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What happens when a dictator wins absolute power and isolates a nation from the outside world? In a nightmare of political theory stretched to madness and come to life, North Korea's Kim Jong Il made himself into a living god, surrounded by lies and flattery and beyond criticism. As over two million of his subjects starved to death, Kim Jong Il roamed between palaces staffed by beautiful girls and stocked with expensive international delicacies. Outside, the steel mills shut down, the trains stopped running, the power went out, and the hospitals ran out of medicine. When the population threatened to revolt, Kim imposed a reign of terror, deceived the United Nations, and plundered the country's dwindling resources to become a nuclear power. Now this tiny bankrupt nation is using her nuclear capability to blackmail the United States.
Veteran correspondent Jasper Becker takes us inside one of the most secretive countries in the world, exposing the internal chaos, blind faith, rampant corruption, and terrifying cruelty of its rulers. Becker details the vain efforts to change North Korea by actors inside and outside the country and the dangers this highly volatile country continues to pose. This unique land, ruled by one family's megalomania and paranoia, seems destined to survive and linger on, a menace to its own people and to the rest of the world. But should the nations of the world allow this regime to survive? That's the question with which this book concludes.
- Sales Rank: #1426515 in Books
- Published on: 2006-10-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.00" h x 1.00" w x 9.20" l, 1.04 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 328 pages
From Publishers Weekly
One of the few reporters to have firsthand experience of North Korea, veteran Asian correspondent Becker (Hungry Ghosts) adds more nuance to a familiar story that the threat of nuclear arms, as well as the world's fifth largest standing army, are part of an attempt to force the rest of the globe to cater to a mad leader's megalomaniacal world. Becker presents a well-fed, unprepossessing Kim Jong Il running North Korea with a cult of personality unmatched in contemporary history, reducing his population to starving anonymous actors in a bizarre personal psychodrama, where "even the mere idea of internal opposition to Kim's rule is regarded as preposterous." Images of this grim state of affairs—which goes well beyond the Orwellian into the Kafkaesque—have been smuggled out over the past few years; how they came to be is described with rare concision by Becker: the Kim dynasty's poisonous and potent blend of Stalinist doctrine and Korean absolutism found its catalysts, he argues, in the varying ambitions of Japan, China and the U.S. While stopping short of calling for immediate regime change, Becker minces no words in warning that we may now have no way out of a monstrous situation. 16 b&w photos not seen by PW. (May)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Along with Iran, North Korea persists as the greatest U.S. foreign-policy dilemma. With a huge conventional army and, apparently, a growing supply of nuclear weapons, the "rogue" regime of Kim Jong Il is a threat to our Asian allies; with the continued development of long-range missiles, it could even threaten the continental U.S. Becker, a foreign correspondent with substantial experience in East Asia, has written a frightening and depressing account of both the domestic and foreign policies of a society and government that are an affront to the human spirit. Like all totalitarians, Kim Jong IL seems to regard his people as clay playthings to be molded as he pursues his grandiose visions. The result is a slave state in which political repression and control are absolute and starvation is rampant. Becker asserts that "regime change" may prove to be the only viable option. However, as he indicates in a scenario that opens the book, that too is fraught with grave danger. Jay Freeman
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Becker makes a powerful case for defining Kim once and for all--not as an ordinary, if nuclear-tipped, dictator, but as an extraordinarily skillful tyrant presiding over the worst man-made catastrophe in modern history.... A highly readable narrative that unearths Kim's history, probes his decision-making style and details the grotesque consequences of those decisions. His book is a subtle plea to the world to expand its focus beyond the--admittedly important--nuclear issue to the vast humanitarian catastrophe unfolding under Kim Jong Il's gaze."--Joshua Kurlantzick, New York Times Book Review
"A tough but even-handed treatment of the subject."--Andrew Scobell for Parameters
"A very timely book.... Not for the faint-hearted. Mr. Becker takes an unblinking look at a dark regime that has made North Korea an international pariah, has elevated its rulers to the status of gods, and through torture and indoctrination reduced its subjects to virtual slaves.... The facts almost defy belief."--William Grimes, The New York Times
"A good new look at North Korea."--Nicholas Kristof, The New York Observer
"One of the few reporters to have firsthand experience of North Korea, veteran Asian correspondent Becker adds more nuance to a familiar story that the threat of nuclear arms, as well as the world's fifth largest standing army, are part of an attempt to force the rest of the globe to cater to a mad leader's megalomaniacal world.... Images of this grim state of affairs--which goes well beyond the Orwellian into the Kafkaesque--have been smuggled out over the past few years; how they came to be is described with rare concision by Becker.... Becker minces no words in warning that we may now have no way out of a monstrous situation."--Publishers Weekly
"Really is required reading. Becker, one of the few Western reporters to spend time in the Stalinist state, details the megalomania of Kim Jong Il--who staffed his palaces with the country's most beautiful women--and the madness of his regime, under which 2 million Koreans have reportedly died of starvation."--New York Post
"Jasper Becker is already known as one of the sharpest observers of contemporary China--and with Rogue Regime he immediately establishes himself as a premier observer, and critic, of Kim Jong Il's North Korea. Readers of this devastating book will be hard pressed to gainsay Becker's assertion that this dynastic dictatorship genuinely empowers evil--or to turn away from Becker's conclusion that only regime change is likely to bring a better life to the millions of ordinary North Koreans suffering under the Dear Leader's rule."--Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy, The American Enterprise Institute
"By giving us an engrossing and well-documented examination of the North Korean regime, Becker proves that Kim Jong Il is in a category of tyranny all on his own and that engagement and appeasement only strengthen him. If you care at all about the slow and certain genocide of the North Korean people, he makes a powerful case for why regime change is the only answer." --Suzanne Scholte, President, Defense Forum Foundation
"Jasper Becker has warned us about North Korea, as a journalist with a sharp eye and an historian with perspective. North Korea with its bizarre cult of personality, its failed economy, its crackpot ideology and its relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is a major challenge in the twenty-first century. The reader will learn of the cunning control freaks who run the country. Becker's convincing book will make the task of the apologists for North Korea that much more difficult." --James Lilley, Former American Ambassador to South Korea and China
"Rogue Regime is the companion work to Jasper Becker's Hungry Ghosts, his earlier, well-documented account of 30 million famine deaths in Mao's China. Once again he pulls back a heavy veil of secrecy and reveals the immense suffering of the people of North Korea." --Dean Hirsch, President, World Vision International
Most helpful customer reviews
32 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Good, but depressing book
By K. Kehler
This is a fine work but a dreary and depressing one. That, I hasten to add, is because of the content and not because of the writing, which is solid and clear. North Korea is a truly strange and bizarre place, and Becker helps to explain not only how it came to be what it is, but also just how appallingly cruel (and spoiled and selfish) its rulers have been. He's also good on what we know about the military capacity of the country.
The indifference to suffering is not confined to the inhuman Kim and his even worse son (Kim Jong Il). China too deserves the world's condemnation for adopting a policy of returning (to a certain death) desperate, starving, dying people who have risked everything to beg on the streets of Chinese border cities. China has valued its influence over N. Korea over humanitarism, and obviously has no concern about the unfortunate denizens of what is literally a slave state.
North Korea is a preternaturally weird and bloodcurdlingly scary place. It's the only country in the world that is almost completely isolated from outside influences, filled with a literally shrinking (because of famine and starvation) population, and presided over by the one fat man in the entire land ... who not insignificantly is sitting with his pudgy, Roman Emperor-esque finger on the buttons of whole host of WMD, with the 20+ million inhabitants of (greater) Seoul held hostage just 35 miles from the DMZ and N. Korea's thousands of missiles, rockets and assorted artillery. Becker's good at describing a place that is stranger than fiction and far more savage: cannibalism, cronyism, corruption, and a callousness that beggars belief, plus nuclear ambitions. It's here in all its frightening 'glory'.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting but disorganized work
By Kenneth Hand
Jasper Becker's "Rogue Regime" was the first book I read about North Korea. It's certainly interesting, filling us in on lots of fun tidbits about Kim Jong Il: that he sleeps with young girls and then dumps them, builds himself palaces, and refuses to cut rations to anyone working on his nuclear weapons. But the book is extremely irritating in that it clearly has not been properly edited: as someone else pointed out, there are plenty of factual mistakes, stylistic mistakes, and at least one grammar or punctuation mistake for every five pages. The chapters are also annoyingly disorganized -- Becker jumps from a pointless hypothetical war between the United States and North Korea to a chapter about the history of the Kims, to a chapter about the North Korean nukes, and so on. I'm especially surprised at the inefficiency of such a publisher as Oxford -- laughingly, their best defense is to say that simply forgot to have it edited.
All in all, however, many people will argue that the book deserves a once through -- particularly for experts on North Korea. Personally, I'm glad I simply got it from the library.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
An Explanation of How Kim Jong IL Came to Power
By W. S. McKenzie
Overall, Jasper Becker provides a readable explanation of how North Korea came to be a self-starved country with a massive defense establishment. He covers the history of Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong Il, their achievement of absolute control, and relationships with Russia, China, and America.
I did have problems with some statements Becker makes. He starts with a fictional scenario of a military confrontation with the U.S.: "On the bridge of the USS Kitty Hawk, Admiral Peter Grey watched the F-16 planes taking off . . ." The US Air Force is justifiably proud of the capabilities of the F-16 but they don't include the ability to fly from aircraft carriers. He describes the Chinese nuclear shelter efforts after the 1963 Cuban missile crisis: "Aircraft hangars, runways, submarines, and destroyers were all secreted deep inside mountain caves so that after a preemptive strike, Chinese forces could sally forth unscathed." Maybe they were very small flying submarines and destroyers that could zip out from the deep caves to the water? Becker confuses me when describing the North Korean nuclear program: "The Yongbyon reactor produced just 5 megawatts (MW) of fissile material . . ." by not explaining why fissile material is measured in megawatts instead of units of mass or radioactivity.
The book is worth reading as a contemporary history of the North Korean regime in spite of the distractions.
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