The New York Times has a column by B.R. Myers about North Korea:
Never mind the chronic food shortage: North Korea’s propaganda apparatus is partying like it’s (19)99 and, over there, it is. Year 1 of the Juche Calendar (named after “Juche Thought,” the regime’s official pseudo-ideology) was 1912, the birth year of the state’s founder, Kim Il-sung, whose birthday was celebrated last week. The new century will therefore be celebrated next year with all the requisite hoopla, which must then be outdone in 2012 for the 100th anniversary of Kim’s birth. The approach of back-to-back centennials, each symbolic of a national coming-of-age, puts great pressure on Kim’s successor and son, Kim Jong-il, to improve living conditions for the masses.
So far, his response recalls the Soviet joke about Leonid Brezhnev “fixing” his stalled train by pulling the curtains and pretending it was moving. The North Korean regime, having been relatively cautious in its economic propaganda for decades, now boldly promises that the North will attain the status of a “strong and prosperous country” by 2012.
The drastic transformation is said to be already under way, thanks largely to production increases effected by CNC, or computerized numerical control. The English-language acronym, an incongruous sight in this most xenophobic of countries, now turns up in everything from wall posters to children’s songs.
Remarkable even by North Korean standards is the current emphasis on kinship metaphors; in letters to the editor, people praise Kim Jong-il as a parent by blood, or describe the people in their “neighborhood unit”— in reality, a mutual-snitching association— as their “real” brothers and sisters. This being Spring, the propaganda is not particularly angry; anti-American rhetoric tends to peak in June and July, when the start and finish of the Korean War are commemorated.
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