For once about North Korea...
In the annals of craziness? I bought a wonderful book on art in North Korea while in the British Museum. The art part is interesting enough, but the description of North Korean lifestyle was by far the most interesting part: it sounded completely horrific. Besides the shortages, regimentation etc etc, men are in the army for eight or so years, nobody but the healthiest and most loyal are allowed to live in the capital, women don’t even ride bycicles and are still subservient, the class stricture is as rigid as during the royal times (only the extensive background records are about your family’s class and loyalty under different criteria) and men can’t marry until 29 or women until 25. Entertainment consists of public classes/readings of works of the leaders, done publically, so family life is almost non-existent. It reads scarily like 1984. (I also went and found The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by by Kang Chol-Hwan, a child prisoner who eventually escaped to South Korea. It reminds me of those books i read about Soviet Gulags. Really chilling.)
And the deceased Kim Il-Sung is viewed as some sort of Jesus-type being, because not only do New Year’s gifts come from him, but apparently his death had supernatural omens etc etc.
Even better? His son, Kim Jong-Il. According to wikipedia: The official biography also holds that his birth at Mount Paektu was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens.
Moreover according to wikipedia, a Russian emissary who traveled with Kim across Russia by train, told reporters that Kim had live lobsters air-lifted to the train every day which he ate with silver chopsticks - historically used in the Chinese Imperial Palace to detect poison. Kim has a reputation for expensive taste. His annual purchases of Hennessy cognac reportedly total to $700,000, while the average North Korean earns the rough estimate equivalent of $900 per year.
Creepy.
Also, apparently, in 1978, on the orders of Kim, South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choe Eun-hui were kidnapped in order to build a North Korean film industry.
Here is a BBC article about it.
Kidnapped by North Korea
By Mike Thomson
BBC Today correspondent
Not many people can claim to have spent much time with the enigmatic North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il.
But South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his wife, Choe Eun-hui, have that dubious distinction.
They not only knew him well but spent several years living in his summerhouse. They were not his friends or house guests - they were his prisoners.
Choe Eun-hui, an actress now in her late 60s, was the first to arrive after being kidnapped in Hong Kong by Kim Jong-il's secret agents in 1978.
The memories of that traumatic event still haunt her today.
"I was really terrified. It was so frightening," she said.
"I was in such a worried state I couldn't eat or drink anything for ages. Finally I fainted and later learnt that they had injected me with some sort of sedative."
She was taken to Hong Kong's docks, bundled aboard and taken on an eight-day trip to Pyongyang.
Her husband immediately flew from Seoul to Hong Kong to look for his wife, and was himself kidnapped soon after.
"Someone suddenly pulled a sack over my head and I couldn't see anything or breathe properly," he said.
It was not long before the reason for their kidnapping was made clear.
"Kim Jong-il later confessed to me that the reason he kidnapped my wife first was because he wanted me to come and make films for him," Shin Sang-ok said.
Kim Jong-il is film mad. Soon after the couple arrived in Pyongyang he took them for a private tour of his film library, which holds more than 15,000 movies.
Keen to add to them, he placed $2.5m into an Austrian bank account and told Mr Shin that the money would be available for him to make "good" films.
Initially the director was not sure what the North Korean leader meant by a "good" film, until he took note of what he watched most often. Top of the list was Rambo, followed by Friday the Thirteenth and all the James Bond movies.
Over the next two years Mr Shin made more than 20 films, many of them propaganda tales commissioned by the man himself.
Meanwhile his wife was given a large room in the leader's scenic summerhouse overlooking the river.
In a series of charm offensives Kim Jong-il went out of his way to make her feel welcome by bringing her piles of expensive clothes and Western cosmetics.
Re-education classes
But life in Pyongyang was not all film-making and ball gowns.
Shin Sang-ok was sentenced to long terms in prison after twice trying to escape. There he received re-education classes designed to teach him the error of his ways.
"I was jailed for about five years, but I didn't know at the time that it would land up being that long," he said.
"If I had known from the start I would rather have been dead. During this time I was very, very depressed. They expected brainwashing to change me."
His wife was also ordered to attend re-education classes. She was forced to study North Korea's "glorious" revolution and later made to sit exams on the subject.
"I was very unhappy. I did think of suicide but then I thought of my family and how much this would hurt them. It was an awful time," she said.
Escape
Finally, in 1986, the couple were given permission to travel abroad together for the first time since their arrival in North Korea eight years earlier.
They went to a film festival in Vienna heavily chaperoned by a team of North Korean minders, but managed to persuade their guards to travel in a taxi behind as they headed for the festival hall.
"We got to a crossroads where we were supposed to turn left for the festival. Our minders' car was following us about 30 metres behind, but several other cars had got in between them and us. So we told our driver to turn right instead, towards the United States Embassy," said Choe Eun-hui.
Seconds later the car behind realised that something was wrong and radioed the taxi that the Shins were in and asked their driver to tell them which way he had gone.
The couple quickly handed him a sizeable tip and lied that they had gone in the opposite direction.
Soon they arrived at the US embassy but could not find anywhere to stop outside, and the couple had to get out down the road.
"We tried to run as fast as we could, but it felt like we were in some sort of slow motion movie," Mr Shin said.
"Finally we burst through the embassy's doors and asked for asylum."
On hearing the news, Kim Jong-il became convinced that the couple had been kidnapped by the Americans, and sent them a message offering to help them get them back to Pyongyang.
It was an offer they could happily refuse.
And the deceased Kim Il-Sung is viewed as some sort of Jesus-type being, because not only do New Year’s gifts come from him, but apparently his death had supernatural omens etc etc.
Even better? His son, Kim Jong-Il. According to wikipedia: The official biography also holds that his birth at Mount Paektu was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens.
Moreover according to wikipedia, a Russian emissary who traveled with Kim across Russia by train, told reporters that Kim had live lobsters air-lifted to the train every day which he ate with silver chopsticks - historically used in the Chinese Imperial Palace to detect poison. Kim has a reputation for expensive taste. His annual purchases of Hennessy cognac reportedly total to $700,000, while the average North Korean earns the rough estimate equivalent of $900 per year.
Creepy.
Also, apparently, in 1978, on the orders of Kim, South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choe Eun-hui were kidnapped in order to build a North Korean film industry.
Here is a BBC article about it.
Kidnapped by North Korea
By Mike Thomson
BBC Today correspondent
Not many people can claim to have spent much time with the enigmatic North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il.
But South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his wife, Choe Eun-hui, have that dubious distinction.
They not only knew him well but spent several years living in his summerhouse. They were not his friends or house guests - they were his prisoners.
Choe Eun-hui, an actress now in her late 60s, was the first to arrive after being kidnapped in Hong Kong by Kim Jong-il's secret agents in 1978.
The memories of that traumatic event still haunt her today.
"I was really terrified. It was so frightening," she said.
"I was in such a worried state I couldn't eat or drink anything for ages. Finally I fainted and later learnt that they had injected me with some sort of sedative."
She was taken to Hong Kong's docks, bundled aboard and taken on an eight-day trip to Pyongyang.
Her husband immediately flew from Seoul to Hong Kong to look for his wife, and was himself kidnapped soon after.
"Someone suddenly pulled a sack over my head and I couldn't see anything or breathe properly," he said.
It was not long before the reason for their kidnapping was made clear.
"Kim Jong-il later confessed to me that the reason he kidnapped my wife first was because he wanted me to come and make films for him," Shin Sang-ok said.
Kim Jong-il is film mad. Soon after the couple arrived in Pyongyang he took them for a private tour of his film library, which holds more than 15,000 movies.
Keen to add to them, he placed $2.5m into an Austrian bank account and told Mr Shin that the money would be available for him to make "good" films.
Initially the director was not sure what the North Korean leader meant by a "good" film, until he took note of what he watched most often. Top of the list was Rambo, followed by Friday the Thirteenth and all the James Bond movies.
Over the next two years Mr Shin made more than 20 films, many of them propaganda tales commissioned by the man himself.
Meanwhile his wife was given a large room in the leader's scenic summerhouse overlooking the river.
In a series of charm offensives Kim Jong-il went out of his way to make her feel welcome by bringing her piles of expensive clothes and Western cosmetics.
Re-education classes
But life in Pyongyang was not all film-making and ball gowns.
Shin Sang-ok was sentenced to long terms in prison after twice trying to escape. There he received re-education classes designed to teach him the error of his ways.
"I was jailed for about five years, but I didn't know at the time that it would land up being that long," he said.
"If I had known from the start I would rather have been dead. During this time I was very, very depressed. They expected brainwashing to change me."
His wife was also ordered to attend re-education classes. She was forced to study North Korea's "glorious" revolution and later made to sit exams on the subject.
"I was very unhappy. I did think of suicide but then I thought of my family and how much this would hurt them. It was an awful time," she said.
Escape
Finally, in 1986, the couple were given permission to travel abroad together for the first time since their arrival in North Korea eight years earlier.
They went to a film festival in Vienna heavily chaperoned by a team of North Korean minders, but managed to persuade their guards to travel in a taxi behind as they headed for the festival hall.
"We got to a crossroads where we were supposed to turn left for the festival. Our minders' car was following us about 30 metres behind, but several other cars had got in between them and us. So we told our driver to turn right instead, towards the United States Embassy," said Choe Eun-hui.
Seconds later the car behind realised that something was wrong and radioed the taxi that the Shins were in and asked their driver to tell them which way he had gone.
The couple quickly handed him a sizeable tip and lied that they had gone in the opposite direction.
Soon they arrived at the US embassy but could not find anywhere to stop outside, and the couple had to get out down the road.
"We tried to run as fast as we could, but it felt like we were in some sort of slow motion movie," Mr Shin said.
"Finally we burst through the embassy's doors and asked for asylum."
On hearing the news, Kim Jong-il became convinced that the couple had been kidnapped by the Americans, and sent them a message offering to help them get them back to Pyongyang.
It was an offer they could happily refuse.