Philobiblon

Bruce Cumings North Korea presents a compelling picture of the Stalinist state, as I said yesterday, but it also presents a revealing, and frequently terrifying, picture of the world’s rogue superpower.

Cumings says: “It was the Korean War, not Greece or Turkey or the Marshall Plan or Vietnam, that inaugurated historically unprecedented defense budgets (the budget quadrupled from June to December 1950, from $13 billion to $54 billion, or more than $500 billion in current dollars) and built the national security state at home and a far-flung archipelago of military base abroad, that transformed a limited containment doctrine into a global crusade, and that ignited McCarthyism just as it seemed to ” fizzle, thereby giving the Cold War its long run. (p. 8)

Now you might say that Cumings is making special pleading for his pet subject, but that budget figure is telling.

Eight years after that budget jump, Cuming says, the US brought nukes to South Korea “in spite of the 1953 armistice agreement that prohibited the introduction of qualitatively new weaponry … primarily to stabilize the volatile civil war” (to stop the South attacking the North).

If you suffer from nightmares you might not want to read the next bit …

There were 280mm nuclear cannons and “Honest John nuclear-tipped missiles” and a year later air-borne “Matador cruise missiles”. Later atomic demolition mines, which weighed 60 pounds but had the same power as the Hiroshima bomb, were added. They were moved around in Jeeps, helicopters and carried in backpacks!!! “That one of them might stray across the DMZ during a training exercise … and give Pyongyang an atomic bomb was a constant possibility.”

“In January 1968 the North Koreans seized the American spy ship Pueblo, capturing the crew and keeping it in prison for 11 months. The initial reaction of decision makers was to drop a nuclear weapon on Pyongyang.”! (p. 53)

Since the weapons were so close to the North, there was a “use it or lose it” mentality. “For decades … the US planned to use tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons in the very early stages of a new Korean conflict, the usual scenario being … within one hour of the outbreak of war”. (p.54)

So we should perhaps most thank Kim Il Sung for the fact there has not been any use of nuclear weapons since WW2. (And you can understand why the regime was, and is, so keen to have nukes of its own.)

But there is credit on the US side – in 1991 President Bush (the older – dread to think what the younger might do with these at hand) “announced that he was withdrawing all tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons on a worldwide basis, destroying them or putting them into storage”. (p.55) But as Cumings says, from the NK view, US submarines can still sail right up to their coast.

Cumings sums up the North as “a small, Third World, postcolonial nation that has been gravely wounded, first by 40 years of Japanese colonialism and then by another 60 years of national division and war, and that is deeply insecure, threatened by the world around it”. (p.151)

It is, for me, a convincing portrait.

* The British Library believes that by 2020, 90 per cent of publications will be available digitally, and only 50 per cent in print. That’s a very different world and, I think, an exciting one. (It made me think of the first time I found an academic journal on a CD – you could search the whole text, for any word: it was astounding, and yes I know I’m dating myself!)

I was reading somewhere about people who have two (or more) computers running on their desk at the one time. I’ve done it a few times at work when things were really desperate, and I’m starting to think that would be very handy at home. (Luxury, yes, but it would I think improve your productivity. I know you can flick between screens with one computer, but it is not quite the same as looking at things in parallel.)

* This sounds, to this militarily inexpert view, a very informative analysis of the increasing sophistication of the Iraq insurgency by The Yorkshire Ranter. Then this Salon piece confirms the impression of increasing sophistication of the insurgency, in its account of the attack that filled three female Marines. Its analysis of the role of women in the US military in Iraq is hardly deep, but I thought one quote from a male marine aged 20 on his third tour of duty is interesting in suggesting genuine grass-roots acceptance of the women’s involvement in the front line.

More on the technological notes: I see that Salon is providing Technorati links to blogs that are linking to its articles: now that’s what I call convergence.

* Japundit is exploring the (contradictory) accounts of the past of female sumo wrestling, and plans for its revival. (Via the excellent new History Carnvial XI on Siris.)

* The Telegraph reviews what sounds like two fascinating books on the fall of the Roman Empire. I’m particularly taken with the exploration of what happened after The End.

PS. I have to add, you REALLY don’t miss this commentary on Ascot hats. If you don’t laugh, you should check to see if you have a pulse.

I promised some time ago a post on North Korea, or rather on Bruce Cuming’s book of that title, and finally here it is.

First, a digression. I went to North Korea in 1998 – there’s an article I wrote about the trip for the Guardian Weekly here – and it was, and no doubt still is, the most fascinating, if spooky, place. I doubt I’ll ever forget the television news, with the presenters’ frenzied enthusiasm, or the way in which I became invisible in the streets of Pyongyang, even the simplest of eye contact seeming to be forbidden, or perhaps too frightening, for the inhabitants.

Cumings is no apologist for the regime – he describes Kim Il Sung at age 68 – “he was a cross between Marlon Brando playing a big oil mogul in a film called The Formula, walking with feet splayed to handle a potbelly and hands amidriff thus to pat the tummy, combined with the big head on narrow shoulders, and the blank, guttural delivery of Henry Kissinger”. (p. 148)

Yet he makes the obvious, but often missed, point, that the regime can’t be quite so dysfunctional as American and South Korean propaganda would suggest, since if it were, it could not have survived.

He says, yes there probably are as Amnesty International reports, 100,000 political prisoners. “Does this system promote human freedom? Not from any liberal’s standpoint. But from a Korean standpoint, where freedom is also defined as an independent stance against foreign predator – freedom for the Korean nation — here, the vitriolic judgments do not flow so easily. This is a cardinal virtue among a people that has preserved its integrity and continuity in the same place since the early Christian era.” (p. 151)

So what is Kim Jong Il really like? “… not the playboy, womanizer, drunk, and mentally deranged fanatic ‘Dr Evil’ of our press. He is a homebody who doesn’t socialize much, doesn’t drink much, and works at home in his pajamas, scribbling marginal comments on the endless reams of documents brought to him in gray briefcases by his aides … He is prudish and shy, and like most Korean fathers, hopelessly devoted to his son and the other children in his household – vastly preferring to sequester himself with them, rather than preside over the public extravaganzas that amaze visitors to the DPRK. … The Dear Leader has tired of all the absurd hero worship, too; he told a visitor, ‘All that is bogus. It’s all just pretence.'” (p. 163)

As for what being an “ordinary” North Korean might be like, Cumings quotes Anthony Namkung, “who attended an evangelical Christian missionary school: ‘It helps in understanding North Korea if you have lived in a fundamental Christian community … Just like the North Koreans, we believed in the absolute purity of our doctrine. We focused inward and didn’t want to be tainted by the outside world.'” (p. 173)

It seems a believable portrait to me.

Yet, strong though this is, the account of North Korea is not the best part of this book. Its first part focuses on America’s relationship with Korea and its approach to the Korean war – extremely revealing and frightening.

But other matters call, to that tomorrow …

Literary types like to dismiss genre fiction as pure formula, yet judging by the number of published novels that are near- (or all too frequently far-) misses, a detective novel is as difficult to write well as any other.

I was musing on this after reading C.J. Sansom’s Dark Fire, the second in what looks likely to be a long series featuring a hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, who’s navigating the hazardous political/religious waters of the later years of Henry VIII’s reign with Cromwell (no the other one) as his patron.

Having enjoyed the first in the series, Dissolution, I was keen to pick up this one, but finished it feeling vaguely dissatisfied (although I did read it through in one session, so it was good enough).

Analysing why, I decided that Sansom has got it 75 per cent right. The characters are excellent – Matthew is an interesting, complex central figure, with believable sensitivities about his hunchback and a plausible back story, and there are colourful minor characters, particularly the apothecary Moor who is his best friend and, in this second book, an important character.

The historical setting is, so far as I can tell, well researched, and it only occasionally intrudes in a way that suggests the author couldn’t resist including this detail, without literary reason.

The plots too fairly rolic along, in a way that demands you keep reading, and have the sort of neatness and fairness that fiction demands and real life almost never delivers. (So in Dark Fire an orphan girl who is accused of murder is kept safe and finally, rightly freed, when anyone who knows anything about “justice” of the time knows she wouldn’t have had a hope. But fair enough: our 21st-century minds demand right triumph, in a way that would have been seen as hopelessly naive in the 16th century.)

What isn’t right is the language, and the detail of the writing. “Lay off the weather!” I feel like yelling at Sansom at regular intervals. And he hasn’t really got the “show not tell” rule. e.g. in Dissolution: “As I passed down Ludgate Hill, I noticed a stall brimming with apples and pears and, feeling hungry, dismounted to buy some.”. Drop the “feeling hungry”, please. Why else would you?

Overall Sansom does a pretty good job of avoiding anachronism, while using basically modern language (I’m not a great fan of the “thee, thou” school of historical writing – you can’t write “in period” because we wouldn’t understand it, and using such dressing is like those home improvement shows that turn a suburban dining room into a medieval hall with a bit of plywood and paint.)

But it is funny how odd words grate: Matthew refers sometimes to his “condition”, sometimes others refer to him as a “cripple”, both of which seem fair enough, but sometimes he is thinking of his “disability” – I’m not sure exactly why, but this just seems too modern a word.

Reading such fiction makes you realise how little we really know about the details of historical life. I’d question, although I can’t cite sources why, whether Matthew and his sidekick in the first novel would really have changed into nightshirts to sleep (which becomes significant in the plot) – surely, particularly when staying at a rough country inn, they would have slept in their day clothes.

Then Matthew in Dark Fire is forever saddling his horse to ride a mile or so across London. I think of Pepys, rather later of course, but he used to walk down to Rochester, and all across London. Given the difficulty of finding somewhere for the horse at the other end would not Matthew have walked?

Still, will I buy the next in the series? Probably.

My name using Egyptian Hieroglyphs!

Script by

Prompted by the fact that I’m about to throw out the T-shirt that I got embroidered with my name on it in Egypt … yes, I know, the things you do when travelling that you wouldn’t dream of normally. (And the odd thing is, the two versions are almost identical – when they could have embroidered anything on the T-shirt and I wouldn’t have known the difference.)

(Via Liberty Street.)