The fat controller
Jonathan Mirsky
KIM JONG-IL, NORTH KOREA'S DEAR LEADER: WHO HE IS, WHAT HE WANTS, WHAT To Do ABOUT HIM
by Michael Breen John Wiley, £16.99, pp. 200, ISBN 0470821310
This is a badly written book — another stake through the heart of what used to be editing — and to learn anything from it read the last three chapters and skim the rest. The first two of these are about the North Korean economy, about which little is known, but Michael Breen has drawn that little together, and the last is an alternative suggestion of how to negotiate with one member of George Bush's 'axis of evil', whose leader, Kim Jong-il, Mr Bush calls 'the pygmy'.
North Korea is one of those places — Tibet used to be another — about which very little is known, but much is written, extrapolated or invented. There are some useful books about it, however, by Bruce Cumings, Nicholas Eberstadt and Selig Harrison, for example, all of them listed by Breen in his bibliography, but not cited in his sparse footnotes.
Breen, who used to write for newspapers, describes himself as a management consultant advising companies on dealing with North Korea, which he has visited several times. He lives in the South and has a lot to say about the Korean character — obedience to powerful leaders, patience with what elsewhere might be called cor
ruption, and a longing to unify the Korean regimes. He claims that 'loyalty touches the Korean soul deeper than a balance sheet'. Serious country specialists should be more cautious about such generalisations.
Breen starts with a quick introduction to North Korea, which he says is run by 'one fat man in the whole country'. He explains that because everyone else is starving — although he also makes plain elsewhere that the ruling class is very nice to itself — Kim alone is fat. He describes an almost wholly secret special economy, earning many millions from gold, minerals, heroin, counterfeiting and arms sales, benefiting, he says, only Kim and his circle, He wants to understand `Kim's shrivelling odiocracy', and above all estimate whether he is willing to wage a nuclear war. Should Kim be demonised? Much of this is worth thinking about, but Breen's vulgar exposition is likely to put off all but the most doggedly curious reader.
He skates through Korean history including a mention of the national creation myth, the mating of a god and a bear — and in his saloon-bar way needs to crack 'which we can be thankful wasn't caught on video'. This survey is a gloomy picture of a tiny elite and a repressed, suffering mass without any mention that classical Korean ceramics, painting and literature are among the most beautiful in Asia or that the Koreans may have invented moveable type. He passes on to the origins of Kim's father, Kim Il-song, his importation into Korea by the Soviets, the creation of his cult and his succession by Kim Jong-il, who Breen, ever the joker, insists on calling 'the Dear Substitute'. He rightly points out that for many years the Americans maintained repressive and corrupt governments in Seoul, although they were much less awful than the regime in the north.
On Kim Jong-il he interestingly draws on some psychological profiles and a few accounts of those who have met him to demonstrate that he may be selfish, dictatorial, cruel and vain, but he is not mad or evil, is 'at ease with himself and able to be flexible in policy'. Breen concludes that Kim could be open to negotiation with the West if there was less focus on the nuclear issue and more offering of advantages if Kim came to the table. These could include — after 50 years — a post-Korean war peace treaty — which Pyongyang wants — a US embassy, 'loans, and access to US markets' and an offer to Kim Jong-il 'of a vision of a secure future'.
Breen 'confesses' that 'I've always enjoyed my trips to North Korea', where he states that fear is pervasive, millions have died of hunger, the gulag is vast and journalists are under constant surveillance. He has seen almost nothing in any depth — this is not his fault — of agriculture, industry, education or health, but says that North Korea's 'fascination' lies in this astounding hybrid: 'It's Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia in the middle of Mao's Cultural Revolution.' Unless this means 'very bad indeed', it is vacuous. North Korea is indeed very bad. But, unlike Nazi Germany, no minority group has been extinguished in Korea, nor is there a fascist union of private industry and government; Kim does not, like Stalin, murder his closest colleagues, oppress minorities or massacre moderately well-off peasants; millions of Mao-style Red Guards are not tearing around the country destroying cultural monuments, closing down schools and universities, persecuting intellectuals, killing tens if not hundreds of thousands, and fighting the army. Actually, much of what Breen says about North Korea could have been said about China until about 1980: essentially closed, secretive, deeply repressive, and still recovering from a famine in which 20 years earlier 30 million people starved to death. But as Breen admits, 'the truth of North Korea is deduced rather than directly experienced'.
His writing makes me cringe. What can this mean? Commenting on Kim's military experience, he writes, 'He couldn't drop and give you ten if his life depended on it,' He describes excited North Korean crowds greeting 'Kim Jong-Elvis'. In a chapter titled 'Is Kim Jong-il Evil?' — itself a crude question — he asks, 'Does Kim have horns on his head?' He analyses dialectical materialism like this: 'At heart, dialectical materialism is a lie: materialism holds there is no spirit, no God, just stuff. When you shut your eyes, your world goes dark.' Progress requires co-operation. Breen generalises, 'even if that co-operation involves, as Victorian mothers told their daughters, just shutting your eyes and thinking of England.' This kind of language might pass around the bar of the Seoul Press Club after a few beers, but why does John Wiley, a respectable publisher, permit it?
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