Fifty-five years after its founding at the dawn of the cold war,
North Korea remains a land of illusions. Isolated and
anachronistic, the country and its culture seem to be dominated
exclusively by the official ideology of Juche, which emphasizes
national self-reliance, independence, and worship of the supreme
leader, General Kim Jong Il. Yet this socialist utopian ideal is
pursued with the calculations of international power politics. Kim
has transformed North Korea into a militarized state, whose nuclear
weapons, ballistic missiles, and continued threat to South Korea
have raised alarm worldwide. This paradoxical combination of
cultural isolation and military-first policy has left the North
Korean people woefully deprived of the opportunity to advance
socially and politically. The socialist economy, guided by
political principles and bereft of international support, has
collapsed. Thousands, perhaps millions, have died of starvation.
Foreign trade has declined and the country's gross domestic product
has recorded negative growth every year for a decade. Yet rather
than initiate the sort of market reforms that were implemented by
other communist governments, North Korean leaders have reverted to
the economic policies of the 1950s: mass mobilization,
concentration on heavy industry, and increased ideological
indoctrination. Although members of the political elite in
Pyongyang are acutely aware of their nation's domestic and foreign
problems, they are plagued by fear and policy paralysis. North
Korea Through the Looking Glass sheds new light on this remote and
peculiar country. Drawing on more than ten years of research
--including interviews with two dozen North Koreans who made the
painful decision to defect from their homeland --Kongdan Oh and
Ralph C. Hassig explore what the leadership and the masses believe
about their current predicament. Through dual themes of persistence
and illusion, they explore North Korea's stubborn adherence to
policies that have failed to serve the welfare of the people and,
consequently, threaten the future of the regime. Featuring
twenty-nine rare and candid photos taken from within the closely
guarded country, North Korea Through the Looking Glass illuminates
the human society of a country too often mischaracterized for its
drab uniformity --not a "state," but a community of twenty million
individuals who have, through no fault of their own, fallen on
exceedingly hard times.
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