- Demick, Barbara.
Nothing to Envy.
New York: Spiegel & Grau, [2009] 2010.
ISBN 978-0-385-52391-2.
-
The last decade or so I lived in California, I spent a good deal of
my time being angry—so much so that I didn't really
perceive the extent that anger had become part of who I was and
how I lived my life. It was only after I'd gotten out of California
and the U.S. in 1991 and lived a couple of years in Switzerland
that I discovered that the absence of driving on crumbling roads
overcrowded with aggressive and incompetent drivers, a government bent
on destroying productive enterprise, and a culture collapsing into
vulgarity and decadence had changed who I was: in short,
only after leaving Marin County California,
had I become that thing which its denizens
delude themselves into believing they are—mellow.
What, you might be asking yourself, does this have to do with a book
about the lives of ordinary people in North Korea? Well, after a
couple of decades in Switzerland, it takes quite a bit of provocation
to bring back the old hair-on-fire white flash, like passing through a U.S.
airport or…reading this book. I do not mean that this
book angered me; it is a superb work of reportage on a society so
hermetically closed that obtaining even the slightest details on
what is really going on there is near-impossible, as tourists and
journalists are rarely permitted to travel outside North Korea's
capital of Pyongyang, a Stalinist
Potemkin village
built to deceive them as to the situation in other cities and
the countryside. What angered me is the horrible, pointless, and
needless waste of the lives of tens of millions of people, generation
after generation, at the hands of a tyranny so abject it seems
to have read Orwell's
1984
not as a dystopian warning, but an instruction manual. The
victims of this tragedy are not just the millions who
have died in the famines, ended their lives in the sprawling
complex of prisons and forced labour camps, or were executed
for “crimes” such as trying to communicate with
relatives outside the country; but the tens of millions forced
to live in a society which seems to have been engineered to
extinguish every single pleasure which makes human life
worth living. Stunted due to lack of food, indoctrinated with
the fantasy that the horror which is their lives is the
best for which they can hope, and deprived of any contact with the
human intellectual heritage which does not serve the interests
of their rulers, they live in an environment which a medieval
serf would view as a huge step down from their lot in life,
all while the rulers at the top of the pyramid live in grand
style and are treated as legitimate actors on the international
stage by diplomatic crapweasels from countries that should be
shamed by their behaviour.
In this book the author tackles the formidable task of
penetrating the barrier of secrecy and lies which hides the
reality of life in North Korea from the rest of the world
by recounting the lives of six defectors all of whom
originated in
Chongjin,
the third largest city in North Korea, off limits
to almost all foreign visitors. The names of the witnesses
to this horror have been changed to protect relatives still
within the slave state, but their testimony is quoted at
length and provides a chilling view of what faces the 24 million
who have so far been unable to escape. Now, clearly, if
you're relying exclusively on the testimony of those who
have managed to escape an oppressive regime, you're going to
get a different picture than if you'd interviewed those who
remain—just as you'd get a different view of California
and the U.S. from somebody who got out of there twenty years
ago compared to a current resident—but the author takes
pains to corroborate the accounts of defectors against one
another and the sparse information available from international
aid workers who have been infrequently allowed to visit Chongjin.
The accounts of the culture shock escapees from North Korea
experience not just in 21st century South Korea but even in
rural China are heartrending: Kim Ji-eun, a medical doctor who
escaped to China after seeing the children in her care succumb to
starvation without anything she could do, describes her first memory
of China as discovering a dog's bowl filled with white rice
and bits of meat and realising that dogs in China ate better than
doctors in North Korea.
As Lenin asked,
“What
is to be done?” Taking on board the information in this
narrative may cause you to question many of what appear to be sound
approaches to bringing an end to this horror. For, according to the
accounts of the defectors, tyranny of the North Korean style actually
works quite well: escapees are minuscule compared to the population
which remains behind, many of whom actually appear to believe the
lies of the regime that they are a superior race and have it better
than the balance of humanity, even as they see members of their
family starve to death or disappear into the gulag. For some years
I have been thinking about “freedom flights”. This is
where a bunch of liberty-loving philanthropists hire a fleet of
cargo aircraft to scatter several million single-shot pistols, each with
its own individual parachute and accompanied by a translation
of
Major von Dach's book, across the territory of tyrannical
Hell-holes and “let the people rule”. After reading this
book, I'm not sure that would suffice. So effectively has the population
been brainwashed that it seems a substantial fraction believe the lies
of the regime and accept their sorry lot as the normal state of
human existence. Perhaps we'll also need to drop solar-powered or hand-cranked
satellite radio receivers to provide a window into the outside world—along
with the guns, of course, to take care of snitches who try to turn in
those who choose to widen their perspective and the minions of the
state who come to arrest them.
By almost any measure, North Korea is an extreme outlier. By comparison,
Iran is almost a paradise. Even Zimbabwe, while Hell on earth for those
unfortunate enough to live there, is relatively transparent to outsiders
who document what is going on and much easier to escape. But studying
the end point of trends which seem to be relatively benign when they
get going can be enlightening, and this book provides a chilling view
of what awaits at the final off-ramp of the road to serfdom.
September 2011 