North Korea Undercover by John Sweeney

officials in the room looked in disbelief at the Italian Communist. Several months later Macaluso received a publication in French from the North Koreans, which amended their position on the Prague Spring and the Czech demands for ‘socialism with a human face’, signalling opposition to Soviet force majeure.
    The relationship between the Italians and the North Koreans, however, was not without tension. In Italy, the PCI had to compete at free elections with other parties who took human liberty as standard. The PCI delegation tried to discuss cultural and personal freedoms with the North Koreans, with very little success. The East Germans would listen to the Italians talk about liberty and counter-attack, pouring acid scorn on the PCI’s ideas. The North Koreans simply ignored them. Macaluso said their attempt to get Pyongyang to engage on political freedom was ‘like pissing on marble’.
    Buzo analyses the marmoreal nature of the regime in his book The Guerilla Dynasty : ‘A particular facet of Kim’s personality which compounded the stultifying effect of ideology was his pervasive mistrust. The purges, the elaborate, multiple overlapping security agencies, the continuing high levels of repression... Kim clearly perceived the threat to his system posed by interaction with even other socialist countries.’ 1
    No wonder the Italians found getting across their far more human version of Communism to their host hard work. Buzo asks why North Korea declined into economic backwardness in the 1970s:
    The major part of the answer lies simply in the extent to which Kim Il Sung lost touch with reality. Physical isolation, paranoia, an overbearing, browbeating personal manner, the corrupting effects of power without accountability, the cumulative effect over decades of daily exposure to extravagant flattery, growing megalomania ... all combined to give Kim the illusion of control over events and deprive him of any real capacity for self-reflection and self-correction. 2
    Kim Il Sung had become a delusional illusionist.

    1 Buzo, pp242-3.
    2 Buzo, P245.

12
    The Man Who Went to North Korea and Came Back Mad
    In 1971, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu went to North Korea. He liked Pyongyang so much he returned in 1978, and the film of this second trip is on YouTube. It’s an unforgettable five minutes of two tyrants just having fun. 1
    The video opens with Ceausescu in a black suit and tie and Kim Il Sung in a light grey Mao suit. The two big men are standing up in an open-top limousine, driving through the streets of the Big Zombie in an immense motorcade led by twenty police motorcycle outriders. Thousands line the streets, crying ‘Hosannah!’ or some such in Korean, but the actual soundtrack of the video is supplied by a living-dead choir, roaring out a weird soundwave, ebbing and flowing rhythmically. A pod of ladies in white Korean traditional dresses holding pink doodahs in each hand whirr, rotate and clap in perfect synchronicity, as if each one is a music-boxmannequin; balloons are released; a footbridge painted with rainbow colours arcs across the motorway, on it more ladies in white doing their stuff. The limousine passes two portraits, one of the Romanian, the other of the North Korean. Ceausescu is centre frame, passing the camera, waving manically; Kim Il Sung is more restrained. He’s been to this kind of party before. He doesn’t quite yawn, but he accepts the mass adulation like the Fonz might. The motorcade swings into Kim Il Sung Square, and then the fun begins.
    Maybe a hundred thousand people crowd the square, maybe more. Closest to the motorcade, more ladies dance, waving things that look like paper flower bouquets, creating the impression of so much multicoloured seaweed floating this way and that in the tide. Half a dozen black-suited security men trot along beside the limousine as it passes a maypole, then yet more ladies, this time North Korean versions of Mary Poppins, waving their brollies