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Kim Jong-il died late last week, the grand dictator of North Korea. It was not regarded as that much of a tragedy in the West. Indeed, we were more amazed to see such deep and loud grief on the part of the North Koreans. It had been common to see North Korea as the living emodiment of Orwell's "1984" and Kim as its Big Brother, but until reading Kristof's column this morning, I did not know how diligently Kim followed the model.
_ _ _
On my first trip to North Korea in 1989, I made a nuisance of myself by randomly barging into private homes. I wanted to see how ordinary North Koreans actually live, and people were startled but hospitable.
The most surprising thing I found was The Loudspeaker affixed to a wall in each home. The Loudspeaker is like a radio but without a dial or off switch. In the morning, it awakens the household with propaganda. (In his first golf outing, Comrade Kim Jong-il shoots five holes-in-one!) It blares like that all day.
The Loudspeaker underscores that North Korea is not just another dictatorship but, perhaps, the most totalitarian country ever. Stalin and Mao were murderous but low-tech; the Kim family added complex systems of repression.
Anyone disabled is considered an eyesore, for example. So people with disabilities are often expelled from the capital, Pyongyang.
Government propaganda is shameless. During a famine, North Korean news media warned starving citizens against overeating by recounting the cautionary tale of a man who ate his fill, and then exploded.
Once in North Korea, I stopped in a rural area to interview two high school girls at random. They were friendly, if startled. So was I when they started speaking simultaneously and repeating political lines in perfect unison. They could have been robots.
When videos (of movies, music or religion) began to be smuggled in from China, police began to turn off the power to entire buildings. Then the police would go door to door and examine what video was stuck inside players. A smuggled tape could mean the dispatch of an entire family to a labor camp.
...
Don’t assume that everybody detests the regime.
All those North Koreans crying because of Kim Jong-il’s death? Their grief is probably sincere. In conversations with North Korean defectors, I’m struck by how many lambaste the Kim regime but add that their relatives left behind still believe in it — because they know nothing else. Many also are passionate nationalists, preferring a homegrown despot to any hint of foreign economic colonialism.
Faith and fear combine to keep people in line. In a book about North Korea, Bradley Martin tells how one of Kim Jong-il’s aides told his wife about his boss’s womanizing. The wife truly believed in the basic decency of the North Korean system and wrote to the leadership to protest the debauchery. The letter was passed on to Kim Jong-il, who brought the woman in front of a crowd and denounced her.
Her own husband then stepped forward, pleading to be allowed to execute her. This request was granted, and the husband then shot his wife to death.
-- Nicholas D. Kristof at The New York Times
_ _ _
On my first trip to North Korea in 1989, I made a nuisance of myself by randomly barging into private homes. I wanted to see how ordinary North Koreans actually live, and people were startled but hospitable.
The most surprising thing I found was The Loudspeaker affixed to a wall in each home. The Loudspeaker is like a radio but without a dial or off switch. In the morning, it awakens the household with propaganda. (In his first golf outing, Comrade Kim Jong-il shoots five holes-in-one!) It blares like that all day.
The Loudspeaker underscores that North Korea is not just another dictatorship but, perhaps, the most totalitarian country ever. Stalin and Mao were murderous but low-tech; the Kim family added complex systems of repression.
Anyone disabled is considered an eyesore, for example. So people with disabilities are often expelled from the capital, Pyongyang.
Government propaganda is shameless. During a famine, North Korean news media warned starving citizens against overeating by recounting the cautionary tale of a man who ate his fill, and then exploded.
Once in North Korea, I stopped in a rural area to interview two high school girls at random. They were friendly, if startled. So was I when they started speaking simultaneously and repeating political lines in perfect unison. They could have been robots.
When videos (of movies, music or religion) began to be smuggled in from China, police began to turn off the power to entire buildings. Then the police would go door to door and examine what video was stuck inside players. A smuggled tape could mean the dispatch of an entire family to a labor camp.
...
Don’t assume that everybody detests the regime.
All those North Koreans crying because of Kim Jong-il’s death? Their grief is probably sincere. In conversations with North Korean defectors, I’m struck by how many lambaste the Kim regime but add that their relatives left behind still believe in it — because they know nothing else. Many also are passionate nationalists, preferring a homegrown despot to any hint of foreign economic colonialism.
Faith and fear combine to keep people in line. In a book about North Korea, Bradley Martin tells how one of Kim Jong-il’s aides told his wife about his boss’s womanizing. The wife truly believed in the basic decency of the North Korean system and wrote to the leadership to protest the debauchery. The letter was passed on to Kim Jong-il, who brought the woman in front of a crowd and denounced her.
Her own husband then stepped forward, pleading to be allowed to execute her. This request was granted, and the husband then shot his wife to death.
-- Nicholas D. Kristof at The New York Times
