expected coming from the Brookings Institution, one of America's foremost military and foreign policy think tanks). Loaded, subjective terms like "totalitarian" and "Confucian" are applied whenever possible in an effort to paint even the most mundane, reasonable activities as sinister, backwards, or irrational (trying to grow corn and potatoes? Diabolical!)

The Korean War and South Korea's military dictatorship, not to mention the massacres and political persecutions carried out with U.S. approval, are whitewashed or omitted completely. Paeans to capitalism and shallow critiques of socialism familiar to any YouTube comment section are sprinkled throughout.

Still, it's a decent primer and to their credit they do occasionally admit U.S. shortcomings, even remarking that North Korea can sometimes be a surprisingly more rational actor than the U.S. But for a book aiming to deconstruct North Korean propaganda, the authors built a substantial propaganda piece of their own.

[Mr.david · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great primer on North Korea: Kim Il Sung, Juche Sasang, etc. Only recommended to those who are interested in isolationist, autonomy-obsessed East-Asian peninsular states! But still, really fascinating.

[Dustin · Rating 3 out of 5]

dense but intriguing read. would love to read an update to include Kim Jong Un