Homo Jucheicus
December 22, 2013
Review of The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot
WHEN the hoodlums of the Korean Workers' Party dragooned thousands of slave children to "earn dollars for Kim Il-Sung" by opening defunct gold mines that even the fascist Japanese occupiers believed to be too dangerous and uneconomical, or by growing herbs that are smuggled and sold abroad, one suddenly thinks of a mob boss ordering his underlings to chisel their way into stolen slot machines and cash registers and hand over all the dimes and quarters.
What we learn from The Aquariums of Pyongyang, if we didn't know it already, is that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a squalid and ramshackle mafiocracy that relies on unjust arrests of fascist puppet-state "agents" and "wreckers" not only to maintain control but also to obtain the forced labour required to prop up its utterly moribund economy and furnish its leaders - the Kims - with the brandy and bling to which they have become accustomed. It is the nation that Albert Anastasia would have founded after reading (and completely misunderstanding) Marx while in jail on an extortion and murder beef.
In this ten-year old memoir written by a blameless child-victim of the North Korean gulags, we also learn that the nation’s brutal and militaristic pseudo-Communist ideology has served to create one of the most atomised, most covetous societies on the planet. All morality goes out of the window, there is violence and alcoholism everywhere, and gangs roam the streets. Despite the pseudo-Communism, everyone is out for themselves, and decades of incessant indoctrination serve merely to create a polity based on hypocrisy, cynicism and corruption, creating a million-man army of scapegoats used both to explain its abject failures and fill its labour camps.
What survives is age-old human avarice, satisfied not by any semblance of hard work or dedication, but by corrupt bureaucratic shortcuts. Officials take bribes to stamp forms and even commute death sentences, security police ransack homes abandoned as a result of the latest purge, and prison guards commandeer slave-camp distilleries for their own personal profit even as they chant the usual tired encomia to their Dear Leader.
We learn about the authorities turning a blind eye to the furtive outbreaks of capitalism in their midst because that is the only thing keeping the majority of the population alive. It is all so miserable and monstrous, and only the faintest flecks of humanity are allowed to survive. If there is anything that offers any sort of succour, it is that North Korea does not work, even if it defies all logic by clinging on to power for so long. Far from creating a society of homo Jucheicus automatons, the brutality and monstrousness of the DPRK regime has created such a huge gap between theory and practice that it can only be bridged by hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy is visible to all, including the leaders. Despite all the regime’s worst efforts to flatten the population’s ruffles and idiosyncrasies, North Korean society is as lumpy and individualistic and conflict-ridden as any. In fact, those efforts have made the ruffles and idiosyncrasies even more pronounced.
The author, who somehow managed to flee to the South via China, is a remarkable, resourceful character. He was the child of a family that got rich running casinos in Japan before being duped into returning to Pyongyang. He was sent to the Yodok concentration camp at the age of 9. The fish he took with him - hence the book's title - perished within days, but he and his family survived nearly a decade of backbreaking labour and soul-destroying propaganda before being released.
He talks little of survivor's guilt, even though it seems obvious that his subsequent defection would have consigned friends, acquaintances and members of his family to the worst of the regime's gulags. Getting out of North Korea required a certain ruthless bloody-mindedness, a will not only to survive but to live. Rightfully, he reserves all blame for a degenerate tyranny run for the benefit of a family of tin-pot Caligulas.
