All summer, I immersed myself in purposeful reading for an Eastern Civilization and Literature semester study I wrote for our homeschool. Finally, I have time to read for pleasure and what do I choose? A harrowing article about near-starvation in North Korea.
There’s an art to selecting the right kind of bedtime reading; choose something bland and boredom will cause your mind to leapfrog to more stimulating topics. The other extreme is just as problematic. An absorbing page-turner might be a great way to escape from the aftereffects of a stressful day — but reaching the end at 2 a.m. will cost a person when the alarm clock rings a few hours later. Nowhere in all these deliberations does a long magazine article about Communism qualify as relaxing reading. And that’s where my troubles started.
The article that pulled me in had been written by Barbara Demick, an international reporter stationed just across the Chinese border from North Korea. Through interviews with refugees who’d defected by walking across a poorly-patrolled bend in the frozen river, she presented a bleak picture of daily life in a country ruled by a Communist dictator of debatable sanity. What I learned was enough to disrupt any freedom-loving person’s sleep.
Ordinary people in North Korea are hungry beyond what Americans can understand. There’s just not enough to eat, for a variety of reasons, some natural and some bizarrely irrational. In the first place, North Korea is not an easy place to farm, with its cold, dry terrain, droughts, floods and poor soil. Obvious solutions — irrigate, fertilize, import food — are not options because of socialist/Communist economic policies that have left the country too poor to build, develop or trade.
Rationing is something I associate with patriotic heroism among U.S. citizens during World War II. In modern-day North Korea, it’s something altogether different, a system imposed on people who have few options with which to augment the meager rice, corn and oil distributed by the government. Food is handed out in accordance with a complex ranking system that takes into account a citizen’s age, gender, work output and documented history. Dissenters, for example, get less than those who are silently obedient. Starvation is common, yet school children routinely sing propaganda songs that insist, “the outside world has nothing that we need!” Really? How about the humblest school lunch ever, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich?
As I worked my way through the article, I felt a sudden craving for popcorn. Maybe it was the long discussion about food that triggered my appetite. Or maybe it was simply the notion that if I felt like it, if I chose to do so, I could get out of bed, heat oil in a pan and pop corn at will. That’s what I did, munching in satisfaction as I read about the next crisis North Koreans encountered in 2009.
The currency had lost so much value that it meant nothing in Korea or the world, so the government decided to replace it with a new form of money. The plan was announced to the elite — government ministers and their friends — one day before the general news release. Ordinary people had just one day to try to save their money, but this was almost pointless. Overnight, their small savings accounts had been declared worthless.
In an interview with NPR radio, Demick explained why the North Korean government chose to wipe out the country’s monetary system:
“From the perspective of the North Korean government, they saw the very notion of money, currency, as sort of antithetical to the socialist way of doing things. This is a very undiluted brand of communism, and you’re supposed to be handed your house, your clothing, your food. You’re not supposed to buy things for yourself. And the government hated the fact that people were working privately on the markets, buying their own food and having that level of economic freedom. And that’s what they wanted to wipe out.”
Americans would be wise to pay attention to the plight of these people who live on the other side of the world. They speak another language and their appearance is not “white American” but they are not so different from us.
North Koreans did not sign up for starvation. Starting in the 1920s, they looked to Marxist (socialist) ideals as a way to gain independence — their country was a colony of Japan, their people were viewed as less valuable than other races, and they were poor in comparison to the industrialized world. They embraced Communism in hopes that it would level the playing field and correct racism and injustice.
That’s not so different than what we modern Americans hear from various quarters. Entry-level Communist or socialist rhetoric usually wins support from the mainstream by pointing an envious and accusing finger at the rich. In the U.S., we often hear about “greedy corporations” that glut themselves with executive bonuses while doling out stingy wages to the common worker. There is some truth to these characterizations, but that doesn’t mean there will be much improvement if those businesses were to be wiped out. We must also be aware of the built-in weaknesses of human nature, which tends to envy those who seem to have it all, or at least have more than we do.
North Korea, with its “undiluted communism,” and the backing of the U.S.S.R, won a war, squeezed out private enterprise and opened the way for rulers who were just as greedy as the bad capitalists. Today, its people starve, and the government takes aim at “greedy” private gardeners in North Korea, people who just want to stay alive. A middle class family that manages to offer a teenage daughter one egg a week is doing handsomely. As a parent, I can’t imagine trying to help my children flourish, let alone keep them alive, in such conditions.
For two years, I’ve heard a constant stream of talk about Communism, socialism and its presence or absence in the current administration. Some of it sounds overwrought and panicky; it turns me off. Some of it, usually that which calls on a knowledge of real history, rings true. None of it helps me sleep better.
Whether we do so in the dark or during daylight hours, Americans would be wise to read and think about the freedoms we enjoy, how we obtained them, and how easily they might be lost. A look back in history would not hurt, nor would a quick survey of what life is like in places like Brazil, China and the former Iron Curtain countries in eastern Europe.
And though my late-night perusal of the New Yorker magazine cost me some sleep, I came out of it with a new title for my regular reading list: Demick’s recently published title, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.”
I can’t wait to start reading — at tea time.
