Book Review: North Korea Through the Looking Glass
OCTOBER 2004
North Korea Through the Looking Glass, by Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig
The title suggests an "Alice in Wonderland" fantasyland, but a huge dose of Edgar Allen Poe must be added to the cauldron to get a feel for the horrors of this most bizarre of lands.
The combination of Confucian kingdom and totalitarian socialist state allows the rulers, Kim Il Sung from its founding at the end of WW2 to his death in 1994 and his successor-son, Kim Jong Il, to wield inconceivable power not only over peoples' actions, but also over their minds. North Koreans almost uniformly believe their rulers are the equivalent of Gods. In the Korean tradition of Confucianism, they willingly subject themselves to ...
