North Korea: Another Country
By Bruce Cumings
Scribe Publications, 2004
256 pages, $26.95
REVIEW BY IGGY KIM
When it comes to North Korea, fact and fiction have become so blurred that even many Marxists and socialists hold the country at arm's length.
But in his latest book, Bruce Cumings — by no means a Marxist — shows that even North Korea can be scientifically understood.
His approach is summed up in the preface: "North Korea does not exist alone, in a vacuum ... It cannot be understood apart from a terrible fratricidal war that has never ended, the guerrilla struggle against Japanese imperialism in the 1930s, its initial emergence as a state in 1945, its fraught relationship with the South, its brittle and defensive reaction to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and its interminable daily struggle with the United States of America."
And further into the book he writes that North Korea "is not a nice place, but it is an understandable place, an anti-colonial 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, with all the predictable deformations."
Cumings avoids the common pitfall of many liberals and socialists alike when passing commentary on demonised regimes. He is able to empathetically separate out the daily lives of ordinary North Koreans from the (often excessive) policies and actions of the state.
Further, without being sympathetic towards Pyongyang, Cumings firmly puts the behaviour of the North Korean state, especially its foreign and military policy, into historical and political context.
At the centre of this is the Korean War: "Why is [Pyongyang] a garrison state? Primarily because of the holocaust that the North experienced during the Korean War [1959-53]."
Holocaust is not an excessive term. Korea triggered an escalation in US Cold War policy, from the "containment" of communism to "rollback", and became a testing ground for it. Hence, instead of stopping in September 1950, when it regained the South at the 38th parallel (arbitrarily drawn by Washington, with the consent of the Kremlin), the US decided to roll on and "liberate" North Korea.
This massively escalated the destruction, indeed, into a holocaust. Four million Koreans (three-quarters in the North), 1 million Chinese and 52,000 US soldiers died. Millions more were displaced and driven to flee abroad.
The strategy of total war (war not just against the state, but also against the people and economy), later used in Vietnam, was pioneered in Korea. "Vietnam was a mere follow-on to the logic established in 1950." This extended to the choice of weapons and warfare methods. Gigantic walls of napalm fire were first seen in Korea.
The imperialists went further in the Korean War than they were able to get away with in Vietnam. They established massive concentration camps and strafed peaceful demonstrations. Thousands of leftists and sympathisers perished in mass executions. Mass graves were still being discovered in the 1970s in the North.
Korea was much more industrialised than Vietnam. The US flattened whole cities, many containing vital industrial infrastructure. In the closing weeks of the war, US bombers destroyed massive irrigation dams that provided water for 75% of the North's food production.
One bombing run was conducted straight after the back-breaking work of mass rice transplantation. Cumings cites a US Air Force document from the time boasting of the results: "The subsequent flash flood scooped clean 27 miles of valley below ... The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of [rice] has for the Asian — starvation and slow death."
Cumings also reminds us that the US war in Korea was a war against a popular revolution. He recounts that 14% of North Koreans were members of the Korean Workers Party.
Against this historical backdrop, the garrisoning of the Korean people by Pyongyang and the ruling KWP contains a popular dimension, that is, it is partly rooted in the interests and genuine needs of military defence of North Korean working people.
Cumings easily debunks any notion that North Korea is living in the past. Most of his book is devoted to recounting and analysing the US's continuing threats and sabotage against any attempts at peace, especially those initiated by the South since the "Sunshine Policy" initiated by Kim Dae-Jung when he was South Korea's president.
As such, the daily realities of North Korean life are still afflicted by the threats of this unfinished war. The size of the armed forces, the KWP's "military first" policy, Pyongyang's resort to the nuclear arms card — all this is rooted in the ongoing stand off with Washington.
And who can belittle this sense of threat given the frenzy of destruction unfolding in Iraq today?
Indeed, a running theme in North Korea: Another Country is comparisons with Iraq and a general condemnation of the Bush doctrine: "No other president would again send American armies to liberate an established state until George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003."
Bruce Cumings, the world's foremost English-language authority on Korea, has done more than any other — left or right — to demystify the deformed workers' state of North Korea.
His two-volume magnum opus, Origins of the Korean War, remains the single most powerful indictment of the US war against the Korean people. It has done much to challenge Washington's lie that it waged a just war to defend South Korea against totalitarian aggression from the North.
North Korea: Another Country carries on this important mission. It is an uncorrupted humanist portrayal about a country that so many liberal commentators love to hate and toward which they are so willing to ditch any element of humanism. It is essential reading in any attempt to truly understand North Korea.
From Green Left Weekly, December 15, 2004.
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