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"Holiday in Hell" -- a review of the new Bradt Travel Guide?s chapters on North Korea
by John Fund, Wall Street Journal EFLThe guide, written by British journalist Robert Willoughby, sometimes twists itself into knots to be judicious, but when it comes to politics Mr. Willoughby can be quite candid: "Remember that this guide is only useful in the country if it's allowed in, so what I haven't explicitly written about I've included [Internet] links to." . . . Even with its pulled punches, the book does a mind-bending job of describing the personality cult that surrounds the late dictator Kim Il Sung ("the Great Leader") and his son and successor Kim Jong Il ("the Dear Leader"). The guide laconically notes that tourists will "be asked to 'pay respect' to statues and shrines" of the two men. "Just do it" is its terse advice. After all, this is a country where even the newspapers are folded in such a way as to avoid creasing the photos of the Leaders. . . . Mr. Willoughby quotes the North Koreans saying that Pyongyang, the capital, is "the political centre, the centre for culture and education and a wellspring of our revolution." But it's apparently dangerous to let guests too close to the wellspring. Most stay in a high-rise hotel on an island in the middle of a river where guards can easily block unsupervised access to the city. The guide calls the island "an Alcatraz of fun." It was once planned that visitors stay in the Ryugyong Hotel, a 105-story pyramid whose construction was halted when famine hit North Korea in the 1990s. Though brochures show it brilliantly lit up in night photos, it is still an empty shell that has never been wired for electricity. Some Pyongyang sights teeter between the comic and the sinister. The Mangyongdae Fun Fair features a grenade-throwing ground and machine-gun stalls. A museum on the Korean War features "the gruellingly written confession of one U.S. helicopter pilot whose handwriting suggests what broke him to spill all beyond his name, rank and serial number." Until recently, the captured U.S. spy ship Pueblo was on display. But nothing quite captures the regime's mindset as a visit to Department Store No. 1. The Bradt guide notes only that, when it visited, "none of the lights were on." But a previous visitor on an unsupervised visit, British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, was surprised to see it full of goods and shoppers. As he recounted in his book "Utopias Elsewhere," he soon noticed that someone he had seen with a shopping bag was suddenly without one. He followed her to an upper floor and saw her stand in line to collect another bag and be paid with a pair of brown socks so she would continue her Potemkin shopping excursion. That must be the store Jimmy Carter saw on his visit in 1994, when he famously proclaimed that Pyongyang was a happy city full of well-stocked stores. Posted by: Mike 2004-01-09 |
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