Seasons in the Kingdom

Seasons in the Kingdom

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Lankov: The Real North Korea

‘The Real North Korea’ by Andrei Lankov

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Max Fisher covers foreign affairs at The Washington Post’s WorldViews blog.
One particular aerial photo appears in just about every American documentary, book or lecture about North Korea. It shows Northeast Asia at night, with neighboring South Korea, China and Japan aglow while the Hermit Kingdom wallows in such darkness, save a dim flicker from the capital, Pyongyang, that it almost disappears into the sea.

The photo is typically used to show the depths of North Korea’s poverty and backwardness. But maybe it also says something about our struggle to understand North Korea that our most famous photo of this mysterious little country was taken thousands of miles away, from space. It doesn’t even show North Korea, really, so much as the North Korea-shaped hole in our understanding of the world. As a senior Obama administration official told The Washington Post after leader Kim Jong Il died in late 2011: “It is scary how little we really know.”

Americans seem increasingly aware of the information gap on North Korea. In early April, as the country issued a barrage of threats, the number of U.S. Google searches for “North Korea” skyrocketed way beyond even those for “President Obama” or “Beyonce.” A Pew Research Center poll found that 36 percent of Americans were following the country “very closely,” an astoundingly high figure for a foreign news story, but they still held misapprehensions about the country’s capabilities.
It could hardly be a better time, then, for “The Real North Korea,” a new book that seeks to answer or at least address the many questions the country poses, such as how it got to be what it is, why its people starve, why Pyongyang threatens nuclear war, how it staves off collapse and what happens when it can’t anymore.

Written by Andrei Lankov, a Soviet-born academic who studied in Pyongyang during the Cold War and has since become one of the most respected scholars on North Korea, the book has the feel of a particularly fascinating college class taught by an elbow-patched luminary. The syllabus ranges from labor camps to nuclear diplomacy, from the police state to the state ideology, offering both the academic consensus and Lankov’s take. His prose is less than electrifying, weighed down by the unnecessary verbiage of the academy (he refers to himself at times as “the present author”) and by digressions clearly meant to satisfy fellow scholars rather than to serve regular readers. Still, readers will come away with a solid understanding of what’s happening in North Korea and why. Lankov illuminates large patches of that North Korea-shaped black hole.

What “The Real North Korea” lacks, unfortunately, is the feeling of immersion, of being there. Lankov has the academic’s unfortunate tendency to comment on history rather than to tell it, making his book not so much a narrative as a series of observations, anecdotes and insights. That can still make for enlightening and often surprising reading. Only Lankov could passingly remark, in a section on North Korea’s onetime efforts to install ideological agitators in the South, that he “personally knows people who once used to commute to Pyongyang via submarine (the usual way of ejecting or infiltrating full-time agents or full-time activists out of and into South Korea).”

ROKDrop post: Korean Military Academy & Sexual Assault

Korean Military Academy Fires Top General After Sexual Assault

Some serious house cleaning going on at the ROK Army’s military academy right now after a sexual assault case that involved a number of generals drinking with the victim prior to the assault:

The head of South Korea’s elite Army academy will be discharged from his service and 11 other Army officers will face disciplinary action in connection with a sexual assault case involving cadets, the Army said Monday.Lt. Gen. Park Nam-su, the head of the Korea Military Academy, had offered to retire shortly after a female cadet was sexually assaulted by a senior cadet after drinking with professors and colleagues during a campus festival last Wednesday.After the female sophomore had vomited due to consuming a lot of alcohol, a senior cadet brought her to his room and assaulted her. The male cadet is now under investigation by state prosecutors, Army officials said. Two one-star generals and nine lower-level officers, who drank with the victim, will be sent to a disciplinary committee over the incident.
During the festival, 38 professors and students drank after a sporting event, which violates the academy’s code of conduct, the Army said.”The academy chief will be discharged from his service and the disciplinary committee will investigate the other officers who drank together,” Maj. Gen. Ryu Sung-sik, who is in charge of Army personnel affairs, said during a briefing. “There was criticism that the Army was late to disclose the incident, but we were cautious because the victim’s parents didn’t want the case made public.”The Army said there is a lack of measures in regard to drinking by cadets, pledging to implement stricter rules for drinking on campus and prepare protective measures for female students, including installing a toughened access system with fingerprint readers at women’s dorms.  [Korea Times]
Currently the US Naval Academy is going through a similar incident where members of the football team are accused of raping a female midshipman that was blacked out due to over drinking.  However, there was no faculty or generals drinking with the midshipman before the assault.  However, in a separate incident a member of the faculty, a Marine Major was carrying on a relationship with a midshipman before being accused of sexual assault.  Then over at West Point there is the E7 accused of secretly videotaping cadets and the rugby team has been suspended due to inappropriate e-mails.

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