Loading ...Regrettably, I am not in North Korea. I want to reproduce for you, in toto, a comment left by a stray interneteer on the Guardian’s travel blog, in a thread sending up North Korea as a travel destination. Here it is, as authored by a chap named blueron, who is perhaps a Neocrat without knowing it.
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North Korea is a helluva place for the visitor intent on seeing the hermit kingdom for him/herself. From 1989 to 1995 I was lucky enough to visit five times, by the end of which I was more than sick of the procession of hideous monuments and Party Line BS from the tour guides who would never take their eyes off you for more than a few seconds at a time.
By all reports, things have gotten worse since then, with all visitors being put up in a hotel in an isolated location on an island in the middle of the river that runs through town. When I was a regular tourist, we stayed at a different place near the train station, and it was still possible to sneak out for a wander alone, though you didn’t remain alone for long, as local goons soon latched onto you and followed, not at all discreetly, and quizzed anyone you happened to pause nearby, let alone had a discussion with.
An open-minded visitor can marvel at the hideous mass control experiment of the place, a state held together by lies and fear. My own politics are left of centre, but I couldn’t find anything redeeming about the horror state that is North Korea. Nothing anyone tells you is true, and it is so obviously fake that it is near-impossible to comprehend why anyone there might believe it. The biggest department store has locals playing theatrical roles as ’shoppers’, I speak Korean, and heard the nonsense exchanges as items were quite suddenly ‘purchased’ right in front of me; I also witnessed the items being ‘returned’ the moment they thought I was out of sight; in a hospital, we were inexplicably shown surgery being carried out in a squeaky clean operating theatre — except the ‘patient’ was wearing jewellery and engaged in conversation with the ’surgeon’ who was supposedly cutting lumps out of his abdomen at the time; at the movie studio, a scene was rehearsed in front of us visitors, then, to the cry of ‘ACTION!’, was filmed in front of us. Except only the front reel of the expensive film camera was rolling, not the back reel — there was no film in the camera. I could go on with dozens such examples that would be comical if they weren’t emblematic of a horrible regime treating its entire population like Pavlov dogs.
But the truly horrible people I met on these trips were the overseas visitors, Brits among them, dyed in the wool socialists desperate to believe that this was indeed a Socialist Paradise. I had one guy from Yorkshire telling me how the people of South Korea were impoverished puppets of the Yankee Imperialist occupiers. I didn’t tell him that I had lived in South Korea for years, and that he was full of shit.
I have heard of one direct legacy of my visits. At the 70-foot statue of Kim Il-sung on Mansudae Hill in Pyongyang, goons hang around visitors and inspect the viewfinder or digital review window on cameras — to ensure that they are not photographing only *part* of the statue. I am fairly sure this is a result of photographs of mine that ran in major news publications in the early 90s — shots of North Koreans paying obeisance to two giant bronze shoes and bronze trouser bottoms.
If you are thinking of going, enjoy it while you can, I say. The border with China is becoming ever-more porous, and desperate North Koreans are slipping through to work in China, many of them returning to North Korea with mobile telephones that can work on Chinese mobile telephone company signals. So the total information blockage that has been maintained for decades is no more, and it is only a matter of time before a critical mass of local knowledge that flies totally in the face of the BS being droned by State TV and Radio erupts into a force for change. It might not be this year or next, but when it happens, it’ll be bloody. Every work unit in every village will have party ideologues who have been instrumental in the myth of a Worker’s Paradise running for cover.
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Blueron here. Thanks for the kind words. But as I still don’t know what a Neocrat is, I can’t figure out if perhaps I am one without knowing it.
Just so long as it’s not related to being a Neocon……