UN Report Compares North Korea

Great posts guys ,thanks.
Several interesting issues raised that I think go right to the heart of the problem, but warrant further investigation.
One that particularly interests me is the one just mentioned by notdrunk . What is holding this crazy puzzle together?
We have just witnessed the amazing turn around with Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, that came out of left field ,and is progressing more rapidly than any of us could have imagined
Can we hope for anything to untangle the mess in North Korea?
I'm going to investigate the Juche and Ten Great Principles and Bruce Cummings, fascinating stuff.

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Originally Posted by sukumvit boy

Great posts guys ,thanks.
Several interesting issues raised that I think go right to the heart of the problem, but warrant further investigation.
One that particularly interests me is the one just mentioned by notdrunk . What is holding this crazy puzzle together?
We have just witnessed the amazing turn around with Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, that came out of left field ,and is progressing more rapidly than any of us could have imagined
Can we hope for anything to untangle the mess in North Korea?
I'm going to investigate the Juche and Ten Great Principles and Bruce Cummings, fascinating stuff.

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It would be too crude to translate Juche as 'self-reliance' which is its core idea, cobbled together from Confucian ideas, but mostly a perversion of Stalin's version of 'Marxism-Leninism' justifying central planning and the guiding role of the party, the army and the leader. It is a bit more complex, and confusing too -on one level it sounds like Stalin's absurd 'Socialism in One Country', which Kim Il-Sung once called 'Socialism in our own Style'; on another level it borrowed from Mao/Maoism before references to Mao were expunged from the record as happens a lot in North Korea. There are two interesting discussions of Juche and the Ten Great Principles in the links. I think it is clear that the centrally planned economy doesn't work, but this simple fact has not yet had its desired impact on North Korea.

1. Paul French, North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula: A Modern History (2007, 2nd Edition)
scroll down to page 30 for the chapter on Juche.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=e...0korea&f=false

2. Article from Asian Perspectives Vol 24, no 1 (2000)
http://www2.law.columbia.edu/course_...105-Cheong.pdf

Many thanks for the great links. There seems to be precious little good reading about North Korea available for someone an outside of diplomatic / academic circles.
I subscribe to the New Yorker and about 3 years ago there was an excellent article about the privation of day- to- day life in NK.
Never forget the descriptions of people starving and dying in the streets . Children being fed' mud cookies' to slake their hunger pangs. Shared the article with two SK colleagues , even they were amazed. I'll try to find it.

"The Good Cook" by Barbara Demick , The New Yorker ,Nov 2, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...fa_fact_demick

Juche. Ever notice that whenever a country is named The Democratic Republic of ...
its usually a good idea to run like hell!
Juche - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia