Rogue Regime: Kim Jong il and the Looming Threat of North Korea by Jasper Becker

From the Publisher

What happens when a dictator wins absolute power and isolates a nation from the outside world? In a nightmare of political theory stretched to madness and come to life, North Korea's Kim Jong Il made himself into a living god, surrounded by lies and flattery and beyond criticism. As over two million of his subjects starved to death, Kim Jong Il roamed between palaces staffed by beautiful girls and stocked with expensive international delicacies. Outside, the steel mills shut down, the trains stopped running, the power went out, and the hospitals ran out of medicine. When the population threatened to revolt, Kim imposed a reign of terror, deceived the United Nations, and plundered the country's dwindling resources to become a nuclear power. Now this tiny bankrupt nation is using her nuclear capability to blackmail the United States.
Veteran correspondent Jasper Becker takes us inside one of the most secretive countries in the world, exposing the internal chaos, blind faith, rampant corruption, and terrifying cruelty of its rulers. Becker details the vain efforts to change North Korea by actors inside and outside the country and the dangers this highly volatile country continues to pose. This unique land, ruled by one family's megalomania and paranoia, seems destined to survive and linger on, a menace to its own people and to the rest of the world. But should the nations of the world allow this regime to survive? That's the question with which this book concludes.

The New York Times - William Grimes

Rogue Regime is not for the faint-hearted. Mr. Becker takes an unblinking look at a dark regime that has made North Korea an international pariah, has elevated its rulers to the status of gods, and through torture and indoctrination reduced its subjects to virtual slaves, three million of whom, according to some estimates, perished during famines in the late 1980's. Mr. Becker puts it harshly: "North Korea can best be compared to a large concentration camp in which the guards and their Gestapo officers are able to live as before but the inmates are slowly being worked to death."

Publishers Weekly

One of the few reporters to have firsthand experience of North Korea, veteran Asian correspondent Becker (Hungry Ghosts) adds more nuance to a familiar story that the threat of nuclear arms, as well as the world's fifth largest standing army, are part of an attempt to force the rest of the globe to cater to a mad leader's megalomaniacal world. Becker presents a well-fed, unprepossessing Kim Jong Il running North Korea with a cult of personality unmatched in contemporary history, reducing his population to starving anonymous actors in a bizarre personal psychodrama, where "even the mere idea of internal opposition to Kim's rule is regarded as preposterous." Images of this grim state of affairs-which goes well beyond the Orwellian into the Kafkaesque-have been smuggled out over the past few years; how they came to be is described with rare concision by Becker: the Kim dynasty's poisonous and potent blend of Stalinist doctrine and Korean absolutism found its catalysts, he argues, in the varying ambitions of Japan, China and the U.S. While stopping short of calling for immediate regime change, Becker minces no words in warning that we may now have no way out of a monstrous situation. 16 b&w photos not seen by PW. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

"To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rogue states are rogue states in their own way, but North Korea is the only one to present multiple dangers and on a massive scale." So writes foreign correspondent Becker (The Chinese, 2000, etc.), who reveals that at least one node on the so-called Axis of Evil is a nasty and dangerous place indeed. This isn't news to readers who have followed the curious fortunes of the Kim dynasty, now represented by the despotic Kim Jong Il. Those who haven't given the world's premier rogue nation much thought-apparently including much of the intelligence community-will, however, find Becker's depiction shocking. During a long-lasting famine in the 1990s, for instance, when many North Koreans attempted to sell their children so the kids could be fed, and others killed and ate their compatriots, Kim feasted, drank imported champagne and moved from one palace to another in a fleet of Mercedes limousines. Having raised the cult of personality to hitherto unknown extremes, he demanded absolute obeisance from his people, and anyone who displeased him wound up dead or enslaved. When a party-loyal economist suggested that the Chinese had plenty to eat because peasants worked their own plots rather than collective land, "the secret police came knocking on his door." Stalin never lived so well, and, even though Becker credits Kim with one or two useful if sometimes weird reforms, this eye-opening account makes it abundantly clear that the dictator needs to "be held personally accountable for his deeds at an international tribunal." How that will happen is anyone's guess, though Becker writes that many in the Bush administration advocate military intervention to unseat Kim, perhapsat the risk of North Korea's lobbing nuclear warheads at the U.S. mainland. More geopolitically engaged, but also less titillating, than Bradley K. Martin's Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (2004). But of much interest to readers who wonder where the next war will be fought.

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