Posts Tagged ‘kim il sung’

(yay! imported Chinese fans for a recent North Korea soccer friendly – and I kid you not!)

 
(our glorious football squad, presently pitying the world’s “other” soccer teams in Johannesburg)

Alright, so we lost our first Group G match yesterday, 2-1 against the mighty single-named Brazilians and their wonderful piece of Kaka. Hey, this is the group of death, kids, so can you even blame us for taking a few shots in the gauntlet?

Yet we showed considerable pluck throughout the 90 minutes. We battled like ancient Koryo warriors. We galloped up and down the pitch like the horsebacked drawers and water and hewers of wood, just like our holy ancestors did in Ancient Koryo, before we were defiled by foreigners. During the game we were duly inspired by the uplifting dreams of the delicious white rice and nutritious meat we might eat – if our Dear Leader considers us worthy enough of the privilege — back in our glorious socialist motherland at the foot of our Great Leader’s statue on Mansu Hill upon our return to the DPRK from this roiling capitalist cesspool, the inheritor to the imperialist apartheid state of South Africa.

(glorious Kim Il-sung pointing at incoming turds over on Mansu Hill)

Here’s what our brilliant, gifted, 100% Korean with-nothing-else-added coach, Kim Jong-hun said about the results of the Brazilian tussle:

The fact that [our] players scored a goal against a strong team like Brazil gives me a lot of pleasure. We didn’t win but we gained valuable experience. We’re going to be more confident, we want to win our remaining games and get through to the knockout stage. Throughout the match the players followed our gameplan and defended well. We were very well prepared and we got some good shots in on goal. I think we fought bravely and with a little bit of luck we could even have got a better result.

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(demonstrations in Seoul by Korean War vets against the Cheonan’s sinking – Bonzo the Bouncing Clown?)

I was catching up recently with some of my Korea research, staying abreast, as I always like to, on what’s been going over on the peninsula in the aftermath of the Cheonan’s sinking.

We could — as the mass media seems intent on reminding us practically every single minute of every single day (confounded by the IDF’s storming of the Gaza-bound flotilla!) — be going to war soon, so I thought it was important to get a sense of preparations on both sides of the 38th parallel.

News on the street is that there is no threat of war, but that does nothing to diminish the disturbing events taking place in some of the ROK’s big cities. Disturbing in Pyongyang too; but then again, we expect things to be disturbing at the Kim Farm in any event.

What I can’t seem to grasp well is the behavior of the Korean people; quite obviously the macabre stuff passing for civility in the North, but especially that of the South? I mean, it’s positively inscrutable. The recent patriotic displays and grandstanding, with Exhibit A above as evidence, would be outright horrendous if they weren’t so damn risible. I mean, is this really happening? For whose amusement is this being conducted? For the Western media’s? Gosh…

To supply you with a bit of color, pictured above is a Korean War vet clubbing a plastic Bonzo-the-Bouncing-Clown-like effigy of the late “Great Leader,” Kim Il-sung. I suppose this is a government-sanctioned means of taking out one’s frustrations with the late dictator’s legacy, not to mention the ominous specter of his present policy, following the loss of 46 ROK lives at sea in the disputed border area? Could this be its ultimate purpose?

(are these the remains of the torpedo which scuttled the Cheonan?)

There were Tae-kwon Do displays, replete with the usual slew of hopped-up young men soaring through thin air to crush blocks and wooden boards as they bellowed epithets and acrid curses at the Kim Family for their horrendous abuse of the DPRK’s hapless peasant citizenry, “our brothers,” by any other name. Again, it’s a violent display which is deeply disturbing in its potential devastation. Yet if it didn’t make me pee my pants from laughter as I catch it on reruns, I’d be very concerned for the state of affairs on the peninsula. I mean, can you imagine these people given free reign to do to each other whatever their hearts desire with zero “nanny state” like oversight from the US Army’s advisory services? No, no, no. An ugly sight indeed…

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In a chaotic unpredictable world, made even more chaotic and unpredictable by the existence of the Kim Farm’s, er…North Korea or the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s” membership in the Axis of Evil, it’s sometimes good to go back and review the possible scenarios on how the DPRK might make it into the next decade.

Given how out of control things seem to be this 2010 – pestilent disease, the deepening global financial crisis which shows no signs of stopping, or the potential of WMD in the hands of Monkey Face and Bam-Bam (or both) — can we reasonably expect to get to 2020?

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I’m suffering terrible misgivings from some new North Korea programming I recently caught over at VBS.tv (14 parts).

Intrepid VBS presenter Shane Smith’s behavior as a tourist in North Korea (with cameraman/producer Eddy Moretti in tow) was disturbing, and I’ll use the remainder of this post to work out why I think he acted as foolishly as he did.

There is a certain built-in mystery to these clips, and I don’t want to steal the thunder for you so I’ll try to be as intentionally vague as I can be.

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The cleanest purest race.

Yes, that is indeed how the North Koreans think about themselves, and a staggering number of South Koreans, as well, if the occasional foreigner-bashing newspaper article is anything to go by. You’ll have to read B.R. Myers latest book on the topic, The Cleanest Race (affiliate link), to know what I’m talking about though (but don’t fret, it’s a thin read and full of pictures to break up the action for the time-pressed).

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