New York Times book review of North Korea: Another CountryChiding America Over the North Korean Uproar
By Stephen Kotkin
Communism collapsed. Well, not exactly. Not in Cuba and not across Asia. It did give way in Mongolia and Afghanistan, both Soviet satellites, but indigenous Communist regimes persist in China, Vietnam and North Korea. In the American imagination though, Pyongyang stands apart.
Kim Jong Il's neighbors cannot ignore his saber-rattling and refugees, but Japan, China, Russia and especially South Korea have not seemed overly panicked. So what's the fuss in the United States? Could North Korea's alleged nukes and misfiring missiles really menace the American homeland? As for Pyongyang's possible proliferation, why not help reinvigorate the International Atomic Energy Agency? Must the United States police the planet? And must all countries come to resemble the American system? Why not let those in the neighborhood confront or engage the addled workers' paradise?
North Korea, insists Bruce Cumings, is indeed an American concern a stance he shares with his bête noire, axis-of-evil antagonists. But whereas hawks urge a toppling, he writes of the North Koreans that "it is their country, for better or worse another country." And yet, he contends in six timely essays (some familiar from his many expert books), the United States contributed mightily to the North Korean predicament and Americans should acknowledge this forgotten responsibility and negotiate a permanent peace. A benevolent hegemon? Such paradoxes twist the book into a double helix of top scholarship and over-the-top commentary.
In some of this compact volume's most effective passages, Mr. Cumings quotes prominent American journalists on the showdown with North Korea C.I.A. estimates of one or two bombs, doomsday alarms to act now before he reveals that the quotations come from 1991-94. Today's hullabaloo is a rerun. He counters the hype with an instructive history.
One chapter documents the roots of the North Korean revolution in the 1930's anti-Japanese guerrilla war in Manchuria, which more than Soviet tanks brought Kim Il Sung and his cohort to power. Another examines the dynastic succession of his son, Kim Jong Il, who works at home in his pajamas, like an information economy habitué, but in public sports polyester leisure suits, pointy-toed elevator shoes and oversize sunglasses of malevolent tint, like a throwback idol. Meanwhile, his illegitimate son craves a Ferrari and his adopted daughter scorns Communism's tedium for Switzerland's high life hints of elite defection.
These insights are served up with liberal doses of anti-American-imperialism castor oil and North Korean sugar tablets. "On my infrequent visits to the country," Mr. Cumings writes, "I have been happy," adding that "empathy for the underdog is something I can't help, being a life-long fan of the Cleveland Indians."
Penal colonies hold 100,000 to 150,000 people, over half of them political prisoners, Mr. Cumings reports. But he deems the gulag both smaller than usually asserted and survivable, partly because detainees' families are incarcerated with them. Free adults face military induction for eight-year terms, the first six without home leave. It's a garrison state (7 million of its 23 million people are in the army or reserves), but he points out that conscripts labor in construction or agricultural brigades. A multiyear famine continues to starve and kill. What holds it together?
Politically, North Korea "is not a nice place, but it is an understandable place," Mr. Cumings writes, "an anticolonial and anti-imperial state growing out of a half century of Japanese colonial rule and another half century of continuous confrontation with a hegemonic United States and a more powerful South Korea." In other words, the country's staying power as well as its "deformations" (the author's euphemism) supposedly emanate not from Communist ideology and censorship but from its historical crucible, especially the holocaust, as he puts it, that the North underwent during the Korean War.
In 1950 "Koreans invaded Korea," Mr. Cumings writes. "What do we make of that?" What he makes of it is that in 1945, by designating the 38th parallel to demarcate American and Soviet occupation zones, the United States was inviting a war. Thus, he suggests that it was not Kim Il Sung or Stalin who incited hostilities but Dean Acheson and Harry S. Truman.
Still, he comes close to endorsing the 1951 ejection of the invading North from South Korea by arguing that the proper response was not a bloody rollback to the Chinese border but a job-done halt at the 38th parallel, which is where matters wound up in 1953 anyway. In the interim, he writes, the United States blanketed civilians with napalm. Three million North Koreans, one million South Koreans, nearly one million Chinese and around 50,000 Americans died. "This was Korea, `the limited war,' " Mr. Cumings writes with fury. American-led forces moonscaped industrial Northern and Central Korea, leaving snowy emptiness and a determined nation that survived in caves.
Mr. Cumings damns the Bush administration "the greater evil" for refusing the pleas of this "shrewd" despotic regime to lift it out of its post-Soviet soup and protect it from being swallowed up by the South.
He salutes South Korea's Sunshine Policy because like détente it embraces coexistence and evolutionary change. Yet of the reforms under way in North Korea, Mr. Cumings skeptically points out that the bureaucracy divides into incommunicative fiefs while the dominant military reveres and profits from the status quo. Perhaps the biggest obstacle is the pride of elites stuck on the memory of how, until the 1970's, the North outperformed the South. Trapped in a time warp, the system awaits an inescapable generational change.
Timeworn predictions of collapse and verbal threats of regime change notwithstanding, North Korea endures. One native Communism, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, was overthrown from without by Communist Vietnam. Homegrown revolutions were cashiered from within in the two ethno-territorial federations, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the latter cataclysmically. Even where Communism cracked itself up, however, it left behind gigantic shards, like obsolete factories and the K.G.B. China's managed changeover is already a quarter century old. The end of Communism is a protracted process.
Stephen Kotkin, a professor of European and Asian history at Princeton University, is the author of "Armageddon Averted The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000" (Oxford).