HEY, THE FUTURE STILL WORKS!:

The other North Korea: A historian's alternate view of Kim Jong Il's shadowy kingdom (Drake Bennett, 12/21/2003, Boston Globe)

WHEN AMERICANS THINK of North Korea at all, it's as a psychotic little menace of a nation and a nightmarish, otherworldly place. Historian Bruce Cumings has devoted his career to painting a different picture. In his 1,400-page, two-volume "The Origins of the Korean War," published in 1981 and 1990, he argued that the Korean War was not a Soviet provocation but a civil war -- one that the United States, by splitting the peninsula in 1945, had made inevitable.  

In his latest book, "North Korea: Another Country" (New Press), Cumings sets out to show, among other things, that the United States visited a "holocaust" on North Korea during the Korean War, that the rebuilt country came much closer to being a socialist paradise than we give it credit for, and that it is the Bush administration, not the Kim regime, that is to blame for the current tensions.

Ideas reached Cumings by phone at his office at the University of Chicago.

IDEAS: In your new book you quote journalist Bernard Krisher, who described North Korea in 1991 as "one big kibbutz." Is that how you would describe the place?

CUMINGS: It's important to realize that in the early `80s, North Korea's per capita output, their infant mortality, life expectancy, all of that, were either at South Korea's level or higher. They had something like double the per capita energy usage of South Korea in the `70s.

But the country's energy regime collapsed and that rippled through everything, including the agricultural sector. Then the Russians cut off all aid with the end of the Soviet Union. And in `95 and `96 the worst floods of the century affected something like 40 percent of the arable land. After Kim Il Sung died in `94, the regime itself became internally stymied in handling its problems. North Korea's tragedy is that it was one of the better Third World developing states in terms of feeding, clothing, housing, and educating its own population -- only to reach a level of degradation in the late `90s that is as low as you can go.

I think it's inexcusable that North Korea, which is a highly centralized state, allowed at least half a million of its citizens to starve to death and an entire generation to be malnourished and stunted. This is not a state, like several in Africa, that is incapable of mobilizing its population. North Korea can mobilize everybody.

IDEAS: How seriously should we take recent reforms in North Korea?

CUMINGS: Particularly since 2000, they have done dramatic things they didn't do before. They normalized relations with the European Union, as well as Australia and Canada, and they sought to normalize relations with Japan. They have allowed market forces to operate in their economy since the mid-'90s -- when their system of delivering goods and services through the state essentially broke down. And then, in July of 2002, they drastically revalued their currency, which had always been grossly overvalued.

Stalin and the USSR have never lacked for apologists in America, but, with the exception of the folks at ANSWR, it's far rarer to find folks who think that North Korea was a socialist garden spot that we destroyed. Leave it though to the Globe to find one and present him to their readers as if he were a serious person.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 21, 2003 9:33 AM