The Hermit Kingdom
Over the last year I’ve grown increasingly interested in North Korea. Its status as the Hermit Kingdom and the sense of mystery that surrounds its activities and atrocities makes it one of the few vaguely defined places on Earth. The near-hysterical and always-slightly-awry English of its DPRK news agency’s communiques, the frankly bizarre haircut and jumpsuit of the Dear Leader, the cult of personality that surrounds him, the rumours about his vast personal pornography collection, the intrigue surrounding its counterfeiting and drug manufacturing activities… North Korea is the epitomy of a bogeyman, malignant in every way both outwards and inwards. Kim Il Jung may cut an outlandish and even comical figure, but the actions of his government do not. In his measured, in-depth review of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty for the New York Review Of Books, Nicholas D. Kristof outlines numerous example’s of the regime’s cruelty to its own people, not least the death of an estimated two million throughout the 1990s due to starvation. Current political wisdom indicates that North Korea’s time is at hand - Martin’s deeper analysis, Kristof suggests, indicates that it could stagger on for several more decades. Through its basis in detailed interviews with those who have escaped from North Korea, it sounds like it might a similar historical undertaking as Anna Funder’s Stasiland, tracing the impact of the political through the personal.
More on North Korea:
Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Travels In North Korea
- Pyongyang in Graphic Detail
- The Ginseng Hunter
- Last Month I Have Mostly Been Reading Graphic Novels
- New article on spike
