Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea [Hardcover]

Jasper Becker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2005

What happens when a dictator wins absolute power and isolates a nation from the outside world? In a nightmare of political theory stretched to madness, North Korea's Kim Jong Il made himself into a living god, surrounded by lies and flattery and beyond criticism. As over two million of his subjects starved to death, Kim Jong Il roamed between palaces staffed by the most beautiful girls in the country and stocked with the most expensive delicacies from around the world. Outside, the steel mills shut down, the trains stopped running, the power went out, and the hospitals ran out of medicine. When the population threatened to revolt, Kim imposed a reign of terror across the country, deceived the United Nations, and plundered the country's dwindling resources to become a nuclear power. Now tiny bankrupt North Korea is using her nuclear capability to blackmail the United States.
Veteran correspondent Jasper Becker takes us inside one of the most secretive countries in the world, exposing the internal chaos, blind faith, rampant corruption, and terrifying cruelty of its rulers. Becker details the vain efforts to change North Korea by actors inside and outside the country and the dangers this highly volatile country continues to pose. Small, podgy and easily overlooked, Kim Jong Il has emerged from the shadow of his father to lead the most successful and dangerous rogue state of our times.
This unique land, ruled by one family's megalomania and paranoia, seems destined to survive and linger on for some time, a menace to its own people and to the rest of the world. But should the nations of the world allow this regime to survive? That's the question with which this book concludes.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One of the few reporters to have firsthand experience of North Korea, veteran Asian correspondent Becker (Hungry Ghosts) adds more nuance to a familiar story that the threat of nuclear arms, as well as the world's fifth largest standing army, are part of an attempt to force the rest of the globe to cater to a mad leader's megalomaniacal world. Becker presents a well-fed, unprepossessing Kim Jong Il running North Korea with a cult of personality unmatched in contemporary history, reducing his population to starving anonymous actors in a bizarre personal psychodrama, where "even the mere idea of internal opposition to Kim's rule is regarded as preposterous." Images of this grim state of affairs—which goes well beyond the Orwellian into the Kafkaesque—have been smuggled out over the past few years; how they came to be is described with rare concision by Becker: the Kim dynasty's poisonous and potent blend of Stalinist doctrine and Korean absolutism found its catalysts, he argues, in the varying ambitions of Japan, China and the U.S. While stopping short of calling for immediate regime change, Becker minces no words in warning that we may now have no way out of a monstrous situation. 16 b&w photos not seen by PW. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Along with Iran, North Korea persists as the greatest U.S. foreign-policy dilemma. With a huge conventional army and, apparently, a growing supply of nuclear weapons, the "rogue" regime of Kim Jong Il is a threat to our Asian allies; with the continued development of long-range missiles, it could even threaten the continental U.S. Becker, a foreign correspondent with substantial experience in East Asia, has written a frightening and depressing account of both the domestic and foreign policies of a society and government that are an affront to the human spirit. Like all totalitarians, Kim Jong IL seems to regard his people as clay playthings to be molded as he pursues his grandiose visions. The result is a slave state in which political repression and control are absolute and starvation is rampant. Becker asserts that "regime change" may prove to be the only viable option. However, as he indicates in a scenario that opens the book, that too is fraught with grave danger. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019517044X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195170443
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,147,585 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but depressing book, May 12, 2005

By 

K. Kehler (B.C., Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea (Hardcover)

This is a fine work but a dreary and depressing one. That, I hasten to add, is because of the content and not because of the writing, which is solid and clear. North Korea is a truly strange and bizarre place, and Becker helps to explain not only how it came to be what it is, but also just how appallingly cruel (and spoiled and selfish) its rulers have been. He's also good on what we know about the military capacity of the country.

The indifference to suffering is not confined to the inhuman Kim and his even worse son (Kim Jong Il). China too deserves the world's condemnation for adopting a policy of returning (to a certain death) desperate, starving, dying people who have risked everything to beg on the streets of Chinese border cities. China has valued its influence over N. Korea over humanitarism, and obviously has no concern about the unfortunate denizens of what is literally a slave state.

North Korea is a preternaturally weird and bloodcurdlingly scary place. It's the only country in the world that is almost completely isolated from outside influences, filled with a literally shrinking (because of famine and starvation) population, and presided over by the one fat man in the entire land ... who not insignificantly is sitting with his pudgy, Roman Emperor-esque finger on the buttons of whole host of WMD, with the 20+ million inhabitants of (greater) Seoul held hostage just 35 miles from the DMZ and N. Korea's thousands of missiles, rockets and assorted artillery. Becker's good at describing a place that is stranger than fiction and far more savage: cannibalism, cronyism, corruption, and a callousness that beggars belief, plus nuclear ambitions. It's here in all its frightening 'glory'.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Explanation of How Kim Jong IL Came to Power, August 5, 2005

By 

W. S. McKenzie (Albuquerque, NM USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea (Hardcover)

Overall, Jasper Becker provides a readable explanation of how North Korea came to be a self-starved country with a massive defense establishment. He covers the history of Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong Il, their achievement of absolute control, and relationships with Russia, China, and America.

I did have problems with some statements Becker makes. He starts with a fictional scenario of a military confrontation with the U.S.: "On the bridge of the USS Kitty Hawk, Admiral Peter Grey watched the F-16 planes taking off . . ." The US Air Force is justifiably proud of the capabilities of the F-16 but they don't include the ability to fly from aircraft carriers. He describes the Chinese nuclear shelter efforts after the 1963 Cuban missile crisis: "Aircraft hangars, runways, submarines, and destroyers were all secreted deep inside mountain caves so that after a preemptive strike, Chinese forces could sally forth unscathed." Maybe they were very small flying submarines and destroyers that could zip out from the deep caves to the water? Becker confuses me when describing the North Korean nuclear program: "The Yongbyon reactor produced just 5 megawatts (MW) of fissile material . . ." by not explaining why fissile material is measured in megawatts instead of units of mass or radioactivity.

The book is worth reading as a contemporary history of the North Korean regime in spite of the distractions.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good background, but flawed, August 30, 2005

By 

Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea (Hardcover)

Jasper Becker's recent book, "Rogue Regime" is really two books in one. The bulk of it is a history and analysis of North Korea, revolving around its current leader, Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung. Authoritatively documented and seriously presented, Becker outlines a case against the world's most horrendous and brutal dictator. His prognostications, however, leave much to be desired.

In "Rogue Regime", the author spends chapter upon chapter relating the devastation that the Kims have brought to North Korea. In this regard, Becker has done a great service in reminding us what it is like to live in that totalitarian state. He looks at all angles.... political, social, economical and most of all, personal, citing defectors who have lived in North Korea over the years. He describes Pyongyang as a city which is almost Kafka-esque.....department stores that are open with nothing to buy and few shoppers, for instance. For a country that is closed to the outside world Becker opens it up, as much as he can.

To say that the author has a neo-conservative bent is an understatement. He castigates Presidents Carter and Clinton and relegates the United Nations to a role of an appeaser in the quest to figure out what to do with North Korea. While there is much merit to his arguments, the one-sided approach he offers is hardly convincing. Becker loosely addresses Iraq, largely supporting the U.S. effort there, but he then goes on to beg the question that so many people have asked over the course of the current Bush administration.....if North Korea poses the real threat to the United States, what are we doing in Iraq and why are we not doing anything militarily to take out the supposed sites in North Korea? It's a question that is posed but left unanswered.

I have reservations about this book but anyone who is curious to know more about North Korea should read it. Still, reading "Rogue Regime" is like driving down a highway without an exit ramp. The trip is worthwhile but it eventually just stops. One wishes that this book had been written a few years ago and that President Bush had read it. The fulcrum of the "Axis of Evil" might have been tipped in a different direction. While pointing the finger, Becker delivers no real solutions.