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North Korea: Another Country

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In "North Korea: another country, the unitiated reader will get a good short introduction to Bruce Cumings and his views on the present-day Korean Peninsula, in all their infuriating clarity.

Cumings is right on several things in this book and wrong on much else. He is right to criticize the Wesern news media's coverage of North Korea for focusing almost entirely on its bizarre features while making little effort to figure out why it is so, and what the leadership is thinking. Perhaps if a country is so bizarre as to be unknowable, the news media are relieved of the responsibility of digging into it to inform their readers. One example of this was the coverage of Kim Jong-Il's 2001 visit to Russia by train. The US media focused on his unwillingness to fly and other trivia, but largely ignored the key point: a one-month absence showed he had great confidence in his grip on power.

Cumings is also right to inform readers of the devastating strategic bombing campaign that the US Air Forces unleashed on North Korea in 1950-53. The US forces brought their WWII experience intact to Korea and proceeded to flatten the North. It is important for Americans to know this, not because the USAF should have done differently in supporting our ground combatants, but because a) it is a matter of history and b) it helps explain some of the subsequent political and military behavior of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, to give the North its full title. By the time of the 1953 Armistice, Kim Il-Sung was as great a believer in US air power as General Curtis LeMay. Kim ordered the burrowing of underground facilities of all kinds, from hangars to factories. One can also draw a line from that war experience to the later North Korean determination to develop nuclear weapons.

What is most tiresome about Bruce Cumings is that he constantly tries to excuse present-day North Korea. He avoids the obvious: that the only proper comparison is with South Korea. In that comparison, North Korea comes off very badly indeed. Having worked six years in Seoul as a US diplomat (in the late '70's and from 1988-92) and having later visited North Korea five times with an international organization, I see no excuse for North Korea's being the way it is, except for the obvious one -- keeping the Kim Dynasty and close supporters in power at the expense of all other North Koreans. To retain a semblance of objectivity, Cumings provides ritualistic interjections to the effect that of course North Korea is not a nice place.

On page 199 of his "Korea's Place in the Sun" (1997), Cumings states it would have been preferable for Kim Il-Sung's 1950 invasion to succeed, calling it a "purifying upheaval that might have been pretty awful," but not as bad as the Korean War or the 1960 uprising against Syngman Rhee or the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. (In the latter two events, the death toll was measured in the hundreds, not the millions.) In this breathtaking scenario, he asserts that a Korea unified under Kim in 1950 would have moderated over time, "as did China, as Vietnam is doing today." What Professor Cumings manages to gloss over in these short sentences is nothing short of stupefying. As John Merrill points out in "Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War," over 100,000 Koreans were killed on the peninsula in left-right violence even before the North invaded the South on June 25, 1950. Kim Il-Sung carried out brutal purges in the part of Korea he did control, and was ruthless in imposing his rule in the North. Success for Kim in 1950 would have been bloody indeed and would have left South Koreans without hope of economic or political improvement, and Kim without any incentive for either. As for Cumings's breezy comparison with China, he surely knows how many millions died in Mao's mad schemes like the Great Leap Forward. Few South Koreans who remember the war would appreciate his consigning them to the tender mercies of the Kim Dynasty. Though he states the point less clearly here, Cumings is still distressed that Kim was thwarted in 1950.

In general, Bruce Cumings explains North Korea's structure and behavior as being more Confucian than Communist. He draws on the structures and traditions of the Yi Dynasty or Chosun Korea (1392-1910) to illuminate the North. There is a fair amount of truth in that comparison. Where his simile runs onto the rocks is the nearly total militarization of North Korea, which has only accelerated after the dynastic succession to Kim Jong-Il, who initiated the "son-gun" (military first) policy. In Confucian Chosun times, military officials clearly took a back seat to civilian scholar-officials. To me, the best comparison to make with that central aspect of the North is with the highly militarized and regimented Japan between the world wars.

A reader wanting to learn more about North Korea would do far better to read "North Korea Through the Looking Glass" by Katy Oh and Ralph Hassig. It is far more objective and thorough.

I can understand many of the other reviews of this book calling it slanted, biased, or infuriating. Cumings is *not* trying to be objectively balanced and thorough, but rather trying to point out what should be widely known, but is instead ignored in what passes for U.S. media "coverage" of North Korea. He is often sarcastic or laconic, and is relaxed where most writers get breathless. That can easily be misread as forgiving or apologetic.

Basically, he takes for granted that we know about the nastier aspects of North Korea from reading the newspaper, and the standard view of the Korean War you get from reading American histories of the 50s. What he points out, for instance, is that if one were to read the Pentagon's discussions of massive nuclear bombing in the 50s and exercises in the 1970s and 80s with nuclear-armed fighter planes from the isolated outlook of the North Koreans, one can perhaps understand their claim to be threatened by the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Now, the American side obviously has no real interest in starting a war that could kill millions, but doesn't that still resemble a nuclear superpower posing a threat to a small, isolated, friendless country?

The main point of Cumings' book is just how poorly the U.S. media cover the North Korean issue: only during a crisis, the same old scary stories about the antics of crazy old Kim Jong Il get recycled yet again, and the South Korean and CIA intelligence reports get quoted, no matter how incomplete they may be.

Cumings also points out some uncomfortable truths about the absolute devastation of North Korea during the Korean war; that the US felt threatened by what they saw as a vast, monolithic, global, unrelenting Communist threat does not change the fact that all of the devastation happened on the Korean peninsula.

If you want to keep seeing North Korea in black-and-white, by all means, read something else. If you want to read about how horrible North Korea's regime is, this is not the book. If you want to understand why MacArthur, Ridgeway, et al. made the decisions they made, or understand the right-wing dictatorship of South Korea had until the 80s, read a different book. If you want to get some idea of how the complicated history of the 20th century might look from the other side of the DMZ and get the decoder ring to understand North Korea's bizarre diplomacy, this book is a good start.

No matter how open-minded and cosmopolitan you are, it is hard to think that North Korea is anything other than a deeply weird country. On the one hand it is a communist dictatorship, but on the other it is apparently a theocratic monarchy. With the possible exception of Albania and Pol Pot Cambodia, no Communist country produces a propaganda that is more offensive to Western principles, one of relentless flattery to the Kim dynasty. It is a deeply chauvinistic culture, only that endlessly harps about the virtue of self-reliance and seems to think that all human accomplishment revolves around North Korea. Yet one can see that many of the electronic devices are actually imports while one sees Korean operas that sound suspiciously like "Swan Lake." Everywhere there is the most garish kitsch about the Kim's, far surpassing Marx or Stalin or Mao, and everywhere one can see the Great Leader's quotations. (Such as "It is important to play the piano well.") All the foreigners are constantly watched and monitored. Thanks to lengthy military service Korean men appear to remain virgins well into their late twenties and early thirties. When Kim Jong Il realized that smoking was bad for his health, he not only stopped, but forbid his General Staff as well.

But this is only part of the story, as Bruce Cumings points out in his brief but important book on the subject. As a book, it has the major weakness that much of what he has said he has written before in his books on the origins of the Korean war and his general history of Korea. But considering that the United States might end up in a conflict that could kill millions of people, it is vital that everybody read this book. The current regime is a very unpleasant one (Cumings calls it "abhorrent"). It has at least 100,000 political prisoners and perhaps 150,000 in its local gulags. Although its economy and living standards may have been as good as South Korea's as late as 1978, its dogmatic economic policy and secretive nature helped worsen major flood and draughts to cause a famine that killed at least 500,000 people. Its leadership is cruel and it is suspicious, but Cumings reminds us that it is not paranoid. If it has 700,000 troops on the border merely 100 kilometres from Seoul, Cumings reminds us that South Korea has 540,000 troops, presumably healthier and better armed, on its border merely 100 kilometers from Pyongyang. Cumings reminds us that behind the monarchical façade the party is dominated by the generation of anti-Japanese guerrillas. Of the forty top leaders of North Korea in 1997 only one, Kim Jong Il himself, is under the age of 60. The average age of the Politburo, excepting Kim, was 72.

This is important for a number of reasons. The Japanese were brutal occupiers, extorting hundreds of thousands of Koreans for forced labor and forced prostitution. Many of its quislings and pimps became the backbone of the South Korean state, including its greatest leader, President Park. Not only did the Korean Communist Party have to face the Japanese, they also had to face the paranoid purges of their Soviet and Chinese "allies," which Kim Il Sung was lucky to escape with his life. Then came the Korean war, in which North Korea faced a truly horrific aerial bombing. Perhaps a quarter of the North Korean population was killed, as dams were destroyed and 867,000 gallons of horrific napalm were used in the first four months alone. That is one reason why much of the North Korean military/industrial infrastructure is underground. Another reason why is that the United States has always had a nuclear threat against the North. After his dismissal General MacArthur spoke of using cobalt bombs to seal the border altogether, apparently unaware that the cobalt he would have used would have been enough to destroy all life on the planet. This was not simply one powerful man's lunacy though. The threat was a constant theme in Korean war planning. After the armistice, and despite a provision in it preventing qualitatively new weapons from entering the peninsula, John Foster Dulles allowed nuclear weapons into the South. This was done not so much out of a fear of the North attacking the South, as to discourage the South from attacking the North. For years the United States has had plans of initiating nuclear weapons within an hour of a potential Northern attack. Cumings reminds us that nuclear signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty are not supposed to threaten non-nuclear signers, and that the 1994 agreement required the United States to give formal assurances not to threaten the North with nukes. Thanks to Republican opposition, those assurances were never given.

It is in this context that Cumings writes of the current nuclear crisis. The North Korean regime is not very likeable, but it is not the West's enemy, nor the United States'. And if it has survived the fall of the Soviet Union, the first nuclear crisis and a major famine there is no good reason to believe that is going to go anyway anytime soon. And one should point out that Korea's democrats, who have suffered things infinitely worse than our doughty warriors against "political incorrectness," have consistently called for a peaceful tactful policy. A deal, involving the end of North Korea's missile and uranium reprocessing technology in return for a formal peace treaty and mutual recognition has been possible and was possible at the end of the Clinton presidency. But that would require the current president to actually know something about North Korea. Maybe someone should give this book to him for a Christmas present.

North Korea: Another Country by Bruce Cumings starts off as a very slow read. The book is divided into six chapters yet the first two--about the history of the Korean War and the DPRK's nuclear record--take up the first half of the book just between themselves. It took me so long just to get through these two chapters. They were interesting, yet boringly written if that makes any sense, and I can only say that I am surprised I never fell asleep while reading them. The next four chapters in the second half of the book proceed at a quicker pace and were a breeze to finish.

Of all the books that I have read so far on the DPRK, Cumings is unlike any other American writer in that he often comes to the defence of the North while putting down the United States. The author makes a sincere effort to understand why the North acts and reacts as it does on the world stage, when other authors would merely find excuses in blaming the North's "despotic dictators". Cumings often portrays the US as ignorant and racist, and having no clue behind its military policies on the Korean peninsula. As a result, Cumings comes across as an apologist, ready to defend the North for its actions while condemning the US and its shuttered view of the world for always getting things wrong in its foreign policy, whether it be its involvement in Vietnam or Iraq. Cumings has taken a lot of heat for his seemingly anti-American, pro-DPRK views, and he shocked me with his constant hammering of American foreign policy and its journalistic integrity:

"Predicting the behavior of crazy people is by definition impossible, and American officials constantly harp on Pyongyang's unpredictability. I would argue, to the contrary, that North Korean behavior has been quite predictable and that an irresponsible American media, almost bereft of good investigative reporters, often (but by no means always) egged on by government officials, obscures the real nature of the United States-Korean conflict. The media has had the wrong stories in the wrong place at the wrong time; the absurd result is that often one has to read North Korea's tightly controlled press to figure out what actually is going on between Washington and Pyongyang."

As seen above, Cumings also has a similar low opinion of Western, specifically American media in their reporting about North Korea. While even I, a self-professed "Friend of North Korea" was shocked by his constant USA-bashing, I have to admit that his assessment of the Western media was bang on:

"With the occasional exception, most of it [ = the news the Western media report about North Korea] is uninformative, unreliable, often sensationalized, and generally fails to educate instead of deceive the public. Given the mimetic nature of our media, the same stories circulate endlessly; often they are contemporary variations on the same old tales that have been around since North Korea became our enemy sixty years ago: they're about to attack the South, their leader is nuts, their people are brainwashed, the regime will implode or explode. Literally for half a century, the South Korean intelligence services have bamboozled one American reporter after another by parading their defectors (real and fake), grinding the Pyongyang rumor mill, or parlaying fibs that even a moment's investigation in a good library would expose."

There are very dry moments in North Korea: Another Country, which seem all the more to drag on by the copious amount of endnotes. Endnotes are not themselves an annoyance, but they become so when they are not easy to find in the notes section since there are no chapter headings to inform the reader what chapter the notes apply to. Throughout my entire read I had to keep a bookmark or a finger holding the place where my last endnote was explained.

The Financial Times called North Korea: Another Country "tart and witty", yet these tart and witty moments were few and far between. Cumings wrote about Andrew Holloway's experiences in Pyongyang, where he worked reediting the English translations of the works by the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. Holloway, coincidentally, worked at the same job as Michael Harrold, who wrote about his own experiences in his book Comrades and Strangers: Behind the Closed Doors of North Korea, which I reviewed earlier this year. Cumings writes about Holloway:

"Like the ambassador, Andrew Holloway was appalled and mortified to find out about the depth. ubiquity, and never-ending self-parody of regime propaganda, but he got to know it better than most, because his job was to polish its English representation in various publications. Within just a week or two, he could barely stand his daily portion of hagiography, gross exaggeration, unseemly self-importance, ridiculous excess, profound solipsism, and all-around mind-numbing drivel that it was his lot to put into something resembling English and that is the butt of jokes around the world--when anyone is paying attention."

The only chuckle I got out of North Korea: Another Country was reading about the reaction Cumings received while on a tour outside of Pyongyang:

While in the North Korean city of Kaesong,"I was surprised by the large numbers of people standing around in midday, gaping at us as if we were Martians".

This is not unlike other reactions I have read when North Koreans see foreigners. I suppose I will have this to look forward to, especially since I will be visiting some cities and towns that only last year were open to tourists for the first time ever.

This book is, in my mind, a valuable addition to the collection of work on North Korea despite its limitations. Bruce Cummings is certainly an expert in the field and despite the obvious, overwhelming consensus of North Korea as a rogue, totalitarian nightmare of a state operated by a half-insane, comically maladjusted madman, he manages to point out the dangers of oversimplification. Likewise, Cummings wisely points out that despite characterizations to the contrary, the North Korean government is well entrenched, its grip on power solid, and its behavior identifiably consistent, if not entirely predictable. Briefly, here are his key points.

1) The Korean war was a civil war wherein the North did not see it as a war of conquest, but one of liberation and national unification.

2) The war was devastating to North Korea, with vast swathes of the country reduced to cinders and people burrowing in caves and sewers to avoid allied air power. This informs their decisions to massively militarize their countries.

3) North Korea has always had a policy of self-sufficiency when surrounded by enemies and as such seeks to develop its military and civil arsenal to minimize its reliance on external forces.

4) Until the 1980s, North and South Korea were on similar levels of economic development, with the North actually leading the South in such key factors as the development of heavy industry, the use of fertilizers, electrical consumption, and so on.

5) Much of the information which informs American public opinion is filtered through the lens of South Korean news and intelligence services, both of which have their own biases and tendencies towards sensationalism.

6) North Korea IS willing to open up to the west to a certain extent and come in from the cold, but numerous factors inhibit this. These include the fact that North Korea will not accept reunification through absorption (as in Germany), the fact that for decades American official policy has been regime change in the North, and the fact that any kind of rapprochement with North Korea is wildly unpopular in the United States.

Nevertheless, Cummings does have a tendency to gloss over the problems of North Korea and is in some ways inaccurate. For example, Cummings maintains that there are no more than 100 to 150,000 prisoners in North Korean camps, a figure which would represent less than one half of one percent of the population. Given North Korea's penchant for collective punishment of families, this number is ridiculously low. Likewise, Cummings fails to explain what precisely went wrong with North Korea to take it from being more or less on par with the South to one of the most backwards and underdeveloped country in Asia. Other than blaming this largely on the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, Cummings declines to comment.

Also, Cummings has a tendency to make certain sweeping generalizations about North Korea in particular and Koreans in general. For example, he actually claims that Korea (unlike China and Japan) has not fallen into a habit of cultural ethnocentrism or racism. This statement is blatantly false, especially for anyone who has ever lived in Korea (especially as a foreigner). One needs look no further than the ways in which the "half-breed" children of Korean peasants and Vietnamese or Philippa women are treated by society.

Finally, Cummings-- while adroitly making comparisons between South and North Korea-- tends to ignore one key fact. While South Korea may have started off as a one-party state, largely run by hard-line conservatives (many of whom had ties to the colonial Japanese administration), the fact remains that over a period of 15-20 years in the 80s and 90s, South Korea DID modernize, democratize, and relax to the point where now it can rightfully be considered a free and fair representative democracy comparable to Japan or Taiwan. North Korea for whatever reason, has never done so and seems extremely unlikely to do so in the near future (or any future, for that matter).

As such, while Cummings does make some excellent points and fearlessly goes against the grain in pointing out some of the benefits of life in North Korea, his analysis remains somewhat myopic and as such, flawed.

As a journalist and instructor writing and teaching on Korean society and culture, I strongly recommend this wonderful book. It is extremely hard to get well-balanced information about North Korea in the U.S., and quite a few readers may find this book shocking. It is no wonder some negative and even hostile reviews have been written about this book. North Korea: Another Country does not make a conventional approach to North Korea, i.e., it does not chiefly criticize the country. Cumings emphasizes in this book the importance of understanding cultural and historical differences between the two countries. If you would like to truly understand North Korea as "another country" and why they are doing all the 'crazy things,' Cumings's North Korea: Another Country is definitely a must-read.

The three ideological pillars on which the North Korean (DPRK) state rests are the following: (i) self-reliance, (ii) national independence, and (iii) independent economy. Any nation doing its utmost to stand on its own feet commands our admiration, but as even a cursory reading of our newspapers reveals to us: the DPRK is almost always reviled rather than extolled. The author endeavours to unravel the mechanisms behind America's irrational hatred of this great nation, and succeeds in his task quite well. The anti-DPRK hysteria in America is rooted in the following two factors: ignorance and indoctrination. The author's second aim is to explain the rationale behind DPRK's Realpolitik. As a post-colonial nation with deep-seated memories of the horrendous crimes against humanity committed by the American terrorists and marauders during the Korean war, the DPRK feels compelled to adopt a stalwart posture vis-à-vis the Americans. The Koreans have taken the following law of the jungle to heart: the strong devours the weak. Therefore, if and when the Yanks come knocking, the DPRK will have one nasty surprise after another in store for the unwanted visitor. An American general estimated that in the case of a new Korean war, "he would need as many as 80,000 to 100,000 body bags for American soldiers who would die" (p. 72). The Americans are not willing to pay such a high price, and this the Koreans know.

Bruce Cumings has a poor opinion of media coverage of North Korea. "With the occasional exception, most of it is uninformative, unreliable, often sensationalized, and generally fails to educate instead of deceive the public." The nuclear crisis is a case in point. "The media has had the wrong stories in the wrong place at the wrong time; the absurd result is that often one has to read North Korea's tightly controlled press to figure out what is actually going on between Washington and Pyongyang."

He also has a low esteem of the bulk of North Korea studies published in the US. Nicholas Eberstadt, a Washington pundit, has been "wrong-wrong-wrong throughout the past fifteen years in his prognostications of North Korean collapse". The most interesting piece of information to be found in his book is that "Kim Il Sung University has a baseball team". Another book published by a CIA analyst has some useful information "on arcane and difficult to research subjects like North Korean wage and price structures, the self-sufficient and decentralized neighbourhood living practices that mostly eliminated the long line for goods that characterized Soviet-style communism, and the decade of one's young life that almost every North Korean male is required to devote to military service." But the author's characterization of North Korea as a `cult society' "merely betrays her lack of knowledge about the society she spent so many years studying, presumably with the best intelligence material that the US government can muster at her fingertips."

Some scholarship on North Korea nonetheless finds favour in his eyes. Besides his own books and articles, "new work by excellent younger scholars has enabled [him] to go beyond [his] previous publications that have dealt with the North." A few testimonies are also worth quoting. Breaking the Silence, the memoir by Kim Jong Il's adopted daughter Li Nam Ok, is used at length. The Aquariums of Pyongyang, a testimony on the North Korean gulag first published in French in 2000, is "an interesting and believable story, precisely because it does not, on the whole, make for the ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its original publishers in France meant it to be."

According to Bruce Cumings, what most reporting on North Korea fails to see is that "the DPRK is not a nice place, but it is an understandable place". Its leaders follow "a rationality of historically informed, trial-and-error, theory-and-practice learned behaviour growing out of the Korean civil conflict going back to 1945, yielding intransigent bargaining strategies and extreme conceptions of national sovereignty." Cumings is not the only analyst to note that "the 1990 dealt North Korea a very bad hand, but they played it with surprising skill". In his opinion, and as of his writing in 2003, the only solution to unravel the impending calamity is "a quick return to the status quo ante 2001, to the compelling and still feasible denouement of the original crisis fashioned by Kim Dae Jung, Bill Clinton, and Kim Jong Il." His hope is that "sooner or later an American president will come to understand this, the crisis will end, embassies will be exchanged, and Americans will begin to enjoy touring this beautiful Hermit Kingdom and meeting with its unknown but warm, proud and dignified people."

Bruce Cumings is convinced that "for decades the North far outstripped the South in economic development", and that standards of living in the 1970s "were higher and more equitably distributed than in the South". His judgement is grounded on the observations of a Swedish ambassador (although he notes that "diplomats were kept in such ignorance that they would speculate as to whether the DPRK had a court system"), on personal observations (his first visit to the DPRK was in 1981), and on some production figures : "the DPRK used as much electricity as the South, with half the South's population; it produced more crude steel and three times the number of machine tools (the building blocks of industry) as the South." "Its agriculture was far ahead of the South in productivity; it used miracle seedlings and its chemical fertilizer application was `probably among the highest in the world,' while the South still ladled human waste on its rice fields." Economists may have second thoughts on such evidence of economic superiority.

Bruce Cumings is a professor of history at Chicago University and a specialist of the Korean war. As he makes it clear, North Korea is "another country", not his country anyway, and although feeling "empathy for the underdog is something [he] can't help, being a lifelong fan of the Cleveland Indians", he feels no sympathy for this "garrison state". On the other hand, he is passionate about the Korean war, his academic field and his key to the understanding of the Pyongyang regime. He still feels anger about the US army's decision to cross the 38th parallel to carry the battle to the North after September 1950: due to this fateful decision, "upward of three million North Koreans died, along with another one million South Koreans, and nearly a million Chinese. Fifty-two thousand more American soldiers died. And the war ended where it began." This tragedy is not ancient history: "the war is still not over and appears unlikely to be resolved anytime soon." The Korean conflict provides a lesson on "how easy it is to get into a war and how hard it is to get out".

Bruce Cumings also holds strong views about the policies followed by the United States of America in the Middle East, the state of its prisons, and other issues. He has every right to hold these views: it is his country anyway. But his commentary on US domestic and foreign policy issues is both excessive and misplaced: one only wishes he would tone down his language, and stick to the topic he is addressing.

Cumings' book has one major strength and one major weakness. Its strength is how much it makes you question what you are told by the American media. Like most Americans, I have a very black-and-white view of North Korea as a dangerous, terrorist-harboring, repressive totalitarian state, the closest you will ever get to George Orwell's 1984 in real life. Cumings bucks this view, but unfortunately, in so doing, he glosses over a lot of the relevant facts that make this view valid. Don't get me wrong, I'm completely opposed to the Kim regime and believe that he has been unbelievably cruel to his people, but Americans also ignore a lot of their own atrocities towards Korea and completely refuse to see the other point of view. Cumings sees the other point of view, but unfortunately ignores the original one he's arguing about, which does have merit. He also seems to have something of a vendetta against the American government and takes cheap pot shots at various Western figures which are detrimental to what is otherwise a scholarly, although occasionally overly argumentative, work.

If you want a book that turns your view of North Korea on its head and causes you to question everything the media tells you, I highly recommend it, but be prepared to be angry and take everything with a grain of salt, because it's pretty one-sided.

After North Korea's first (and confirmed) nuclear test on October 9 2006 the interest on this country has soared and this book is a good start for anyone asking questions about the North Korean regime. Although I expected more "inside information" about the conditions of everyday living in North Korea, Mr Cumings does a fine job presenting this country not simply as a member of the famous "axis of evil" but as another choice of communal life which has deep roots in the Korean history and ethics. I was shocked to learn that North Korean youths are obliged to serve eight years in the military (and take their first leave after the sixth year!) but equally amazing were the statistics which prove that North Korea was at a better economic position than the South, until the beginning of the 1980s. The author does not hide the fact that Kim Jong Il (and Kim Il Sung before him) behaves and lives like a king in a very poor country, sending his children to Swiss schools and purchasing very expensive Italian and German sport cars but he denies that the regime faces the danger of imminent collapse or that we must ecpext it to "explode or implode" in the next years. Altogether this book will change many of your established (and rather distorted) views on North Korea and is a very useful tool to understand the current situation and perhaps the future of the Korean Peninsula.