Saturday, December 20, 2014

Quotes from Christopher Hitchens on North Korea


“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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