What does the future hold for North Korea?
Hey, if you expect me to know what’s going to happen in that bizarre and shrouded country, you’re weirder than the North Koreans:
But I will join in the speculation as to whether the above emotion is real or not and say that IMHO it is real on the part of many people and nervously exaggerated on the part of others. When people live in a totally controlled environment and believe that their country, their society, and their very existence depends on one person, the loss of that person is a blow that is more analogous to a young child’s loss of parents than to anything we would experience at the death of a leader, Dear or otherwise. What they are feeling is not just grief (although it is that) but also fear.
This is especially true of the children and young people in the country. Kim Jong Il has been in power since 1994. You do the math. Anyone below the age of 21 or so has never known anything else. Terrifying indeed.
And those of them who don’t feel the requisite intensity for real would make sure they “catch” it from those around them, and demonstrate the requisite depth of emotion in order to demonstrate the proper depth of devotion.
Hey, cynical ol’ me believes that many of these hysterically crying boobs know exactly what they are doing, and are accumulating lots of positive comments in their dossiers as politically reliable supporters of the Party.
As for the rest, well, chronic mal-nourishment, brutal work schedules, and many decades of over the top propaganda about the “Great leader” have done their job.
an excellent book about the subject is “Battle for the Mind” by Sargent. Although considerably dated it contains many insights on mind control.
Oh and the good news. Dear Leader’s son may be worse. Thank goodness we have Obama to deal with him.
Close your eyes and listen to the grieving. Could it not be the sound of those begging for release from hell?
To look at the contrast between South Korea and North Korea is to view the petri dish where free market capitalism has been compared to collectivism. And yet intellectuals still believe in the promise of collectivism. It has to be a genetic trait. Reason cannot account for such a thing.
War is coming again
It’s been said that the Spanish and Latin American speech, larded with references to God and Jesus, is a holdover from the time of the Inquisition when it paid to seem to all, neighbors, informers, secret police, particularly devout.
For some of these folks there will always be somebody watching no matter the future.
Happened to watch the 1978 movie Prince and The Pauper. So I looked up the immediate succession. Yeah, the kings died, Bloody Mary took over, she died…. Dukes and whatnot were beheaded. New boss same as the old boss.
All one has to do is type “satellite image of north korea at night” to show how backwards that country is.
Wow.
“It’s been said that the Spanish and Latin American speech, larded with references to God and Jesus, is a holdover from the time of the Inquisition when it paid to seem to all, neighbors, informers, secret police, particularly devout.”
I don’t know who said that, but I’d be willing to bet that he was blowing smoke through his hat. You hear the same sort of references in English and French, but stripped of any devotional meaning or (in the case of British English) morphed into something unintelligible.
BTW I find the public displays of grief quite striking because I’ve never seen people wailing in grief except during an actual disaster; e.g. a man whose boys were trapped when their truck went onto a lake and through the ice. It reminds me of Takashi Nagai’s memoirs of WW2 in which he described how people managed to work despite the devastation at Nagasaki, but the news that the emperor surrendered completely shattered them and reduced them to tears and bewilderment.
Kim Jong Il (like his father before) was depicted in the national art and music as a benevolent god, and now that god is dead.
MissJean.
About the English: I looked up the origin of “gorblimey”. My guess is that even the Brits don’t know it. It certainly doesn’t put one immediately in mind of the Deity.
We have some Mexican friends, upper class (their daughter’s wedding reception had a sit-down dinner for 650), and they use the interjections considerably more frequently than one hears in English.
Now, it’s possible that there’s a different reason for it, but it’s plausible. Picturing yourself in Inquisition Spain means, among other things, taking care not to come to the attention of the Holy Office one way or another.
And picturing yourself in a situation as vile and as horridly controlled and surveilled as NK, I think you’d take care to look at least as devoted as your neighbor. After all, informers have quotas. And you have to be internally controlled so that the difficulties of living so don’t slip out as any kind of dissatisfaction. Eventually, you may convince yourself. It would be safer.
Part of what I wrote here yesterday: The NORKS are a nation of children brutalized for sixty years by successive paranoid schizophrenic parents, and no good can come from most of them, ever. They are bent beyond straightening.
Richard Aubrey, “gorblimey” is a contraction of “God blind me”. Its much more understandable if you do the contraction in 2 stages. From “God blind me” to “Gawd blin’me” to “gorblimey”.
They love Big Brother.
Joe. I know. I had run into a reference to “tweed gorblimey caps with the brims sewn down” (Masters. Bugles and A Tiger). Eventually looked it up.
By the time it got to describing a cap, it was not an interjection of surprise or dismay. It was a matter of an attitude in WW I. You took an officer’s flat cap and removed the stiffener. Higher didn’t like it, but what they were going to do that was worse than being a subaltern on the Western Front was uncertain. And attitude, and ejaculation of surprise it remains.
Richard, I reckoned you probably did, but I put it in just in case. I just love the psychological twists and turns of how words smudge in both sound and meaning as they move across dialects, languages and borders; but, often etymologies leave the reader with no real idea of how a word ends up with the meaning and spelling it has. Maybe in future there will be a word for any massively exaggerated emotional display: “To Nork” ?
Joe.
Yeah. Then there was the Great Vowel Shift, which is why “God’s Wounds”, came to be “zounds”, missing the shift.
However, in the Spanish language family, we don’t have smudged words referring to the Deity, so that, whether they’re meant sincerely, or simply because they’re an automatic part of language, they sound like they’re meant.
The mortal god is dead. Long live the mortal god.
analogous to a young child’s loss of parents
This is the key observation which informs us why their ideology is fundamentally corrupt. There is a natural progression in human development from “child” to “adult”, which requires an attainment of optimal independence. This does not, however, apply to marriage, since that cooperative (and the institution which honors it) is derivative of the natural order.
The principal principle, whether by divine inspiration or axiom, is “individual dignity”. With greater independence, we have the opportunity to realize and preserve it.
Richard Aubrey: On the Great Vowel Shift.
Neo.
Thanks for the vowel reference. We’re seeing/hearing another. At the hands, so to speak, of young women.
“Yes” and “desk”, for example, are now “Yuss” and “dusk”. The same for other words with the same vowel sound.
And “fast” and “family” are getting to be “fahst” and “fahmily”. There is even a slight lengthening.
The first is grotesque and the second sounds like somebody putting on airs.
I am reminded of a couple of extraordinarily, even excessively, educated types interviewed by NPR years ago who had translated “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” into Latin. I think the entire reason for the exercise was so they could be heard by the entire world, or at least those listeners of NPR whose arms were broken and who could not change the station, saying “Laaahhhtin” as many times as could be managed in a given sentence.
Ah, the difference between Americans and others: when Reagan was shot everyone I knew celebrated. If he had died, they would not have wept.
And, really, why should anyone care profoundly if leaders die? I’ve never met a leader. They so seldom do good. They represent no one but themselves.
Ref vowels. It seems young women are also putting an “uh” at the end of a number of words, usually the last word of a sentence.
And it’s the young women who started the interrogative rise at the end of a declarative sentence, thus disempowering whatever they thought they were trying to prove.
Tehag. You’re hanging with the wrong folks, although it seems to suit you. Keep it up.
Makes one wonder how obvious a fake orgasm must be in North Korea.
Tehag. You’re hanging with the wrong folks, although it seems to suit you.
What can I say: academics. Alas, I no longer hang with Ph.d. crowd (provincial, self-righteous, hate-filled), so my sense of superiority is no longer bolstered by my social circle.