The Only Winning Move

Pokeing around on the internet for the previous entry, I found this video of KCTV’s opening sequence from about a year ago (27 August 2009). About what you would expect - opens with views of Mount Paekdu, followed by patriotic music, then a reading of the entire broadcast schedule for the day, etc. But one thing that was interesting - the word for “television” in North Korean is apparently a straight borrowing from English??? Really??? I was under the impression that North Korea went to great pains to make sure that no words in standard use in the northern dialect were either foreign loanwords of any kind or even Korean words assembled from character combinations by the Japanese? (Although North Korea makes only limited use of Chinese characters, preferring to write everything in native Korean Cho-sun-gul/Han-gul script, neologisms are often created by stringing characters with appropriate meanings together to get the sound of the new word.) Obviously I’m mistaken about that if the national broadcaster refers to itself as “television” on television.

I suppose this shouldn’t come as much of a surpirse. After refusing to pay for a World Cup feed - meaning that its people effectively can’t see their national soccer team make its first appearance (today, by the way) since 1966 - North Korea then doesn’t bat an eye pirating the feed anyway. KCTV aired all but 10 minutes of the South Africa - Mexico opener, and edited versions of France - Uruguay and Argentina - Nigeria. No love for the South, though - South Korea’s win over Greece wasn’t shown.

This fascinating NYTimes article revisits a story I missed the first time around: North Korea apparently “redenominated” its currency last year as a way of shutting down the private markets, and it turns out to be the closest thing to a controlled economic experiment we can run in the real world. The policy was to replace the old currency with a new one, but only allow so much of the old money to be exchanged. The idea was to wipe out savings so as to “equalize” any gains that might have been accumulated on the private markets that have been tolerated (but only barely) in special zones and at special times of day in North Korea for the past few years. An underhanded trick to be sure, but what do you really expect from a regime like that one? Anyway, the economics lesson is that as soon as news of the coming redenomination spread, prices in the markets spiked by something like 10000%. Real economists will have more interesting things to say about this - but the central puzzle for me is why anyone would want to sell at all under those conditions. Today you have … however much you’ve been saving. Tomorrow you’ll have at most $30. The obvious reaction to such news is to go out and buy whatever you can, as that’s the only way to capture any of the value of your soon-to-be-extinct money. The question is why anyone else - all of whom are in the same situation - would even sell you anything at all? Wouldn’t it be a bit like paying in Confederate money here? Why would you, as a vendor, take in exchange for something an object of barter that you KNOW will soon be worthless? I mean, I guess the obvious explanation is that you’re hoping to turn around and spend the currency yourself, so there’s a musical chairs quality to the whole deal. Even though everyone knows someone will be left holding the bag, they’re all frantically trying not to be that person - and it works because no one is sure about the exact moment the markets will have to close. But I suspect another piece to the puzzle is that some people have better connections than others, and North Korea being the reasonably corrupt place it is, they know that their friends/family/business associates who work at the bank will let them change more money than the official limit. I guess a huge advantage comes to those people if they’re left holding piles of cash.

The secondarily-interesting question is why they don’t just continue to use the old currency in defiance of the new funny money. Put differently, suppose they held a war and no one came?. Or, in this case, suppose they held a currency redenomination and no one showed up at the banks? What happens if you keep spending the old money and people keep accepting it? The question is especially interesting to me because a minor variant on this seems like a low-risk strategy in any case. You go to the bank to change money, and you change something just over the minimum amount needed to get the maximum compensation (I guess you go just enough over to allay suspicions that you’re holding on to old currency). So you get your measly $30 worth of new Won. What’s to stop you keeping the surplus old won? And why wouldn’t anyone take them? It seems like, in fact, it would be a potentially really valuable thing - a truly inflation-free currency! I mean, I guess a general mistrust of the currency, plus the fear of arrest, would be the obvious explanation - but from what I read, dollars and yuan circulate pretty freely in North Korean markets, and that can’t be kosher, right? So trading in contraban currency is not really a new or apparently very well controlled thing in North Korea.

No, I admit I’m stumped. It seems to me like there must be old won still floating around there, acting as a medium of exchange, even if it lost a lot of value in the redenomination.

The whole thing kind of reminds me of that scene in Wir können auch anders, where the two brothers are trying to buy a boat in 1993 East Germany, and they keep piling cash in the seller’s hand, and eventually they put a 100DM note in East Marks on the top of the pile and the guy waves his hand over it and says “no, that doesn’t exist anymore.” Well, sure, but presumably only because there’s a more valuable, harder currency in circulation that people would rather have. It’s not so clear in a case like North Korea’s, where the old currency was a sham, and the new currency is even more of a sham! I suppose one wouldn’t be allowed to spend the old currency in official stores, but then one is hardly allowed to spend dollars and yuan there either!

In the end, though, I guess is probably is the dollars and yuan that explain it. If you can’t spend them in the official stores, but you can take them with you abroad (assuming you can escape this charming shithole), then that’s an argument for preferring them to old North Korean money.

I wonder whether North Korea won’t have turned a corner here, though. If people already didn’t trust the old currency, and they KNOW they can’t trust the new currency (they’ve been burned before, after all), then the obvious strategy would be to stop using it at all - just convert what you have into hard money whereever possible. I suspect the state lost a lot of control last November, even if they don’t quite see it yet. Or maybe they do, and that’s what explains the recent belligerence. Fewer and fewer straws to grasp in this endgame.

No surprises here: there will apparently be no World Cup feed in North Korea. The first time in 44 years the DPRK has appeared in the Cup (last was in 1966 - the year of what the British Ambassador erroneously calls England’s “great” victory. England did win that year, but only by scoring a highly controversial ‘winning’ ‘goal’ that wasn’t really one.), and no one who cares will be able to see it. The problem is that SBS, which has sole broadcasting rights on the Korean Peninsula, wants to be able to film the North Korean fans’ reactions as their team plays. Simple enough request, one would think, but apparently the North Korean government sees some dark design the rest of us aren’t Korean enough to understand. Oh, and they don’t want to pay for it.

Don’t look now, but Kim Dae Jung has died at 85. It doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage over here, but in other parts of the world - read: East Asia - he’s a household name. Kim was one of the “three Kims” of the troubled 1970s in South Korea - one of the two championing democracy (the third, Kim Jong Pil, wasn’t exactly opposed to it). Partly because of his resistance to the dictatorship of the late President Park, but more for his Sunshine Policy of rapprochment with North Korea (pursued during his term as president of South Korea), Kim Dae Jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000.

OK, it’s a custom not to speak ill of the (recently) dead, but I think if you get the luxury of choosing your legacy you have to live with it. The 2000 Peace Prize wasn’t the stupidest one they ever awarded (Yassr Arafat anyone?), but it WAS one of the many examples of political meddling by the committee. And the Sunshine Policy itself IS raving idiocy.

The idea is to have a Korean version of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik - a way of dealing with East Germany. It goes like this: be nice to the East Germans so as to keep ties between the counties open. More ties means more information from the West means more dependence on the West means no complete communist stranglehold on economic and political life in the DDR. In the context of Germany, it worked brilliantly. But Korea is not Germany, and I don’t have to go into all the reasons why the batshit insane de facto theocracy that sits on the other side of the most heavily fortified border in the world can’t be bribed into playing (relatively) nice the way Honnecker’s government could. With East Germany you got something for your money. OK, it wasn’t totally tangible all the time, but it was there. North Korea is just a giant money black hole. You put the money in, they spend it on more weapons and buy mud with the change, and meanwhile no one is even allowed to own a cellphone to talk to relatives in the South. Brilliant.

I get that brinkmanship with North Korea is scary. But here’s the difference between a statesman and politician. A politician just wants to do what will make people like him. A statesman knows you can’t always blink. Jimmy Carter, if you’re wondering, is a politician, despite what the European press would have you believe. And North Korea, in case you’re wondering about THAT, is one of those situations where you shouldn’t blink. It should be obvious to everyone that our North Korea policy is a huge failure. Maybe it’s time to cut the aid off completely.

I don’t guess Kim’s dying will have much effect one way or the other since he had been in poor health for a long time and wasn’t doing much in the way of public engagement over the last decade. But hey, it can’t hurt!

About a month ago, I kicked off a spate of watching documentaries about North Korea. The first was Daniel Gordon’s “Crossing the Line,” and what follows in the next paragraphs is what I wrote about it on seeing it. The next two were another by Daniel Gordon (”A State of Mind”), and Pieter Fleury’s “North Korea: A Day in the Life.”

I’ve just seen a rather interesting documentary. It’s called Crossing the Line, and it’s an extended interview with James Joseph Dresnok, one of the four American soldiers who defected to North Korea in the 60s - the only one of the 4 still living there.

It’s sort of a hard film to talk about - one of those things where you don’t really wanna say anything one way or the other because whatever you say it will be wrong. The filmmakers are professional North Korea documentarians - this being their third movie about DPRK-related themes. They’re probably the only people in the world the regime would’ve let talk to Dresnok this openly, and so there’s a real sense of not wanting to analyze too much because you know this is all you’re going to get and you might as well make the best of it. But perhaps for that reason, I spent most of the movie unable to decide whether the filmmakers had done a stand-out job walking the balance beam this close to the edge without falling off, or in giving us the impression they had.

In the calm of hindsight, I’ll say it was neither. Rather, I think this movie was a bit of serendipity. Mainly, there’s the matter of it coming out a mere two years after Charles Robert Jenkins - the other of the four still currently living - managed to get out and go to Japan with his wife. He wasted no time in publishing a damning account of his treatment in North Korea. The North Korean regime being one of those that genuinely cares what the world thinks of it, putting the more loyal and grateful Dresnok up for an interview would be an obvious countermove. But this countermove couldn’t have been made without Gordon, really. No one is going to believe a homespun interview with Dresnok, so the North Koreans can’t very well release one themselves. Nor can they really trust the foreign media to do it, since any one-shot deal like this comes with no incentive on the part of the foreigners to behave. However, if the documentarian were someone who (a) runs a Beijing-based Tourist Agency that specializes in North Korean tours AND (b) had already made two other reasonably regime-friendly documentaries, then of course things would be different. To top it off, Dresnok himself is, as the film makes clear, painfully unassimilated into North Korean society. In an odd way, that works to their advantage, because he’s not foreign or strange at all. Dresnok talks just like any other Southern straight-shooter. We trust him instinctively because we’ve met so many people like him, and yet we don’t really know what’s on the line for him in agreeing to this. He seems sincerely supportive of the North Korean regime, though certainly not fanatical. But even Dresnok only gets a stilted view of what life there is like, and unlike Jenkins, he doesn’t have any other options.

For me, the real fun of the film was getting to talk around Pyongyang a bit. You get a real look inside some shops, apartments, the subway, the streets. It’s not the no-strings walking tour I’d like, of course, but it’s a better view of the city than I’ve seen anywhere else.

Unfortunately, the filmmaker turns out to be a minor douche. If you watch the “Extras” interview with him, you get the standard-issue Eurotrash nuanced reflection on things. For example, I did wonder when watching the film why every time we flashed to Richmond (where Dresnok comes from) we saw a statue of Jefferson Davis. Now that I’ve seen the interview, I know that I’m supposed to draw a parallel with the statue of Kim Il Sung on Mansudae - you know, the one with his right arm outstretched and the mural of Paekdusan in the background. Yup - speculating about why Dresnok has managed to adapt to North Korea so well, our insightful director notices that there are statues of “bad people” in Richmond too. Of course, he quickly covers his tracks by noting that “we all do [build statues].” Well, right, but there are, I hasten to point out, some important differences - starting with the fact that Jefferson Davis is, to most locals in Richmond, just some dead white guy, and not the living embodiment of the nation that has to be bowed to every time you pass him. There are monuments and there are Monuments. Then he goes on to point out that Dresnok is the kind of guy who, if he’s stayed in America, would probably be sitting on a front porch talking about how great George Bush is. And I’m left scratching my head trying to remember even one uncritical Bush voter that I’ve met. I’ve met some pretty uncritical Obama supporters, mind you, but even so - nothing on the order of what I understand goes into Kim Il Sung worship. But most of all, I’m trying to figure out how he missed that long section of the movie he ostensibly directed and that I just saw where Dresnok explains how by 1966 he wanted out, tried to seek asylum at the Soviet Embassy, was denied and turned over to the North Korean authorities, and then spent the next 7 years in “reeducation?” What part of this makes for anything like an easy assimilation into North Korean society? If Dresnok weren’t a redneck from Richmond, I supposed it would’ve been decades of reeducation, then? For an encore, he points out that he was shocked at how many flags one sees in the US - and notes that you also see a lot more flags in Pyongyang than you would in the UK. Well, OK, maybe - it’s true enough that I didn’t see very many flags when I was in London, and it’s a common enough complaint from foreigners that there are too many flags in the US. But there again - I saw his film, and what I didn’t see were lots of flags in Pyongyang! It looked about like Germany to me. There would be city-sponsored flags on streetlamps and such, but I can’t recall seeing even a single national flag in someone’s house or on someone’s person (outside of the obligatory Kim Il Sung badge, I mean). So this isn’t even grasping at straws, really - it’s more like letting your stereotypes put up imaginary straws for you to reach for. And to top it all off, he’s wearing an Ahn Jung Hwan T-Shirt, which means I’m morally obligated to smash him in his prissy little face if I ever meet him.

Not that this is going to stop me from seeing A State of Mind, which I’ve already ordered from Netflix! Stay tuned.

- 20 June 2009

…and of course I did order and watch it, and I’m pleased to say it was better than the Dresnok one. I mean that in just about every possible sense, really. It was better-made, more comfortable to watch, about a more interesting subject, as well as refreshingly apolitical (well, mostly…).

This one deals with training for the mass games that are North Korea’s chief and most characteristic artform. Gordon follows two young girls over the course of several months as they train and eventually perform. And … well, beyond that it’s hard to know what to say. The film is what a documentary should be - a fairly straightforward depiction of its subject. As such, in this case, it’s also the most successful film on record at humanizing North Koreans, which seems to have been Gordon’s goal. So on all counts it’s a job well done. The amount of training and preparation that goes into the games is, exactly as we expect, simply staggering. It would have to be - however creepy one may personally find the games, they’re nothing if not technically jaw-dropping. But the more interesting parts of the film involve watching North Koreans in their homes, doing things North Koreans do - which both are and aren’t the same things we do. Family life in North Korea is, unsurprisingly, much like family life in South Korea, modulo huge amounts of drinking and hitting - but of course it’s unclear whether their absence is an effect of culture or censorship. At the same time, South Koreans don’t have a radio on the wall in the kitchen that looks like a circa 1963 high school intercom that broadcasts propaganda from 6am to 10pm, and while on which the volume can be adjusted, it can never be turned completely off. Nor do the luckiest of us live 3 generations in a three-bedroom apartment which has two televisions only by virtue of the fact that one of the daughters has participated in a state propaganda display. Still, this is exactly the view of North Korea that people like me have been longing to see - and though I obviously admit I have no independent way of verifying it, it rings true. Given what I know about North Korea, and given my belief that people the world over are basically alike and basically good (even if their governments aren’t necessarily) this is the kind of daily life that I would expect in a more organized and totalitarian version of South Korea.

We’re not completely free of Gordon’s simpering Euro-hip politics, though. The token pointed criticism of the North both in the film and in the director’s interview amounts to this: this girl has worked so hard for so long in the hopes that she can perform in front of “The General” (Kim Jong-Il), and he doesn’t even show up. Now - it’s not that I don’t agree that if Mr. Kim were anything like a decent fellow he would and easily could find the time to put in an appearance. The games go on for 20 straight days, after all, so there’s really no excuse. It’s just that focusing on particulars like whether Mr. Kim is a stand-up guy does worse than let the system itself off the hook - it actually implies that there’s nothing wrong with it that replacing Kim couldn’t fix. It implies that there’s nothing wrong with the enforced hero-worship that leads this clearly capable girl to spend her adolescence training to be the perfect communist through what can only be described, in the context of any starving country, as a waste of resources (at some point they actually quote the estimated number of man-hours that go into it), so long as the hero is well-cast. It implies that there’s nothing wrong with mass displays of subjecting the individual will to the will of the collective, so long as the dictator plays fair. But this implication is monstrous: the problem with North Korea and societies like it isn’t so much that they tend to be ruled by pigs, it’s that this is inevitable, because any time power is so concentrated, the center of power cannot help but draw the congenitally corrupt to it. Of course, Gordon is under no obligation to make political comments in his film - and indeed, given that his stated purpose was simply to put a human face on North Korean society to counter the standard western propaganda line, it probably would have been better if he hadn’t. But if he’s going to make political comments, it would be decent of him to at least stand up for the good guys rather than making exucses for the bad. But that, of course, is what is meant by “simpering:” the problem with Euro-intellectuals is that they tend to think that “giving perspective” and having “independent thoughts” means manufacturing reasons why Clearly Bad Things aren’t so bad as we’ve thought. But they’re wrong about that. This kind of exercise is bad enough if done in good faith; it’s downright depraved when done to score points with the in crowd.

Still, those comments aside, the film is largely apolitical, and this is one of its many clear advantages over Crossing the Line. Of the two - both of which, let me not be misunderstood, are well worth watching - it is far and away the superior: if you only have time for one, it should be this one.

Compared to Gordon’s work, Fleury’s is disappointing. North Korea: A Day in the Life is ironically controversial for - to hear some commentators tell it - having giving too sympathetic an ear to North Korea, allowing too much interference from the government. My impression was something like the opposite of that. Fleury has made what I consider to be the most effective bit of anti-North Korean propaganda I’ve seen. Unlike Gordon, he doesn’t make excuses for the system. Quite the contrary - he gives the system’s spokesmen just enough rope with which to hang themselves. We get, for example, a stock over-the-top rant from an old man that is ineffective not merely because it’s so silly (the Americans are apparently responsible for absolutely freaking everything that ever goes wrong in North Korea ever), but because it comes from a veteran of “The Big War.” We recognize the real motivation instantly from experience with our own grandparents: we in the younger generation owe everything to their generation, and we can’t possibly ever do anything to repay the debt. As a bit of self-serving positioning, it’s really not that hard to see through. This is then followed by his daughter repeating the same ridiculous rant but clearly uncomfortable with it. We get the point: she’s not so certain that the Americans are the root of all evil, but she’s not allowed to have her own opinion, neither by her self-righteous father-in-law, who is a bully, nor by the government, which controls all access to facts. The overall impression is one of a place so perverse that the deck is stacked by the authorities even in normal inter-generational family dialogue. Scenes from the kindergarten work in the same way. We hear a story about Kim Jong Il that’s embarassing enough in content, and twice as much when told in the carefully practised worshipful intonation of the teacher. For desert, we get to eavesdrop on a staff meeting where teachers discuss ways to make the already artificial telling of the story even more over-the-top than the performance we just saw. The point that in the west such a story of generosity would never be about a real person is lost on no one. All told, North Korea comes off looking like a really sick place.

Fleury’s honesty puts the lie to Gordon’s pretentions of objectivity - but perhaps on account of that honesty Fleury’s film is really boring. Because he hasn’t got anything to offer the authorities and they know it, they don’t seem to cut him much slack. We see North Koreans go through the motions of life at school and at work, but unlike with Gordon’s film, we don’t really feel like we got to know these people much, and consequently we don’t come much closer to knowing what life in North Korea is like. Gordon was smarter about cracking the regime’s nut. First he made what you might call a film everyone can agree on - a bit about the surprising 1966 World Cup performance by the North Korean national team. It’s the kind of thing that could have - and apparently did - play well as a national greatness film in North Korea, and sticking to a harmless subject like sports obviates the need to simultaneously convince your western (and primary) audience that you’re not kow-towing to the regime’s censorship. Whether by design or by accident, Gordon got his foot in the door and manages to slowly pry it open a bit, getting a more candid peek at daily life in his second film than Fleury was allowed to see, much less show.

So the bottom line is this: if you have time for all three, watch all three. If you have time for two, watch Gordon’s films. And if you have time for only one well, it’s gotta be A State of Mind. I won’t call it brilliant, but it was satisfying in an odd way. Highly recommended - if you can look past the hip politics. Which you can - blink and you miss it.

I have two things to say about North Korea.

First - we should absolutely board one of their suspicious ships. They are bluffing, and calling them on it is the best thing that could happen for all concerned. I don’t expect that there are actually any weapons shipments on them (no doubt that’s “Plan B” - complaining to the UN about harassment), and yes, that would be embarassing. But it would also expose the bluster as empty, and that would make the whole thing worth it.

Second - the only reason they are bluffing like this is because President Obama is a ball-less wuss. All the speculation about how this has to do with a succession issue may or may not be true - but IF it’s about a succession issue, then only because they needed a pretext of some kind to start sabre-rattling, and that happened to be now. The real reason, the underlying reason, is that they sized Obama up, realized he hasn’t got the guts to stand up to them, and decided to make a play. They’ve judged correctly and made the right move from their perspective … unfortunately.

And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with Obama’s reaction to the Iran thing. I happen to think he’s making the right call there. There is nothing of consequence going on, and it’s anyway none of our business. Whichever of the two hand-picked clowns ends up winning that election, no change in Iranian foreign policy will result.

I love the internet because…

…you can get a comprehensive guide to the Pyongyang Metro.

This is surely a thing no ordinary citizen needs. You can’t go there. Or, if you do go there, you can’t possibly get lost. Or, if you do get lost, finding your way back is only the beginning of your worries. But what the hell - let’s have a guide to the Pyongyang Metro. It’s quite an impressive site. Among other things, it has an mp3 file of the greatest song ever written.

It occurs to me upon listening to my new favorite song for the 12th time that living in North Korea must be like growing up at summer camp. Full disclosure: I never actually went to summer camp - unless you count the week I spent at Camp Broadstone in 6th grade. But I’m going to continue speaking from ignorance, if I may, since, to be fair, that is all any of us can do where the DPRK is concerned. But it seems like it must be a lot like summer camp. You get a couple of goofy uniforms, some inadequate food, there’re nonstop group activities designed to make you feel good about everything - especially the camp itself, you build teams until you just can’t anymore, spend all your time getting away with stuff behind the counsellors’ backs, but what the heck, some of the cheesy official activities are fun too. There’s a lot of conformist social pressure, but give it a week and you carve out a niche for yourself, find some friends, and generally have a good time in spite of yourself. Not that, given the choice, you would ever, ever come back again, but while you’re there you have this strange fanatical devotion to your own camp … as opposed to those completely lame camps on the other side of the mountain where the food sucks and they do all manner of silly things.

I spend entirely too much time thinking about life in North Korea - in Pyongyang in particular. I have an irrational fascination with the place - which I fed today via this collection of Russian tourist pictures.

I know exactly where it comes from. See, I’m a libertarian, which makes North Korea exactly the opposite in every way of every political belief I have. That said, people are people, and there’s really only so much a regime can do to reorganize human nature. And that said, any political conviction involves tradeoffs, and I guess I’m curious what I’d be giving up in choosing a libertarian paradise as opposed to a socialist one. “Tradeoff” here means exactly what it says. One can take it as a moral point of pride to not interfere with how other people live their lives - which is what I do - but that’s a long way from saying that how other people choose to live their lives doesn’t occasionally annoy me.

I think the thing I like most about Pyongyang is that the 60s never happened there. There is no one - not a single soul - in North Korea who thinks Jim Morrison is a poet, for example. There are no dreadlocks. You will not run into anyone on the street with jigsaw puzzle tatoos on his face, or pink hair, or a chain that goes from his nose to his ear. The buildings never shake to any passing bassline. There are not pop songs called “My Humps.” Junior high students don’t drink Robitussin to be cool. There isn’t a single car anywhere with an “At Least the War on the Environment is Going Well” bumper sticker. No one’s even heard of a hackeysack. And there aren’t basement coffee houses with fishtanks made out of old TVs.

Of course it’s not worth the tradeoff. OF COURSE. But still, you gotta admit, it would be nice, just for a day, to walk down a street where all the nonsense is state-sponsored - and therefore no one in particular’s fault - rather than the kind of all-volunteer they-bring-it-on-themselves ridiculousness one sees every day walking down Kirkwood here in Bloomington. But just for a day, and as a tourist.

I think the world is going to be a very interesting place when the two Koreas reunite. Hopefully I will still speak some passable Korean by then, and be at liberty to go there. Both of which points are highly in doubt.