Stephan Haggard Comments on Kim Jong Un's Embrace of Western Culture
It's still 'My Way' or the highway under North Korea's Kim
07/13/2012
Carol J. Williams,
Los Angeles Times
In the 45 years since Paul Anka wrote it and Frank Sinatra made it famous, "My Way" has celebrated the rugged individualism that Americans like to think defines their spirit of independence, determination and pride.
But those are not virtues held dear in totalitarian North Korea, where deviation from Communist conformity can land a maverick in the nearest re-education camp.
So North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's recent embrace of Western songs, movies, cartoon characters and flashy fashion — public displays his late father and grandfather would have denounced as "spiritual pollution" — has set Korea analysts to pontificating on what the new leader's cultural inclinations might signify.
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Stephan Haggard is the director of the Korea-Pacific Program at IR/PS, where he specializes in the Korean economy. In 2011 Haggard published Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea with co-author Marcus Noland, with whom he had previously authored Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform. Dr. Haggard writes the "North Korea: Witness to Transformation" blog at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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