Review of Jasper Becker’s Rogue Regime

The Marmot gets two tips of the hat today, the first for spotting this review of Jasper Becker’s book, Rogue Regime. Chris Beaumont has praised Becker’s previous book, Hungry Ghosts, about the Chinese famine during the Great Leap Forward years, which cost an estimated 30 million lives. Becker appears to be that rarest sort of person who possesses two traits seldom found in a single individual–compassion and the capacity for reason.

In northern China, Becker joined a Chinese shopkeeper to hunt for refugees, for whom the Chinese government was paying 60 [illegibile] bounties. They found one near a garbage dump. “As the shopkeeper fished around in his pocket for some plastic twine, a dirt-covered face scabrous with pellagra that looked about fifty years old shrunk back into the shadows of a hood made from grey sackcloth, like a medieval leper,” he writes. The woman, who was in fact only 28, had crossed the border in a final effort to avoid starvation. As a prisoner, she would be sent back to North Korea, to face possible torture or even death in a labor camp. Becker bargained with the shopkeeper for her freedom, ultimately paying about $24, “the market price for a North Korean life.”

Not a scene I suspect Selig Harrison has ever seen, nor cared to. Becker confronts the responsiblity for North Korea’s famine–which I tend to believe was engineered intentionally–and shows the regime’s nature clearly, without the distortion one can experience viewing it through the bottom of a champagne glass.

“After a succession of statesmen–Jiang Zemin, Vladimir Putin, Kim Dae Jung, Sweden’s Goran Persson, Madeleine Albright–have returned home to tell us how rational, well informed, witty, charming, and deeply popular Kim Jong Il is, President Bush’s judgement that Kim is loathsome seems the only honest and truthful one,” Becker writes. He measures Kim’s odiousness not just in nuclear weapons but in corpses. Kim and his father, Kim Il Sung, are responsible for the deaths of millions of North Koreans, he estimates, including as many as 1 million political prisoners and 3 million in a 1990s famine driven by Kim’s failed policies, which Becker calls “an unparalleled and monstrous crime.”

Simplicity can be a blessed thing when nuance only serves to crowd out what should be obvious. Becker goes on to conclude:

The only way to achieve any meaningful change, Becker asserts, is to remove Kim from power. “With the right political will,” he writes, “the world could quickly agree on remedies to disarm a criminal state.”

It might take a lot of pressure on China’s currency and Korea’s auto imports and defense needs to get them to “agree,” but we have plenty of tools to persuade others to cooperate with us. The humanitarian issues involved here are as under-publicized as any since 1942. Making public issues of them could create enormous pressure for action, as they did in Haiti and Bosnia before.

One thing is certain: Jasper Becker’s book is on my summer reading list.