Daniel Foster is quite right: More often than not, those North Korean tears are real.
There were similar displays in China when Mao Tse-tung died. In conversations over the years I’ve asked many Chinese friends & relatives who were adults at the time whether they wept, and if so whether sincerely. The answers fall into three groups.
1. Sincere weepers. A great many people — at least half — wept sincerely. They loved Chairman Mao. He’d brought peace after decades of war, civil war, disorder, and corruption. The price of that order looks steep to us; but that’s because we take civil order for granted. After a long spell of desperate chaos, most people will take order at any price. Furthermore, great numbers of town people had an “iron rice bowl” — security at least of food, shelter, and warmth, in return for undemanding work. It’s surprising, and depressing, how many people will settle for that. Sure, everyone knew about the famines, the purges, the Cultural Revolution, and the petty persecutions. People rationalized that away, though, under the pressures of patriotism and the desire to stay out of trouble. Never underestimate the human power of rationalizing away! Mao got a pass on much of the bad stuff: people blamed lower-level officials. The proverb you hear a lot in this context is: “The [Buddhist] scriptures are true, but the priests distort them.” I fictionalized a weeper on p. 242 here (available in e-Book! … as soon as I can master this damn formatting), though in fact the poor girl is too upset even to weep.
2. Swept-alongers. Most of the rest told me: “I didn’t feel grief myself, not like you do for a relative; but everyone else was upset, and it’s hard to resist being pulled in.” Basic crowd psychology: It’s infectious, like yawning.
3. The Awkward Squad. A few have told me: “I pretended to cry, because I might have got in trouble for not crying, but it was fake: in my heart I hated the s.o.b. and was glad he’d died at last.” Those few all had a certain distinct type of personality: skeptical, contrarian, prickly, stubborn, and antisocial — the Awkward Squad. The first job for anyone serious about being a totalitarian dictator is to identify these people and hustle them off to the camps. They are only a small minority: the rest can easily be manipulated.
There were similar displays of collective grief when Stalin died. The movie The Inner Circle gets a good scene out of it.
And as a matter of fact, there is still grief for Stalin. At any rate, prowling around the Kremlin the other day, I got sight of the little necropolis where Soviet leaders are buried. I couldn’t get close, and my cheapo camera has no distance capabilities, but I could make out Stalin’s monument. There was a pile of fresh-looking flowers heaped around the base.
"Basic crowd psychology: It’s infectious, like yawning."
We see this element, even amongst today in what we used to consider the 'conservative community'.
The desire for acceptance and belonging is overwhelming, and we see this following the crowd producing very dysfunctional - self destructive behavior and conceptions.
The "mob" mentality is as old as humanity, and often makes an enormous mess.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNow that there is funny.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGiven the life expectancy in the country, there are very few NORKS who remember a time before the Kim Family Rule. By now those who would be described as skeptics of the implied divinity of the Kim Family were long ago hauled off to the mines. The party has long used the mines as a way to make troublesome types go away.
So, we are left with a population that mostly lives hand to mouth, entirely dependent on the generosity of what they have been raised to believe are gods. What stands between those holding onto a shred of human dignity and the packs of feral youth roaming the streets is the state.
You'd cry to if faced with the very real possibility that the only thing between you and certain death has just gone away.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNow we know how life will be like under the GOP!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAh yes - think of the children's choirs, singing school songs written by their teachers in honor of their "dear leader" - and the crowds chanting - oh wait, what is that they're saying? "OBAMA" (2008)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNon sequitur alert!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is like those gratuitous comparisons some people make between their political adversaries and the Nazis. It's a desecration of the memory of Kim's victims.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is like those gratuitous comparisons some people make between their political adversaries and the Nazis. It's a desecration of the memory of Kim's victims.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWow...lame.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"security at least of food, shelter, and warmth, in return for undemanding work. It’s surprising, and depressing, how many people will settle for that."
I would submit that thinking OTHER than this needs to be taught, and one of the reasons the Anglosphere became dominant is because it was. As we, culturally, but also through actual formal education, chip, chip, chip away at that, it's in our future, too.
Probably not anything I really need to tell you.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI can confirm to you that more often than not those tears are real. The Kims are sort of like deities in a state cult, who are capable of super human things like controlling the weather based on his mood. If you read Kim Jong Il's "official biography" is claim that when he was born flowers bloomed in the middle of winter. The media reported that the first time he played golf he completed 18 holes in 32 strokes including 11 holes in one. That country is extremely isolated and as far as many of them know their life is the best that it can get and the rest of the world is suffering.
I have met a few people who have been there, including one very odd individual who is actually very sympathetic to the regime and thinks they are building a utopian paradise. If you go there you have to lay flowers at the feet of a giant statue of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il's father, who is actually still considered their president/head of state, even though he has been dead for 15 years, Kim Jong-Il was actually the "supreme leader". But foreigners that go there are usually marched around in a parade and used for propaganda purposes. They are only allowed to see certain parts of the country and are escorted by a government official.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI am less convinced that the tears are genuine. Cults of personality are nothing new, and the more extreme they are the more unpredictable, violent and complete is the reaction against them when the whole fragile edifice finally cracks. Ceaucescu was deluded enough to think that the Romanians loved him, but we saw how rapidly and violently his reign ended. A solid majority of Libyans grew to hate the "brother leader". Iraqis never quite had the chance to successfully rebel against Saddam Hussein, who attempted to create the same personality cult in Iraq, but easily 2/3 of Iraqis wanted him dead.
The revolutionary generation in China did revere Mao, because in much of the country, life was in fact easier after an incredibly traumatic WWII experience. Many Cubans support Castro, especially those who remember the Bautista years, and they still have some reason to do so - the revolution had tangible benefits for many and while Cuba has problems, it is far from the sort of hell on earth North Korea has become. North Korea more closely resembles Libya, Iraq or Romania at the end of those dictatorships - economic and social indicators are going backwards. The people are subject to arbitrary and horrendous brutality, and feel great uncertainty about the future, and their resentment builds against the obvious massive privilege on the part of a tiny elite. I've had the privilege to have witnessed events in both Iraq and Libya, and I feel confident that large numbers of North Koreans will turn on the regime rather suddenly if circumstances change and they either feel they have no choice, or the security forces weaken sufficiently.
Let me venture a hypothesis here... Many of us have a slight inclination to view Asian totalitarianism through a sort of "Manchurian Candidate" brainwash lens and that may lead us to mistake the fake tears for real ones. The Japanese populace as a whole was certainly fanatical in WWII although one could argue that in a war, there was a reasonable belief on the part of many Japanese that they faced an existential threat. And I admit that there is a powerful social pressure for conformity, a cultural trait that Mao exploited. But I suspect Koreans are probably not really so different from Libyans or Romanians or any other human beings. They may be less isolated than we think, and less in thrall to the bizarre cult of this brutal family who has ruled them since the aftermath of WWII. North Koreans are human beings, with all that implies, and not just automatons of some huge cult. Even in Jonestown there were dissenters, many of them, who were shot or forced to drink the koolaid.
These horrible dictatorships seem strong until, suddenly, they aren't. Personality cult dreams evaporate so rapidly.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTwo more examples of real crying over a dictator:
A friend of mine from Yugoslavia was was around 6 years old in 1980 when Tito died. He told me that he and all of the other schoolkids couldn't stop weeping at the funeral parade.
It is said that when Brazilian president (and former dictator) Getulio Vargas killed himself in the governor's mansion in 1954, the people protesting on the street outside dropped their signs and started crying.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThose flowers on Stalin's monument were probably put there by Putin himself.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseReal tears or not, anyone wearing a North Korean uniform deserves a bullet in the head...
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse