Docos On North Korea (Part 1: The Tourist Trail)

The death of Kim Jong Il has rekindled my interest in North Korea. Over the last few weeks I’ve seen quite a lot of movies, articles, photos and so on. Here’s a rundown of them and what they have taught me. My main takeaway was this: NK is fascinating but the texts about NK are doubly fascinating. It is because NK is so foreign to us that the assumptions of people who write about NK become all the more apparent.

As you might know, it’s quite possible to go to NK as a tourist, usually through one of the Chinese travel agencies. Basically you pay for a 7 day package tour where you are supervised, chaperoned and itineraried at all times. So it’s a pretty standard package. This video (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) by David Pluth documents said standard tourist itinerary.

However, it’s much more than documentation — it is a creepy bit of NK apologism that’s a fascinating text in its own right. He starts by saying [paraphrased]: “What’s your view of NK? Probably negative. This video will open your mind.” He then proceeds to react to everything as if he was on a regular organised tour of any country other than NK. Especially creepy is when he praises the large array of dishes laid out before him and says “and that’s just the entree”. Doubly-fascinating then.

This page is a fairly long description of the same kind of tour by a guy from Russia. There are lots of photos meaning there is a lot more detail than you would otherwise see. He also got quite a few pictures of the countryside, ordinary people and places and so on — often from the window of the minivan. His commentary provides a very different perspective to what you’d be used to. For instance he says NKeans are closer in mentality to Russians than to westerners. Hmm. And then there’s this: “Recall that DPRK is a socialist country since the 1940s (not in the Lenin/Marxist understanding, of course, but in that of the USSR in the late 1980s) with all its pros and cons.”

The whole idea of pros and cons is ridiculous and reminds of of the whole false balance idea. There were definitely some things the late 80s USSR did better than say the late 80s USA. Perhaps there are some things NK does better now than (say) Australia. But the overall landscape of pros and cons is so skewed that to merely speak of “pros and cons” is as misleading as to say “research epidemiologists and people who think vaccines cause autism”. Still, a rare look at NK from the “other side of the Iron Curtain”.

Next is a video by Vice.com, a bastion of gonzo journalism in all its glory. Their “travel guide” to NK (part 1, part 2, part 3) is essentially the founder Shane Smith going on the same kind of tours but bringing an obviously different perspective. There are many bits of propaganda on the tour that are noteworthy. What I found most telling though was that part of the standard tour is the People’s Library (or some such building) where the tour guide shows you a Soviet-style school reading desk that they use and explains that Kim Jong Il invented it, and how important it is to have a desk that’s adjustable to the height of the reader and how this shows that Kim Jong Il was so etc etc. This same moment was present in David Pluth’s video as well, I believe.

What surprises Shane is just how alien the world of NK is to him. He concludes that culturally they have absolutely nothing in common. But he also keeps pointing to the great contradiction of the country’s devastation vs the showy grand facade of the capital city and the fact that it’s all for nobody. Even if you don’t like the style, this video is probably best at showing the creepiness of the regime’s official face.

Welcome to NK is a documentary whose makers were taken on the same standard itinerary. It’s meant to be more professional and shows some more ideosyncracies. More to follow in part 2 of the post.