Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.

This kind of Confucian communism bore greater resemblance to the culture of imperial Japan, where the emperor was the sun to which all subjects bowed, than to anything envisioned by Karl Marx.

North Korea’s defense budget eats up 25 percent of its gross national product—as opposed to an average of less than 5 percent for industrialized countries. Although there had been no fighting in Korea since 1953, the country kept one million men under arms, giving this tiny country, no bigger than Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest military in the world.

A hungry stomach shouldn’t believe a lie, but somehow it did.

The end of an era did not come in a single moment. It took years before people understood that their world was irreversibly altered.

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.

Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive.

But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

Guilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.