“Nothing to
Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” is a
book by Barbara Demick. She follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over
fifteen years.
Some excerpts from the book that captures the stark
realities of life inside one of the world's most feared dictatorships and last Stalinist
paradise on earth.
“IF YOU LOOK AT SATELLITE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE FAR EAST by
night, you’ll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of
darkness is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Next to this mysterious
black hole, South Korea, Japan, and now China fairly gleam with prosperity.
Even from hundreds of miles above, the billboards, the headlights and
streetlights, the neon of the fast-food chains appear as tiny white dots
signifying people going about their business as twenty-first-century energy
consumers. Then, in the middle of it all, an expanse of blackness nearly as
large as England. It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as
vacant as the oceans. NorthKorea is simply a blank…………………………North Korea faded
to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had
propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s creakily
inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went
out.
Hungry people scaled utility poles to pilfer bits of copper wire to swap
for food. When the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and
the squat little houses are swallowed up by the night. Entire villages vanish
into the dusk. Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can
stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the
buildings on either side.
When outsiders stare into the void that is today’s
North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where
the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached. But North Korea is not
an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed
world. You can see the evidence of what once was and what has been lost
dangling overhead alongside any major North Korean road—the skeletal wires of
the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire country."
About Kim
Il-sung
“To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From
Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s China, from Ceauşescu’s Romania to Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings: the statues looming
over every town square, the portraits hung in every office, the wristwatches
with the dictator’s face on the dial. But Kim Il-sung took the cult of
personality to a new level. What distinguished him in the rogues’ gallery of
twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim
Il-sung understood the power of religion.
His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the
pre-Communist days when Pyongyang had such a vibrant Christian community that
it was called the “Jerusalem of the East.” Once in power, Kim Il-sung closed
the churches, banned the Bible, deported believers to the hinterlands, and
appropriated Christian imagery and dogma for the purpose of self-promotion.
Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the
manner of Pentecostal preachers.
North Korean newspapers carried tales of
supernatural phenomena. Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors
clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. When Kim
Jong-il went to the DMZ, a mysterious fog descended to protect him from lurking
South Korean snipers.
North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the
propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their
indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory
day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, lm, newspaper article, and
billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically
sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung’s divinity.
Who could possibly resist?
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