North Korea Undercover by John Sweeney

North Korea Undercover by John Sweeney

Author:John Sweeney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus


1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd3H9X-Y12k

2 Sweeney: The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu, p8.

3 Martin, p547.

13

The Washing of Brains

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’ is the opening sentence of the novel that prefigured the horrors of North Korea, George Orwell’s 1984. But even the Old Etonian seer would have been surprised, I expect, by the weird hollowness of the life of the mind, North Korean-style.

The Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages is no ordinary college. As always, we had a local guide who showed us that the foreign language institute had been created under the wise guidance of Kim . . . blah-blah-blah. The KITC video has a jaunty middle-of-the-road jazz number playing as our party wanders around the university. The video shows a great slab on a wall where Kim Jong I’ls giant ideogram hangs – dated ‘2009.12.17’, showing that only twelve years after Juche Time was established, it had been abandoned by the regime propaganda functionaries. They show us pictures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, empty corridors, emptier classrooms, a huge room where students might sit at the desks, listening to tapes whirring away of ‘The cat in the hat... ’ or whatever, entirely vacant. Something is missing. This is a university with no students.

Where are the students? They are at a meeting, said Miss Jun. All of them? Yes, she said. This may well have been entirely true. It’s apparently quite common for the regime to demand 100 per cent presence of all students at a rally or even the rehearsal of a rally, and nothing takes precedence over obeisance to the state. ‘Sorry, I’ve got an essay to write . . .’ is not a functioning excuse in the DPRK.

They showed us an intranet computer terminal which was linked to a library catalogue, of sorts. On the KITC video, you can clearly hear me ask for a book by ‘George Orwell . . . Animal Farm?’ To my intense disappointment, they had Orwell’s great satire on Stalinism. Or, correction, the book showed up on the electronic menu. I never saw a hard copy of it. The computer may have been lying. But it’s entirely possible that they do have Animal Farm in a North Korean university, but only because its true nature – to my mind, the greatest satire ever written – has somehow escaped the clod-ears of the regime’s censors. If so, raise a glass to Orwell’s memory. In fact, do that anyway.

The tour of empty spaces continued. In the corner of one room was a stack of simple learn-to-read magazines, heavily thumbed. Knowing North Korea, one wondered whether any of the fancy computer terminals and voice-booths actually worked, or whether the foreign language students had to learn most of their English the old-fashioned way. As there were no students around, we could hardly ask them.

One reason for the absence of students may have been because the Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages is a spy school. Its most famous alumnus is, according to US Congressional testimony, Kim Hyun Hee.



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