Solidarity, anti-Imperialism, and Hot Babes!

UPDATE: Welcome Wikipedia readers! I knew I should have flickr’ed these priceless photographs before the KFA boys took them down. I’m doing my best to reconstruct those parts of the post that I can.

Are you a pompous, porcine, undistinguished single guy with delusions of grandeur, a penchant for dressing like an Austin Powers villian, and a vague resemblance to Lou Costello? The Dear Leader offers you a life of relevance, power, profit, petty burglary, more power, and (reportedly) joyous outbursts of song. Even better, he’ll will surround you with hot chicks, and this time, they can’t run away from you! All he asks of you is a willingness to look this ridiculous in public, and as a mere formality, your signature here giving The Dark LordSatan all right, title, and possession of your immortal soul from hereinafter. Offer not valid in Pennsylvania or Vatican City. Sign:______ Date: _____ Juche:______

For those of you who don’t know him, he’s the always flamboyant Alejandro Cao de Benos, the president of the Korean Friendship Association, who hails from Spain and hobnobs between Pyongyang and Barcelona (from where I suspect he checks this site pretty regularly, so if I suddenly disappear one day, please nobody go asking Pyongyang for my remains, ok?).

At the end of each flight, Mr. Cao sends the bill to the people of North Korea.

Below: Pyongyang’s new bowling alley.

Besides plenty of “solidarity,” what else can you find in Pyongyang? Bowling! A KFA tour means you get the near-exclusive use of what’s obviously a multi-million dollar bowling alley bought with money that didn’t go to buy food or medicine for starving people that North Korea wants us to believe it really, really wishes it could feed, but for all those natural disasters.
Who are the KFA members? Think equal parts “1984” and “Lord of the Flies.” They claim that there is no famine, repression, or dictatorship in North Korea, and they love to show their loyalty to the Dear Leader through poetry:

From the sky came a great warrior
With a heart purer than the diamond

He rescued us from the suffering

Brought us happiness and pride to this horizon

To live and die following his steps

There will be no tear lakes that fill the emptiness

But guns and soldiers who will defend his conquest

But even a petty despot and failed poet–even a Don Quixote trapped in a Sancho Panza body–needs to loosen his Mao suit in the evening . . . which leads us to the real draw of the KFA tour: hot chicks who act like they dig you. Because they have to. And if you’re swimming against a powerful current that’s pulling you toward the great genetic waterfall that plunges into the River Styx, that means plenty.

Below: KFA caption: “beautiful guide in Manyondae”

Above: KFA caption: “Singing karaoke together with beautiful Korean girl in Hyangsan Hotel (also in Korean: “Ban Gap Sum Ni Da” is really cool!)”

Below left: KFA caption: “I can’t be her husband because: I’m not highly educated (not yet), I’m not a soldier and I`m not a member of Workers’ Party of Korea” . . . and because given the choice, she preferred the gulag.

Above right: KFA caption: “during building international friedship :)” [sic.]

Below: KFA Caption: “The most picturesque, beautiful & delightful boat journey I’ve ever had! The scenery was good too! Me with the most beautiful guide in the DPRK; near Wonson 27 July 04”

Creep alert! Your heart goes out to the poor North Korean woman at left, who was no doubt raised to believe that foreign men are lecherous, baby-bayoneting rapists. She obviously has a case of the creeps from being ogled and photographed by these drooling losers, and what young woman wouldn’t? Can you really claim “solidarity” with people you treat like department store mannequins?

Right: KFA caption: “love-birds”

So what have we learned about friendship today? For one thing, that the KFA is to “friendship” what NAMBLA is to “love,” and the KFA boys, who normally wouldn’t be able to get a date in a sweaty prison weight room, would sell their inadequate, pitiful, unloved souls to bask in the glow of pretty girls who have no choice in the matter (if you don’t get the NAMBLA reference, for the love of G-d, don’t google! Especially at work!). So much for defending Korean women against the depredations of foreign pervs. Let’s hope for the sake of the women that none of it goes any further than having to spend time with these guys, or we’ve discovered a real atrocity.

My point here is not to make myself the arbiter of puritan manly virtue–because I’m not–nor is it to lie to you and call myself a born-again feminist. Like most men, there’s a snarling, hormone-doped Bill Clinton chained to the basement radiator of my soul, behind a door deadbolted by Mrs. OneFreeKorea, my conscience, and a few things I hope I learned from my mom and dad.

My point is to illustrate the seductive lure of an exploitive system, especially for the weak-minded and inadequate, that gives a select few ownership rights in the unfortunate many, and that recognizes no inherent rights, only state-allotted privileges that are fully revocable on demand. Given that temptation, some would forget the pain of the human beings who live in this unfortunate country and treat it like an amusement park at best, or their own private kisaeng house at worst. And some apparently do.

For all the contempt you may feel for the predatory naivete of the KFA types, they’re ultimately not going to do much to prolong the Dear Leader’s reign, and they come across as a fairly pathetic cast of characters. Their photos can still be both interesting and revealing, even if not intentionally. They often portray North Korea in the same way the “imperialists” at the New York Times do–as a beautiful, tragic country that barely functions. Still, the country might function just a little better without them siphoning scarce resources and scarcer dignity away from the needy.

Someone call “The Daily Show.”

(main page)