LAST CALL: Site Unseen
Malenic, Marina
LAST CALL MARINA MALENIC Site Unseen NORTH KOREA IS RULED by the world's worst living tyrant, a man responsible for the death of millions. Kim Jong Il claims to have been born...
...The newest U.S...
...satellite technology has brought much of what goes on in the country to light...
...And despite the fact that the massive edifice is visible from every part of Pyongyang, tour guides claim not to know where it is, and it no longer appears on city maps...
...Despite Kim's success at destroying so many of the individuals in his country, his dream of creating a new humanity to take their place was doomed from its conception...
...Yongbyon also happens to be the setting of "Azaleas," a poem written by Kim So Wol during Japanese occupation of the peninsula...
...satellite called Ikonos can distinguish objects measuring just over 30 square inches...
...Satellite imagery also clearly illustrates that North Korea has a functioning system of concentration camps...
...One witness to the removal of nuclear material out of casks reportedly saw men wearing lead aprons haul rods out of a reactor one at a time, a procedure considered barbaric by any other country's standards...
...Accounts of North Korean scientific methods have emerged in recent years, including those describing humans doing work only machines would do elsewhere...
...The Ryugyong Hotel is not easily hidden from their sight, as much as Kim might wish to will it away...
...North Korea's state ideology juche or modified Stalinism or whatever one might wish to call it-aims at nothing less than the creation of a new humanity, with every trace of bourgeois individualism extinguished from the people's minds...
...He assumed the title "Dear Leader" in the 1980s in anticipation of succeeding his father, Kim Il Sung, whose cult of personality he would also inherit...
...North Korean defectors, however, report how their enslaved countrymen lay the flower at statues and monuments to the late Kim Il Sung...
...The kwan-li-so, or "political penal labor colonies," hold as many as 200,000 prisoners who are living-and dying-under conditions similar to those found in the Soviet Gulag...
...The past four generations of South Korean schoolchildren have memorized the poem in class, and many now say that, upon hearing the word Yongbyon, they are as likely to think of azaleas as of the nuclear reactor...
...Even though Kim has succeeded in infecting some of North Korea's populace with pathological denial, U.S...
...spy satellites can distinguish an object measuring four square inches, while even a commercial U.S...
...Perhaps the greatest monument to juche is the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, rumored to have been conceived in the mind of the Dear Leader himself...
...The female narrator of the four-verse poem recounts her sorrow at the imminent departure of her beloved, scatters the blossoms over his path, and asks him, "Tread gently, please, Step by step, softly, On the flower of devotion...
...The poem was published in 1922, and at that time, Yongbyon was known for the lushness of the rhododendrons on Yak Mountain, about a mile west of the town...
...It is a 105-story monstrosity whose dark, jagged form looms over the city like the ghost of Stalin...
...Paektu, under a double rainbow-even though in reality he was born Yuri Irsenovich Kim in an army camp near Khabarovsk in the former Soviet Union...
...Kim maintains one of the world's largest standing armies and is producing nuclear weapons, even as central planning and the state ideology, known as juchewhich he defines as "self-reliance," but is in reality a blend of nationalism and isolationism-have led the country into ruin...
...Moreover, the Ryugyong remains unoccupied and unfinished-many experts even suspect it maybe structurally unsound...
...The town of Yongbyon is the site of the nuclear reactor from which North Korean officials claim plutonium has been extracted and reprocessed for atomic bombs...
...Kim Jong Il claims to have been born atop the sacred Mt...
...Its sinister angles and hulking girth are reminiscent of a vampire sarcophagus...
...Kim is pursuing his goals no matter the human cost...
...Moreover, books ignore themes of love and romance, presumably because the state believes they could contaminate students' devotion to ideology...
...Kim So Wol's poem is little known in North Korea because most poems are tributes to the late dictator and his successor...
...L A S T C A L L M A R I N A M A L E N i C Site Unseen T ORTH KOREA IS RULED by the world's worst liv ing tyrant, a man responsible for the death of millions...
...But while defectors have described a society in which romance and courtship are strongly discouraged, some have said that lovers do discreetly exchange poems...
...A., 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 2005...
Vol. 38 • April 2005 • No. 3
