In the Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens (a.k.a. Christopher’s Brother) visits everybody’s favorite Stalinist state, North Korea.
Ordinarily, I have little patience for travelogues to the North — I’d much rather read about Catherine Zeta-Jones, even if she’s grown disappointingly thin — but this one is kinda fun to read, and the photos are cool.
(HT to Coming Anarchy)
19 Comments
Looks to me like CZJ had her jawline surgically trimmed.
Good writing in the North Korea piece. I’m with the Marmot when he says, “I have little patience for travelogues to the North,” because they are always about the same things: the Kim Il Sung musuem and statue, the subway station, the female traffic cops. But this piece is above average.
Among my Korean students I don’t know any who read articles like this. I think it would behoove them to do so. They would get a more realistic picture of what is going on than they get from the Sunshine Policy crowd.
good god, it looks like CZJ got eyebrow tattoos and her husband just stepped out of Madame Tussauds.
CZJ gives me “Posh Spice” neukim.
Does evangelical atheist Christopher Hitchens cite North Korea as an example of religion’s negative effect on human well-being?
“Yet in this citadel of privilege, every face I see is thin, every belt tight, every garment worn and faded, every child and adult under-sized, most windows unlit.”
Every noun drowning in adjectives…
Tits on a stick doesn’t suit the sultry Ms. Zeta Jones. As I recall, she’s always been rounded, so this new skinny look is not in keeping with her natural set point. She gets steady work, so I don’t know why she inflated her boobs and then deflated the rest of her body.
North Koreans have a religion.
They worship a family of pudgy Korean midgets who look like they’re Chinese.
@5
Lurn how 2 draw conclusions, thx.
North Korea does have a religion, moron, they worship the great leader; hell, the article even mentions that Kim Il Sung may have copied this aspect from his PRESBYTERIAN upbringing. Read ffs people.
@6
Hah! Nice.
Its hard to imagine that this is happening just 100 miles away from where I am now. And that nobody seems to care. I think the distance between Pyongyang and Seoul is shorter than the length of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. What if North Hollywood was a godforsaken shithole and Long Beach was a capitalist paradise?
I think plenty of people care, mateomiguel, just not the people who the most rides on: the koreans themselves. Not much one can do if the younger generation wants their smartphones more than the freedom of long lost cousins or aunts and uncles.
Why aren’t there more articles like this in the S.Korean press? It’s like the South just prefers to ignore what’s going on in the North, especially in the Gulags, while considering the Norks to be their equal (albeit country bumpkin) cousins.
Once the North falls, most of the teeth gnashing will be coming from the south as they try to explain their reasons for propping up the north for so long while ignoring the misery of millions of their brethren. Ignoring the problem today only makes tomorrow’s problem worse.
I just talked to one of my coteachers about this very thing; she said that her dog is more important to her than what happens in North Korea.
That’s nice Jdog….I guess she eats dogmeat every day then?
Netizen Kim:
Does evangelical atheist Christopher Hitchens cite North Korea as an example of religion’s negative effect on human well-being?
Peter Hitchens writing has nothing to do with what his brother Christopher writes or believes…..politically they are poles apart. So what’s your point?
Sometimes I think misery is ground into the earth here. Misery suffuses the concrete used to build the towering a-pa-tuh forests. Agony is in the paint used to mark the lanes of the highway. The leading ingredient of kimchi is the suffering of the person who made it.
Oh wait, now that I’m getting all pedantic about it, I remember that Koreans already think this too. The story of the Korean people is full of shared misery. Isn’t that what Han really means?
They’re just jealous of their northern brothers for hording all the misery and not sharing.
…Or you could read my own humble North Korean travelogue over @
http://www.ghosttreemedia.com/
Seems like we came to pretty much the same conclusions…
I’ll echo the lack of patience with travelogues to NK, but nothwithstanding the swipe above (6), I kinda liked Hitchens writing style. Not all of it the tired rehash that wears the patience.
In particular, I found the following interesting:
“…Pyongyang’s famously attractive traffic policewomen who, clad in fetching uniforms, control the sparse traffic with strangely provocative robotic gestures.”
“strangely provocative” - THAT’S IT! If you’ve spent some time in Pyongyang (in my case, not much), perhaps you can relate to that characterization. I certainly can.
Though I can’t speak for what animated Hitchens’ characterization, in my case, what was “strange” about the attraction was the cognitive dissonance of feeling pity for the woman, standing at attention at the same largely deserted intersection every day, and at the same time thinking, “ya know, she’s kinda hot. And that flawlessly executed traffic-directing manuever is, well, kinda hot.”
Well, in that situation, one day I finally did what any other sane male would do. I yelled “stop”, got out of the car, and ran over and started dry humping her leg like a dog.
You might expect that my North Korean minder (not to mention the unfortunate object of my affections) would have taken grave offense. Actually, over a few shots of soju later, my friend admitted he’d been wanting to do the same thing for years.