Dear Leader
by Jang Jin-sung
Kim Jong-il's poet defects with the secrets.
you want to see the North Korean regime from inside its own propaganda machine
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Jang was a state poet — one of a tiny elite who had access to foreign literature, foreign films, and Kim Jong-il himself. His job was to create the cultural mythology that kept the regime in place. This memoir is the rarest kind of North Korean dispatch: from someone who was part of the apparatus, who understood how it worked from the inside, and who eventually couldn't continue. The most politically illuminating North Korean account on this shelf — not the experience of the ordinary citizen but the machinery behind the curtain.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- North Korea • East Asia
- Voice
- Written by a North Korean author
- Themes
- Authoritarian PlaybookWitness
