Bonfire night comes early to Pyongyang

Most people were no doubt amazed by the pictures from Pyongyang in North Korea. The event celebrated was the 80th anniversary of the Anti-Imperialism League, or cynics might say the tenth anniversary of the last time the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il had a wank.

The reporters on Sky News spoke about "extraordinary pictures from Pyonngyang." Well, there's nothing really extraordinary about pictures of people dragooned like robots and made to move in military formations sometimes spelling out words like "Peace", "Screw" and "Shit" in Korean. This is usual prime time viewing, ever since Bruce Forsythe pulled out of a North Korean version of the Generation Game, because there was only ever going to be one family in the show: the Kims, and Korean Central TV refused to take the Irish show The Lyrics Board because it was unsure whether host Lynda Martin was a woman or a mannekin.
But last night the more I looked at these images of thousands of people carrying torches against a black background the more queasy I became. It was horrible, like a nightmare. A bit like Mississippi Burning, or maybe The Wicker Man without Britt Eckland and the sexy dancing. It was nightmarish, like something from a horror movie. There was a commentary by the North Koreans. I don't know Korean so I don't know what it said, but the announcer sounded as if he had had a vindaloo and that he was really bound up. Nothing would work.
The analogy with Mississppi Burning was not exactly crazy. We couldn't see the faces of the "protestors" in Pyongyang, so they could have been wearing white hoods. I also thought that the Nazis' torch-lit processions must have looked similar.
And one other little cavill: the gig was supposed to mark the foundation of the Anti-Imperialism League. It was accompanied by banal but jaunty North Korean marching songs. Now these don't sound very North Korean to me: there is hardly a glimmer of a pentatonic scale there. In fact, they sounded rather western, well in relative terms. They were very similar to the type of musical crap turned out by Stalin's musical minions just the last years of his reign.