Starting here in this little house and throughout the rest of the next forty years, I had to adapt to live in a place that I came to think of as another planet. Years later, in fact, I would often tell my daughters, “We are not in the world. This is not the real world.”
This is both correct and incorrect:
If you want to know North Korea, you have to understand its government has systematically alienated it and isolated it from the 
rest of the world to an unimaginable extent for the past 60+ years.
It is not of this world – but sadly – it is in this world.
The book is a must read: (Amazon page)
It should be read in tandem with Aquariums of Pyongyang.
Both books give an intimate description of what a demented Disney World Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il created. Both books are firsthand accounts of just how screwed up and unimaginable life is in this nation.
Both are highly readable – written in an oral storytelling tradition common to autobiographies that are written by an author through detailed, exhaustive conversations with the person it is about.
The Reluctant Communist is about an American soldier stationed in South Korea who defected to the North during the period of the Vietnam War – then – spent the next 40 years of his life suffering in that twisted society.
While in NK, he eventually married a Japanese woman – who had been kidnapped in Japan by North Korean covert operatives so she could teach North Korean spies the Japanese language and customs. She was just one of a handful of people NK has kidnapped for such purposes.
After several decades of hellish life in the North, Jenkins’s wife was allowed to return to Japan as a measure by Pyongyang to ease tension after it officially acknowledged the kidnapping program. (NK was on the verge of convincing Tokyo to give it massive economic aid as part of “normalizing” relations when the acknowledgment unexpectedly exploded in Japanese society making such economic aid politically impossible for the ruling party in Japan.)
Robert Jenkins himself was allowed to leave the North, as were other spouses and family members of the once-abducted Japanese, when Japan and world opinion continued to press North Korea on the issue.
That allowed Jenkins to tell his story in full. And it is a story you will never forget.
You have to read it to understand the depth of insanity that is North Korea…
Our Holocaust Now
I believe the people in democratic societies around the world today truly believe that – if they had been in power as the main generation during the worst tragedies in human history — the time of Stalin’s Purges or Mao’s Great Leap Forward or Pol Pot’s Killing Fields or Hitler’s Holocaust —- that they would have “done something” instead of “letting” it happen.
Our democracies do still pay much tribute to the “lessons” of Hitler’s Holocaust, but have we really learned…???
In the 1990s, North Korea’s failed system brought about a a massive famine in which a large chunk of the North Korean people starved to death — and the government refused to allow effective relief through global aid groups and the UN – and instead used the famine to weed out elements of the society it deemed undesirable.
North Korea also continues to this day to run numerous large scale concentration camps the size of some notable American cities where citizens it deems it cannot trust are systematically brutalized by a hellish life we can’t even imagine.
We do have something going on today that warrants being called a “holocaust” – and it has been going on now for over 60 years.
What are we currently doing to bring it to an end?
…very, very little. Next to nothing…
And certainly virtually nothing if you focus on results…
common to autobiographies that result from a professional author spending countless hours interviewing the person the book is about.
