on North Korea

Lately I've been fascinated with North Korea. I read this book last month --- it's worth reading if you're interested in North Korea. If you're only mildly interested, I recommend this article. If you want something even shorter, I'll write a quick summary below. (If you're not interested, then go fuck yourself.) (And I'm not saying that to be insulting, I'm saying that you'll probably get more enjoyment out of fucking yourself than you will suffering through my barely organized thoughts on North Korea.)


Korea was occupied by Japan in 1910, but after WWII, the US took military control of the South, and the USSR took the North. The border was hastily drawn by the US with the sole purpose of keeping Seoul in the South. (p.inc.) The split left North Korea with the inferior lot. War ensued. Lots of Koreans, Americans, Soviets and Chinese died. In the end, the original hastily drawn border remained.

The Soviets installed Kim Il Sung as the ruler of the North. Kim essentially told his people he was God, and that Americans and South Koreans were the poor, ruthless, ravenous enemies. Kim cut off his citizens from all communication with the outside world and tried to create a society that was completely self-reliant (this philosophy is called Juche.) Here's a funny example of Juche from the article:

In 1997, Pyongyang officially withdrew from Christian time and placed North Korea on a Juche calendar, which marks the beginning of history as 1912, the year of Kim Il Sung’s birth.

(I hope one of my ancestors was the asshole sitting around making fun of the decision to use Jesus Christ's birthdate as the beginning of history.)

60 years later, South Korea has one of the largest and most prosperous economies in the world, while North Korean leaders would kill to get Robert Mugabe on the phone for some economic advice.

Five factors are generally to blame for North Korea's economic collapse:
1) suppression of free enterprise (they essentially criminalize free enterprise)
2) investing a vast majority of resources into military
3) having leadership whose sole purpose is to maintain power (or that is just unbelievably incompetent)
4) less than ideal farmland (and some major fuck-ups with said farmland)
5) the fall of the Soviet Union, which provided North Korea with aid and discounted fuel

Food in North Korea is rationed by the state, and based on what I've read, the average North Korean doctor survives on an amount of food that would make the average American homeless man cringe. Soup made from grass and ground tree bark seems to be a staple of the North Korean diet. North Koreans die of starvation and hunger-related illness at an alarmingly high rate, and during an especially brutal famine that ensued after the fall of the Soviet Union, North Korea lost somewhere between 5-20% of its entire population.

One of the stories in Nothing to Envy was about a North Korean doctor who would leave her hospital every day to forage for food. Eventually, like everyone else profiled in the book, she fled to China.

The exodus to China and what it says about the general state of North Korea is summed up perfectly by this sentence from the Gourevitch article:

It is a measure of what things are like in North Korea that those who have escaped invariably speak of their first impression of the peasant villages and factory towns of China’s rough and underdeveloped northeast with a continuing sense of astonishment that just across a fifty-metre-wide river people could be living in such extraordinary wealth, with all modern comforts, and such freedom.

One especially memorable story described a North Korean woman entering a Chinese village for the first time and seeing a heaping bowl of food in the backyard and assuming the family was preparing for a feast. Shortly after, she realized that the food had been left out for the family dog.

North Korean radios and televisions are fixed to only receive broadcasts from the state run networks, and subversive speech is punished by imprisonment of the speaker and speaker's entire family. But as more North Koreans slip in and out of China and spread information of what they see, and as more learn how to intercept broadcasts from foreign countries, word of their true condition will spread. And with its longstanding leader now dead and his 28 year-old son primed to become the new figurehead, it will be interesting to see what -- if anything -- happens.

The biggest obstacle to an Arab-style revolution is simply the inability of North Korean citizens to communicate. Egyptians, Libyans, Tunisians and Yemenis all had mobile phones and computers and internet and twitter and facebook, but a potential North Korean revolutionary will be thrown in a prison camp for sending a smoke signal.

In addition, there are two other factors that help the North Korean regime maintain the status quo:

1) Nuclear Weapons: They may have cost North Korea an economy, but it gets other countries to pay attention and give aid.

2) Extremely poor people: China and South Korea aren't exactly thrilled about the possibility of North Korea being liberated and all of its poor people stampeding into their cities. So instead of pushing for a regime change and ending all of the human rights atrocities, China and South Korea seem to have a a policy of, "Hey, let's take it easy, maybe they just can clean things up a little with some nudging in the right direction from us."


I felt the need to post this because thinking about North Korea, plus reading a book about a WWII pilot's starvation (within a week of the North Korea book) gets me thinking about how rich we are every time I unwrap a Chipotle burrito.