On the essays shelf:
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Anyone who’s read me for a while knows my fascination with totalitarian countries, autocracies, dictatorships, group brainwashing masked as ideological fervor, the whole nine yards. I actually could spend the entirety of my time reading about such things, and have to kind of take steps back from time to time. I’m currently in that mode again. I re-read Darkness at Noon last year. I just re-read 1984. Both of those books I probably read every other year, on average. I am also now re-reading Robert Conquest’s great and daunting The Great Terror: A Reassessment
The situation of North Korea is, of course, one of the most extreme examples of that we have ever seen, on our planet, ever. Especially now, when the media is what it is, and social media, when you can’t keep a secret anywhere, not even in the most fascistic of dictatorships. A long time ago, 10 years ago, Jeez, I wrote a piece about “silence”, in terms of North Korea and this huge train crash that had apparently happened. Here it is. It was the silence that was so deafening and so noticeable. It told you everything, it told you nothing. That type of loud loud silence continues, although inroads are being made, and there are actually some memoirs coming out now, some voices from Inside.
Christopher Hitchens traveled to North Korea and wrote this essay for Vanity Fair, which went up in January, 2001. It’s part travelogue/part political essay – his “travelogue” stuff is always well worth the time. His pieces from Iraqi Kurdistan, for example … but of course the man went everywhere. North Korea is, of course, closed to outsiders, and if you go there you are “chaperoned” every step of the way. There are some fascinating blog-posts and essays by others who have been there, or who have had jobs there … I read one piece somewhere (and I can’t remember where) where a couple of people broke into the abandoned ruin of Ryugyong Hotel and took photographs of what it was like inside. There was a huge Esquire piece about that monstrosity, which sits in the center of Pyongyang, falling into ruin. There are also fascinating Youtube clips of tourists who managed to ditch their guides, break into the hotel, and take videos of the interior.
I kind of want to go. There are lots of places I’d like to go, Iran and North Korea being at the top of the list. For now, I live vicariously.
In the excerpt from Hitchens’ essay below, he mentions the Ryogyong Hotel, and brings his typically refreshing perspective to the level of brainwashing he sees, and the constant question: Do they believe this?
It’s THE question. And if you think the answer is easy, you need to read more about totalitarian systems. In Conquest’s book, he talks about the big show trials in the mid-1930s, when old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev and Kamanev and others, raced to put their heads on the chopping block. The “act” fooled many Western journalists, who basically took the credulous position of: “Well, these guys are all CONFESSING. So naturally … there must be SOMEthing to it.” Stalin was no dummy. He knew that that would be the reactions of the “useful idiots” (his term) in the West. It was the CONFESSIONS that were so startling, so difficult to argue with. Conquest delves into what he calls “The Party Mind,” and how it operated and changed over the course of the mid-teens and 1920s – and how the adulation one must show it became more and more extreme, as the Party became completely equated with Stalin. There was no difference. If we don’t ask WHY these things can occur, if we assume we know the answers, then we are at risk for being fooled again. There were those who dismissed Conquest’s work, who thought he was exaggerating. Never underestimate the ideological bias of someone who still wants to believe in the underlying ideology, even though that ideology led to the death of 20 fucking million people. 30 million. Conquest wrote his astonishing book before perestroika and glasnost! He relied on unofficial sources, and memoirs written by those who had gotten out … it was the only way. He knew there were gaps in the picture because the Soviet State was such a closed system. When the archives were finally opened and Conquest could actually consult the original sources (many of which had been doctored, of course), he went back and edited The Great Terror, saying that he realized that in many cases he had UNDER-estimated the extent of Stalin’s terror.
Conquest had been so criticized for the original book by cries of “He’s exaggerating!!” (Stalin’s useful idiots still making themselves useful) that he joked he wanted to call the updated version: “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”
Hitchens and Conquest were friends. Conquest was one of his idols, too, along with Rebecca West and Orwell … and Hitchens’ writing on totalitarian groupthink and political brainwashing is worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as those giants.
I wish he had written a whole book about North Korea. But whatever, here’s an excerpt from his 2001 essay.
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a cafe makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men’s room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it’s almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn’t like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.
There’s a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there’s no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There’ wouldn’t be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang – which is the most favored city in the country – every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It’s 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn’t moved in years; it’s a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. “Under construction,” say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradictions for now.
I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it’s been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia. Near the southernmost city of Kaesong, captured by the North in 1951, I was taken to see the beautifully preserved tombs of King and Queen Kongmin. Their significance in F.M.-L.B. cosmology is that they reigned over a then unified Korea in the fourteenth century, and that they were Confucian and dynastic and left many lavish memorials to themselves. The tombs are built on one hillside, and legend has it that the king sent one of his courtiers to pick the site. Second-guessing his underling, he then climbed the opposite hill. He gave instructions that if the chosen site did not please him he would wave his white handkerchief. On this signal, the courtier was to be slain. The king actually found that the site was ideal. But it was a warm day and he forgetfully mopped his brow with the white handkerchief. On coming downhill he was confronted with the courtier’s fresh cadaver and exclaimed, “Oh dear.” And ever since, my escorts told me, the opposite peak has been known as “Oh Dear Hill.”
I thought this was a perfect illustration of the caprice and cruelty of absolute leadership, and began to phrase a little pun about Kim Jong Il being the “Oh Dear Leader,” but it died on my lips. And there is more than just callousness and fatalism in the Confucian style. It was noticeable, during the visit of Kim Dae Jung, that Little Boy observed Confucian etiquette, deferring to his senior at all points and even respectfully adjusting his pace to that of the older man. Similarly, rather than seem too ambitious in taking the succession after his father’s death, he delayed his assumption of formal power and decreed a three-year mourning period for the departed – the pious Confucian maximum. Even the two national flowers – the Kimilsungia and the Kimjongilia – reflect this relative modesty. The Kimilsungia is a gorgeous orchid. The Kimjongilia is a fairly humble member of the begonia family.
