North Korea: An account by Peter Hitchens

MAGAZINE AND NEWSPAPER ARTICLES describing the deprivation of life in North Korea have been commonplace for years now, but none so eloquently convey the squalor as a recent piece in Britain’s Daily Mail by Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s brother).

Calling the country a real-life Truman show, Hitchens says that Pyeongyang is more to be pitied than to be feared. Astonished at the shabbiness of the city’s showplace district for foreigners, he wonders what the rest of the country, where those without privileges live, must be like.

During his five-day stay in the country, Hitchens saw acres of farmland, but only two tractors; miles of railroad track, but only four trains (and those moving at reduced speed); soldiers armed with weapons so decrepit they seemed more dangerous to the users than to the targets; a luxury hotel for foreigners that shut off the power as soon as the tour buses left; and computers with no working links to websites outside the country.

The tour bus taking Hitchens and his party to a museum broke down. The driver unsuccessfully tried to patch the fuel line with chewing gum. Then the replacement bus that arrived also broke down en route; they never made it to the museum.

There’s also some trivia that was new to me: The immense, unfinished Ryugong Hotel, a 1,000-foot-high pyramid of ugliness that dominates the skyline, has the same dimensions as the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984. The Kim Il-sung Institute of Health and Longevity fed the elder Kim a special diet of extra-long dog penises (minimum length, 2.8 inches) to keep him alive longer. (Now we know why the Koreans have such a taste for Fido.) Also, while I followed the story of Kim Jong-il’s son Kim Jong-nam when he was caught traveling in Japan on a false Dominican Republic passport, I didn’t know that he was with two women (neither one his wife) and a suitcase full of cash. The name on the passport was Pang Xiong, Chinese for “fat bear”.

The article does have some quirks. Hitchens says he never saw anyone in jeans or a baseball cap. (First thought: So what? Second thought: Good for North Korea.) He also wonders if the deification of the Kim family had its origins in Japanese attitudes toward the Emperor before the war. (If there is a connection, I don’t think one begat the other; I suspect it would be more likely the situations had common ancestors.)

The photographs are a highlight of the article. The most striking photo is a close-up of what appears to be a bus or streetcar. Most of the glass is missing from the window. Among the passengers sitting inside we see an old woman whose expression is a combination of resignation, fatigue, and despair; a middle-aged man looking at the camera whose face mixes traces of resentment, anger, and embarrassment; and a frightened little boy.

We’ve all seen photos of the bronze statue of Kim Il-sung, but this one has Hitchens posed next to it. That conveys very directly a sense of the monument’s monstrosity .

And one aspect of the photos is particularly odd—for some reason, Peter Hitchens is prominent in most of them. I’ve never seen news journalism accompanied by snapshots in which the author was brought so blatantly to the forefront.

It’s online here.