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.

The Mighty Kim

"Come on Without,
Come on Within.
You ain't seen nothin'
Like the mighty Kim."

I know, I know. I can't help it but I am a child of the '60s.

So the Dear Leader has done it again. And the world seems positively impotent to do anything about it.

The dealings of the world's "superpowers" with North Korea resemble nothing so much as a hostage drama involving a heavily-armed psychotic lunatic. They offer Kim Jong-il sweeteners and confidence-building measures like cigarettes maybe, a chance to talk it over, sort things out sort of. But most of their time is taken up in pleading with him not to do anything stupid. "Kim? Kim can you hear us?" they say on a loudspeaker. Kim shows he can hear by letting off a nuclear missile or something else that goes bang.
"Kim, put down the nuclear remote control. Just put it down. Now step away from the barrel of Sarin. We're not going to hurt you..."

The Dear Leader is a strange fish by anyone's standards. He lived a pampered life as a child, the heir apparent to the play-ground thug, better known as The Great Leader Kim Il-Sung. Hhe was the bane of all of his teachers because he showed that he was "cleverer" than them, and because he was deemed to be "smarter than the average bear Boo-boo" he always got great report cards and cool scores. It was known outside North Korea that he liked fast cars and fast women - actually any speed of woman - (what aspirant heir apparent doesn?), Cognac and movies. His pursuit of girls often took the form of the "no frills" type of flirtation favoured by the late Serge Gainsbourg when he said to the relatively clean Witney Huston on French TV. "Witney, I want to fuck you". The Dear Leader, it seems, never took "Let me think about it" for an answer. His cinematic tastes were also unorthodox. Whereas you or I might pop out to the video store for a DVD in the evening, Kim Jong-il liked to make his own films. If he couldn't find enough willing participants locally he would get the North Korean Secret Service to kidnap talent from abroad and keep them on set in North Korea for the duration of the shoot. If they didn't like it they could take part in another form of shoot. And remember, in the Workers' Paradise which is North Korea the notion of resting actors or actresses has long been unknown.

Since the Dear Leader took over the family-run concentration camp and vast Hell-on-Earth theme park, aka the Korean Democratic People's Republic, life for the ordinary citizen has defied expectations. Most thought it couldn't get any worse... I remember reading a piece a few years back in so august a publication as the Far Eastern Economic Review about the new Pyongyang. Readers were told how the place was changing, how those nostalgic for the old Stalinist days needed to hurry before the place was transmogrified beyond recognition into yet another Asiatic megalopolis devoted to money-making. North Korea might not have taken off like China but it was on the blocks sort of stuff. This gushing encomium aka bullshit was flatly contradicted by other sources who spoke of massive famine accompanied by public executions of speculators, wreckers and deviants. There were also reports of new execution methods including starving victims of oxygen until they died. Slower admittedly than a firing squad but having other definite cost advantages PLUS it didn't leave a mess. This is the country that has become the planet's ninth nuclear power.

But what of the secretive Dear Leader? One would think that he is an international pariah, yet not so long ago he was allowed to travel the rails of Russia in his armour-plated train, with an army of chefs and waiters, a lobster tank and silver chop-sticks, to meet Vlad the Impaler of Chechnya in Moscow. No worries about hold-ups or missing connections, because his train was given priority over all - ALL - other traffic on affected routes.

Now the reason why he had to go by train is because he's afraid of flying. He has been for years. Indeed he is supposed to be quite literally scared shitless of it. Still, that didn't prevent him from getting his pilot's licence.

The Dear Leader's behaviour, it is said, is becoming ever more erratic. You will remember how I mentioned his fondness for women? Well, let's just say, he's been having problems in that area for a number of years now. It seems that the Dear Leader cannot get his Little Leader to stand to attention, or he's having some other issues affecting sexual functions. At first he thought ginseng might help - it is a native Korean product, but even after eating lorryloads of the stuff his problems were as bad as ever. Then he hit on the idea of the Internet. It's not available in North Korea but it is reputed to have one avid fan and keen surfer: Kim Jong-Il. Maybe he'll read this (and I can take the opportunity to plug two of my books, Fool's Gold and The Thinkers' 50 which have both been translated into Korean). However, the Dear Leader's tastes tend towards the ... er... adult. His advisers felt that if he watched enough sexually explicit videos on the web then his libido might just be kick-started back into action. But reports from the Hermit Kingdom suggest that this too has been a flop.

He is naturally pissed off (which is all he can do with his equipment, sorry). This has led to an increasingly Quixotic attitude towards the development of nuclear weapons. Maybe deploying The Big One might lead to something else going up.

And so the world holds its collective breath, regional and International security being tied inexorably to the little prick of a little prick.




But just remember.
"When Kim the Eskimo gets ya
Every thing's goin' to be all right."