Review: Sandra Fahy, “Dying for Rights,” Columbia University Press, 2019

“In a penicillin bottle I wrote her date of birth, the day she died, and her name. I hung the bottle around her neck. I tied her hair. [The other prisoners and I] tied her legs. Her arms. We wrapped her body in a plastic bag. This is what happens in a prison camp in North Korea. That’s how we wrapped the dead bodies. When the warehouse has twenty dead bodies, we take those bodies to a place called the Kkot Dong San, the flower hill. We dig a hole that can fit twenty bodies, we bury them there.”

When Timothy Snyder began to research “Bloodlands”–his monumental history of the tragedy Hitler and Stalin inflicted on the peoples between the Vistula and the Don–he had at his disposal the newly opened archives of formerly Communist states, whose archives now revealed their suppressions, embellishments, and manipulations of mass murder. One cannot document the crimes of the bloodlands between the Imjin and the Yalu today far beyond the extent to which the UN Commission of Inquiry has already done so. But while a UN report must limit itself to a dry documentation of evidence, Professor Sandra Fahy’s newest book, “Dying for Rights,” is a literary documentation that is readable, beautifully written, and often profound. As such, it goes far to explain the most inexplicable crimes human beings are committing against each other today.

An audience is gathered to attend the criminal’s moment of “correction.” Anyone may attend. Those gathered to watch the killing will hear the gun blast, smell the sulfur, see the head explode, see heat rise from the blood, but they also witness a gathering of people who do not intervene against this moment of death. The audience is the other part of the apparatus of this style of killing. Public execution is a profoundly performative gesture in North Korea’s exercise of state power. This type of killing operationalizes anticipation, risk, and the moment of action/inaction for both the individual and the collective. It is a performance, the climax of which is the moment the state acts–which is precise, grotesque, and entire–while the audience and the victim absorb the action of the state. The audience and the victim are so thoroughly acted upon by the state as to be rendered inactive, inert nonthings. The audience sees the killing and sees a collective that does not intervene. What is killed along with the executed individual is any lingering belief among the citizenry that the collective can act against the overwhelming power of the state. It is the public, the populace, that is executed.

Fahy traces the continuum of North Korea’s repressive history to its origins, when NKVD advisors helped Kim Il-sung build the foundations of a police state strong enough to gird it through bloody purges, uprisings, a disastrous war, and internal dissent among wearier, outward-looking factions of the Workers’ Party. Her history of how North Korea became one man’s monolithic fiefdom, and then shattered into an anarchic-yet-resilient patchwork of markets, is deeply researched and flows swiftly. Her recitation of that history supports a convincing argument that Pyongyang’s crimes against humanity are not patches to a creaking system, but are coded into its genome–“intrinsic to the state and ongoing”–to such an extent that political genetics yield physiological traits that are no less visible than a child’s inheritance of a parent’s facial features:

“Stunting is the body’s way of sacrificing linear growth in order to survive. Stunting doesn’t happen from a few missed meals. It is the long-term result of protracted malnutrition at critical growth periods. The border between North and South Korea, arguably more than any other border in the region or world, demonstrates how political demarcations–how political rights–materialize in the flesh and bones of citizens. This is not metaphor. The spread of contagious diseases such as tuberculosis and multi”“drug resistant tuberculosis in North Korea can hardly be compared with South Korea. The 38th parallel is found in mortality rates either side of the border. It is counted in births and the weights of newborns. It is demonstrated again and again in the number of people who gamble their lives crossing the border from one kind of life to find another.”

How can this be? North Korea is not a poor country; it is a rich country filled with poor people–it has a temperate climate, mineral wealth, rich fishing waters on two long coastlines, an inheritance of heavy industry, and ports perfectly situated to become hubs of the vibrant commerce that has thrived around it. Pyongyang’s apologists externalize its abuses and privations as defensive–regrettable but necessary to defend the nation against foreign enemies. Fahy slaps this argument down by citing Pyongyang’s own words to make a convincing (if mostly self-evident) argument that its choices were a calculated prioritization of political control over the needs and the happiness of its people. Prison camps use hunger as a tool to control prisoners. The state allocates more food to those assigned a higher songbun, or political caste, and to those living in more politically favored regions of the country. Fahy cites no less an authority than Kim Il-sung, who justified the purges and mass imprisonment of Christians by saying, “We cannot move towards a communist society with religious people.” To Kim, the law was “an important weapon for implementing the policies of the state.” The sacrifice of the individual presented no restraint. In fact, Pyongyang’s crimes are preemptive exterminations of internal enemies.

Pyongyang both decries and exacerbates a “notional” state of war. It exacerbates this state of war through armed attacks (about which there is nothing notional) and weapons tests, decries the very state of war it raises to extort concessions, and weaponizes the state of war to delegitimize dissent as war by other means, by foreign enemies. Yet, as Fahy sensibly asks, “If the armistice is the main obstacle to a peaceful atmosphere for human rights, how is it that South Korea doesn’t suffer the same degree of egregious crimes against humanity?” Fahy cites evidence that Kim Jong-un still fears internal threats more than external threats: “[The] forthcoming war will not be the war between DPRK and USA but it will be the war of idea and will among ourselves.” The world still awaits the arrival of the Swiss-educated reformer that so many experts had so recently foretold.

Here, one also sees Pyongyang’s collectivization of human rights, thus reducing individuals to pixels in a mass game, or burial mounds on a hillside. There are no individual rights, only the collective right of the state as national proxy, as interpreted by one man. Thus, in response to the Commission of Inquiry’s report, and to the toxicity that would become attendant to investing in such a place, Pyongyang produced a “human rights” report that scarcely mentioned individual rights at all, but recited a series of fictional constitutional guarantees and restatements of rights in collective terms. The state is not just a proxy for those who obey. It is the judge and executioner for those who do not.

“We do not conceal or lie about our partiality, we do not obscure our class-consciousness in the context of human rights. Socialist human rights are not class-transcending human rights to grant freedom and human rights to hostile enemies who oppose socialism, or to disobedient traitors who stand against the People’s interests. Our human rights are the rights that legitimise the persecution of enemies of the class, violating human rights of the People, workers, peasants, or intellectuals.”

~ ~ ~

Except, as Fahy argues, obedience is no longer possible. After the Soviet Union fell and ceased to provide it with subsidized food and fertilizer, the state could no longer guarantee the North Korean people collective rights, either. A theme of “Dying for Rights” is how, since the Great Famine, it has forced every citizen to make soul-warping ethical choices–to steal or to starve, to submit to rape or to be beaten and raped, to intervene against evil or to accept the shame of complicity, to wait for the state to provide or to break its laws and provide for one’s self, to starve with one’s family or sell herself to traffickers to survive. Christopher Hitchens once described North Korea as a place where that which is not absolutely compulsory is absolutely forbidden. Fahy documents the myriad of ways in which North Koreans cannot live without evading that which is compulsory or doing that which is forbidden: “Life itself is threaded through with a guaranteed vulnerability.” The choices are sharper as one descends the ladder of songbun into a life of poverty and prohibition. The choice is sharpest of all for those who would flee from it by breaking the laws of multiple nations to reclaim even a few of the rights that they, themselves, have been denied since birth.

Nor, for most, is a complete escape even possible. Pyongyang sends workers abroad out of financial necessity, but it effectively isolates and controls them there. Its security forces use “love abuse” by making hostages of the parents, wives, and children of workers, diplomats, and escapees. Its agents follow refugees to South Korea, where they have tried to kill some of the more outspoken émigrés, and have probably coerced others into “re-defecting.” Fahy makes the shocking claim that more than 800 of them may have gone missing after arriving in South Korea. Many were contacted by brokers and lured back to the area near the China-North Korea border. Fahy could have done more to elucidate the role of Pyongyang’s agents in using leaked South Korean government data to select, coerce, and lure “re-defectors,” but she explains how the state exploits them at staged press conferences, and for its domestic propaganda. Pyongyang’s message to potential dissenters is clear: no one is beyond the state’s reach. Escapees who are not targets for assassination may find themselves targeted by online harassment or smear campaigns. Fahy devotes much linguistic analysis to these campaigns, in which all nouns have adjectives, and all adjectives are superlatives. Her description evokes Victor Klemperer’s writing about Nazi Germany’s weaponization of language. It, too, dehumanized untermenschen, extirpated objective truth, and repackaged grains of truth selectively to serve the only remaining right–the state’s collectivized right to “persecute” all who do not conform. The emigre’s only alternative is to live “in shadows, waiting, hoping she may one day safely access legality.”

Thus, even an “escapee” cannot escape from her fear, but at least she can achieve a partial escape of her mind. Thus, she might understand at last how the state forced these horrible choices on her, through its gross misallocations of national resources, or by assigning her a political status from birth, perhaps because some sin by a grandparent has since been digitized into the security forces’ records. Before their escape, most North Koreans knew little about conditions elsewhere in their own country, and least of all in Pyongyang, where the privileged ate well while the poor died by the hundreds of thousands. Few of them knew that their rights were being violated–indeed, that there are such things as “human rights” at all–or that other nations believe that they transcend national borders. Atomized and mutually isolated, they merely struggle to exist for another day. Physical escape becomes a path to intellectual escape, too.

~ ~ ~

At its most perceptive, “Dying for Rights” is a story of the struggle between mendacity and epistemology–how one sees truth through the nacht und nebel of the most secretive state that has ever existed. Yet North Korean witnesses now find their accounts marginalized by a state that skillfully exploits our own conflicts of interest to deny even their memories of meaning. Thus, journalists must choose between access and objectivity; aid workers must choose between access to a few of the hungry and a forthright assessment of why many more will continue to go hungry; policymakers must choose between denuclearization and speaking about the abuses that inform us why Pyongyang’s denuclearization is so imperative. Suddenly, when confronted by foreigners, the state prefers to deal with individuals rather than collectives after all.

Pyongyang thus forces the foreign visitor to make some of the same difficult choices that it forces on its own subjects. Lyrically, Fahy writes, “What seems multidimensional is rather a charade. Movement along the surface of the text, much like a Mobius strip, flips the traveler upside down and disorients: it seems plural, but is eerily one-sided.” She recalls how she herself was denied access to North Korea, but never told why. Generations of aid workers and journalists were confronted with the same risks and choices. The AP’s Pyongyang bureau has since slinked out of our sight in shame, but CNN reporter Will Ripley (believe him or not) has replaced it as Pyongyang’s most pliable propagandist. Fahy devotes much attention to Ripley’s work, and his reputation should not survive it without serious injury. But the tricks do not work so well on everyone.

“In an artful gesture, North Korean representatives said that Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Marzuki Darusman was welcome to visit Pyongyang on condition he come as an ordinary person, not in his capacity as the UN special rapporteur. The invitation is confounding. How could he visit North Korea without being the special rapporteur? The stripped-down, depoliticized person of Darusman was being welcomed, but his expertise and the organizational power that he represents was denied. I describe this gesture as artful because it illustrates a phenomenon observable in almost any rhetoric emerging from North Korea: the phenomena of access without access, telling without telling, truth without truth, information without information, and so on. Other scholars, referencing North Korea’s own literature, have described this mind muddying rhetoric as “the fog.”

Yet despite this, the UN Commission of Inquiry still produced a clear, credible, and powerful indictment. Fahy’s book would have benefited from some sharper criticism of foreign aid workers who have either enlisted as Pyongyang’s propagandists, or (in far more cases) collaborated in its use of the hungry as human shields, allowed Pyongyang to politicize them as critics of foreign sanctions, and muted their criticism of its responsibility for the longest food crisis ever experienced by a temperate, industrialized country. It would also have benefited from less attention to the unimportant words of occasional (and seemingly, mentally ill) “defectors” to North Korea, or to the coerced “confessions” of tourists. Conversely, it would have benefited from more attention to a small, vocal, and well-funded group of Pyongyang’s sympathizers, who act in direct and indirect coordination with Pyongyang’s propagandists, and who are also making inroads with gullible journalists and far-left and far-right quarters in Washington and other capitals.

Still, Fahy makes her points well enough, and in the process, she not only offers cogent insights about North Korea, but also about ourselves, and how some of us react when a state forces us to choose between our interests and our ethics. In a world that repeats the slogan “Never Again” with escalating insincerity, how have we responded to crimes against humanity “without parallel in the contemporary world?” Not entirely well, it seems. Fahy thus warns a divided world that its compartmentalization of human rights causes it to misjudge this regime’s ineradicable character at its own peril. Is it listening? At the moment, neither the U.S. nor the South Korean president is. Sadly, Fahy concludes, North Koreans will remain hungry and repressed until Pyongyang accepts “fundamental changes” to its economic and agricultural and political policies, but because these changes would necessarily involve sacrifices of state control that Pyongyang prioritizes over the health and happiness of its people, it will instead go on as it has for decades–exacerbating and exploiting the same state of war against foreign enemies, who will go on paying it to give them a moment’s peace.

~ ~ ~

If this all sounds as bleak as the book’s title, “Dying for Rights” finds hope in Pyongyang’s unequal struggle with truth and the dissent it inevitably sows among those to whom it is revealed. Perceptively, she notes that “those who are most disenfranchised by the North Korean government are among the least likely to gain access to foreign media.” North Koreans may be isolated and misinformed, but their humanity survives. Fahy recounts the sardonic narration of a farmer whose goat and pig were stolen by hungry soldiers.

“When her relation told her what happened, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The military were in need, yet so too was her uncle, she reasoned. Later, when people asked about the absence of the goat and pig, her uncle explained that it was thanks to his consistent political education that his pig and goat both volunteered to join the army.”

Fahy calls for “creative and adaptive ways” of opening communications between North Koreans and the outside world. That is important, but so have many others. Equally (if not more) important are her calls for harnessing the work of guerrilla journalists operating inside North Korea and delivering their reports back to other North Koreans, to show them what conditions are like in different provinces, counties, and neighborhoods in their own country. “Dying for Rights” is thus a story about a war waged by a government against its own people, and how Pyongyang’s war against the truth itself is a major theater in that greater war. At this time in history, that story is an unfinished tragedy. We can only hope for a day when Fahy can begin mining the archives in Pyongyang, to tell us what remains hidden. For now, one can find no more perceptive account than this one.