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Published in Yonsei Journal of International Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Summer 2015): 140-141. REVIEW: Blaine Harden, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom (New York: Viking, 2015); 304 pages; $27.95. In The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, Blaine Harden, the famed author of Escape from Camp 14, recounts the first years of the North Korean state through the experiences of Kim Il Sung and No Kum Sok. The stories of the former, the founder of the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (DPRK) and the latter, a North Korean fighter pilot-turned-defector, remind us of the diverse individuals who sought to navigate the DPRK’s first tumultuous years. As Kim triumphed in power struggles at the top and sought to remake North Korea in his own image, No, whose father had worked for the Japanese before August 1945, survived at the bottom by praising communism until he could escape to South Korea...
This article discusses the ever-growing body of English language memoirs by North Korean defectors, including popular works like The Aquariums of Pyongyang, Dear Leader, The Girl With Seven Names, and a number of other publications that have appeared in print recently. In discussing these books, it argues that the stories of North Korean defectors represent a form of soft power that is playing an important role in shaping how the American public, and the international community at large, views North Korea. It particularly emphasizes the ability of North Koreans to shape the future of the DPRK from beyond its borders and reminds readers that the fate of Kim Jong Un’s regime remains closely intertwined with the agency of its own people. KEY WORDS North Korea, DPRK, Defectors, Human rights, Memoirs, Shin Dong-hyuk, Lee Hyeon-seo, Kim Yong, Jang Jin-sung, Kim Eun-sun, Kang Chol-hwan, Blaine Harden, Park Yeon-mi, No Kum-sok, Charles Robert Jenkins, Kang Hyok, Joseph Kim Website: http://inss.re.kr/eng/eng.htm
JAS: Journal of Asian Studies
Review of Blaine Harden's 'The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom"2015 •
Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press
Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953-19642005 •
North Korea Caught in Time: Images of War and Reconstruction, co-authored by Chris Springer (Reading, U.K.: Garnet Publishing)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in North Korea: The Forgotten Side of a Not-So-Forgotten War2010 •
On the basis of Hungarian archival documents, the essay describes how the North Korean population was affected by the calamities of the Korean War (carpet bombing, foreign occupation, political repression, famine, and epidemic diseases), how the North Korean leadership reacted to these problems, and how ordinary citizens tried to survive the war and the famine.
Van den Bosch, J., "Irreversible Regime Transitions: The Impact of Hereditary Succession and Personalist Rule in North Korea," in: The Korean Peninsula Unification Trajectories: Insights from Poland and Germany, Warsaw, 2017, pp. 47-83.
Irreversible Regime Transitions: The Impact of Hereditary Succession and Personalist Rule in North Korea2017 •
This article takes a closer look at the internal evolution of the North Korean political system and how it has been subjugated to the personalist regime of the Kim family. The author argues that North Korea should no longer be perceived as a totalitarian regime since it is now a fully entrenched personal regime in the first place. The author investigates how this process of personalization took place in the institutional, ideological and mobilizational dimensions of the DPRK as well as the influence on its international relations (gatekeeping). Based on these insights the author provides some scenarios for endogenous transitions from this regime type and how hereditary succession and personalism affect its survival strategies..
Under Communism, Albania and North Korea rejected de-Stalinisation, clung to leader cults, and, after the acrimonious break between Moscow and Beijing, championed ‘self-reliance’. Often mentioned in passing, the Albanian!North Korean parallel has seldom been analysed. This article highlights three aspects that shaped the Communist regimes’ insecurity: the social dynamics of war and early threats; the challenge presented by de-Stalinisation in 1956; and the momentous Sino!Soviet split in the early 1960s. Like the boisterous language of Marxism-Leninism and the drive to engineer a non-capitalist society, insecurity was also built into the Communist international system. Clinging to Stalinist methods, then, was also a reflection of the self-destructive potential of calls for reforming the Communist system, which threatened to tear the Eastern bloc apart. Tirana and Pyongyang pursued different paths to ‘self-reliance’, yet they could not help speaking a similar language and facing similar problems. North Korea ultimately joined the Non-Aligned Movement but achieved little success in the Third World. The irony is that tiny, isolated Albania, which shunned the Movement, ultimately ended up non-aligned: violently critical of Moscow, Beijing, and Washington, and distrustful of practically everyone else.
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The NK News Study Guide, Part 5: The Idea Called Juche2013 •