North Korea and Potemkin Villages

Useful Idiots

One of the most cringe-inducing episodes in recent Western history was the infatuation of the majority of intellectuals in the first half of the last century with the Soviet Union.  Whilst Stalin was ravening his subjects with famine, Western intellectuals were praising the wonder of a socialist economy.  They did this, of course, because long ago they had become converted to socialist ideology.  The Soviet Union was the leading exemplar of the secular New Jerusalem.  The standard eschatology of the time was that capitalism and private property was going to fall apart under their own contradictions whilst the Soviet New Model Man would emerge superior and the way of the future.  The intellectual avante guard became willing dupes.

The constant procession of Western admirers was treated to all sorts of displays of the wonder of the New Model Economy.  They dutifully gooed and gahhed. Stalin even ordered New Model Towns to be made--subsequently labelled Potemkin Villages after a consort of the Russian Tsarina Catherine II--which were essentially like Hollywood movie sets.  Through these Western visitors were duty conducted, dutifully to return back home raving at the wonderful increase in housing quality and living standards being enjoyed in the Soviet Union.  Meanwhile, eastward, beyond the Urals, the Gulag camps were hard at work.

In recent weeks we have had our own Potemkin moment.
  One of our own, superannuated economist, Gareth Morgan recently was escorted through North Korea.  He marvelled at the splendour of the place. His findings included:

• it was fantastic
• The country is beautiful
• The country is just fantastic, the farms are perfect. They have no pollution.
• huge pride in their personal space
• those they witnessed were not malnourished or lacking in necessities in clothing or shelter
• poor, yes, but wonderfully engaged, well-dressed, fully employed and well informed
• what North Korea has achieved economically despite its lack of access to international money has been magnificent.
  Hat Tip: Kiwiblog

Presumably, Mr Morgan's tour was conducted at night. We know that in the darkness of that land during the night, it is rather hard to see things properly.  Below is a satellite image of North Korea (outlined) at night.



Gareth has been visiting a giant Potemkin Village.  He has clearly forgotten the old saw about mushrooms being kept in the dark and fed horseshit. 

But jokes pale when the reality of life is exposed in that terrible place.  This, from The Guardian. 

Camp 14: Total Control Zone is different. The German film-maker Marc Wiese's film tells of horrors that could be happening as you read this, in North Korea, in prison camps so vast that they show up on Google Earth.

Some are "re-education" facilities, where the inmates can hope to be released after a period of hard labour and immersion in revolutionary doctrine. The "total control zone", however, is a life sentence, with death the only exit. Other, that is, than escape. Shin Dong-hyuk was born in the camp and fled, aged 23, in 2005. Wiese's film gives a harrowing account of life in a world where people like him are regarded as lower than worms or flies.

Wiese's work has taken him from the Bosnian war to Palestine, Belfast and South Africa; he has talked to war criminals and people who have ordered suicide bombings. Even he was shocked, though, by Shin's reply when, hoping to start the film with an upbeat story, he asked him for a memory from when he was four. "So he told me, 'I have a memory; it was a public execution.' I said, 'Did your mother talk to you about that? Did she try to help you?' He looked at me and was shaking his head, and he said, 'No. For what? It was happening every week.' And just for me, personally, I said, 'Shin, what did your mother teach you?' and he said, 'Only one thing: how to survive.'"

Survival meant living by the rules, which included informing on anyone in breach of camp regulations. When Shin overhead his mother apparently plotting to help his brother escape, he told his teacher. Later, he had to watch as his mother was publicly hanged and his brother killed by firing squad. He felt nothing. If he hadn't informed, he and his father would probably have been executed, he says. This revelation takes Camp 14: Total Control Zone into the area of Primo Levi's "grey zone", where the distinction between victim and perpetrator becomes disturbingly blurred. "For me, this was never a victim story," says Wiese. "That would be, honestly, boring. Camp 14 is, for me, a film which is showing how a system is able to condition three people. In the beginning, Shin and the two guards are very opposite. But in the middle, as he is talking about his mother's execution and they are talking about torture, they are very parallel. Shin is saying, 'Well, she did something wrong.' And the perpetrators are saying, 'Well, of course we tortured. Of course we executed. They told us we have to, so we did.'"

Able to act with impunity, the guards beat, killed and raped prisoners on a whim. While Oh Yang-nam, a former secret service policeman also interviewed for the film, questions what he did, Hyuk Kwon, a former commander in camp 22, shows no remorse. "I'm convinced he has a sadistic side, because he's smiling," says Wiese. "He's talking about rape. It's impossible to smile. Around 50% of the material with him was simply not usable. It was too tough. It made a freak show out of Camp 14." Still, it may yet serve a purpose: "If ever a human rights court is established for North Korea, they can have my raw material, and it's enough to sentence them both."

Ah, Gareth, you have been played like a fool.  What did Lenin allegedly call such?  Useful idiots. That will do.