North Korea Propaganda | Professor Brian Myers | Ji Seong Ho | John Sweeney - Interesting Documentary
North Korea – Propoganda
John Sweeney
Panorama Thermonuclear Threat
The Pyongyang TimesWe’re flying into the strangest nation on earth. It’s unstable, aggressive, paranoid, and after its latest nuclear test in February, even China, it’s old ally, voted against it in the UN. – It’s old ally. No wonder North Korea is fast running out of friends. Journalists are all but banned from North Korea so I’m going in undercover, part of a tour group. Guide number one, the regime’s human face.
Guide number one “Hello everybody, I’m glad to meet you here in Pyongyang.”
It’s immediately clear that we’ve come to North Korea at an interesting time.
Guide number one “At the moment the situation is very tense. As you know. Nobody knows when the war will be provoked. But, anyhow, we will be safe. Our bus has the mark of the Korean International Travel Company so the Americans will not strike our bus.”
Our guide number two says hello.
Guide number two “Good afternoon everybody. So I’m a guide from K.I.T.C.”
John Sweeney with Tour GuideThey were both our guides and also the ever vigilant escorts. We are on an official eight-day tour, so the guides put us up in one of the top hotels in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. Pity about the lights. This is the toilet, there are more lights. And here’s the view outside the hotel. They’re building a bank, night and day, day and night. It’s now four in the morning. They never stop. I’m told it’s a joint-venture with a Chinese bank. A rare sign of inward investment?
First stop, this is tourism Stalin style. Joining us today is the trip’s official cameraman. He films us, we film him, he films us filming him. This is a controlled society, but what’s the ideology behind it? The official video they made about the trip, with their words and music, given to us at the end, provides a clue.
Official video “This is a monument to the party. It was erected in October 1995 to mark the 15th anniversary of the founding of the Workers Party of Korea.”
John Sweeney “So there is the hammer, there is the sickle, and there is the paintbrush, workers by hand and by brain. It feels like some sort of an old religion.”
The main square: many see North Korea as a Communist state. One year ago Marx and Lenin stood in pride of place, but this year, on our trip they’ve gone.
John Sweeney “So, what sort of system is this?”
Professor Brian MyersProfessor Brian Myers “North Korea has a higher share of the population in uniform than Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had until the Second World War. So I think it’s much more accurate to look at North Korea as a far-right state than ultra national state.”
John EverardJohn Everard, British ambassador to North Korea, 2006-08 “It is deeply racially biased. Koreans are taught that they are superior. Kim Jong Il was an unabashed admirer of Hitler and copied him quite consciously. Down to details like the Nuremberg marches which are staged in Pyongyang to this day.”
At the mausoleums, tourists are banned from taking cameras in. Kim Il Sung has been dead these past 19 years but he still calls the shots.
Mark FitzpatrickMark Fitzpatrick “As far as I know, it’s the only nation in the world ruled by a dead man. The Generalissimo, Kim Il Sung is still the leader of the country.”
John Sweeney “But, he’s a corpse?”
Mark Fitzpatrick “I’m sorry, but you don’t understand the North Korean ideology, the religious nature of this. He is, a kind of a, God, he lives eternally.”
As does his son, Kim Jong Il. Kim 2, lies in his own glass box . when he died nearly 2 years ago, his youngest son Kim Jung Un, then 28, took over the family firm. Kim the third was schooled in Switzerland and became a general at 27. He has linked his star firmly to the military.
John Sweeney “So, North Korea ultra-nationalistic, militaristic, and its leaders are gods. It is a worrying combination.”
Ji Seong HoJi Seong Ho “In North Korea, if you say the wrong thing, you will die. You will be sent to a political prison camp. Even if one knows something, sees something, one must pretend to be ignorant. Disagreement isn’t an option. Disagreement means death.”
John Sweeney “The ideology may be terrifying, but does this place really work? At this bottling plant, on the production line, no production today. The military seems to work, on the road anti-aircraft guns. Next, time to pay homage to Kim the first. I bow, it’s what’s expected in the God-like status of the Kims. It’s at the entrance of what we are told is a collective farm. You get the feeling this isn’t an ordinary farm. So, where are the crops, the fields, the animals? Instead, propaganda drones out from loudspeakers all day long. So what about the farm-workers? Where do they live?”
They show us a model house with a model family, model kitchen and a fridge full of food. But, this didn’t seem to have anything to do with farming.
The Gilded CageOff to a spa hotel, set aside for the regime’s worthies and foreigners like us. Breakfast – in a gilded cage.
We sneak out of our spa hotel, the barbed wire separates us from the locals. North Korea is one of the poorest places on earth. So welcome to the real North Korea! Life is bleak here. No reliable power, no freedoms as we know them not even to travellers to the capital without permission.
Tour guide “Please don’t take photos.”
The more we see, the worse it gets. Our tour guides are anxious not to capture the poverty.
Tour guide “No photos, no photos.”
Washing in Icy WaterHere a woman washes clothes in an icy river. People scavenging in mud and if this is a market there wasn’t much on sale! No smoke from this chimney. It looks as though it’s been idle for some time.
They take us to a showroom for this giant industrial complex. They make electricity generators here, they say, there goes the electricity again. We ask for a tour of the factory.
Tour guide “Now the Korean peninsula situation is getting worse and worse, on the verge of Korean War. So they are now producing military things. So they can’t show the whole factory.”
To us, they used the war as an excuse when things go wrong. Do they do the same with their own people?
Mark Fitzpatrick “When you talk to the Korean people, a lot of them recognise that North Korea is very backward and very poor. But they tend to blame that on outside interference and American sanctions, and, indeed, if a light bulb blows in Pyongyang, the people say blame an American.”
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Further Reading
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea – Barbasr Demick
Aquariums of Pyongyang – Kang Chol-Hwan
Aquariums of Pyongyang – Kang Chol-Hwan
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