i'll never stop crying

maybe it's just my lack of imagination or empathy or something, but the sobbing north koreans seem just a trifle disingenuous to me. i need better resolution, but i'm not seeing the actual tears, only hearing the overwrought, seal-like barking. to be honest with you, i don't think you can quite 'brainwash' a whole population; really nothing is more evidently absurd than a cult of personality, especially when the object is as unprepossessing as the various kims. you can call people dear and beloved all you like: that's just funny (well, and a little bit pitiful or desperate), and i would think that many north koreans would be as capable of seeing that as anyone else; they're not robots or puppies, but have, i assume, almost human-like intellectual and emotional capacities. as i've often said, if you don't think there's a little dude in the corner snickering - especially at crap that ham-handed and boring and repetitive and obviously self-serving - you don't know our species very well, and that sort of thing is contagious. you know you can put posters up all over your school; that doesn't mean the adolescents aren't going to think your stuff is jive, or just experience it as white noise.

thank god, we are a fairly skeptical and cynical species, or at least we give rise to cynics and skeptics all the time. it'd very hard not to notice that you're starving while officials are eating, for example. the official you're immediately dealing with is obviously stupid and corrupt and all-too-human; so's the guy above him, whom you met one time; it's just liable to occur to you that it runs right up the ladder. and the ideology of these maoist assmonkeys is just so banal, so luridly false to the reality, so idiotically repetitive, and so on, that i just think that a lot of people won't, or literally won't even be able to, believe it. as havel said: you can get people to sort of act like they accept it (because there are terrible penalties for failing to simulate epistemic compliance); you can get them to shuffle from place to place on schedule or sob simulated sobs in unison; that doesn't mean everyone doesn't understand that they are being bombarded with jive.

Comments

[Stephen]

Just to get totally racist... Crispin, wise up- Koreans are the fucking gnarliest people on the planet. I have never met a more heedlessly driven and possessed people in my life. To work alongside a Korean is to be totally driven into the ground. I imagine that this is kinda like what the old Prussians were like, only realistically, they were pussies by comparison.

They just drive on grimly, no matter the hardship. Watch Duk Koo Kim get killed in the ring by Ray Mancici... The last 15 round fight. Kim is clearly going to die by about round 14... But he still keeps coming, his face falling off, still fighting. Not lacking strength, just technique, having started boxing late in life. Holy fuck. Koreans terrify me.

[crispy]

if that's true, stephen, then they richly deserve the sort of regime they have, or really, it could hardly be otherwise.

[adamcrazypants]

isn't that the case for everyone everywhere? we're an ocean away, and we can barely know the half of it. but sure, yeah, we know what's best for them, and can criticize and break down their culture and system of governance, etc. Ahmed Chalabi saywhat.

I thought the right loathed the UN.

[Joe]

Slightly different take on the North Korean mindset:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/books/excerpt-cleanest-race.html?pagewanted=all

Excerpt:

"In this book, therefore, I aim to explain North Korea's dominant ideology or worldview — I use the words inter- changeably — and to show how far removed it is from communism, Confucianism and the show-window doctrine of Juche Thought. Far from complex, it can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader."

[brian]

this happened before i was born, but i imagine that people were crying their eyes out when jfk was killed and that dude was a fucking war criminal.

[Kerry]

although the keening and fist-thumping--the first 60 or so seconds of it, anyway--does makes good theater.

[BenSix]

"I have never met a more heedlessly driven and possessed people in my life."

In fairness, a lot of Chinese people reacted similarly in the case of Mao, and a lot of Russian people in the case of Stalin. It seems to be a broad enough phenomenon that I'd be cautious about attributing it to personal failings. For one thing because I've never been starved and subjected to lifelong indoctrination.

[BenSix]

A fitting tribute - http://kimjongildroppingthebass.tumblr.com/