Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family

Arirang Mass Games - North Korea, 2011, Joseph A Ferris III

Six years ago when I had a brief interest in short wave radio I picked up Voice of Korea a few times and was fascinated by this window into the bizarro-land of North Korea (or the People's Democratic Republic of Korea as it likes to be know, a string of words that somehow manage to reflect reality by an astonishing 0%). At the time my general impression of the North was that of an amusingly backward Stalinist state that acted up a bit on the world stage but was otherwise harmless and so I thought about writing into the station to receive a token marking my reception of their broadcast. Seeking the station details led me to a friendship association site which was run by a shady individual with connections to the North and the more I read this about character and the general behaviour of the DPRK outside its own borders the less I thought writing to them was a wise idea.

One aspect of North Korea media which you pick up very quickly is that it has a very limited palette. Seemingly nothing interesting happened in North Korea without it somehow involving, when he was alive, Kim Jong-Il. No factory made the headlines unless it was opened by him. No farm tripling its harvest could avoid being visited by him. The constant referencing of bloody Mount Baekdu as if it was Olympus to Kim's Zeus drove me up the wall pretty quickly. You could chalk all those up as quirks of an oriental society we in the West just don't understand, but this isn't the moral absolutism of cultural imperialism. East Germany might have been the closest realisation of a totalitarian society in the image of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four but it lacked a dominating personality cult the likes of which can in modern times only be found broadly north of the 38th parallel. The details of institutionalised crimes against humanity are horrifying without doubt; but philosophically the most sinister element is not the cult of personality (now spanning three generations) in itself, rather it is the fact that the Kim dynasty is not a true absolutist monarchy. Its presentation as the embodiment of the nation is facilitated by the agreement of the other power-seeking factions within the state - chief among them the armed forces. The subjugation of the Korean people is nothing less than a conspiracy. The very idea of a place where the simplest kind of lies cannot be called out terrifies me, truly.

With the Soviet Union you could at least convince yourself that there had somewhere along the way been a corruption of the founding principles - the expulsion of Trotsky and Stalin's consolidation of power is most commonly cited, though I have my own ideas about the Russian Revolution. The story of North Korea has far more in common with the Eastern European satellite states being set up and propped up by the army of a much larger and powerful neighbour. There was no revolution in Korea, just an advancing army which installed a new elite into government. The changing frontiers of the Second World War formed geographical pockets in which malformed states could flourish in the shadow of the superpowers during the Cold War. Latin America has long been the backyard of the United States and South and Central America had its share of strongmen. The difference it seems was that the convenient ideology of the strongman in 20th century Eurasia was 'communism' whereas the military dictatorships of the Americas were deeply reactionary movements. The enduring irony lost on most of the world was that none of the self-proclaimed Marxist states ever managed to actually enact political, social or economic equality.

The Eastern European states behind the curtain eventually broke free as the Soviet Union began disintegrating, yet North Korea continues to survive as a little backward appendage of the People's Republic of China. To come back to Nineteen Eighty-Four; the world situation of the novel is typically accepted at face value - that the world is divided into three equally abhorrent totalitarian empires that are engaged in a never-ending war with each other whose only purpose is to suppress humanity for no higher purpose than the balance of power. However I read one interpretation of Airstrip One as a pre-echo of North Korea - a state isolated and convinced the war is still ongoing while the rest of the world is actually free (to varying degrees) and completely ignoring it. Still one thing remains true of both - there is a global tripartite conspiracy to conserve the regime. It happens to serve Chinese, Russian, and American strategic interest to prevent the Kim dynasty from collapsing. Now you know the value of human rights.

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