The first really good Hitchens article in a while (North Korea is the subject)

[alfred russel]

A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Kim Jong-il's regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Feb. 1, 2010, at 10:01 AM ET
Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world's most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he'd heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.

I was struck at the time by how matter-of-factly he said this, as if he took it for granted that I would find it uncontroversial. And I did briefly wonder whether this form of totalitarianism, too (because nothing is more "total" than racist nationalism), was part of the pitch made to its subjects by the North Korean state. But I was preoccupied, as are most of the country's few visitors, by the more imposing and exotic forms of totalitarianism on offer: by the giant mausoleums and parades that seemed to fuse classical Stalinism with a contorted form of the deferential, patriarchal Confucian ethos.

Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire wrote that those trying to master a new language always begin by translating it back into the tongue they already know. And I was limiting myself (and ill-serving my readers) in using the pre-existing imagery of Stalinism and Eastern deference. I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, and I understand now that I got the picture either upside down or inside out. The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.


These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that.

Consider: Even in the days of communism, there were reports from Eastern Bloc and Cuban diplomats about the paranoid character of the system (which had no concept of deterrence and told its own people that it had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in bad faith) and also about its intense hatred of foreigners. A black Cuban diplomat was almost lynched when he tried to show his family the sights of Pyongyang. North Korean women who return pregnant from China—the regime's main ally and protector—are forced to submit to abortions. Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters. (The illustrations in this book are an education in themselves.) The United States and its partners make up in aid for the huge shortfall in North Korea's food production, but there is not a hint of acknowledgement of this by the authorities, who tell their captive subjects that the bags of grain stenciled with the Stars and Stripes are tribute paid by a frightened America to the Dear Leader.

Myers also points out that many of the slogans employed and displayed by the North Korean state are borrowed directly—this really does count as some kind of irony—from the kamikaze ideology of Japanese imperialism. Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one.

regime cannot rule by terror alone, and now all it has left is its race-based military ideology. Small wonder that each "negotiation" with it is more humiliating than the previous one. As Myers points out, we cannot expect it to bargain away its very raison d'etre.

All of us who scrutinize North Korean affairs are preoccupied with one question. Do these slaves really love their chains? The conundrum has several obscene corollaries. The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with the lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that—to judge by the standard of care and nutrition in the "wider" society—must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. Even in South Korea there are those who feel the Kim Jong-il regime, under which they themselves could not live for a single day, to be somehow more "authentically" Korean.

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.


But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

http://www.slate.com/id/2243112/pagenum/2

[Admiral Yi]

The prose is decent but the insights are not terribly profound.  What did you think was so awesome about it?

[Razgovory]

He lost me at the very last paragraph.  Why is this horror show our future?  Brown or Obama planning to put us all in to camps?

[Berkut]

I think he means that having to deal with this horror show is in our future.

[Razgovory]

I think he means that having to deal with this horror show is in our future.

I guess you are right, but I suspect that South Korea will be dealing with it most.  Just like Germany dealt with it's commie portion after the wall fell.

[grumbler]

I remember reading almost this same article twenty-some years ago (maybe not from Hitchens), only it was Albania, and not North Korea, that had produced these nonhuman troglodytes.  Turned out to be untrue, and I am pretty sure Hitchens is way over-reacting here as well.

Still, it was an amusing read, and I have long since lost any hope Hitchens would ever again write to inform, so thanks for posting it.

[Berkut]

I think he means that having to deal with this horror show is in our future.

I guess you are right, but I suspect that South Korea will be dealing with it most.  Just like Germany dealt with it's commie portion after the wall fell.

To that extent, I think you are missingthe point of his article, which is that looking at North Korea as a "last gasp holdout" of traditional Communism (like East Germany) is not really understanding the problem.

They are not Communists, really, and probably never really were. And they are not going to fall over like the Communist regimes all fell, eventually.

[Grallon]

Since China has less compunctions to resolve issues than we do - we should let them deal with the yellow dwarves.




G.

[alfred russel]

The prose is decent but the insights are not terribly profound.  What did you think was so awesome about it?

Maybe I'm not up on contemporary perspectives on NK, but the idea that they are dropping any pretense of communism while focusing on a racial nationalistic identity is new to me.

[Josquius]

I remember reading almost this same article twenty-some years ago (maybe not from Hitchens), only it was Albania, and not North Korea, that had produced these nonhuman troglodytes.  Turned out to be untrue, and I am pretty sure Hitchens is way over-reacting here as well.

Still, it was an amusing read, and I have long since lost any hope Hitchens would ever again write to inform, so thanks for posting it.

I think time is the key.
When Albania collapsed there were plenty of people around who fully remembered a pre-evil regime time.
With North Korea these days such folk will be in relatively short supply, give it another decade or two and there'll be none.

[Razgovory]

I think he means that having to deal with this horror show is in our future.

I guess you are right, but I suspect that South Korea will be dealing with it most.  Just like Germany dealt with it's commie portion after the wall fell.

To that extent, I think you are missingthe point of his article, which is that looking at North Korea as a "last gasp holdout" of traditional Communism (like East Germany) is not really understanding the problem.

They are not Communists, really, and probably never really were. And they are not going to fall over like the Communist regimes all fell, eventually.

That's begs the question who cares?  So long as they stay within their borders they can get even shorter and poorer and and more racist.  Till they are 6 inch hobo-Hitlers.  I don't see how we have to deal with it anymore then we have to deal with say Zimbabwe. 

[DisturbedPervert]

When Albania collapsed there were plenty of people around who fully remembered a pre-evil regime time.
With North Korea these days such folk will be in relatively short supply, give it another decade or two and there'll be none.

North Koreans better act fast while there are still a few around who remember how good things were under Japanese occupation.

[Josquius]

When Albania collapsed there were plenty of people around who fully remembered a pre-evil regime time.
With North Korea these days such folk will be in relatively short supply, give it another decade or two and there'll be none.

North Koreans better act fast while there are still a few around who remember how good things were under Japanese occupation.

Albania wasn;t exactly the nicest of places pre-communists either.
But the point is they remember that Kimmy didn't create the universe when he farted and all that crap. If the people have known something else no matter how bad then they can disbelieve the lies.
Hell, give it extra time and then people won't remember the Korean War either- then the government can really have fun re-writing history.

But this is quite a problem I see with N.Korea unlike with the eastern european nations which are being pretty succesful these days. They've never been a free, civilized nation. They went right from backwards medieval state to occupied by a nasty foreign power to under a totalitarian regime.

[Razgovory]

When Albania collapsed there were plenty of people around who fully remembered a pre-evil regime time.
With North Korea these days such folk will be in relatively short supply, give it another decade or two and there'll be none.

North Koreans better act fast while there are still a few around who remember how good things were under Japanese occupation.

[jimmy olsen]

I've had several other foreign teachers tell they've been told straight up by Koreans that Koreans shouldn't marry foreigners. However I personally haven't run into that and indeed coworkers have been encouraging me to get a Korean girlfriend. Still, there is a lot of ignorance (not malicious I think, just flat out ignorance) here about other peoples and races.