【ABC111219】朝鲜：没有自由，幽默，讽刺……无爱的国度

小明啊

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3738744.html
North Korea: no liberty, humour, irony ... no love
I've only time for thumbnail sketches ... vignettes. I wrote a piece from North Korea called Visit to a Small Planet which is a line I stole from a play of Gore Vidal's, because it did seem to me as if I had left this planet completely to go on this visit to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, and it was as if coming back from another spatial body altogether.
And the article got, I have to say for myself, a lot of praise, a lot of good reviews and a lot of notice, and every time I got praised for it, I used feel slightly congealed, slightly nauseated, because I knew that of all the articles I've ever written as a foreign correspondent, it was probably the greatest failure. I had not got near to describing for an American audience, what it would be like. 'By the way, we know where your children go to school.' What it would be like to be a North Korean even for a day, and I'm not sure I can try it even now. I'll give it a shot.
My friend Martin Amis wrote a book called The War Against Cliché or is it The War On Cliché? saying that as all of us who write and think and speak try to remind ourselves there's nothing worse than using borrowed phrases. Once you've said 'the heat was stifling', 'she was rummaging in her handbag' to win two Nobel prizes was 'no mean achievement', once you're using someone else's words, and that's part of literary intellectual death, so we try and avoid it. So when I went (reeling back a little here just to spool it back) when I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece.
So I went to this meeting of this then-unknown dissident, Vasilav Havel and various of his Czech friends and Slovak friends in an apartment in Prague and we thought that no-one knew that he had these visitors coming from America, but someone must have given us away because it wasn't long before the door fell in and in come police dogs and guys in leather coats carrying heavy electric torches and truncheons and so on, slammed me up against the wall and said, 'You're under arrest and you've got to come with us.' And I said - I thought of saying 'I demand to see the Ambassador', and I said, 'What's the charge?' And they said, 'We don't have to tell you the charge'. And I thought "fuck". Now I do have to mention Kafka.
Totalitarian is a cliché, dictatorship is based on clichéd thinking, on very tried and tested uniform stuff. They don't mind that they're boring, they don't mind that they're obvious, their point is made and I thought 'Now you've made me, I know you're going to make me do it'. Well multiply that by as much as you can and you have the following surmise.
I went to North Korea, finally got in, took me a long time, had to go under a second identity, had to pay a huge bribe, I was there, I got there. And I thought I know what I'm not going to say about North Korea, I'm not going to say it. The schoolchildren are marched to school carrying pictures of the Dear Leader and the Great Leader. The loudspeakers speak of nothing but the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. At workplaces there are sessions set apart every day for cries of hatred against the United States and the West and South Korea. I'm still not going to do it. They won't make me say 1984, they just won't make me do it.
But eventually they make you do it. You have to, your mind just adjusts to it.
The North Korean State was started in 1950-'51, that's the year 1984 was published for the first time. You think, could it be that someone handed a Korean translation of this to Kim Il Sung and said 'Do you think we could make this fly?' and he paged through and said, 'I don't know, but we could sure give it the old college try', because that's what it looks as if they did. There is no private life for a North Korean. There isn't a moment when you are not either on parade or when you're not on parade, told to stay indoors. You're not wanted, stay at home you're under curfew. Lights are out in Pyongyang and that's the capital city, at 8.30. You can't go out after dark, stay in. There's nothing to watch, there's nothing to see. All the television programs, when it's working, are all about the Dear Leader, as are all operas, all films, all concert performances and all public lectures. There's nothing else to talk about.
The light of the human being, this is what I failed to convey in my article, is completely pointless. The concept of liberty or humour or irony or happiness or love doesn't exist. You are there simply as a prop for the State. And though used to be, as with any slave system, that they would feed you in return for your services. That compact broke down a couple of decades ago. Now they don't feed you either. They barely clothe you. The so-called demilitarised zone, you've seen the word 'demilitarised zone' haven't you, in the press even quite recently. Why do they call it demilitarised zone? Words lose their meanings so fast; it's the most militarised zone on the planet. There are nuclear mines sown in the DMZ, there's a concentrating of force and violence on either side of it that is unequalled anywhere, it's the most militarised zone in the world. That's the only place where North Korea and South Korean soldiers meet directly face-to-face, staring at each other across the table. They change guard about five or six times a day. The North Koreans naturally put up their best soldiers to stand there, to put the best, bravest, toughest face on North Korea. The best ones they can find are six inches shorter than the South Korean ones are. That's what a famine state is, on top of a slave state. We now have millions and millions of North Korean children totally stunted in mind and body and will have to be dealt with at some point, who have been raised to believe that they live in a regime that is run by a god. And here I must just indicate - I was going to do this later but I'll say it now - there's a thing that took me ages to notice about reading George Orwell's 1984, I wrote a book about it, I'd written many articles about it. It took me a long time to notice something, that's so obvious it's crying to be said.
In 1984 it's assumed there's no more religion, there's no church in 1984 not even a tame State church, there's nothing. No-one mentions the idea of faith, except in Big Brother. Quite interesting, it's as if it's an entirely secular dictatorship. In North Korea you might think that was the case since it has an officially Communistic ideology, but it's not, it's the most religious state it's possible to imagine. It's actually two people who have been fused into one, maybe this is reminding you of something, there's the father and there's the son. It's one short of a trinity. The other way of phrasing it is this: when the president, our president, writes to Kim Jong Il, the son, the Dear Leader, he doesn't call him Dear Mr President, he calls him Dear Mr Secretary. Have you ever noticed that? Why is that? Because he's not the president of North Korea, he's the head of the Communist Party, the North Korean Workers' Party and he's the head of the Army. He's not head of the state. The head of the state is his father, who's been dead for 15 years.
So it's a necrocracy, or a mauselocracy or a thanatocracy in which the one is diffused into being with the other, and where both of them are said to have had miraculous births attended by miraculous phenomena such as, for example, birds singing in Korean, when they were born.
So that this is possibly the most deiocratic country as I've ever seen. Or that there has ever been, where the only duty of the citizen starving and stunted and enslaved as he or she may be, is the worship of the leader and of the leader's father.
The moment is coming, I think it may already in fact have come, when the system will no longer work. It is a situation where the old order cannot continue in the old way, is unable to do so, and where those whom it rules do not wish, have no further desire, to be ruled in the old way, but it could be that there is something incompatible between us and our needs and our desires and our nature, and the idea of a human system that can guarantee everything, that can control everything, that can know everything and that can control and know and run everybody. And on that hope we must repose our own hopes.


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