“I still make sure to go, at least
once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted and
where there is either too much law and order or too little. (Worst of all, I have found, are those
post-Hobbesian places-such as the Congo-where tyranny and anarchy manage a
fearful symmetry, and occur simultaneously.)
One of the articles for Graydon Carter that won me the most praise was
an essay titled “Visit to a Small Planet,” in which I described acquiring
another identity and bribing my way into North Korea. Every time I got a tribute to the success of
this places I felt a slight access of shame, because only I could appreciate
what a failure it was. I had exerted all
my slack literary muscles to evoke the eerie wretchedness and interstellar
frigidity of the place, which is an absolutist despotism where the slaves are
no longer even fed regularly (and is thus its own version of the worst of all
possible worlds), but I knew with a sick certainty that I had absolutely not
managed to convey to my readers anything of how it might feel to be a North
Korean even for a day. Erich Fromm might perhaps have managed it: in a place
with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a
mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the
permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been
achieved.” - Christopher Hitchens Hitch-22
a memoir
“North Korea is a famine state. In
the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of
corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy
restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the
Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of
inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and
tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn't
tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the
realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in
the whole time I was there.”- Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War:
Journeys and Essays
“In the closing months of the
twentieth century, I contrived to get a visa for North Korea. Often referred to as ‘the world’s last
Stalinist state’, it might as easily be described as the world’s prototype
Stalinist state. Founded under the
protection of Stalin and Mao, and made even more hermetic and insular by the
fact of a partitioned peninsula that so to speak ‘locked it in’, the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea still boasted the following features at the end of 2000. On every public building, a huge picture of
‘The Great Leader’ Kim II Sung, the dead man who still holds the office of
President in what one might therefore term a necrocracy or mausolocracy. (All other senior posts are occupied by his
son, ‘The Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il – ‘Big Brother’ was a perversion of family
values as well.) Children marched to school in formation, singing songs in
praise of aforesaid Leader, compulsory wear for all citizens. Loudspeakers and radios blasting continuous
propaganda for the Leader and the Party.
A society endlessly mobilized for war, its propaganda both hysterical
and in reference to foreigners and foreign powers- intensely chauvinistic and
xenophobic. Complete prohibition of any
news from outside or any contact with other countries. Absolute insistence, in all books and in all
publications, on a unanimous view of a grim past, a struggling present, and a
radiant future. Repeated bulletins of
absolutely false news of successful missile tests and magnificent production
targets. A pervasive atmosphere of
scarcity and hunger, alleviated only by the most abysmal and limited food. Grandiose and oppressive architecture. A continuous stress on mass sports and mass
exercise. Apparently total repression of
all matters connected to the libido.
Newspapers with no news, shops with no goods, an airport with almost no
planes. A vast nexus of tunnels
underneath the capital city, connecting different Party and police and military
bunkers.
There was of course, only one word
for it, and it was employed by all journalists, all diplomats and all overseas
visitors. It’s the only time in my
writing life when I have become tired of the term “Orwellian”.’ - Christopher Hitchens “Why Orwell Matters.”
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