A chillingly fascinating, matter-of-fact firsthand piece by Peter Hitchens on North Korea:
The electric current in homes and offices seems suspiciously feeble and shuts down abruptly when the government thinks bedtime has arrived. The authorities also have views on when you ought to wake up. A siren rouses the sluggards at 7 each morning, though light sleepers will already have been alerted to the approach of the working day by ghostly plinking, plonking music drifting from loudspeakers at 5 and 6 o’clock. The sensation of living in an enormous institution, part boarding school, part concentration camp, is greatly enhanced by the sound of these mass alarms.
I wondered what they reminded me of until it came to me that they resembled the Muslim call to prayer, wavering and throbbing across Islamic cities for the pre-dawn prayers. For while visitors may see this place as a prison, many of its inmates show every sign of regarding it as a shrine to the human god whose image they all wear on their clothes and whose various names cannot be pronounced without reverence: the Great Leader, Gen. Kim Il Sung. [emphasis added]
…
As for the bow, I performed a perfunctory Episcopalian nod, inoffensive, polite, but far from effusive. One of the many advantages of an Anglican upbringing is that one has gestures for all occasions, including obeisance to the bronze images of unhinged tyrants—though I found myself strangely disturbed by and ashamed of this particular breach of the Commandments for some time afterward. As I laid the equally obligatory and hideous flowers, I silently assured myself that I was doing so in memory of Kim’s many victims. You may classify this as cowardice, and I will not necessarily disagree, but it seemed that I had accepted that I would have to kowtow to this cult the moment I decided to enter North Korea. What is more, I sensed that my guides and guards genuinely revered this thing and that it would be plain bad manners to refuse.
It gets worse. Much worse. Required reading.
[...] sometimes subtly but inevitably and inexorably). There was a time — and there remain many places — where ‘good’ is defined very differently than it is in the West in the early part of the 21st century. We would do well to remember [...]
By: The Aquifer of Truth « New Wineskins on December 15, 2007
at 9:29 am
[...] under Pol Pot, like Cuba under Fidel, like the USSR under Stalin and like Germany under Hitler, the North Korean government is in fact one man–Kim Jong Il–a man who wants to be god. (Iran, despite its rhetoric, is somewhat different; but that’s another [...]
By: Moral Equivalence and Wishful Thinking « New Wineskins on December 11, 2007
at 3:14 pm
My imagination is running away with me this morning, so I fly forward to the effort to air drop rice into NORK. First the government tells people not to touch it. It is poisoned. However, in a country in famine, which has, in other times and places, led people to cannibalism, boiling animal dung for its nutrients, and so on, someone cooks the rice and does not die. They only tell one person, who informs on them and they are arrested, but then, someone else cooks the rice, and also lives, and tells two people, only one of whom informs on the rice boiler, who nevertheless disappears, but then, two people know. Very slowly, word gets out. In a year, people are brazenly boiling rice and eating it. In two years, society has completely broken down. “If they lied about the rice, what else have they kept from us?” Of course, the government puts out some poisoned rice of its own. People find ways to test this stuff, feed it to an annoying neighbor kid, maybe. If he dies, two problems solved. If he lives, only one. The trust that makes society possible, so diminished in a Communist state, is now completely gone. The concentration camp analogy gets, to everyone’s horror, even more real. But, the guards are starving, too, so they are eating the rice. Will tiny trust bands develops, rice-boiling clubs? Even my fevered imagination can go no further. Any one have ideas? One is simoply to pray,earnestly, for the NORKS. It’s a start, anyway.
By: Michael on November 30, 2007
at 11:39 am