Anju: January 21, 2012

The Daily NK writes about “The High Price of Idolatry:”

We should perhaps remember with great concern the time when Kim Jong Il used $900 million to both permanently preserve Kim Il Sung’s body and then create Keumsusan Memorial Palace to keep it in.

It is no simple task to erect a statue of anybody, let alone someone who presumably requires a large statue such as Kim Jong Il. In the South Korean city of Gumi, a mere 5m statue of former President Park Chung Hee cost 1.2 billion South Korean Won ($1.03 million). Kim Il Sung’s statue in Pyongyang is 24m high. For a massive statue like that to be erected, the foundations also need to be consolidated, then a road must be paved to go to the area. Lighting needs to be set in place and electricity provided all year round.

Thus, at the same time as Kim Il Sung was being publicly idolized, thousands upon thousands of people in different parts of the country were collapsing in the streets of hunger.

Jimmy Carter was unavailable for comment.

I don’t think you have to agree with Soviet-style political abuses of psychiatry to believe that people with an emotionally driven affinity for evil regimes probably have a psychological disorder that’s amenable to medical diagnosis. Not that the disorder necessarily makes them unable to function in society, it just makes them look awfully silly and unworthy of publication in any serious newspaper. The more debatable question that follows is whether you still consider The New York Times to be a serious newspaper, given its willingness to publish the likes of Christine Ahn.

But then, great institutions die like our own bodies — one piece at a time. I thought the Times wrote an interesting (and favorable) review of “The Orphan Master’s Son.” Here’s another review at Bloomberg Businessweek. This is going to have to go on my very crowded reading list, along with that Kim Jong Nam book I’m eagerly anticipating.

So the number of North Koreans arriving in the South continues to rise, but are these recent arrivals in China or people who’ve been hiding in China for years, finally making a break for it? Everything I hear from the China-North Korea border these days is about crackdowns, snipers, and land mines.

I don’t fully understand why North Korea is importing more cell phones, given the mortal threat they potentially pose to its monopoly on information. The best explanation I can offer is that they’re thinking like the city governments that give free needles to junkies: they’ve concluded that people are going to get them anyway, so better to give them something they can control better. “Approved” phones can be concentrated in loyal hands, can’t call overseas, can be monitored (a few of them, anyway), and can be cut off should things get dodgy (as our British friends would say). The other reason may well be that Orascom’s financial generosity to the regime — and key regime officials — has influenced its judgment. There are some things I just can’t explain. This is one of them.