Mick Hartley

There was a long article yesterday in the Pyongyang Times, described as a joint editorial of Rodong Sinmun, Joson Inmingun and Chongnyon Jonwi, under the heading, Glorify This Year 2012 as a Year of Proud Victory, a Year When an Era of Prosperity Is Unfolding, True to the Instructions of the Great General Kim Jong Il:

Having seen out the year 2011 in bitter tears of blood, the service personnel and people of Korea are now seeing in the New Year Juche 101 (2012).

It was a long-standing tradition of our people to extend best wishes for good health to the great leader Kim Jong Il on every New Year’s Day and set out on the advance of that year. His august name and benevolent image were a banner of victory that instilled in our people confidence in sure victory and will to achieve it and a source of their mental strength. Now our service personnel and people, turning the great sorrow into one-thousand-fold strength and courage, are embarking on a grand march towards the goal of achieving prosperity in the new century of the Juche era, following the leadership of their supreme leaderKim Jong Un.

That we parted too suddenly and unexpectedly with the great leader Kim Jong Il last year was the greatest loss our nation had suffered in its 5 000-year-long history and the bitterest grief our Party and people had experienced….

On it goes…and on…and on. It's clearly intended as some kind of grand New Year's Day rallying call to the faithful, at the start of the year in which North Korea is supposed to show itself as a Great and Prosperous Nation.

The overall appearance of the country has been transformed to be appropriate for a thriving country. True to the far-reaching plan of Kim Jong Il, building up Pyongyang into a world-class city has been undertaken full steam, and Ryongnim, Taehung, Hoeryong and many other parts have been turned into socialist fairylands. Monumental works of performing arts, like the drama, We Will Recollect Today, which represents the art and literature in the Songun era, have been created one after another, and a new golden age of the mass-based arts has been ushered in.

Last year witnessed the demonstration on an ennobling high of the traits of our service personnel and people who are ready to take the road of the revolution to the end following the great Party.

The situation was tense and complicated, yet the sentiments of our people who were keeping in step with their leader in onward advance remained unstained and invariable.

The period of mourning over the death of the great Kim Jong Il proved that the ties between him and his people sealed in aspiration and emotion are eternal and unbreakable. The tears our service personnel and people shed with greatest sorrow were tears of the unity, unaffected and crystal-clear, and tears of their firm determination to follow the Party to the end of the earth. The ideological and mental virtue of our people, who are possessed of the most ennobling sense of moral obligation, makes the enemy tremble with terror and strikes the rest of the world with admiration.

I think it's fair to say that this is not, on the whole, an accurate reflection of the feelings that the rest of the world entertains towards North Korea. Still, it's an interesting experiment: how detached from reality can a whole nation become, as the rest of the world evolves and the memories of Communist rule outside the hermit kingdom fade like scratchy old newsreels of Mayday parades in Moscow. 

There's no doubt that the outpourings of grief for the Dear Leader were more choreographed and less genuine than they were for his father back in 1994. The stranglehold over the minds of the people that was still possible back then becomes harder and harder to maintain with the increasing and unstoppable flow of information nowadays. North Koreans know that people in the South live better lives. How many outside of the Pyongyang elite believe this Socialist Fairyland guff anymore? How many really rejoice to be living in The Great and Prosperous Nation? There's a palpable sense of desperation here as the recycled cliches become more and more preposterous, more and more absurd.

Unfortunately desperate men are more likely to resort to desperate measures.