North Korea: State of Paranoia

"This is an excellent introduction to the history and politics of North Korea, including its complex relations with South Korea, Japan and the USA, and provides a good general overview of where the regime is coming from, and what it might do next. I am always interested in the perspectives of foreigners writing about North Korea, although sometimes I feel it’s not always correct. They can only present the theory on the surface, not the inner understanding. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . My grandfather was from the elite, and had many books by Marx and Lenin, which was uncommon at the time. But when Kim Jong-il started to gain power in the 1970s, our ‘Dear Leader’ removed most of the books and had them burned. In South Korea, I saw a movie about Nazi Germany when they were burning the books. That reminded me of what Kim Jong-il did. His regime then replaced most of the books with multi-volume Kim Il-sung memoirs. “Swathes of the population are still starving, undernourished and malnourished” We did have some detective and spy novels though, about North Korean spies in South Korea. There were a few foreign books, such as The Count of Monte Cristo , but often they had pages that were stuck together with glue. We wondered what could be inside. We did have some foreign films as well, but only from China and India. And it was very obvious when something had been cut, like a kissing scene. When I first went to China, there weren’t many books in Korean. But I found a book about marshmallows, and I read it over and over. I had no idea what a marshmallow was, and I had never eaten one. I ate my first marshmallow in 2013, and now whenever I see a marshmallow it reminds me of that book. I also read a lot of history, and recently I’ve been reading about the re-unification of East and West Germany, to compare it to the situation in Korea. Of course. Nobody expected the German reunification to happen when it did. Many experts have been expecting re-unification between North and South Korea for some time, yet our peninsula remains divided. Who knows? It will be very difficult, but the German example has inspired me. Sometimes I like to imagine that it is happening in my country instead, and I hope that day will come."