Dystopian fiction has captivated the popular imagination with nightmare worlds devoid of happy endings. What, then, would the worst dystopia look like? It would have to have, at the least, an oppressive totalitarian regime with a single dictator, as in 1984. The people would be powerless against their intractable economic conditions, while the elite would have access to restricted commodities and technology like in Anthem. The government would control information like in Fahrenheit 451, and concentration camps would await those who speak out against the regime like in V for Vendetta. Even worse, if you tried to flee you would be hunted down and killed, as in Logan’s Run. Yet all these conditions—militaristic oppression, widespread poverty, and religious and cultural control—exist in reality. Welcome to North Korea, a tragic dystopia whose hopelessness and desolation has surpassed the darkest imaginations of authors and moviemakers.
In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother wields absolute power through “the Party.” He has a mythological background and never seems to age. Moving from fictional Oceania to North Korea’s DPKR, the so-called “Great Leader,” Kim Il-Sung, has been President since 1972, though he died in 1994. His living successor and son, the “Dear Leader,” otherwise known as Kim Jong-Il, is believed to control the weather with his mood.
In 2007, 40 percent of North Korea’s known budget was spent on his family’s deification. One of the most sacred places in Pyongyang (the capital of North Korea) is a 60-foot bronze statue of the Eternal President, Kim Il-Sung, beneath which all visitors are expected to lay flowers. Unlike the Party in 1984, the DPKR likes to keep up the facade of democracy. The Korean Worker’s Party (KWP) has been in power since 1949 through single candidate “elections.” The party elite and those loyal to the KWP are in fact the only people allowed to live in Pyongyang, North Korea’s largest city. So-called “Pleasure Brigades,” made up of women ages 13 to 40, are forced to provide high-ranking party officials with dances, massages, and sexual services.
The societies of many dystopian works of fiction are entirely isolated from the outside world, which is believed to be inhospitable and dangerous. In the 1976 cult classic movie, Logan’s Run, a physical barrier in the form of an enormous bubble encapsulates the “known world.” In North Korea this barrier is less conspicuous, but no less palpable.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) runs along the North-South Korean border with armed soldiers lining both sides. Along the Chinese border, soldiers in military installations and watchtowers are always on the lookout for people coming in or out. In Ayn Rand’s 1938 novella, Anthem, a Council of Vocations chooses a person’s career regardless of personal preference.
Likewise, children of Pyongyang train intensely at whatever skill has been selected for them in preparation for the Arirang Festival, the world’ largest human performance. In North Korea, every aspect of economic life is planned, coordinated, and restricted. Not only is trade with foreigners restricted, even private markets are, on the whole, forbidden. Luckily, underground markets and informal economies have begun to emerge as a result of the dire economic conditions North Koreans faced during the 1990’s famine.
Alan Moore’s graphic novel and the recent 2006 blockbuster of the same name, V for Vendetta, modernized the dystopian genre using contemporary London as its setting. In V for Vendetta, the Norsefire government uses mass surveillance through closed-circuit television and news networks to promote its propaganda.
While they don’t go as far as monitoring your home, the North Korean state completely controls the media, which is rated the least free in the world by Freedom House, a Washington-based research institute. All news that is circulated through magazines and newspapers originates from the state-owned Korean Central News Agency. These networks advance Kim Jong-Il’s personality cult. They regularly report on his daily activities and offer daily prayers to him.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the American government of the future has outlawed books in order to eliminate critical thought. In this novel, “Firemen” have the responsibility of locating and burning any such contraband.
In today’s North Korea, owning a Bible will result in your execution. Any book that can be perceived as subversive to the North Korean government or socialist system is strictly forbidden. As in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, North Korea holds faux religious ceremonies through its four state-run churches. Genuine religious freedom in North Korea simply does not exist.
In the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green, food shortages spur the development of soylent green, a food substitute made from the processed remains of deceased humans. As a result of great famine of the 1990s which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 300,000 to 2 million, North Korean defectors have reported stories of people being driven to cannibalism, eating their starved children or bodies dug up from graveyards.
Jonathan Swift was being ironic when he suggested eating infants in his “Modest Proposal”, and yet neither he nor Hollywood could have predicted that modern people would have to resort to such survival methods.
Due to these grim conditions, many North Koreans attempt to flee into China. However, if they are caught, they will be repatriated and sentenced to up to 15 years in prison. In these prison camps, prisoners are beaten, tortured, starved, or executed. Defectors report that few prisoners survive their entire sentence.
John Stewart Mill could not have considered contemporary North Korea when he called his fascist-inspired dystopia was “Too bad to be practicable.” In North Korea, the elites have absolute control over the people. The poor have not been reconciled with the elite as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, nor has a hero been able to topple the authoritarian regime like in Logan’s Run or V for Vendetta.
And yet, there are signs of hope. North Koreans have established black markets to trade freely amongst themselves. Some farmers are now allowed to sell a portion of their own crops at farmers’ markets. Most recently, there has been talk of educational training programs in the West for elite North Korean students.
If you would like to learn more about the human rights crisis in North Korea, see what you can do to help, or have any stories or information on North Korea you would like to share with us, please blitz “The North Korea Project” (also feel free to visit http://nkp.tumblr.com). The North Korea Project is a new student organization committed to raising awareness of human conditions in North Korea.
