7 Lies About North Korea

[imomus]

I first met Christian Kracht in 1991, when he came to London to write a feature about me for Tempo magazine. The photos were by a then-unknown photography student called Wolfgang Tillmans. Christian's next assignment was to live for a month as a homeless person on London's streets and write about that. When I next heard from him, he'd become "one of the best-known writers and journalists of his generation", with books translated into 14 languages. In 2003 he commissioned me to write a short story for Der Freund, the literary magazine he was editing, and I responded with "7 Lies About Holger Hiller" (published here in English for the first time).



Kracht managed to edit this German literary magazine while living in Katmandu, Nepal. He's now back in Berlin (the phone and internet just proved too patchy in Katmandu to get any collaborative work done) and has just published a coffee table book about North Korea. Total Recall: Kim Jong-Il's North Korea proposes "the nation as time machine". Leafing through Eva Munz's gorgeously faded photos of monumental buildings, vast boulevards with only one car, suspicious rental crowds, opulent (but non-operational) underground railway stations, and patriotic collectivist murals, it's easy to see parallels with certain parts of East Berlin. For Germans, this really is a time machine back to their own past. It's also, in a certain way, beautiful.

Yesterday I attended the launch for the "North Korea coffee table book" in the control room of an old power station (later the Vitra Design Museum) in Prenzlauer Berg. North Korean propaganda posters decorated the walls, and video monitors streamed whitewashing films at us, accompanied by solemn ceremonial music. The result was remarkably similar to ostalgie -- with more beautiful, faded East Asian pastel colours.



"Those few thousand tourists -- and a few journalists -- who come annually to the North Korean capital of Pjongjang are accompanied by guides and only allowed to see what the regime considers worth seeing," the publisher's blurb for Total Recall explains. "Some places are prepared particularly for this viewing with actors, who represent pedestrians, but are not, with consumer goods, which are apparently on sale, but are unavailable, and with dubious statistics. Kim Jong Il's People's Republic of North Korea is a gigantic installation, a simulation, a play. Eva Munz, Christian Kracht and Lukas Nikol travelled to North Korea to make pictures of a country from which there are no pictures. What they show in this book is a window onto the gigantic 3-D production of Kim Jong Il, who writes the nation's statistics and makes its film script. Because, from the outside, no accurate view is available of this total installation, the authors make the only one possible: they commentate their photos with quotations from a didactic book of axioms on the art of film written by the dictator - who not only collects wine and Mazda RX-7 sports cars, but also has an enormous film library."

While photographer Eva Munz (who was born in socialist East Germany) had found her experience of North Korea menacing, Christian Kracht was full of praise for what he'd seen of the nation. It was simply beautiful. People seemed happy. He felt very free there. It was like participating in a nationwide piece of cinema. It was only when he approached the South Korean border that Kracht, wearing a pink suit, felt menaced by something sinister: from the unfree south, yoked by the tight bonds of capitalism, border guards and Americans watched him through binoculars, taking pictures. I laughed with delight at this reversal of the usual stereotypes.



Kracht will give a talk at Rafael Horzon's REDESIGNDEUTSCHLAND Wissenschaftsakademie on Monday, September 11th at 8pm. Apologizing for missing my lecture there a couple of weeks ago, Christian had the perfect excuse. "I was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro that day," he said.

Comments

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

This entry truly disgusted me.

[beketaten.livejournal.com]

I too feel that it can be interperated in a pro-communist, unrealistic way, but that Momus is just expressing incredulous amusement and bewilderment of how differently some of these experiences can be interperated. It's not necessarily saying that this is how things "really" are there, but it's about bemusement at how differently people can see things.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I happen to believe that the most disgusting and evil societies on Earth are our own. That's because, unlike President Bush, I measure "evil" by things like car ownership, pointless and endless industrial growth, and living with an ecological footprint which it would take four or five planets to sustain, when we only have one. I also measure "evil" by actual invasions and actual wars waged by the nation in question. North Korea is considerably less "evil" on all these criteria than the nations most of us come from. I'm fine with people pointing out the vast number of things wrong with North Korea, but it's totalitarian to suggest that all nations should be market-led capitalist states, with all the ugliness, bullying and unsustainability we know those entail.

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone here is saying that "all nations should be market-led capitalist states." The fact of the matter is that this ostalgie you're so very fond of nowadays is as perverse as any nostalgia for any state. The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.

Speaking as someone who takes a pretty big stock in these issues, the continued propping up of deformed worker's states like North Korea from certain sides of the Left is counter productive for our "cause," if, in its decentralization and lack of program, a cause it can still be called. It's like the US communists who rallied behind Stalin, probably because his named ended in an "in" like Lenin, and so he was clearly just as noble as that great man. Feh.

I'm as disgusted by the state of the world, and my own country, as you are, Captain: but I fear that rallying behind North Korea and similar brutish dictatorships because they are the enemy of your enemy is reactionary by definition. Is it so very hard to believe that maybe there are no good guys right now, and that those of us who give a good goddamn have to do something new instead of wasting our time propping up the old models that failed? bourgeois US republican democracy, Stalinist autocracy, libertatian bluster, reactionary fascism, postmodern glibness: these old modes have proven themselves useless. Can't we think of something better??

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

it's not easy mate..i'm all dizzy. nation states and all that....

[beketaten.livejournal.com]

Notice how Momus says that Kracht found it "in a certain way beautiful". He's just explaining. Man, you all need to step back, just like I have to remind myself to do all the time.
Extreme personalization with what fragmented knowledge one has is not necessarily the way to rational nor comprehensive analysis.

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I'm a cranky, graying twenty-something Marxist. So all is forgiven.

TO be perfectly serious, however, I think the problem I had (and have) is the immediate dichotomy of US/West and The Rest of the World: as in, since capitalism is a blight, then radical Islam, North Korean autocracy, and any other reactionary sect must be closer to the "truth." Quite honestly, it's my dogged belief that no one on the world stage is innocent right now: what Momus may, if he deigns to respond, call "moronic cynicism."

My problem is that so many intelligent Marxists (or let's say anti-capitalists, to be all-inclusive) spend time critiquing the Western world, propping up malformed reactions against it, and never get to the heart of this issue: how in the hell do we improve/revolutionize it? And I do believe that's as "rational" a question as one can ask.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think I hinted at an answer to the "how do we improve the West" question in yesterday's comments, when I said that states like East Germany should be regarded as a scrapheap from which we can plunder the good and leave the bad to rust. North Korea can also be treated this way: as a parallel world where the managerial / logistical / privatizing mindset that mars the West simply doesn't apply, leading to much more extreme results. Some of which actually, intentionally or not, create virtues.

My impression of North Korea is based not only on Kracht's book, but also on a long and very interesting documentary I saw on Arte, and on the travel impressions of Ishmaro Gensho, a Japanese writer who went there. All these people have come back with positive things to say about North Korea. It's only people who base their impressions on American propaganda who speak of it as a place of unrelenting evil and unhappiness, so miserable it could only be improved by invasion and forced conversion to the market system.

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

Of course the "scrapheap" idea is ideal: synthesis is all-important. And no place, really, is entirely bereft of goodness: even Nazi Germany had good citizens trying to live honest lives, despite the horrors of its regime. As North Korea is not Nazi Germany, I'm sure there are a lot more. I think the reaction you see is split into two categories: anti-communist Liberals who (at their base) believe in the wonders of capitalism, and communists who see states like North Korea, China, and post-Stalinist Russia as embarassments. They're the ones most pointed to when criticized our collectivist tendencies, and so we get a little defensive, I guess.

To that end, I say that looking to the GDP for inspiration is much wiser than North Korea. In fact, all your talk of ostalgie has had me researching it quite extensively in my spare minutes between reading for school and working. It's as good a starting place as any!

And of course the place cannot only be improved "by invasion and forced converstion to the market system." To say that would be to betray every principle I (and you, I'm sure) hold dear.

On a sunnier side note, how's life? :)

sunnier side

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

I do not see the Cuban intervention in Angola or the Chinese in Tibet as something even vaguely resembling what your taking about other than a reason for countries to start over as in Mao's China or Shinawat 's dimeze. As for footprints, half the globe lives in Asia burning wood and coal as their daily activities. Which is, on it's own a peaceful path to global crisis. In the other hand the breasts will do me fine!



http://www.mg.co.za/organisation/khmer-rouge
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB67/
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=9750
http://www.prachatai.com/english/node/122
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_india-hits-back-at-china-what-about-tibet-pok_1299135

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

Right, far less evil to starve your own people than own a car! As if the lack of cars and industrialization in N. Korea was due to anything other than economic constraints. Trust me, if they had the economic power they'd be filling up their country with cars and factories just like the west.

[beketaten.livejournal.com]

The Soviet Union's legacy of atrocious neglect of the natural environment still plagues the shores of Estonia, among other places.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

But it's pretty.