"The Paranoid Peninsula" attributes all the evils which continue besetting North Korea (famine, excessive military spending, its crumbling industrial base and infrastructure) to the all-embracing nature of economic planning.)
Openly talking about mistakes and lost opportunities: the North Korean leadership for excessive adherence to a command economy: "The country has failed not primarily because it is run by a leadership obsessed with the cult of personality or because it is a one-party state entirely devoid of democracy, though neither of these truisms about North Korea has helped its development, but because it subscribes to the failed concept of the Soviet-inspired socialist command economy that insists on a centrally planned system."
Every aspect of public life in this country is dominated by two omnipresent concepts: "state as a religion" and "revolutionary dynasty.", which inculcate in the North Korean populace an obsession with dogma and the personality cult.
