Review: Offering red pill about North Korea, new book instead jettisons truth
While aiming to humanize North Koreans, Felix Abt’s latest presents misleading critiques of Western narratives
David Tizzard March 1, 2022
Review: Offering red pill about North Korea, new book instead jettisons truth
The stated aim of “A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves and Nuclear Bombs?” (2022) is to help the reader discover how much the mainstream media and pundits have misled them about the true nature of North Korea. The basis for these claims is the seven years that the author, Felix Abt, spent living and working in the country as the CEO of PyongSu pharmaceutical company until 2009.
These experiences, the author asserts, have helped him see the dangerous disparity between life inside the country and its portrayal in Western media outlets. He alone sees this truth. Effectively, this is the reader’s chance to be red-pilled about Pyongyang.
Bruce Cumings, Michael Pembroke and to a lesser extent Theodore Jun Yoo have all made valuable contributions to this approach. Their disparate writings do an excellent job of highlighting the culpability of the West for various injustices against Koreans and also present an at times sympathetic view of the DPRK. There is room for such views in both academia and mainstream media, particularly when presented professionally and backed up by genuine research and good faith.
However, “A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves and Nuclear Bombs?” does not succeed on these counts.
Does the author write with an agenda? Consider one of the first arguments the reader encounters: “Economic sanctions against North Korea,” the author laments, “began on June 28, 1950 with a total embargo on exports.” Academics debate the effectiveness of sanctions and their moral implications. But the author completely fails to mention that the sanctions were put in place because North Korea had just sent 75,000 troops across the border and invaded South Korea three days earlier.
That staggering lack of context, which can really only be understood as a willful omission of information to make an ideological point, characterizes the arguments that Abt presents throughout.
A parade to celebrate North Korea’s 70th founding anniversary in Pyongyang on Sept. 9, 2018. | Image: NK News
The author, for instance, talks continually of an “expanding middle class” and “growing marketization [that] has enabled people from all class backgrounds to set up small businesses of their own and bring greater prosperity to their families.” Readers could be forgiven for thinking they were reading about a Scandinavian state rather than North Korea.
Abt goes on to declare that conglomerates in North Korea are run by affable gentlemen, and that women hold various positions of power unlike in the more oppressive South Korea. He describes himself as a “handsome Prince making everything right” only to be stopped by the “evil witch of foreign-imposed sanctions.”
Most of the book’s single-page chapters follow a similar pattern. First, an image: Generally, a screenshot of a YouTube video, a cropped headline from a Western media outlet or a tweet. Then, in normally no more than 100 words, the author describes why the provided image is an example of the West’s deliberately negative framing of North Korea.
It’s certainly true that some media use exaggerated and orientalist language in their reporting on life in the DPRK. Many will have seen the sensationalist stories about death by dogs, 11 holes-in-one and so on. Such reporting is incredibly problematic and is not just restricted to tabloids and fringe websites.
But there is also a great deal of accurate, informed and balanced coverage of North Korea. In fact, it could be reasonably argued that the country has never been understood better.
Nevertheless, the author continually disparages serious academics and writers. He places the word “expert” in speech marks when referring to people such as Dr. Remco Breuker, a man whose knowledge and understanding of Korea is surely not questioned among scholars. Abt also spends a great deal of time contradicting the claims of award-winning author Barbara Demick, particularly in reference to her 2010 book “Nothing to Envy.”
These frequent and shallow attacks on respected writers on North Korea demonstrate the author’s interest in denigrating many of the field’s leading figures. However, one cannot escape the feeling that had Abt spent even half the time researching and writing his own work as he has attacking others, he would have achieved a great deal more.
North Koreans wait at a bus stop in Pyongyang on Oct. 1, 2016. While Abt’s book attempts to humanize North Koreans, this effort comes at the expense of the truth, David Tizzard writes. | Image: NK News
One can certainly sympathize with the author. He spent a great deal of time inside the country, made many friends and had a number of positive and rewarding experiences. Some of the photos Abt includes of North Korean people laughing, drinking and singing are marvelous. This book attempts to humanize North Koreans, depoliticize them and show them in the best possible light.
That is a laudable approach, but it should not come at the expense of truth. Both seasoned experts and relative newcomers to Korean Peninsula issues are unlikely to learn anything about North Korea in this book. Just as the author does not explain the Korean War, genuine explorations into DPRK history, politics, traditions or culture are all absent.
In that sense, the book fails. It does not provide any new or interesting information on the DPRK. It attacks Western media but not in a way that is insightful. The book might have served better as a series of tweets, as there will no doubt be people out there willing to embrace the bite-size partisan observations. But for anyone who wants to learn about North Korea, look elsewhere.
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A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves and Nuclear Bombs ?: An alternative account to the Western media's blinkered North Korea portrayal Kindle Edition
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Test your North Korea knowledge!
The author of the book "A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom" invites you to find out how much you have been misled and lied to about North Korea by the media, pundits and activists. He is happy to share insight and a more balanced view of the world’s most isolated, under-reported and misrepresented country.
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Publication date
February 15, 2022
Print length : 63 pages
Felix Abt
☆ Felix Abt has lived and worked as a senior executive on behalf of multinational groups and smaller enterprises in nine countries on three continents. He was one of the few foreign business people who lived and worked in North Korea - in Felix's case, for seven years!
☆ In North Korea he witnessed MANY FIRSTS that nobody would have expected from the world's most isolated, under-reported and misrepresented country:
The first fast food restaurant selling 'happy meals', the first café selling Western gourmet coffee, the first miniskirts and high heels, the first Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty bags, the legalization of markets and advertising, the first North Korean debit card (with which he went shopping), the first technocrats instead of party committees, running state-enterprises, a foodstuff company's first robot (made by ABB, a multinational group whose chief representative he was in Pyongyang), a multiplication of all sorts of small private business, a massive expansion of private slope farming, the emergence of a fast growing middle class and a drop in poverty, cosmetic surgery in the capital (even though it was illegal), people watching foreign movies and reading foreign books (despite censorship), the first business school (which he co-founded and ran), the first e-commerce (set up by North Korean painters and Felix Abt, selling their paintings around the globe), the first North Koreans dancing Rock 'n Roll (with him), the first foreign chamber of commerce (which he co-founded and chaired), the first North Korean enterprise (a pharmaceutical factory whose CEO he was) winning contracts in competitive bidding against foreign companies, the first software joint venture company exporting award-winning medical software (which he co-founded) and many more.
☆ All this and more you will find in his memoir "A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom"
☆ Visit the author's photo gallery showing a different, changing North Korea: http://northkoreacapitalist.tumblr.com
Re-visit it from time to time as more pictures will be added.
☆ Watch his video "North Korea out of the dark": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-35WjN42l9A
☆☆☆☆☆
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Lies, insinuations and distortions with no empathy for the suffering North Koreans!
ByThe Chollima Report
Mar 3, 2022
Author: Felix Abt is a Swiss Businessman and author who lived and conducted business in North Korea. His two books, “A Capitalist in North Korea” and a “A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves
and Nuclear Bombs?” have sought to refute myths about the country and its people.
David Tizzard, a Seoul-based academic, published a hit piece against me on NKnews.org, “reviewing” my new North Korea book “A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves and Nuclear Bombs?” . The following article seeks to respond to the criticism point by point using excerpts and replies:
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● “Abt declares that conglomerates in North Korea are run by affable gentlemen, and that women hold various positions of power unlike in the more oppressive South Korea.”
No, I didn’t! I knew other North Korean conglomerates who were not necessarily run by affable gentlemen. And where did I talk about the “more oppressive South Korea”?
● “He describes himself as a ‘handsome Prince making everything right only to be stopped by the ‘evil witch of foreign-imposed sanctions. ”
No, I didn’t! It was about the “fairy tale” PyongSu, not about me. Tizzard intentionally “misunderstood” it.
● “Abt disparages serious academics and writers such as Dr. Remco Brueker, a man whose knowledge and understanding of Korea is surely not questioned among scholars.”
Tizzard omits the fact that Breuker (not Brueker) is better known as a public figure and a political activist than as an outstanding Korea scholar. He successfully led a campaign against North Korean “forced labor”, pushing Western and other countries to deny work permits to the estimated 100,000 North Koreans who had jobs abroad. Finally, the UN banned all North Koreans from working abroad. Breuker’s claim of “slave labor” was rejected by another scholar, Andrei Lankov, and I took issue with Breuker’s campaign too in my book (under “Small Businesses Opened by Returning North Korean Expats”). Even though Breuker’s campaign greatly hurt North Korean workers and their families (rather than the regime), I did not disparage him for that.
Prof. Breuker also teamed up with Jang Jin-sung, a defector who claimed that he was Kim Jong Il’s favorite poet, but when ordinary defectors were asked about him, they were not aware of that. Breuker invited Jang to his Leiden University, Holland, as a guest lecturer in 2015. He also translated Jang’s book “Dear Leader” into Dutch. At one high-profile event, organized by Breuker at his university in 2014, Jang made his case in a public lecture why the DPRK would collapse and Kim Jong Un would be out of power within 5, maximum 7 years. 8 years later he is still in power. Jang also pushed the claim that the Organisation and Guidance Department (OGD) is North Korea’s real power center and Kim Jong Un its “puppet”. Breuker embraced and promoted that claim too, even though other academics remained skeptical. His friend Jang fell into disgrace when the man who called himself “North Korea’s poet laureate” was accused of being a rapist by a North Korean defector and another woman in South Korea.
● “Abt also spends a great deal of time contradicting the claims of award-winning author Barbara Demick, particularly in reference to her 2010 book ‘Nothing to Envy’. These frequent and shallow attacks on respected writers on North Korea demonstrate the author’s interest in denigrating many of the field’s leading figures.”
Tizzard’s characterization of my book sounds like the perfect character assassination: “misleading, unreliable, dishonest, frequent and shallow attack on respected writers, denigrating many of the field’s leading figures.” Of course, he didn’t produce any evidence that I have denigrated the “respected writers” Barbara Demick, Adam Johnson and others. As readers will see, I tried to be factual and civil when I analyzed their writings (and shortcomings) offering proof and certainly avoided the kind of ad hominem attacks that Tizzard launches against me.
Tizzard admits that Abt “had a number of positive and rewarding experiences” in North Korea but intentionally ignores all the bad ones I describe at length and illustrate in my book, caused by foreign imposed sanctions. Two examples: the destruction of the pharmaceutical industry and the impossibility to lift millions of poor North Koreans out of poverty in provinces far from Pyongyang as power supply was denied to them, something completely irrelevant to academic Tizzard.
Sanctions: a subject for debate among academics in their comfort zone
● “Academics debate the effectiveness of sanctions and their moral implications” explains Tizzard in his piece. And that’s all he had to say about the sanctions.
What is clear, Tizzard shows a lot of empathy and sympathy for academics and ”respected writers” regardless of what they write and do but absolutely zero empathy for North Korean miners, painters, fishermen, patients, textile workers and others that I have described, even though many of them have lost their livelihoods, or perhaps died in a mining accident or died perhaps because they were no more pharmaceuticals available to cure their infections, all as a consequence of indiscriminate, strangulating “sanctions”.
● “Does the author write with an agenda?” Tizzard asks rhetorically.
Yes, I confess I do. Namely talking about the things that he and many other Western academics and journalists don’t want to hear about. To his piece Tizzard added three photos: Two images showing North Korean soldiers and one showing seemingly depressed North Koreans at a bus stop, giving you the full picture of true North Korea according to Tizzard – in contrast to mine. He sharply concludes his review by telling “anyone who wants to learn about North Korea to look elsewhere”, just as he does. Of course!
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