Bradley K. Martin – Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea & the Kim Dynasty

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea, was established in its current form not long after WW2, when competing US/Soviet interests split the peninsula into two halves. Within the space of a few short years, a former anti-Japanese guerilla fighter who styled himself Kim Il-sung had risen to take control over the fledgling nation. American journalist Bradley K. Martin, armed with decades of experience reporting on East Asian affairs, as well as several trips into DPRK himself, explores how the country has become one of the most fascinating, cruel, tyrannical and stubborn regimes the world has ever known. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (2004) hopes to pull back the screen from behind North Korea and to illuminate this vile, enigmatic regime. The popular narrative about North Korea is well established in the popular mindset by now: the brainwashed, uniformed masses, indoctrinated from birth to deify and revere their “Dear Leader” Kim Il-sung and his successor, son Kim Jong-il. Statues of the leader adorn squares across the nation’s capital, Pyongyang; children learn to repeat by rote his name and wisdom in school; Christmas is not celebrated but the Dear Leader’s birthday is a national holiday; citizens must wear a badge of the Dear Leader’s face on their clothing; and all media is state-provided, such that all films, all television, and all books are about the Dear Leader and his achievements in North Korea. Outside influences are strictly frowned upon. There is much truth to all of this, and what Martin also reveals in his illuminating book is what lies behind the bizarre facade: prison camps, gulags, forced labour, torture, disappearances and widespread state brutality. It is distinctly possible that the modern state of North Korea represents the most perfect and hermetic totalitarianism that the imagination of man has yet conceived.

Martin relies on many interviews with state defectors during his book, building up a picture of what life is like inside the deeply stratified society. Only the elite are permitted to live in Pyongyang, which is perhaps best thought of as a showcase for foreign eyes. Most of what little money North Korea has is poured into elaborate building projects in Pyongyang: the world’s tallest hotel, for example. Or another statue dedicated to Kim Jong-il and the “socialist paradise” he and his father have created. Or the five-lane highways (cars are notoriously expensive and scarce in DPRK) in which the middle lane is reserved especially for use of the Dear Leader. The old, the crippled and those from “bad” family backgrounds (read: those with anything less than perfect loyalty to the regime) live in the rural, remote parts of the country, where state-distributed food rations are often scarce and families often resort to living of berries and sometimes tree bark for survival. Any criticism of the regime is punished strictly – the prisoner herself and, until recently, her entire family would be carted off to some gulag in the mountains for anything up to ten years (Kim certainly seems to have picked up a thing or two from those early days with Stalin), and Martin recounts interviews with former prisoners who talk of near-stavation, of being forced to sit, straight-backed and fists held out, for over ten hours a day. While in recent years it seems that public executions have halted, and the families of political prisoners and defectors are no longer punished (ascertaining accurate information about the most secretive state in the world is never easy), the country remains both cruel and unusual. Meanwhile, of course, the Dear Leader lives in the most resplendent luxury: owns more than a dozen palaces, has concubines to spare (picked up from the street to audition – their parents merely informed that their daughter has gone to “serve the state”), and there is even an anecdote that each grain of rice eaten by Kim Il-sung was individually chosen and washed.

Of course, North Korea is now over fifty years old, and things have changed. Martin talks the reader through the economic, political and social evolution of the state; from its initial status as little more than Stalinist lap-dog, through its 1950-53 war with South Korea (Kim Il-sung invaded, although that was not the message given to DPRK citizens, who have always been taught that South Korea and its ally, the USA, represent an aggressive imperialist threat), the thorny nuclear issue (which in the 1990s seemed to halt promising talks with South Korea), and the stuttering “reforms” begun in recent years by Kim Jong-il, who was historically reluctant to follow the path of China and embrace market forces, having witnessed the collapse of Communism both in Russia and in Eastern Europe. It seems, in recent times, that private black markets have begun to organically emerge in some parts of the country; the last resort of a people with no alternative. It may be these black markets which save  the people of North Korea. Rice rations have been historically extremely unreliable; DPRK is a country rife with malnutrition and pellagra. Reunification with the South remains the great obsession of the Kim regime and its states ultimate goal, although, as Martin points out on more than one occasion, the South itself is currently less than keen on the idea; facing the prospect of absorbing a failed state with an emerging economy would not be in the best interests of South Korea at this point.

While Martin briefly touches upon some of the ideological and philosophical traditions that have helped form the modern DPRK, I would have liked to see more of this. North Korea cannot be understood without grasping the concept of juche, a specifically Korean form of nationalist self-reliance propounded by Kim Il-sung which has been largely responsible for the country’s isolationism and inward-looking nature. This idea of juche, combined with a feverish dedication to Communist ideals, and – as Martin suggests all too tantalisingly – combined with the Confucianism which permits dynastic succession, is the mindset which helps form North Korea. There are many hard-won details in this book which will inform and educate anyone who wishes to learn about DPRK; the role it has played, and continues to play in the world, as part of George W. Bush’s famous “axis of evil” (along with Iran and Iraq). It is a superb achievement, and will no doubt lead to further reading on my part on the subject of North Korea.

Robert Fisk – The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

Based for the last 30-odd years in Beirut, Robert Fisk is one of Britain’s most formidable and courageous journalists. In his articles for first The Times and then The Independent, he has witnessed and reported on the manifold tragedies of the Middle East throughout all its recent tumultuous past, and finally he has written what the Sunday Times calls his “testament”. This is not a book to be taken lightly: at approximately 1300 pages, it details unflinchingly the horrors perpetrated by occupying forces, religious fundamentalists, despots, mujahedin forces and others, in Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Turkey, Syria, ‘Palestine’ and more besides. The Great War For Civilisation (2006) is a mammoth achievement, and one which anyone with an interest in this most fascinating, beautiful, war-torn and cruel part of the world must read. It begins with two interviews Fisk has done with Osama bin Laden – one during his days road-building in the Sudan, and one in the caves of Afghanistan during the 1990s, the only country which would take bin Laden after he was kicked out of Khartoum. For the Afghans, of course, bin Laden represented the resistance to the Soviet invasion. He was their great freedom fighter who high-tailed there from Saudi Arabia as soon as the Soviets invaded. He tells Fisk, in a moment of great sinister portent, “I pray that one day God will allow us to turn America into a shadow of itself.”

From this opening moment, the Middle East’s wounds are pulled open and shown to us, with all the concomitant horror and shame that we – as Westerners – must bear. Fisk’s reporting on the cancer wards of Baghdad following the 1991 Gulf War will turn the stomach: children and teenagers groaning sick with cancer caught from depleted uranium munitions from Western forces. Or the shocking details of the monstrous, epic Iran-Iraq War, in which American-supplied chemicals were used to devastating effect against the Iranians – this in the days, of course, when Donald Rumsfeld was happy to shake hands with Saddam Hussein, the West seeing him as a “secular strongman” in the Middle East against Khomeini’s spreading Islamic Revolution. This, of course, before Iran-contra, selling arms to Iraq’s opponents and using the money to fund right-wing militiamen in Nicaragua. This is a book with a body count in the millions: Fisk’s chapter detailing the Armenian genocide and the Turkish government’s pusillanimous refusal to acknowledge it is devastating in its accounts of torture and horror (and topical: only last week Barack Obama refused to acknowledge the genocide by its proper name: after all, Turkey is an American ally – such cowardly attitudes, Fisk is at pains to point out, are what have caused Arab resentment towards the West for the last hundred years or so). He also recounts the deposition by Western forces of Mossadeq, Iran’s only ever democratically elected leader, and our subsequent installing of the Shah, with his torture chambers and secret police. Suddenly Iranian nationalism and Khomeini’s anti-Western propaganda has a more understandable wellspring.

While the pornography of torture is hardly the point, the chapter describing the events of the Algerian Civil War is particularly harrowing, and even I had to skip certain passages. An internecine conflict over Islam and Algerian nationalism, the Civil War in Algeria threw up some of mankind’s most cruelly imaginative methods of inflicting pain and suffering on his fellow human beings. De Gaulle emerges rather positively in Fisk’s account; but those who followed him, let us say, do not.

Also central, of course, is the Israel/Palestine conflict, and it is here that Fisk occasionally reaches white-hot anger and eloquence. An ongoing theme in this book is the softening of language, and ongoing compliance of journalists with the Western authorities, that marks contemporary reporting. It is this softening which allows Israel to hold “disputed territories” rather than what they are – occupied. It is what allows a wall to be a “fence”, it is what allows Israeli bombers to be “extremists” but Palestinian bombers to be “terrorists”. Fisk has a journalist’s ear for language and what language can do, and some of the most insightful moments of this book are not descriptions of the Shah’s torture chambers or the Taliban’s oppressions, but his ruminations on the language of war.

Fisk is dismissive of the Oslo accords: so highly trumpeted as a great “opportunity for peace”, how could this treaty be regarded by the Palestinians as anything other than a humiliation, when Israel continues to flout Resolution 242 and the agreed 1967 territories shrink further and further from view? Might has indeed made right, in the eyes of the international community, which turns a blind eye to Israel’s crimes, and especially to America, which virtually bankrolls the nation. Make no mistake: Fisk details massacres and cruelty with a true gaze, and captures too the brutality and loss of children blown apart by Palestinian suicide bombers in Gaza and elsewhere. And if there is one event, one moment which seems to have affected Fisk most deeply, it is the 1982 events at Sabra and Chatila. Fisk returns to this episode repeatedly, an episode in which Lebanese Phalangist militia, aided and abetted by Ariel Sharon’s Israeli troops (the same Ariel Sharon, let us not forget, who was memorably described by George W. Bush as a “man of peace”) slaughtered and massacred their way through Palestinian refugee camps, murdering perhaps a thousand people.

Are there problems with this book? Well, yes. Fisk’s attempts to draw a thematic and narrative thread of his father, the WW1 soldier, feels tacked-on and contrived, and adds little to the book. Given that this work is culled from thirty or more years of reporting, there are also moments which Fisk repeats himself somewhat, and this can test the reader’s patience. And yet, this huge, devastating book deserves to be read: we are, as Camus said, “up to our necks in history”.

George Orwell – Homage To Catalonia

In late 1936, George Orwell went to Spain to fight against the Fascist forces of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He was stationed primarily in Catalonia, mostly around Huesca and Barcelona, fighting under the auspices of the POUM, a Marxist organization notable for being headed and formed by Andrés Nin. Orwell fought both as a private and a corporal, and lasted just over six months in Spain before returning to England following a gunshot wound to the throat. Homage To Catalonia (1938) is his account of this time and his reflections on the war. It is safe to say one thing, I believe: the book Orwell wrote is not the book he would have wished to have written. Although the longstanding effect of this period on Orwell was to strengthen and solidify his adherence to the belief in democratic socialism (specifically as pitted against both capitalism and Stalinism), Homage To Catalonia is a book which reads as the slow disintegration of a man’s optimism about the war in which he was engaged. The opening of the text is almost wide-eyed in its hope: on entering Barcelona, Orwell is both disappointed by the scarcity of resources like food and weaponry, but most of all, deeply moved and impressed by a town where “the workers seemed to be in the saddle”: Barcelona in late 1936 gives Orwell a glimpse of the kind of Socialism and equality he considered an ideal. An end to class distinctions and hierarchies, all men working together as one for a common goal, all drawing the same pay, all using the same resources, all language of servility and deference abolished. Buoyed by these experiences, he is sent to the front line, and one of the great strengths of Homage to Catalonia is its articulation of these days – the boredom, the lack of action, the lice in the trousers, the mud and stubble, the antiquated rust-buckets serving as rifles and bombs – all punctuated by the occasional move forwards or the whizz of bullets flying overhead. The depiction of what was ostensibly trench warfare here is one of the book’s great delights.

The other great strength of the text is what occurs when Orwell returns to Barcelona in May 1937 – his account of the internecine squabbling and fighting in the city between the various Republican forces (both governmental and non-governmental), which while only serving to strengthen his idealism in a larger sense, damaged forever his idealism as regards the Spanish Civil War. Las Ramblas is transformed into a collection of barricades and occupied buildings as the various factions – supposedly on the same “side” in the war – compete for dominance, leading Orwell to ruefully assert in one of the Appendices that the war must be understood to be triangular in nature. Slowly the anti-Fascist side was being torn apart by its own internal machinations and power struggles. The POUM and other revolutionary groups supported the continuation of the workers’ revolution which begun at the outbreak of the war, whereas the Republican government, supported by the Communist factions which had the support of the USSR (along with the superior weaponry this brought) favoured restricting activities to merely defeating Franco. The story of Orwell’s political sympathies in this fight is the story of his movement from the latter to the former, ultimately concluding that the kind of hierarchical democratic capitalism being espoused at this point by the Communists and the Republicans was not only detrimental to the anti-Franco campaign but also would serve only to bring in Fascism by the back door. The extent to which Orwell’s political and social views had been solidified and focussed by his experiences in Spain are most powerfully brought to bear in the book’s conclusion, where Orwell returns home to England:

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of Outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen – all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Homage To Catalonia is a work both personal and political, crucial to both an understanding of Orwell’s developing political consciousness, and as a record of that most romanticized conflict, the Spanish Civil War.

Christopher Hitchens – Letters To A Young Contrarian

I became aware of Christopher Hitchens, unusually, by way of his right-wing younger brother Peter, the demagogic and ultra-conservative Mail On Sunday columnist. It is to be endlessly celebrated that the elder Hitchens sibling is a substantially more interesting and intellectual figure. A once-Trotskyist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of twentieth century history and conflict, whose firm commitment to individual freedom from state terror led him into an alliance with Bush and Blair over Iraq; the man invited by the Vatican to play Devil’s Advocate over the beatification of Mother Teresa; and the author of the coruscating attack on religion God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens has made a formidable career as a radical, a freethinker, one who rubs against the grain, a contrarian, if you will. Letters To A Young Contrarian (2001) takes its form from Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet, with Hitchens penning a series of letters to a fictional correspondent, forming a series of lessons and instructions of how to live the life of the non-conformist, he-who-does-not-agree. For Hitchens, this position is a serious one – he litters this short and marvellous book with examples from history and the arts of those who speak for the dispossessed, those who fought alone for Reason and truth, and urges the reader to do the same. With the wisdom and bite of his own experiences, he instructs his anonymous student that disagreement and conflict are not merely irritating detours on the road to some blissful Utopia. Such a Utopia – a “Disneyland of the mind”, as he calls it, is not what we as humans desire, nor should we. Dissonance and conflict are what spark change, are the catalysts for action and keep us from moral, social and cultural atrophy.”It is not what one thinks”, he writes, “but how one thinks.” Hitchens’ breadth and depth of knowledge is impressive: sweeping from Kissinger to Peter Porter; from East Timor to Washington via Bosnia and Palestine, he is a thinker not to be taken lightly, and writes with clarity and vision of the value of the dissident voice in an increasingly meretricious, apathetic and ‘post-ideological’ world. He is deeply suspicious of the fashionable “identity politics” which dominate much contemporary social discourse, wherein emotions take the place of opinions, and where a “feeling” is elevated to the level of a principled stand – and calls for the reader to reject such solipsism and to embrace the life lived at an angle from society, raising questions, bristling with angst and, yes, a troubled mind; for Hitchens, the life of the independent thinker is one which necessarily will be plagued by dark nights of the soul. Embrace and welcome solitude.

Over the course of the text, Hitchens’ true loves and most enduring concerns make themselves known through sheer force of repetition – the fate of those oppressed by totalitariansim whether of the Left or the Right, victims of fascism both secular and religious; language with all its attendant joys and dangers; and most of all, irony (“the gin in the Campari, the x-factor, the knight’s move on the chessboard, the cat’s purr, the knot in the carpet”); and a profound distrust of those who claim certainty for themselves, in particular religious dogmatists and tyrants. For these latter Hitchens has nothing but contempt. His praise is reserved for those who stand against prevailing winds – Thomas Paine and George Orwell are heroes, writers such as Czeslaw Milosz are admired, as is, with reservations, Solzhenitsyn (a “titan of morality”). This book is a delight and a call-to-arms for those who do not wish to lose themselves in the crowd, who are suspicious of group-think wherever they find it, and who still see that a path of thinking radicalism is one well worth taking. The final words to the inimitable Mr Hitchens:

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”

Clive James – Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of my Time

“History is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself.” – Hegel.

Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of my Time is an extraordinary book by the Australian writer, broadcaster, poet and critic Clive James. Over nearly 900 pages and over 100 short essays, James takes us on a look back over the century just gone, with all its attendant despotism, ideological warfare and tragedy. The essays – arranged alphabetically – cover a dazzling variety of people; writers, thinkers, philologists, historians, politicans, directors, some of whom are well-known but many are people who seem to have been forgotten (chapters include Anna Akhmatova, Mario Vargas Llosa, Heinrich Heine, Miles Davis, Coco Chanel, Terry Gilliam, Walter Benjamin, Alexandra Kollontai, Paul Celan, Witold Gombrowicz, Marcel Proust, Karl Kraus, Egon Friedell, Margaret Thatcher, Dubravka Ugresic, Jose Saramago, and many, many more)… and through it all James pulls a thread: the case for humanism and against ideology. The book, in total, is a humanist call to arms against totalitarianism in all its incarnations, and James repeatedly returns to certain themes: the vibrant Viennese cultural scene in the early part of the century, embodied by people like Peter Altenberg and Stefan Zweig; the fate of emigre writers; and most of all, the towering menace of Stalin and Hitler.

It’s not all German/Russian politics, though: James the witty cultural commentator also rears his head. The chapter on poet Heinrich Heine becomes a treatise on celebrity culture and stalking, while another chapter discusses Richard Burton’s hairstyle in more depth than you ever thought you’d read. A chapter on Terry Gilliam becomes an analysis of torture, while his discussion of Sophie Scholl mutates into a meditation on the many virtues of Natalie Portman.

The book is – or should be – compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the 20th century, and the lessons for art and politics that we can learn from it. I will say that I didn’t agree with everything in this book; his attitude towards the Tampa immigrants in the chapter on documentary maker Chris Marker rubbed me the wrong way, but then disagreement and dialogue are part of the book’s own internal dialectic. James – in refreshingly readable and clear prose – attacks hypocrisy, short-sightedness and cowardice wherever he sees it, referring time and again to the conduct of artists and thinkers during WWII and under Stalin. Worth the entry fee alone is the superbly coruscating attack on the pseudo-philosophy and ideological sophistry of Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as James’ moving chapter on Sophie Scholl, guillotined at 21 by the Nazis for her dedication to liberal democracy. Challenging thought both on left and right, James’ only dedication is to humanism and art, and this highly politically haunted book offers his vision of how we respond to the horrors of the century we have witnessed; through the connections in the humanities. Astounding. A feast.