"The image that opens the first chapter of Barbara Demick's "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" is a satellite photograph of North and South Korea by night. The southern nation is spangled with electric lights, including the vast, solid blotch of brightness that is Seoul, while the north is entirely dark except for the tiny dot of the capital, Pyongyang."
So begins a fascinating article on Salon by Laura Miller reviewing Demick's book on what is now described as the Hermit Kingdom.
"As Demick points out, "North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world." Its inhabitants have no choice but to partake of the pre-industrial conditions that some Western elites now mourn as part of the vanished past. With the factories and electricity shut down, the air over Chungjin is pristine again, and you can see every star in the night sky. Doctors provide herbal remedies, but only because they have nothing else; furthermore, they are required to spend weeks camping out in the mountainous countryside, harvesting wild plants. Some resort to growing their own cotton in order to have bandages. Most North Koreans have never seen a mobile phone and don't know that the Internet exists.
They have also seen their neighbors, friends and relatives starve or get carted off to prison camps for offenses as trivial as joking about the Dear Leader's diminutive stature. A former kindergarten teacher Demick interviewed still suffers from crippling survivor's guilt when she remembers how she watched as her students wasted away. "What she didn't realize," Demick writes, "is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring." In the famine years, parts of North Korea were not so different from Nazi concentration camps, where, as Primo Levi observed, anyone who made it out inevitably had something to be ashamed of."
So begins a fascinating article on Salon by Laura Miller reviewing Demick's book on what is now described as the Hermit Kingdom.
"As Demick points out, "North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world." Its inhabitants have no choice but to partake of the pre-industrial conditions that some Western elites now mourn as part of the vanished past. With the factories and electricity shut down, the air over Chungjin is pristine again, and you can see every star in the night sky. Doctors provide herbal remedies, but only because they have nothing else; furthermore, they are required to spend weeks camping out in the mountainous countryside, harvesting wild plants. Some resort to growing their own cotton in order to have bandages. Most North Koreans have never seen a mobile phone and don't know that the Internet exists.
They have also seen their neighbors, friends and relatives starve or get carted off to prison camps for offenses as trivial as joking about the Dear Leader's diminutive stature. A former kindergarten teacher Demick interviewed still suffers from crippling survivor's guilt when she remembers how she watched as her students wasted away. "What she didn't realize," Demick writes, "is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring." In the famine years, parts of North Korea were not so different from Nazi concentration camps, where, as Primo Levi observed, anyone who made it out inevitably had something to be ashamed of."
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