The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

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Book TV: B.R. Myers, "The Cleanest Race" - YouTube youtube.com2010년 3월 24일 - 10분 - 업로더: BookTV B.R. Myers takes an in-depth look at North Korean society and the domestic propaganda to which its citizens ...

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B.R. Myers at the World Affairs Council of Northern ... vimeo.com2010년 2월 15일 - 66분 ... frequent contributor to both NPR and The New York Times, as well as author of The Cleanest Race: How ...

The Cleanest Race

by
B.R.Myers

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Title:	The Cleanest Race
Author:	B.R.Myers
Genre:	Non-fiction
Written:	2010
Length:	169 pages
Availability:	The Cleanest Race - US
	The Cleanest Race - UK
	The Cleanest Race - Canada

• How North Koreans See Themselves -- and Why It Matters
• With numerous photographs, including eighteen in color

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Our Assessment:

B : interesting take; fascinatingly bizarre

See our review for fuller assessment.

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Review Summaries

Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Far Eastern Econ. Rev.	.	4/12/2009	Andrei Lankov
The NY Times	.	27/1/2010	Dwight Garner
Salon	.	3/1/2010	Laura Miller
Wall St. Journal	.	27/1/2010	Melanie Kirkpatrick
The Washington Post	.	28/2/2010	Stephen Kotkin

  From the Reviews:

• "Brian Myers takes a fresh approach. He largely ignores what the regime tells the outside world about itself, but concentrates instead on what North Koreans themselves are supposed to believe, paying special attention to the North Korean narratives and mass culture, including movies and television shows. (...) There are few books that can give the world a peek into the Hermit Kingdom. The Cleanest Race provides a reason to care about how those in North Korea see themselves and the West. It is possibly the best addition to that small library." - Andrei Lankov, Far Eastern Economic Review
  
  
• "He is a crisp, pushy writer who is at his best when on the attack, and his often counterintuitive new book attempts a psychological profile of Kim Jong-il and his regime. (...) Mr. Myers뭩 arguments are too wily and complex to be neatly summarized here, but he includes a fascinating analysis of Mr. Kim뭩 depiction as an essentially -- and crucially -- feminine military leader." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
  
  
• "Myers feels that the racialism at the heart of the regime's ideology will sustain it even as it fails to provide the prosperity it promises." - Laura Miller, Salon
  
  
• "Mr. Myers bases his analysis on a close reading of domestic propaganda (which is different from that distributed to and aimed at foreigners) and popular culture. The worldview he describes goes a long way toward explaining the erratic behavior and seemingly bizarre thought processes of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. His outlook may well extend more broadly, to North Korea's leadership and other elites." - Melanie Kirkpatrick, Wall Street Journal
  
  
• "(H)e brilliantly shows how North Korean novels -- books we are lucky not to have to read -- are obsessed with the belief that Koreans form a uniquely pure and spiritual race, a worldview also widely held in South Korea, where Myers lives. The author's prose is spirited, even angry." - Stephen Kotkin, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       North Korea remains among the most isolated nations in the world. To outsiders it seems a repressive, impoverished nation, dominated by leaders -- Kim Il Sung, and now his son, Kim Jong Il -- who are little short of insane. Add in extreme militarism, and now nuclear capability, and North Korea stands out among the world's oddball countries as one to be very concerned about.
       In The Cleanest Race B.R.Myers argues that policy-makers, academics, and (more predictably) journalists have all got it very wrong in how they analyze North Korea. He dismisses the officially-touted Juche Thought-ideology as: "a sham doctrine with no bearing on Pyongyang's policy-making", and argues that instead it is the real North Korean worldview that must be examined and should guide how outsiders deal with the nation (since it is what guides the nation itself). And what a worldview it is !
       Myers maintains:

Paranoid, race-based nationalism has nonetheless guided the DPRK in its policy-making from the start.

       North Korean exceptionalism sees the Koreans as a people of incomparable purity -- 'the cleanest race' -- and in the North, in particular, they have managed to remain very pure (while the South has sullied itself with its dealings with foreigners, and especially the pernicious, domineering influence of America). As Myers points out, this is the kind of ideology that can withstand a great deal: while various forms of Communism eventually came to look like hollow shells in the face of reality (especially economic reality), the idea of racial superiority (and a need to maintain it) can be maintained even in the face of famine or the fact that Koreans seem to be a lot better off in the South than in the North.
       Much of the evidence Myers presents is based on North Korean propaganda. As he notes, the propaganda disseminated abroad differs markedly from domestic propaganda -- and it is the latter that he focuses on. It's a fascinating picture, beginning with a rewriting of the Korean creation-myth and the development of the personality-cult around Kim Il Sung.
       Only an intrinsic sort of superiority is claimed, and:

To be uniquely virtuous in an evil world but not uniquely cunning or strong is to be vulnerable as a child, and indeed, history books convey the image of a perennial child-nation on the world stage, wanting only to be left in peace yet subjected to endless abuse and contamination from outsiders.

       Myers argues that North Korea is certainly not Confucian in its outlook:

Confucius demanded rigorous self-cultivation through study; the Kim regime urges its subjects to remain as childlike and spontaneous as possible.

       Presenting the leader (apparently plausibly, to his countrymen) as a beneficent parent-figure -- and generally more maternal than paternal (with Kim Jong Il's various wives and children completely left out of any depictions and descriptions of him, as if his only family were the entire nation) -- has proven an an effective means of controlling the population, which remains devoted to the ideals he represents. The official story-lines that the citizens are fed -- many of which Myers offers as example -- are hair-raising in their absurdity, but the big picture seems to be one that the citizens can, for the most part, subscribe to. (It does, however, make for pretty boring art: as Myers notes: "The lack of conflict makes North Korean narratives seem dull even in comparison to Soviet fiction.")
       Myers' use of propaganda and, especially, examples from North Korean literature and film show how adaptable the system is, and how even catastrophic events and counter-intuitive examples (South Korea's successful consumer-society) can be turned to fit the narrative. Meanwhile, foreign states are treated with little respect and generally depicted as ultimately having to give in to North Korea, always backing down from escalation -- which does not bode well in any future confrontations regarding North Korea's nuclear arsenal.
       It is a silly 'Text' the North Koreans have cobbled together for themselves here, but then most ideologies can be made to look fairly silly. Certainly, to outsiders, it does not seem like a very successful one, but Myers makes a decent (though not wholly convincing) case that it has an impressive hold on almost all North Koreans. Significantly, if Myers is right, most outside efforts to effect change -- whether of democratization, reunification (on Southern terms), or simply de-nuclearization -- are unlikely to succeed using the usual stick and carrots: the promise of greater economic prosperity by itself, for example, looks pretty much like a non-starter. But Myers also notes that the ideology is vulnerable -- especially if it becomes clear to Northerners that Southerners are, in fact, pretty happy with their own situation -- and that any such legitimacy crisis may well force the leaders to even more irrational (re)actions.

       The Cleanest Race is illustrated with numerous photographs (including a section in color), which nicely support the text. (Among the hilarious iconic imagery: big pictures of waves crashing against rocks ("the waves of a hostile world crash ineffectually against the rocks ").) Myers presents his material and makes his case succinctly and well, though given the paucity of information about many events (much less day to day life) in North Korea the argument is not always entirely convincing. Nevertheless, The Cleanest Race offers considerable valuable insight into this very closed-off country, and a valuable alternative (or additional) lens through which to regard the actions of its leaders.
       Certainly of interest (and with considerable entertainment value, too) -- and a must-read for anyone interested in Korea.

- M.A.Orthofer, 28 January 2010

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Links:

The Cleanest Race:

• Melville House publicity page
• Profile at VOA

Reviews:

• Far Eastern Economic Review
• Slate
• Wall Street Journal
• The Washington Post

Other books by Brian Myers under review:

• Han Sorya and North Korean Literature
• A Reader's Manifesto

Other books of interest under review:

• See Index of Korean literature

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About the Author:

       Brian Reynolds Myers teaches North Korean studies.

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© 2010 the complete review

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Excerpt

‘The Cleanest Race’

By B. R. MYERS

Published: January 26, 2010

Preface

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Related

Books About Life in North Korea (January 27, 2010)

The most important questions regarding North Korea are the ones least often asked: What do the North Koreans believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them? Yes, we know the country has a personality cult, but this fact alone tells us little. Cuba has a personality cult too, yet the Castro regime espouses an ideology quite different from that of its counterpart in Pyongyang. On what grounds is the North Korean Leader so extravagantly acclaimed? What is the nature of his mission, and the purported destiny of his nation as a whole? Only through this sort of information can one begin to make sense of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), to use its formal name. It is unfortunate but by no means surprising that our news correspondents eschew such topics in order to return ad nauseum to the same monuments and mass games, the same girl directing traffic. More remarkable has been the extent to which academics, think-tank analysts and other Pyongyang watchers have neglected to study the worldview of the military-first regime. Regardless of their own political leanings (and North Korean studies remains marked by a sharp left-right divide), they have tended toward interpretations of the country in which ideology plays next to no role. Conservatives generally explain the dictatorship's behavior in terms of a cynical struggle to maintain power and privilege, while liberals prefer to regard the DPRK as a "rational actor," a country behaving much as any tiny country would in the face of a hostile superpower. Such interest as either camp can bring to bear on so-called soft issues exhausts itself in futile attempts to make sense of Juche Thought, a sham doctrine with no bearing on Pyongyang's policy-making.

To be sure, the Western world is generally much less interested in ideology — for reasons that are themselves ideological — than it was during the Cold War. Most Americans know just as little about Islamism as they did before 9/11. But why is there more talk of ideological matters in any issue of Arab Studies Journal than in a dozen issues of North Korean Review? The obvious if undiplomatic answer is that most Pyongyang watchers do not understand Korean well enough to read the relevant official texts. But even scholars with the requisite language skills would rather research other topics, usually of a military, nuclear or economic nature. One colleague told me he finds the North Korean personality cult too absurd to take seriously; indeed, he doubts whether even the leadership believes it. But no regime would go to such enormous expense, year in, year out for sixty years, to inculcate into its citizens a worldview to which it did not itself subscribe. (The only institution in the country that did not miss a beat during the famine of the mid-1990s was the propaganda apparatus.) As for absurdity: the examples of Nazi Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia show that a dictator and his subjects are capable of believing and acting upon ideas far more ridiculous than anything ever espoused by the Workers' Party. For all the hyperbole in which it is couched, and the histrionics with which it is proclaimed, North Korean propaganda is not nearly as outlandish as the uninitiated think. No matter what some American Christian groups might claim, divine powers have never been attributed to either of the two Kims. In fact, the propaganda apparatus in Pyongyang has generally been careful not to make claims that run directly counter to its citizens' experience or common sense. Granted, it has made museum exhibits out of chairs that Kim Il Sung rested on while visiting this factory or that farm, but there is no reason to doubt that he actually did sit on the things. (In most cases there is an authenticating photograph nearby.) This approach can be contrasted with that of Stalin's Soviet Union, or Mao's China, where propagandists were not quite so effusive or incessant in their praise of the leader, yet regularly made claims — of bumper harvests, for example — which everyone knew to be untrue.

While ignoring North Korean ideology, the West has assiduously, almost compulsively, added to its pile of "hard" information on the country. Much of this has come from experts in nuclear or economic studies. Aid workers have also contributed accounts of their experiences in the country. An international network of Google Earth users is busily identifying structures visible in aerial photographs. Despite all this, experts continue to describe North Korea as "puzzling," "baffling," a "mystery" — and no wonder. Hard facts cannot be put to proper use unless one first acquires information of a very different nature. If we did not know that Iran is an Islamic country, it would forever baffle us, no matter how good the rest of our intelligence might be.

Unfortunately a lack of relevant expertise has never prevented observers from mischaracterizing North Korean ideology to the general public. They call the regime "hard-line communist" or "Stalinist," despite its explicit racial theorizing, its strident acclamation of Koreans as the world's "cleanest" or "purest" race. They describe it as a Confucian patriarchy, despite its maternal authority figures, or as a country obsessed with self-reliance, though it has depended on outside aid for over sixty years. By far the most common mistake, however, has been the projection of Western or South Korean values and common sense onto the North Koreans. For example: Having been bombed flat by the Americans in the 1950s, the DPRK must be fearful for its security, ergo it must want the normalization of relations with Washington.

These various fallacies have combined to make the West worry less about North Korea's nuclear program than about Iran's. The word Confucianism makes us think of Singapore, Asian whiz-kids, and respect for the elderly; how much trouble can a Confucian patriarchy be? Self-reliance does not sound too dangerous either. Communism has a much less benign ring to it, of course, but if there is one thing we remember from the Cold War, it is that it ended peacefully. For fifteen years the perception of a communist North Korea has sustained the US government's hope that disarmament talks will work with Pyongyang as they did with Moscow. Only in 2009, after the Kim Jong Il regime defied the United Nations by launching a ballistic missile and conducting its second underground nuclear test, did a consensus begin to emerge that negotiations were unlikely ever to work. Yet the assumption prevails that the worst Pyongyang would ever do is sell nuclear material or expertise to more dangerous forces in the Middle East. All the while the military-first regime has been invoking kamikaze slogans last used by imperial Japan in the Pacific War.

In this book, therefore, I aim to explain North Korea's dominant ideology or worldview — I use the words inter- changeably — and to show how far removed it is from communism, Confucianism and the show-window doctrine of Juche Thought. Far from complex, it can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader. More must be added perhaps, if only to explain that "therefore" to an American reader, but not much more of importance. I need hardly point out that if such a race-based worldview is to be situated on our conventional left-right spectrum, it makes more sense to posit it on the extreme right than on the far left. Indeed, the similarity to the worldview of fascist Japan is striking. I do not, however, intend to label North Korea as fascist, a term too vague to be much use. It is enough for me to make clear that the country has always been, at the very least, ideologically closer to America's adversaries in World War II than to communist China and Eastern Europe. This truth alone, if properly grasped, will not only help the West to understand the loyalty shown to the DPRK by its chronically impoverished citizens, but also to understand why the West's policy of pursuing late Cold War-type solutions to the nuclear problem is doomed to fail.

The word ideology is used in this book in accordance with Martin Seliger's understanding of it, which Zeev Sternhell puts in the following nutshell: "a conceptual frame of reference which provides criteria for choice and decision by virtue of which the major activities of an organized community are governed." Note the word major. No ideology determines every aspect of a nation's daily life. Technology, production and administration have always been guided in the DPRK by what Franz Schurmann referred to, in regard to China, as the "practical ideology of expertise." And like all parties, the Workers' Party is ready to resort to temporary deviations from ideological essentials in order to maintain its hold on power. Paranoid, race-based nationalism has nonetheless guided the DPRK in its policy- making from the start. It is only in this ideological context that the country's distinguishing characteristics — which the outside world, with its Stalinist-Confucian model, has always found so baffling — make perfect sense.

What is more, this ideology has generally enjoyed the support of the North Korean people through good times and bad. Even today, with a rival state thriving next door, the regime is able to maintain public stability without a ubiquitous police presence or a fortified northern border. Sensationalist American accounts of the "underground railroad" helping North Korean "refugees" make it through China to the free world gloss over the fact that about half of these economic migrants — for that is what most of them are — voluntarily return to their homeland. The rest remain fervent admirers of Kim Il Sung if not of his son. Though we must never forget the men, women and children languishing in Yodôk and other prison camps, we cannot keep carrying on as if the dictatorship did not enjoy a significant degree of mass support. How significant? Enough to make the regime desperate to hold on to it. I intend to argue, however, that this support cannot be sustained for long, because what the masses are taught — especially in regard to South Korean public opinion — is coming increasingly into conflict with what they know to be true. It is the regime's awareness of a pending legitimacy crisis, not a fear of attack from without, which makes it behave ever more provocatively on the world stage.

The official worldview is not set out coherently in the leaders' writings. These are more often praised than read. So-called Juche Thought functions at most as an imposing row of book-spines, a prop in the personality cult. (A good way to embarrass one's minders in the DPRK is to ask them to explain it.) Unlike Soviet citizens under Stalin, or Chinese under Mao, North Koreans learn more about their leaders than from them. It is not in ideological treatises but in the more mass-oriented domestic propaganda that the official worldview is expressed most clearly and unselfconsciously. I stress the word domestic. Too many observers wrongly assume that the (North) Korean Central News Agency's English-language releases reflect the same sort of propaganda that the home audience gets. In fact there are significant differences. For example, where the DPRK presents itself to the outside world as a misunderstood country seeking integration into the international community, it presents itself to its own citizens (as I will show later) as a rogue state that breaks agreements with impunity, dictates conditions to groveling U.N. officials, and keeps its enemies in constant fear of ballistic retribution. Generally speaking the following rule of thumb applies: the less accessible a propaganda outlet is to the outside world, the blunter and more belligerent it will be in its expression‎ of the racist orthodoxy.

The following chapters are based on my own extensive research of as many different forms of domestic propaganda as I could find at the Unification Ministry's North Korea Resource Center in Seoul. (This is, ironically enough, a better place to study the stuff than Pyongyang, where a foreigner's requests for anything more than a few months old are met with suspicion.) From nightly news reports and television dramas to animated cartoons and war movies; from the white-papered Rodong Sinmun, the Workers' Party organ, to women's and children's magazines printed on rough, gray paper; from short stories and historical novels to dictionaries, encyclopediae and school textbooks (these last printed, semi-legibly, on the worst paper of all); from reproductions of wall posters, oil paintings and caricatures to photographs of monuments and statues: these are the sources I have spent much of the past eight years studying. In the interest of brevity and variation — and in emulation of Alfred Pfabigan's practice in a perceptive travelogue entitled Schlaflos in Pjöngjang (1986) — I will occasionally refer to the body of myths espoused in this propaganda as the Text, though the reader is not, of course, to imagine a closed set of books.

Why would such a secretive country export propaganda that lays bare the true nature of its official ideology? There are many reasons. One is that the DPRK has never relinquished its dream of fomenting a nationalist revolution in South Korea. Another is that it can earn hard currency by selling these materials at a high price to one or two licensed distributors, who in turn sell them to research libraries abroad. Perhaps most importantly, the regime rightly assumes that almost no one hostile to the DPRK will ever bother to look at these materials. (I can count on one hand the times I ever saw a Western visitor take a North Korean book from the Resource Center's shelves.) Finally, and unfortunately, the more sensitive content is kept out of mass-produced, "hard copy" propaganda and confined to outlets intended exclusively for domestic eyes and ears. A current example is the on-again, off-again glorification of Kim Jong Il's putative successor Kim Jong Ûn, a mainly oral campaign carried out at party lectures, factory assemblies and the like, and through unprepossessing posters hung in display cases far from tourist sites. Fortunately a sharp-eyed Taiwanese business traveler managed to photograph one of these posters, thus affording the outside world some insight into the nature of this budding personality cult. Regardless of whether Kim Jong Ûn actually ends up taking power, I regret not having been able to include more about his myth in these pages.

***

This book is divided into two parts. The first recounts the historical development of the official culture, starting with its origins in colonial Korea. In the second part I will discuss each of the Text's main myths in turn, from those of the Korean child race and its motherly leaders to the myth of the "Yankee colony" to the south. Each chapter in part two contains an italicized section in which I take the liberty of condensing the relevant myth to a page or two, telling it sans excursions and in strict chronological order — admittedly, a very un-Korean thing to do. This way the reader can check the main assertions of anti-American propaganda, say, without necessarily having to bother with my ensuing eval‎uation of it. (These sections were written with a view to the many people who have complained to me about the unreadable diffuseness and repetitiveness of the few North Korean books available in English.) Although I have written these sections in a prose meant to replicate the effusiveness of the original propaganda, I do not want anyone mistaking them for direct quotes; hence the italics.

In closing, let me make perfectly clear that in this book (if not in my last book on North Korean culture) I am more interested in thematic content than aesthetic form. I also focus more on propaganda that sheds light on North Korea's relationship to the outside world than on propaganda regarding, say, the land reclamation project. If this constitutes "essentializing," to use a trendy pejorative, so be it. Anyone interested in a discussion of the DPRK's literature as literature, or art as art, is advised to look elsewhere. So too are readers who want to know how the propaganda apparatus is organized, how the broadcast networks operate, and so on.

From “The Cleanest Race,” by B. R. Myers. Excerpted with permission of Melville House, the publisher.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/books/excerpt-cleanest-race.html?pagewanted=all

Books of The Times

North Korea Keeps Hiding, and Fascinating

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By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: January 26, 2010

Computers are rare in North Korea, and the Internet, for most of its citizens, is little more than a whispered rumor. It’s probable, in fact, that only one person surfs the Web in North Korea without someone monitoring every click: Kim Jong-il, that authoritarian regime’s supreme leader.

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Courtesy of Eric Lafforgue

A North Korean poster extolls the country's “military first” policy.

NOTHING TO ENVY

Ordinary Lives in North Korea

By Barbara Demick

Illustrated. 314 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $26.

THE HIDDEN PEOPLE OF NORTH KOREA

Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

By Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh

Illustrated. 300 pages. Rowman & Littlefield. $39.95.

THE CLEANEST RACE

How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters

By B. R. Myers

Illustrated. 200 pages. Melville House. $24.95.

Related

Excerpt: ‘Nothing to Envy’ (January 27, 2010)

Excerpt: ‘The Hidden People of North Korea’ (January 27, 2010)

Times Topics: North Korea

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Courtesy of Eric Lafforgue

A detail of a painting that shows ubiquitous iconography: Kim Il-sung carries Kim Jong-il as his wife, Kim Jong Suk, looks on.

When he’s online, and not lurking on sites devoted to his obsessions (movies, fancy food, young women, nuclear weapons), Mr. Kim must sometimes see what his country looks like, to the rest of the world, in those haunting satellite photographs of the Far East at night.

You’ve probably seen them. The countries near North Korea — Japan, South Korea, China — are ablaze with splotches and pinpricks of light, with beaming civilization. But North Korea, a country nearly the size of England, home to some 23 million people, is a black hole, an ocean of dark. Barbara Demick, a foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, begins her excellent new book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,” by poring over these satellite images. She’s shocked by them, and moved. “North Korea is not an undeveloped country,” she observes. “It is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.”

“Nothing to Envy” is one of three provocative new books about North Korea, from writers who are committed to parsing the slivers of light that escape this enigmatic and often baffling place. The others are “The Hidden People of North Korea,” by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, and “The Cleanest Race,” by B. R. Myers.

North Korea is not an easy country to observe. Few foreign journalists are allowed in, and then only with official minders and strictly limited itineraries. To get a sense of how ordinary citizens live, writers must rely primarily on the accounts of defectors.

If we have trouble seeing North Koreans plainly, they cannot see us at all. Telephone use is severely restricted. (Even the telephone book is a classified document marked “secret.”) Postal service is spotty. There is essentially no e-mail. Television and radios receive only approved channels. The country’s citizens are force-fed a steady, numbing diet of state propaganda devoted to sustaining the personality cult of Kim Jong-il and savaging all things American.

How are North Koreans taught to think about us? Well, here’s one indication. Children learn a ditty called “Shoot the Yankee Bastards” in music class. One verse goes:

Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.

(The truly poignant words here are “with my own hands.”)

Ms. Demick’s book is a lovely work of narrative nonfiction, one that follows the lives of six ordinary North Koreans, including a female doctor, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan. It’s a book that offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.

The people Ms. Demick observes lived, before their defections, in northeastern North Korea, far from the country’s tidy, Potemkin village-like capital, Pyongyang. The existences she describes sound brutal: there is often not enough food; citizens work long days that can be followed by hours of ideological training at night; spying on one’s neighbors is a national pastime; a nonpatriotic comment, especially an anti-Kim Jong-il wisecrack, can have you sent to a gulag for life, if not executed.

Ms. Demick writes especially well about the difficult lives of those who do manage to defect. Not only are they bewildered by life outside of North Korea, and have to be taught to do things like use an A.T.M., but they also live with deep shame and guilt, knowing that relatives left behind have probably been sent to prison as punishment for their escape.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book, “The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom,” is wonkier than Ms. Demick’s and less reader-friendly, but it covers more ground. The authors are married (Ms. Oh’s parents were North Koreans who fled to South Korea); he is an independent consultant specializing in North Korean affairs, and she is on the research staff of the Institute for Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Va.

Courtesy of Eric Lafforgue

Guards in Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, one of the most militarized countries on earth.

Their book is based on more than 200 interviews with defectors, and it paints a picture of a restless populace, increasingly dubious about the official propaganda. “It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the people support Kim Jong-il,” they write. “Rather, it does not occur to them to oppose him.” North Koreans are too busy trying to survive, and too preoccupied by the tensions of the supposed mighty conflict with America, to be able to think about much else.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s portrait of Mr. Kim’s hyper-sybaritic lifestyle is detailed and devastating. He may look like a man of the people, they write, with his tan slacks, zippered jackets and stout build that make him resemble Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in “The Honeymooners.” But they chronicle his obsession with the latest electronics, the “pleasure teams” of girls he keeps handy, the Bordeaux wine he has flown in. While many of his people starve, they write, Mr. Kim “is such a connoisseur that, according to his former chef, every grain of rice destined for his dinner table is inspected for quality and shape.”

The authors are aware that Mr. Kim’s anti-American paranoia isn’t baseless. The leader of a different country in George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” they note, was captured and later hanged.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book concludes with pointed policy recommendations. They think it is nearly hopeless to negotiate with Mr. Kim and suspect that “nonproliferation agreements with the regime will simply encourage it to brandish new threats in the future.” Instead of fixating on Korea’s weapons, the authors suggest bypassing the regime and reaching out to North Korea’s people, who sorely need humanitarian aid and “a new way of thinking about their government and their society.”

Mr. Myers, the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters,” is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and famously the author of “A Reader’s Manifesto,” a controversial and humorless broadside against the literary writers (Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy among them) whom he finds pretentious or obscure. Mr. Myers directs the international studies department at Dongseo University in South Korea.

He is a crisp, pushy writer who is at his best when on the attack, and his often counterintuitive new book attempts a psychological profile of Kim Jong-il and his regime. Mr. Myers has pored through mountains of North Korean propaganda — from nightly news reports and newspapers to war movies, comics, wall posters and dictionaries — and he argues that the West is misreading the country’s core beliefs.

He explains that North Korea’s dominant worldview is “far removed” from the Communism, Confucianism and official “show-window” ideologies that Westerners analyze. Instead, he argues, this worldview “can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.” His North Korea is guided by a “paranoid, race-based nationalism.”

Mr. Myers’s arguments are too wily and complex to be neatly summarized here, but he includes a fascinating analysis of Mr. Kim’s depiction as an essentially — and crucially — feminine military leader. His regime presents North Korea more as a motherland than a fatherland, Mr. Myers writes, and he cites official slogans about Mr. Kim like “We Cannot Live Away From His Breast.” The lack of a patriarchal authority figure, he says, “may also have helped the regime preserve stability by depriving people of a target to rebel against.”

Mr. Myers also cautions against the idea that the West can persuade North Korea to shed its nuclear weapons. Mr. Kim “cannot disarm and hope to stay in power,” he writes. At the same time, he notes, “blue jeans will not bring down this dictatorship.” Any signs of serious unrest, he observes, will encourage Mr. Kim to raise the level of the tension with the West, and possibly do something rash with his nuclear arsenal.

Kim Jong-il reportedly suffered a stroke in 2008 and has looked frail during his recent, and increasingly rare, public appearances. While the world speculates about his successor, almost certainly to be one of his sons, one of the lessons of these books is not to remove our eyes from the blinkered lives of the average North Korean.

“The Kim regime essentially holds its people hostage,” Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh write, and they are dismayed to note that “the United States is much more interested in the hostage taker’s weapons of mass destruction than in the fate of his hostages.”

North Koreans sometimes joke, Ms. Demick writes in “Nothing to Envy,” that they live like “frogs in the well.” It’s a line that sends you back to study those satellite images, and to contemplate those who dwell under Mr. Kim’s inky moral darkness.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/books/27book.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books