Customer Reviews

The perfect dictatorship - By: Thomas Koetzsch, 19 May 2007
Bradley K. Martin's (BM) book is an excellent & rather detailed report on how North Korea works.

In his preface, the author reminds us of H.G. Wells' Time Machine & there especially the part where mankind has split into the Eloi & the Morlocks & how they control the Eloi. In Wells' book this process takes about 800,000 years. In North Korea this process was reduced to just over 50 years. The rest of the book explains how this transformation came about.

BM starts off with the biography of Kim Il-sung & there draws quite a bit on the dictator's own publications. He follows this up with the Korean War & Kim Il-sung's elimination of all rivals & establishment of a totalitarian state. He then goes through all the aspects of Korean society & economy. He also goes through the different classesin society, namely, those connected to the top leadership, those who are not & those who have an unclean spotin their past. One does get the impression that every other person fits into that latter category at least once during their lifetime.

There is also a fair bit on Kim Jong-il & his unpopularity. The author shows that it was Kim Il-sung who messed up the economy. Kim Jong-il is blamed for it because he surfaced officially around the time things started to go wrong. However, there is no need to shed any tears, Kim Jong-il is quite a screwy characterin his own right. You can read that right through the whole book.

BM gathers all this information through his own trips to the country & through interviews with defectors. Using such information can be a touchy business, but I don't think the author is at risk here because of the large number of people he must have interviewed for this book (one notices that throughout the book). This should allow him to cross-reference information quite thoroughly.

BM also deals with the nuclear issue. He does support a negotiated settlement. In the book, he recounts the testimony of a defector as to what would be necessary to bring such a settlement about. This testimony struck me as if the US is expected to go the distance with North Korea reaping the benefits without any steps of its own apart from (maybe) dismantling its nuclear programme.

Finally, the author looks into the future. He recounts North Korea's economic liberalisation although I am dubious whether these small steps will lead anywhere useful. I agree with him that it isin the common interestin the region that North Korea continues to exist but I find a regime change inconceivable. There are testimonials from various defectors which seem to imply a lot of discontent, but the book as a whole gives the impression of North Korea being the perfect dictatorship, so that opposition could not organise itselfin such a way to bring about a large scale uprising.

In the final pages, the author suggests to Kim Jong-il to change his regime into a Thai-style constitutional monarchy, but having read the book I doubt that the `dear leader' is capable of making such a transition.

I urge you to also read the footnotes because there is a lot of additional informationin there.

This is excellent stuff. One note of caution though, it is at times a very chilling read.