Conditions in North Korea (some spoilers for The Orphan Master's Son)

Great Debates
1

I am truly conflicted about where to post this. This thread is inspired by a book I’m reading called The Orphan Master’s Son (spoilers below), so maybe it goes into Cafe Society. However, I’m hoping to get factual answers, so GQ? I’m about to express my opinions, so IMHO? Anyway, GD is my favorite forum, so I’m posting here.

OK, I’m reading this book called The Orphan Master’s Son, and it is a novel about a North Korean man and his journey through life. I’ve done a little research, and it’s apparently fairly accurate, with the author having done interviews with defectors.

If this novel is reflective of reality there, the conditions in North Korea are truly horrifying. I’m not talking about famine, which is horrible of course, but the level of repression, torture, murder, deception, theft, and so on. I’ve read 1984, and it seemed like a cautionary tale, but seemed too extreme to be real. However, reading this book makes it seem like an instruction manual. People just disappear, reappear later with different identities, there are speakers everywhere broadcasting daily propaganda, people constantly turn each other in, prisoners are routinely tortured to death, old people are shipped to labor camps to die (while telling their relatives that are being sent to a beach-front retirement community). Anytime something goes wrong, all the people construct elaborate lies to cover for each other, then tortured until either they confess what happened or truly believe the lies. People regarded as heroes are tortured to prove their dedication and to fully believe their own heroic stories. Women are routinely prostituted to powerful men, and even fairly common men get some prostitution vouchers. Wives of men who are lost, killed, imprisoned, or tortured to death are farmed out to new husbands. It goes on and on.

My questions:

Has anyone here been there? What was it like?
Does anyone here know whether that book is accurate? I trust the SDMB more than some review website.
It seems like all of this is for the benefit of just a few top generals and the Kim family, or possibly even for just one person (whoever is the current Kim leader). Even the top generals are in constant danger, so it really seems like it’s purely for Kim’s benefit. How does this system survive? How has there not been some general who had a relative tortured to death take matters into his own hands?
Has there ever been another country like this any time in history? Or has the combination of better monitoring and propaganda technology, along with an ultra-repressive regime, made this possible?

2

This isn’t much of an answer, but I just showed this to my South Korean college exchange grad student. He said it’s 100% plausible and he doesn’t doubt any of it.

3

AIUI, the author of that novel spent a considerable amount of time in North Korea himself firsthand, so he would have some inkling.

4

FWIW, the late Christopher Hitchens visited North Korea. He said it felt like it’d been designed by “someone who mistook 1984 for an instruction manual.”

5

I’ve long said that North Korea in its present form was engineered by people who read 1984 and studied WWII and said “You know, there are a lot of good ideas here but they didn’t take them far enough.”

6

That’s exactly right - it seems worse than 1984. And, I swear I never saw that Hitchens quote - I think I came up with the same thought independently.

I’m interested in further information, thoughts, research links if anyone can help out.

7

In most authoritarian states in existence today, the average person is probably left alone as long as they don’t start openly challenging the authorities. Even in modern China, people might privately complain about the lack of a job, the pollution, working conditions. They’re fine as long as they don’t talk about it on the street, and more importantly, as long as they don’t start organizing. The more people who are exposed to one’s “sedition,” the more severe the consequences. For most of the world’s people living in an authoritarian state, it doesn’t necessarily mean that life is hell; it just means that you accept living with corruption and squandered resources. You accept that some people are privileged and have higher social status than you, and that they probably always will. Furthermore, you accept that there’s little you or anyone else can do about it. It sucks in terms of knowing that your children’s economic opportunities aren’t what they could be, which is why the smart parents send their children to study abroad. Just keep your mouth shut and all will be well, or at least okay.

North Korea, on the other hand, is not just any authoritarian state; it is the textbook example of a totalitarian state. They aim for complete and total control of the mind. The Khmer Rouge and Mao’s China were similar. I’ve spoken extensively with people who survived both Pol Pot and Chairman Mao’s China. Government-induced disaster after disaster. Famine after famine. Purge after purge. Example after example of complete and total incompetence in governing a state and extreme brutality to make sure nobody complains about it. I don’t know what conditions in North Korea are like, but I know that in the Khmer Rouge and Mao’s China, entire families could be sent to labor camps simply because they were suspected to be hostile to the state. These camps included all kinds of hell. Life was, and is, truly a brutal experience, and one considers themselves lucky to have survived it.

8

NK may be the best current example of this structure, but it’s not unique in history. This sort of structure is well-known as a means of controlling a population.

You create a layered structure of classes, lowest to highest. Anyone in a higher class pretty much automatically has complete control over everyone in a lower class - rank hath its privileges. But, and this is the key point, you also have mobility between classes. If a lower class person shows sufficient loyalty/toadiness to the higher classes, and brutality to the lower classes, he can move up, and gain extra privileges. But at the same time, a person can be pushed down, and lose some or all of what they’ve had.

This produces a population of lower classes that will do anything they have to to move up - ratting on their neighbors, beating or killing people the government wants oppressed, whatever. It also keeps the generals you mention in line - they know that there’s always someone ready to take their place, and that they can end up in a gulag at a moment’s notice. When everything you have is tied to your place in the government structure, you support that structure with everything you have.

And even if you think it sucks, you never tell anyone that, because you never know who will take the opportunity to move up in the world by ratting you out.

9

North Korea has a 51-rank system called “sonbun” that is basically promotion and demotion as Horatius describes. You try to advance up the pole. But generally demotion is easier than promotion.

10

There is a you tube channel called Asian Boss that has a series where they interview North Korean defectors. Their experience are horrifying and similar to what you describe. For instance one North Korean was getting smuggled into China and he saw a plastic Coke bottle in the river and could not believe that anyone would throw away something so valuable.

11

It’s all so cruel and pointless. If Kim just said, screw it, give me a few billion dollars and I’ll scram, is there any way that the North could be folded into the South without massive bloodshed? I imagine that the SK economy is large enough to survive. West Germany was able to do it with East Germany, but there were definitely some hiccups along the way and East Germany was nowhere near as screwed up as NK.

12

Kim would never do that, since even a few billion dollars isn’t worth as much as being a living god with nigh-infinite power (even if that power is over a pretty shitty place).

I really don’t think you could integrate the current population. It would be akin to integrating 25 million primitive tribesmen into a modern population of only twice that. Not meaning that as an insult, but from all accounts the average NK citizen is kind of on that level. On top of that, they are indoctrinated from birth that Kim is their god and that anything that smacks of the west is pure evil and wants to kill them. It would be like Satan popping up and saying, “God has pissed off. I’m in charge now.” The Christians wouldn’t like it, no matter how much he told them that everything they ever knew was wrong and that life is going to be great.

It would take 2 generations for any integration to happen.

13

Kim would be running the risk of assassination while being a foreign expat. Look at how his own brother, Kim Yong Nam, was murdered by VX poisoning while in Malaysia.

14

Has anyone done the analysis on whether this is the worst ever, in terms of oppression, information lock, and other conditions? It seems like the combination of an island nation (or, at least, only one other country on the border), monitoring technology, and military technology has made this uniquely awful, but maybe the Khmer Rouge or USSR were just as bad.

I know that other regimes have killed more of their own people, but there’s something worse here (in my opinion) – it’s a lifetime of psychological torture, with the threat of much worse psych and physical torture always hanging over your head, combined with near starvation conditions and a total lack of outside information or hope.

I’m a terrible student of history – were other awful regimes as bad? Worse? Hard to compare? Were there any that lasted this long?

Since I’m asking questions, how did they get the first generation under control? When they started putting this kind of oppression in, there must have been many people used to the status quo ante.

15

Maybe. I feel like if Kim were able to manage a peaceful transition to a merger with the South, he’d be a hero. In fact, when he was first taking power, I figured he’d want to do something like that – he was educated in Switzerland or something and saw how things could be. How can he treat his own people like that?

I’ll be honest, I find the whole thing so awful as to be literally unbelievable. I can’t intellectually or emotionally grasp how this situation could continue for decades. I guess I’m just hopelessly naive about how awful oppressive regimes really are.

16

Korea was controlled by Japan from 1910 - 1945. The Japanese built some heavy industry, but most of the population was still subsistence farming. So they were used to starvation, famine, and oppression, so to speak. Then in 1950 NK invaded South Korea and kicked off the Korean War, which has been going on (officially) ever since. So NK has been on a wartime footing, more or less, for almost all of the last century. It’s all they’ve ever known. The status quo ante wasn’t all that different.

That’s most of the tragedy. South Korea has become part of the First World and a major economic power. North Korea, to say the least, has not.

Regards,
Shodan

17

In current North Korea entire families are sent to camp for three generations - meaning after you and your siblings are sent their your children your children’s children will live out their entire lives in that camp, paying for a “crime” they never committed and which occurred a generation or two before they were born.

Accounts from both former prisoners - including one born in a camp who managed to escape - and former guards are absolutely chilling.

18

I read an account by a North Korean doctor who escaped across the northern border and, while stumbling around the territory just across the border, came across a bowl of food and immediately stopped to eat it, and it was the best food she’d had in some time.

Turned out it was dog food. She ate a bowl of food left out for a pet in someone’s yard. She said when she found out it was dog food she started to understand just how screwed up North Korea was, that dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

Pretty much all stories from refugees are like that.

19

My question is, not advocating it but if Best Leader were assassinated, would it be same shit different day with the second in command, or would it be an immediate desire for unification and change? Is there even a stated second in command there? Would it matter if the assassination was done by North Korean leaders or foreigners?

20

The USSR was certainly no paradise, but no, it was not as bad as North Korea currently is. Not sure about the Khmer Rouge - if nothing else, they didn’t last nearly as long as the Kim dynasty in North Korea, they simply didn’t have time to institute some horrors that North Korea has.

It didn’t start as bad as it is now - a lot of the stuff was implemented incrementally.