Fascinating review from The Atlantic on some new books about North Korea. Read the whole thing but puzzle for a second on the strange case of Bruce Cumings, a history professor from the University of Chicago, author of North Korea: Another Country, a book in which the reviewer, B.R. Myers, notes, somewhat acidly, “we are even informed that the regime’s gulags aren’t as bad as they’re made out to be, because Kim Jong Il is thoughtful enough to lock up whole families at a time.”

The motivation of men like Cumings remains a mystery to me. According to Myers, “the mixture of naiveté and callousness will remind readers of the Moscow travelogues of the 1930s, but Cumings is more a hater of U.S. foreign policy than a wide-eyed supporter of totalitarianism.”

Maybe, but a willingness to embrace of some of the world’s nastiest regimes has long defaced the record of the academic left in the West – and US foreign policy cannot solely be to blame.