did this picture get someone killed?

the regime in North Korea is both barmy and savage, as any fule kno. Its ruling dynasty and the elite that surrounds it cannot afford to move on from the worst extremes of the Cold War in which its people are still living, even though they must. The regime's pronouncements read like a bad joke, most of the time, and its leaders, since the nation's founder Kim Il-sung ("Kim: The Early Years"), to his allegedly playboy son Kim Jong Il ("Bad Elvis", as John Sweeney dubbed him) to today's Dear Leader Kim Jong Un ("Fatboy Kim", ibid.) have looked increasingly ludicrous with each generation. One day the regime will come crashing down, and the Kims with it. But until then the people of North Korea live in a tragic parody of a socialist paradise. And yet, look at this picture. It is an official photograph taken of Leader Kim's visit to an orphanage (one with no children in it, but that is the way of things in the Democratic People's Republic). It appears not to have been photoshopped or tampered with. Someone in that place has (or had) a subversive sense of humour. The picture is from KCNA, the Korean Central News Agency, the sole official news agency.

fatboy kim look behind you

I am not one to subscribe to the notion that totalitarian or fascist regimes can be brought down by ridicule - look how effective the satirical cabarets of 1930s Berlin were against Hitler - but there is a place for taking the piss. The worker in the orphanage, the member of Kim's entourage, the humble official, whoever it was who had the notion of placing the two stuffed toys behind Kim in the compromising position they are in has a juvenile sense of humour, but a subversive one. It's good to see that subversiveness is alive and well and living in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, where there's not much to laugh about, most of the time. The joke that is Fatboy Kim's haircut has probably worn a bit thin by now.

Of course, this picture may be fake. I don't think so, but it may be. Of course, if it's real the person responsible for the placing of the animals may have been identified and terminated by now. Commenters on Mashable, which is where I first saw this picture, seem to think so.

For those who care, the stuffed animal in the, er, submissive position in the picture is a Japanese manga character. He is a blue cat with no ears called Doraemon who has come back from the future to help a little boy called Nobita live a better life. I think he is fab and I have got several pieces of Doraemon merchandise at home. And, why, pray tell, can the Glorious People's Republic not create their own stuffed animals, but instead use ones imported (we suppose) from Evil Imperialist Japan?

Leaving quite aside the notion of being pictured smoking a cigarette in an orphanage. Or anywhere, really, these days.

 

 

 

 

North Korea - Lankov and Sweeney

North Korea has for many years been something of a hobby of mine. My uncle was in Korea during his national service in the Navy, but would never talk about it. when I was a child I was curious. Much later, when I was at the BBC Monitoring Service as a foreign affairs editor on what was at first a print publication called the Summary of World Broadcasts, later on line and these days much changed of course (I started that job in 1984) I was given responsibility, kind of, for North Korea. Understanding what its news media were saying, keeping an eye on what they were putting out, that sort of thing. I began to study Korean in the late 1980s and went to South Korea for a while too, but that is another story. North Korea was a hoot, at times. The language used by KCNA, the Korean Central News Agency, North Korea's English-language voice, was especially colourful. They would refer to the South Korean media as "venal trumpeters" and "corrupt penny-a-liners". The South generally were "splittist flunkeys". You get the kind of thing. Now, after the Cold War, North Korea seems even stranger. Huge triumphal arches, miraculous happenings to do with the Kim dynasty, and so on.

So, I was interested a few months ago to read a book written in English by a Russian, Andrei Lankov, who lived and worked in North Korea for years, called "The Real North Korea". Leaving aside the inevitable infelicities in English, especially in the use of articles (he is a Russian after all - Andrei, let me edit your next one: I understand the grammar and structure of Russian and Korean and I'm a native English professional editor, you won't find another one like me) it was utterly fascinating. North Korea, he tells us, when formed in 1945, had to be communist of course, but there were no communists in it then. So they had to find some, and bring them from the USSR and other places where the likes of Kim Il Sung were hanging out. He it was who called the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in a private conversation with Brezhnev in 1966, "idiocy". No flies on Kim the Elder, I've always thought. North Korea remains the only country ever to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as not a lot of people know. It is worth reading this book for the vignettes of life in that secret state, for the pictures never seen elsewhere, some of them taken by the author, of the lives of ordinary North Koreans - and for a different perspective. It is especially worth reading for his analysis of what has kept the Kim dynasty in power for all these decades against the odds, why the regime, entirely rationally, will not change, and, also entirely rationally, why it must. He has added to the sum of historical knowledge.

A different perspective again is to be found in the book by the journalist John Sweeney, "North Korea Undercover" which chronicles a visit he and others made as tourists. He says "understanding North Korea is like figuring out a detective story where you stumble across a corpse in the library, a smoking gun beside it, and the corpse gets up and says that's no gun and it isn't smoking and this isn't a library." The book's working hypothesis is, Sweeney says, "that Kim Jong Un's talk of nuclear war is a confidencc trick and that the Pyongyang bluff is blinding us to a human rights tragedy on an immense scale." That seems about right, and it is time more of the international community took an interest. Though I can quite see why the international movers tend to discover a prior appointment and scurry away when the subject comes up.

Sweeney is not immune to the desire to take the piss that often comes over those who encounter North Korean propaganda - I certainly succumbed to it regularly in the 1980s - he calls Kim Il Sung, rather splendidly, "God the Mother", Kim Jong Il "Bad Elvis", and the current incumbent, Kim Jong Un, "Fat Boy Kim". He too though, like Lankov, glimpses what he calls "the survivalist logic lurking in the dark". No one knows for sure what the elder two Kims were like. Sweeney cites "someone" as saying that the best book about North Korea was written in 1592, and is called "Richard III". I lay my cards upon the table as a passionate Ricardian, and move on. Although I note, and recommend, the film version of that play which stars Sir Ian McKellen, is set in a totalitarian regime of some kind, and has the Lady Anne a junkie.

What is particularly to be recommended about Sweeney's book is the fact that he includes interviews with many North Korean defectors to the South, and this book brings their stories together in one place in readable English, which I do not think anyone else has done.

Read both these books - you will understand totalitarianism a little better. It has not gone away from this world, despite the grounds for optimism I believe there are - death-squad regimes have largely gone from South America and the Iron Curtain is down, but let's not all relax quite yet - and the fact that such a regime can still exist when we all thought it could not is all the more reason for finding out more about it.

As an aside, the official ideology of North Korea, called Juche or Chuche, depending on which transliteration system you prefer, is known in North Korean propaganda as "the Chuche idea". There is no exact translation of that Korean word into English, but it has almost the exact same meaning as a name in the Irish language - Sinn Fein. Not that...

I once had a grey tomcat I called Chuche. He had to go to another owner after a while, who changed his name to Freddie. Pity really.

North Korea and the silliest propaganda

I have never been to North Korea. Well, not unless you count Panmunjom, where the tourists put one foot over that silly line on the ground. I've been there twice. The first time was in 1987, when South Korea was just coming out of military rule (the first democratic elections were in December that year). An American in the same tour group as me at Panmunjom (I think she was a missionary) said to the American military guide "What would happen if I tried to cross to the North?" He said "We would endeavour to prevent it, Ma'am." She said "Does that mean you'd shoot me?" He said "We'd endeavour to prevent it, Ma'am." The second time I went to Panmunjom was in 1999, when our guides were not American military but a South Korean tour company - the Cold War was over and the North Korean guards in their too-large caps just looked silly. But there were, and are, tens of thousands of troops at the border between the two Koreas, UN troops who are mostly Americans, and their job is to get killed if there's a southward invasion. It's hard to find out just how many US troops are there, for understandable reasons - the US Army 2nd Infantry Division is now the only remaining US forward deployment in the world - but most of the non-US military serving there are South Korean, and there are about 1,000 of them, a small proportion of the whole.

I've just read journalist John Sweeney's book 'North Korea Undercover'. This he wrote after a visit to the country during which quite a lot of secret filming was done, and a BBC Panorama programme (which I have not seen) was subsequently made. It is rather a good thing that he reminds us in this book of the fringe Marxist grouping the Workers' Party of Ireland , a big cheese in which was (and remains - he is still national treasurer in the Republic) Sean Garland. Garland made a number of visits to North Korea in the 1980s, and was implicated in alleged counterfeiting and money laundering by North Korea. The evidence against Garland was strong enough for the US to seek his extradition, but ultimately the Republic of Ireland refused this, and Garland, now elderly and unwell, remains in the Republic. This interested me because in the 1970s and 1980s many people in Labour politics in the UK had contacts with various Irish left groupings. Some of these contacts were really quite close. A Labour councillor in Reading, Kevin McDevitt, who died in 1988, used to talk openly of his contacts with people in Irish left groupings, and in particular about contacts with North Korea. He once offered to get me a North Korean bicycle when he knew of my interest in Korea.
Martin Salter, then deputy leader of Reading Borough Council, later Labour MP for Reading West 1997-2010, was a big fan of McDevitt's. He saw Kevin as a kind of political father figure, it appeared to colleagues at the time, and was rather starry-eyed at the image of McDevitt (mainly promulgated by Salter not McDevitt) of Kevin as a swashbuckling hero of the battle against British imperialism and occupation of Northern Ireland. It's certainly true that campaign groups like the Troops Out movement were a lot closer to the mainstream of the Labour Party than they would be today. Salter did not proclaim these contacts once he was an ambitious backbencher in the Blair Labour administration in the 1990s.

My own interest in Korea came about through language study and cultural interest. This led me to go to work for BBC Monitoring in Caversham, Reading, in 1984, and there I spent a number of years in the East Asia section, and a lot of that time working on the monitoring of North Korean media, especially the KCNA news agency, which is quite extensively quoted from in Sweeney's book. Thus the material he quotes was mostly edited by me. Of great interest to Sweeney was the BBC reports monitored from KCNA of Sean Garland's visits to North Korea and statements he made there. The East Asia editor of BBC Monitoring during the 1980s, and thus my boss, was of Irish origin, which may or may not have had anything to do with the fact that the first couple of KCNA reports on Garland's visits to North Korea were published by the BBC, but then editorial priorities appeared to change, and while I thought such reports were of interest, perhaps especially to government customers, my superiors had other ideas. Well, it's all a long time ago. But now that tensions are high again on the Korean peninsula Sweeney has seen fit to refer to these matters again, and he is right to do so.

In passing I note the name mentioned by Sweeney of one David Richards, described by him as a British communist with North Korean connections. I have been trying to research this person, but have come up with nothing so far. However, while I was at BBC Monitoring a person called David Richards asked for an informal visit to the East Asia section, and met several of us, including me. He was working in Pyongyang, he said, as an English editor for KCNA. This would have been in about 1986 or so. He wanted to leave, and was looking to recruit a replacement on behalf of his bosses at KCNA. He had previously, he said, been based in Harare, Zimbabwe. There the trail goes cold, at least for my research skills. Anybody else know about him? I wonder where he is now. I was quite curious about the KCNA opportunity, and might even have applied for it, but for family reasons did not. Perhaps just as well. I don't regret it. The next year, 1987, I was offered the position of English language editor for the Seoul Olympic operation, to have charge of their English-language output in the run-up to the 1988 Olympics and beyond. I turned it down, and that I am sorry I did.

Sweeney says the BBC should start a (North) Korean service, and staff it with North Korean exiles. So indeed they should. Sweeney undoubtedly knows, though he does not say, that serious thought was given to the setting up of a Korean language service as part of the BBC World service. It was serious enough to warrant the sending of a member of staff to Korea for three months, to learn the language (ha!) and look around for recruitment opportunities. Yes, readers, I was that person. And all very interesting it was. However, at that time the decisions on what languages the BBC should broadcast in (though not editorial content) were taken by the Foreign Secretary. At the time this was Geoffrey Howe. He said no. More or less as I was getting off the plane on return from Korea. When the 30-year rule allows release of documents about this in a couple of years' time I shall be most interested to have a look.

Let's talk Korea.

the moment it all went wrong

north korea supporters

the flag moment