A really existing Orwellian nightmare

"Nothing to envy" is a chilling, heartrending and engrossing description of everyday life in North Korea. The author has interviewed refugees from North Korea's third largest city, Chongjing. Life in this supposedly "democratic people's republic" turns out to be an almost exact replica of George Orwell's novel "1984". The novel's description of a futuristic totalitarian state caricatured Stalin's Soviet Union. In North Korea, the caricature is the real thing!

The book really speaks for itself, but some details stand out more than others. Markets are almost entirely abolished, and so are wages. Instead, everything is rationed. Citizens get food, clothes, housing and even children's candy from the government. The society is fiercely hierarchic, with limited social mobility for the lowest estates. Most people aren't even allowed to live in Pyongyang, the national capital. Nor are people allowed to leave their home towns without special permission from the proper authorities. Sexual puritanism is so extreme, that several of the people interviewed by the author knew next to nothing about sex even in their late 20's. One well-educated defector had no idea that women menstruate!

Repression is severe. 200,000 North Koreans are imprisoned in the country's own version of the Gulag. The most notorious prison facilities are virtual death camps. The large number of political prisoners isn't surprising. Critical off-hand remarks can lead to interrogation or imprisonment. Mobile police patrols search people's homes at random, usually in the middle of the night. If somebody defects, all family members (even loyal ones) are automatically sent to the camps, with virtually no hope of being released. Public executions are common. Children are taught to spy on their parents, and those who do are treated as heroes. The regime doesn't even trust its own allies. Pro-Communist Koreans from Japan who immigrated to North Korea weren't allowed to enter "the core classes", some were purged, and none were allowed to return to Japan once they realized the true nature of the regime...

The economy of North Korea virtually collapsed during the 1990's, as the Soviet Union dissolved and subsidies to the regime were discontinued. Rather than reforming the economy, Kim Il Sung and his successor Kim Jong Il decided to continue as if nothing had happened. The famine of the mid-90's was man-made. 2 million North Koreans might have starved to death. The lucky ones managed to escape to China. One refugee, who worked as a doctor in North Korea, was stunned to realize that dogs eat better in China than college graduates in North Korea. Meanwhile, the army was stealing most of the humanitarian aid from the United States, United Nations and various international agencies.

Even in this living hell, there are certain details that actually struck me as humorous, in a bizarre kind of way. One is that most North Koreans wear identical clothes. These are made of "vinalon", the only indigenous North Korean invention. Vinalon is a fibre made out of limestone and anthracite (!). It's worthless compared to real wool or textiles. Well, isn't it a great achievement to turn coal into clothes? This almost sounds like a parody of "sustainable development"...

Another absurd detail: One of the refugees interviewed lived in a small shack during the famine, but still had portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on her wall, since this is compulsory. At one point, everything in the shack was burglarized, including the glass covering the portraits, but not the portraits themselves! Defaming the photos of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il is punishable by death, so the burglar rather left them on the wall!

I'm not a great fan of neo-liberal capitalism, but this book shows what happens if a centralized command economy is created on an artificial basis and strictly adhered to: permanent rationing, virtual serfdom, little or no domestic economic growth, a quasi-feudal hierarchy and a totalitarian state making sure nobody leaves. And, of course, an absurd propaganda apparatus to convince people (if at all possible) that they really have "nothing to envy".

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels actually criticized a similar system proposed by some of their opponents, calling it "barrack socialism". Marx and Engels would have been horrified by North Korea. Yet, in an ironic twist of history, the barrack socialism of North Korea claims to be Marxist! But while Marx and Engels would surely have opposed Kim Il Sung's evil parody of their philosophy, they weren't very prescient overall. China, with its "state capitalist" blend of state ownership and market mechanisms, would have been attacked by the founders of Marxism as "bourgeois socialism". Yet, China is one of the strongest economies in the world, suggesting that some form of dirigiste mixed economy is the real alternative to both American neo-liberalism and the neo-feudalism of North Korea. In another strange twist of history, China too claims to be Marxist...

Let me conclude by saying that "Nothing to Envy" (the title is an obvious double entendre) is one of the best books I've ever read. The book is tragic, and parts of it might actually make you weep. To call it "one of my favourite books" therefore feels slightly bizarre. But yes, it *is* one of my favourite books. Barbara Demick should be commended for giving us this glimps into one of the most despicable societies in the world, the Orwellian nightmare of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.