Big Brother and double-think on the peninsula
The Hidden People of North Korea, by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. $39.95, 296 pp.
The haunting portrait of everyday life under modern dictatorship offered in The Hidden People of North Korea should be vaguely familiar to most Americans, but the level of detail in Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh’s new book makes for occasionally surprising and unsettling reading. The book is a continuation of Hassig and Oh’s longer project, begun with North Korea Through the Looking Glass (2000), of exposing the political and economic deprivations of Kim’s regime. In Hidden People, the authors consider their subject from the ground up, piecing together information from a multitude of primary sources and interviews with over two hundred defectors to create a narrative of life under a stifling regime. Unfortunately, the result is often disjointed, and the book does not ultimately add much except curiosities to our understanding of North Korea.
Cognitive Dissonance
The primary theme of Hidden People is that North Koreans are “double-thinkers” who balance a forced devotion to their leader, Kim Jong-il, with private criticism of the state. The forced devotion is evident: Hassig and Oh report that “three framed photos of Kim Il-sung, his wife Kim Jong-suk, and Kim Jong-il … are required to be hung on the most prominent wall in every North Korean dwelling and workplace.” The propaganda and ritual extend to all layers of society: schoolchildren are made to march to school in soldierly fashion, while “coworkers are required to attend political meetings and self-criticism sessions.” From the perspective of Americans weaned on 1984, it all seems eerily familiar.
But Hassig and Oh firmly believe that North Koreans can see through the propaganda and identify the real cause of their nation’s deficiencies: a dictatorship as incompetent as it is predatory. The regime’s credibility was severely strained by the 1994 death of Kim Il-sung, the primary architect of the modern North Korean state. Afterward his death, the central government practically closed down for three years, during which time Hassig and Oh report that five to ten percent of the population died of starvation. North Korea’s current leader, Kim Jong-il, has never been able to reconstruct the national unity or relative efficiency that his father constructed. His father was a skilled politician and comparatively populist; he made frequent neighborhood visits in all parts of the country. Kim Jong-il, by contrast, is secretive, suspicious, and driven primarily by his “animal’s instinct for judging one’s loyalty,” as Hassig and Oh put it. In this mismanaged kleptocracy, Hassig and Oh believe, North Koreans struggle to identify with a nation that they no longer wholeheartedly believe in and that no longer provides for them.
Predictions and Prescriptions
Unfortunately, Hassig and Oh’s predictions for the future of North Korea are vague, unlike their particularistic accounts of North Korean life. They believe that Kim Jong-il “is neither crazy nor strange; he is just doing his job.” His abuses of power, then, result from the system that he inherited, rather than his own megalomania. Therefore, the authors suspect, Kim’s death will not change everything all at once, but rather, political transformation will come ultimately from the North Korean people.
Hassig and Oh also use their account as the basis for several questionable foreign-policy suggestions. They want, for instance, to bypass the Kim regime and send North Koreans damning information about their government. The United States would then “let [the North Koreans] choose how to act on that information.” That is, the authors suggest that the United States should subvert an openly hostile regime that claims to have weapons of mass destruction, and wait for the North Korean people to carry out a revolution—which, without U.S. military intervention, could be immediately subdued by government authorities. Perhaps it is unsurprising that this is not the consensus view on the North Korean situation.
The Hidden People of North Korea succeeds at showing us a North Korea that is strange, stifling, and in many ways frightening. North Koreans’ double-thinking is an interesting curiosity and a revealing case study of human psychology. But Hassig and Oh’s failures at the levels of prediction and prescription ultimately make their book somewhat less than it could have been.
Paul Mathis ’12 is a Contributing Writer.