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A review by alexisparade
North Korea: Another Country by Bruce Cumings
4.0
From a left perspective this is a pretty tame defense of the DPRK, but for a book published in 2004 with a mainstream liberal audience in mind, this feels like an extremely cutting edge breakdown of how the United States actually helped create and then push North Korea into their supposed political extreme, and how North Korea’s actions aren’t nearly so irrational when viewed in historical context of all the atrocities that have been committed against them.
I had a lot of issues with some weird, one-off minutiae (Cuming’s jokes never, EVER land), and I think he often gives more lip service than necessary to the uncontroversial “look at how WEEEIIRD their lives are!!” perspective before finally getting around to his point ten pages later. Most of my real frustration with this book came from Cumings’ obvious unwillingness to discuss political ideology, though, which always comes off as an irrational fear of accidentally seeming TOO sympathetic to communism, especially when Cumings is always quick to remind us that don’t worry, he hates communists, too!! And while he definitely positions himself as more of a Korean War-era history expert than a modern political analyst, I think I was also expecting maybe a little more in-depth criticism of Bush’s unfounded North Korea/Iran/Iraq axis of evil, and how fear-mongering around North Korean nukes played into helping rationalize the WMD excuse for the Iraq War.
But the stats and research are all there, and nearly impossible to argue with, even if it’s left largely up to the reader to draw larger political conclusions about trade sanctions, Korean reunification, etc. For any normie democrat or even self-proclaimed leftist who finds themselves parroting mainstream anti-DPRK rhetoric without really understanding why, though, this book is extremely enlightening.
Side note: how weird was it when he referenced his wife Meredith Jung-En Woo’s academic study as the best source for a specific number without even like?? mentioning her by name, he literally just called her “my wife” lol
I had a lot of issues with some weird, one-off minutiae (Cuming’s jokes never, EVER land), and I think he often gives more lip service than necessary to the uncontroversial “look at how WEEEIIRD their lives are!!” perspective before finally getting around to his point ten pages later. Most of my real frustration with this book came from Cumings’ obvious unwillingness to discuss political ideology, though, which always comes off as an irrational fear of accidentally seeming TOO sympathetic to communism, especially when Cumings is always quick to remind us that don’t worry, he hates communists, too!! And while he definitely positions himself as more of a Korean War-era history expert than a modern political analyst, I think I was also expecting maybe a little more in-depth criticism of Bush’s unfounded North Korea/Iran/Iraq axis of evil, and how fear-mongering around North Korean nukes played into helping rationalize the WMD excuse for the Iraq War.
But the stats and research are all there, and nearly impossible to argue with, even if it’s left largely up to the reader to draw larger political conclusions about trade sanctions, Korean reunification, etc. For any normie democrat or even self-proclaimed leftist who finds themselves parroting mainstream anti-DPRK rhetoric without really understanding why, though, this book is extremely enlightening.
Side note: how weird was it when he referenced his wife Meredith Jung-En Woo’s academic study as the best source for a specific number without even like?? mentioning her by name, he literally just called her “my wife” lol