People's democratic revue - North Korea

National Review, Sept 1, 1989 by Anthony Daniels

PYONGYANG-ONE of the Great Leader Kim Ii-sung's less-wellknown attributes is his exquisite

sense of humor. He has been playing hilarious practical jokes on the people of North Korea for four and a half decades, and there is simply no end to his inventiveness.

Take the construction of the Ryugyong Hotel in downtown Pyongyang, for example. This 105-story concrete pyramid, which looks like a spaceship from a 1940s science-fiction comic strip, will one day have three thousand rooms and a conference hall seating two thousand. For a country with an economy like North Korea's, the hotel represents an enormous investment. The joke is that Pyongyang is already grossly oversupplied with hotels, 90 per cent of whose rooms are permanently unoccupied. The real reason for the Ryugyong's construction is that the South Koreans were awarded a commercial contract to build a 103-story hotel in Singapore.

Or take Pyongyang Department Store Number 1. During the recent World Festival of Youth and Students, a Soviet-funded jamboree that brought 15,000 people from around the world to Pyongyang, it was specially stocked with goods that are normally never seen in the city. They were piled

neatly onto shelves ftom which they were then never moved-the piles were as perfect and untouched at the end of the day as at the beginning. Through the

store, up and down the escalators, thousands of North Koreans trudged like extras in a movie. These Potemkin shoppers left the store with no more than they entered with-I stood at the entrance for half an hour to check. I then followed some of the "customers" for a while: round and round they went, occasionally halting for a few minutes at a counter to make it appear busy. Once I stared too long at a counter and the assistant, growing uncomfortable under my gaze, suddenly started to give everyone brown plastic bowls. The recipients did not know what to do with them. Some took them to the counter opposite, others shuffled round in little circles with them. None took them and left, and I ceased watching to put an end to their discomfort.

But never let it be said that North Korea is drab. The money is most colorful-blue for hard currency, red for rubles, and white for the Korean masses. One time I caused a sensation by buying a pen: Koreans gathered round to watch this extraordinary and unaccustomed transaction. Did it mean that pens were really for sale? Only for blue money, of course.

And then I saw the Potemkin shoppers receive their wages at the end of their shift: they lined up at the cos

metics counter and each of them received a little tub of rouge, many of them coming away bemused, not knowing what it was they had received. This was surely wittier than anything in Orwell.

The participants in the Festival of Youth and Students were housed in a vast complex of apartment blocks, gymnasia, hotels, and auditoria built originally for the 1988 Olympics. Recent history had undergone swift revision, however: none of the Olympic events was held in Pyongyang, and the participants in the festival were therefore told that the whole complex was built specially for them, They were informed also that it had been built by enthusiastic workers who "volunteered" their spare time and their days off. This was not so much an untruth as a confirmation of Engels's prescient dialectical definition of freedom, which he said was nothing other than the recognition of necessity.

The festival was held under the slogan (everything in North Korea is held under a slogan) FOR ANTI-IMPERIALIST SOLIDARITY, PEACE, AND FRIENDSHIP! Certain of the national delegations had to be kept apart lest they quarreled and cast doubt on the otherwise unquestionable truth that all conflict in the world is caused by American duplicity; but everyone without exception felt able to call down anathema on South Africa, encouraged by posters depicting the various races of mankind in a state of prelapsarian harmony, How surprising, therefore, to meet Africans studying in North Korea who were warned by officials on their arrival that, since Koreans were a homogeneous people, the Africans would be deported if they were ever found with Korean women, and the women would be killed.

One of the Great Leader's most engaging little jokes is the assertion that the state he founded is anti-fascist, when in fact North Korea is a fascist state in almost pure form. Whenever they were asked about the complete absence from Pyongyang of disabled people, our guides replied with ominous decisiveness, "This problem has been solved." Pyongyang has absurdly wide boulevards, more for tanks than for traffic. The special Kim II-sung salute is fascist: one enormous poster shows a giant Kim with his arm outstretched, Hitler-like, over the Lilliputian masses.

But it is in its regular mass rallies and ceremonies, whose purpose is to overwhelm all reason and make the individual aware of his own deep insignificance, that North Korea reveals itself to be truly National Socialist. The opening ceremony of the Festival of Youth and Students involved seventy thousand performers and was held in a stadium seating 150,000. Ranks of young men goose-stepped while bearing symbols of peace. Two thousand musicians played martial music while tens of thousands of dancers formed themselves into the shape of a flower, the kimilsungia. Twenty thousand children held up and then swiftly changed colored cars to produce anti-imperialist slogans, pictures of steelworks, and portraits of the Great Leader. They had been drilled steadily for six months, and foreign residents told me they had seen military truckloads of children returning home from rehearsals at two in the morning. How the Great Leader loves children!