Book Review: Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader – Michael Breen
Ford, G. (2012). Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader by Michael Breen, Asian Review of Books, 10 March.
Michael Breen’s book is subtitled, “Who he is, What he wants, What we do about him” which in the circumstances of his protagonist’s death in North Korea sometime in the second week of December last year suggests, to put it mildly, that the book has been rather spectacularly overtaken by events. After all, the New Leader Kim Jong-Un merits precisely two mentions in the index. So in the current context, this is history that is rapidly receding into the past. Maybe that’s not so bad. Kim Jong-il is in fact a revised and updated edition of a book initially published in 2004, littered with the evidence of an over-hasty revision.
Michael Breen is a South Korean Management Consultant with a distinctly neo-conservative bent who has lived in Seoul for thirty years and writes regular commentaries about both ends of the divided Peninsula. There is some good writing in the middle sections of the book dealing with Korea’s post-1945 history although with perspectives that would be politically contentious even in Obama’s Washington. For example, the U.S. Administration, unlike the author, refuses to consider North Korea a Nuclear Weapons State.
This aside, the book suffers from three major problems. The first is the slipshod editing. In Chapter three, a paragraph—presumably left over from 2004—explains that Southern perceptions of the North are flawed because South Koreans have never been allowed to visit the North, while Chapter 11 has a whole section on the almost two million South Koreans who have travelled to Mount Kumgang in the North as tourists. This tourist complex with hotels, golf courses and shops—you could even pay with American Express—in the North was opened as part of the implementation of President Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy” (for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) and drove the South’s relations with the North for nearly a decade. Breen fails to mention it.
Second, the book is padded out with speculation, exaggeration and pure fantasy. There are literally pages of uncorroborated quotes. Even footnotes meant to be “academic” aid and abet. A report, for example, that at the Mass Rally in October 1945 when Kim Il Sung was introduced to the population of Pyongyang that the crowd yelled abuse is footnoted with an eyewitness who “did not recall heckling”. The same is true of “anecdotes” of Kim Jong Il’s schooling and upbringing with an allegation that he killed his younger brother when he was five, presented as “one North Korean defector has suggested that Jong-il pushed him in and laughed as his brother struggled and drowned, but doesn’t reveal how he came by this explosive information.”
Equally, while no one suggests that North Korea’s human rights record is other than grim—although they did commence a Human Rights Dialogue with the European Union in 2002 that lasted nearly three years—Breen suspends his critical faculties in quoting page after page of propoganda text from Christian fundamentalists whose plea to the West during the famine in the late 1990s was send bibles, not rice.
Third, and last, Breen either doesn’t know or doesn’t tell his readers some of the more inconvenient truths about the North. At the mundane level, for Breen the American spy ship “Pueblo”, captured by the North Koreans in 1968, is still moored off Wonsan on the northeast coast; but any foreign visitor to Pyongyang sees it moored on the banks of the Taedong river. All very embarrassing for the U.S., as it was sailed around the Peninsula through international waters a decade ago and American intelligence failed to spot it. More important, he fails to mention that the disputed maritime border between North and South and Seoul’s arbitary Northern Limit Line is neither recognised by the U.S., nor conforms with U.N. rules on maritime boundaries. It was here, when the South’s Navy was conducting live-firing exercises into the disputed waters, that the shelling of the fortress island of Yeonpyong occurred after the North called the South on the hotline and ask them to desist and were refused.
On balance, I felt that Breen’s Kim Jong- il does more to obscure than enlighten, but I guess the feelings are mutual. At the end of the book, Breen lists around eighty “excellent” books that have come out since 2004 on North Korea and I’m afraid I don’t make the cut. Nevertheless, he’s got a lot of them right. If you do find yourself with Kim Jong-il, skip the rest and just browse the “Recommended Reading”.