A peek into the world's most closed society

One of the curses of communism is hunger. A major problem with a totally planned economy is that its inefficiencies and lack of a free market inevitably lead to shortages. The result, in virtually every communist country, has been widespread starvation, even famine.

The two great examples that spring to mind are the Soviet Union in the 1930s, particularly the famine in the Ukraine, and China during the so-called Cultural Revolution of the 60s. 100s of millions of people died of starvation and disease during these manmade calamities.

When I say "manmade" I refer in both cases to just one man -- Uncle Joe Stalin who deliberately starved the Ukrainians so the Russians could eat their food, and the "Great Helmsman", Chairman Mao, who reduced his people to scavenging and even cannibalism.
Lesser examples are to be found even today, in Castro's Cuba and Comrade Bob Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

And then there's North Korea. The rest of the world will never know (and perhaps does not much care) how many millions starved to death in the 90s as Kim Jong-il presided over an economic collapse the likes of which has rarely been seen except in pockets of poverty and savage backwardness like Pol Pot's "Kampuchea" (Cambodia), the site of the Killing Fields.

Barbara Demick is the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. She has just written a remarkable book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, which I read over the weekend. I'm not exaggerating when I say I found it hard to put down, even during the hockey game.

Nothing to Envy is not a newspaper report. It is not a dry, dull recitation of facts and figures, perhaps because statistics and factual reports from North Korea are largely "unavailable". Instead, Ms. Demick tells the true stories of six ordinary people she met in South Korea, and explains how and why they left their homeland.

You'll read about a kindergarten teacher and her mother, a street kid, a graduate student, a doctor, and a factory worker. All of them escaped -- not too strong a word -- from North Korea, leaving behind everything. (One woman ran away from an abusive husband and made her way to the Chinese border clad only in a nightgown.) All of them left behind families, some of whom were able to get out, but some of whom were imprisoned or just died.

Ms. Demick recounts in detail the deprivation and horrors her subjects' lives. We westerners simply cannot imagine living with no electricity, no heat and almost no food. The description of what these poor people ate is enough to make you feel guilty about chowing down on a steak.

The doctor, after wading through an icy river to get into China was delighted to find, just inside the open door of a cottage, a bowl of white rice and meat scraps. She wept when she realized that it had been left out for the family dog. "Here," she thought, "even dogs eat better than doctors in Korea."

The stories end somewhat happily as the refugees eventually get to South Korea, but their psyches will be forever scarred by what they endured and thoughts of those left behind.

I found Nothing to Envy a gripping read. And Mrs. Walt, who has little interest in geopolitics and almost never eads non-fiction, is devouring it now.

I recommend it to you, dear reader, on the theory that we should know our enemies. The North Korean government still talks, in its newspapers and schoolbooks, about "Amerian bastards". The two words are always conjoined. And they are out to get us!

Some laughed at George W. Bush when he talked about "the axis of evil". Well, there is evidence that the communist regime of North Korea is being propped up by money from the Middle East. And they do have the means to make a nuclear bomb. In fact a device was tested just a year ago.

Some think that the dictatorship of Kim Jong-il will collapse. They point to the downfall of the USSR and the changes in China to argue that we don't need to worry about North Korea. But the Soviet dictatorship is not dead. It has merely changed its shape and face. Putin is a latter-day Stalin. As for China, its economic system may have changed, but its political system is stronger and more repressive than ever.

As Ms Demick points out in her epilogue "North Korea survived the breaching of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the market reforms in China, the death of Kim Il-sung, the famine of the 1990s, and two terms of George W. Bush's presidency." They are not going to suddenly admit that they've been wrong for over 60 years and join hands with their brethren across the DMZ.

We must pay attention to North Korea. We must understand how their system operates and how they think. Reading Nothing to Envy (2009, New York, Spiegel & Grau) will give you a small but terrifying idea.