North Korean Apologist Bruce Cumings

Leaders dear and great is a postive review of Kim Jong-Il: North Korea's Dear Leader by Michael Breen. It begins with an examination of the North:

"No one who has visited North Korea is likely ever to forget the experience. It is an encounter with political evil in its most absolute and uncompromising guise. The inhabitants of the country are not, of course, themselves evil; but they are caught up in a regime in which everything that is not forbidden is compulsory, and what is compulsory is monstrous. For once, it really is the system that is at fault."

Most intersting, however, is the reviewer's criticism of Bruce Cumings, author of North Korea: Another Country:

"Mr Breen, although not a scholar, is vastly more sensible and imaginative than Professor Bruce Cumings, a renowned historian at the University of Chicago, who has spent much of his career trying to prove what is not true, namely that the Korean War was started by the Americans and their allies in the South. Even he is now back-pedalling on this claim, but he still offers apologetics for the North [North Korea: Another Country, The New Press, £14.95]. He blames its paranoid isolation, its preposterous propaganda, and its virtual enslavement of its people on American conduct in the Korean war. This is the equivalent of blaming Nazism on the Treaty of Versailles.

"Like every useful idiot before him, Professor Cumings is much impressed by free child-care and kindergartens, much more so than by gulags and famines. There is no Potemkin village so transparently a fraud that he would not be taken in by it. Such matters as collective family responsibility, whereby entire families are severely punished for the political dissent of one of its members, do not impinge on his imagination - a faculty with which he is not much blessed."