It Gives New Meaning to the Term ‘Love-Fest’

The L.A. Times’s Barbara Demick continues the parade of unflattering portraits of Arirang, this time turning her sharp eye on South Korea’s fawning admirers of the Northern system, beginning with some contrasts that ought to have been obvious to those less eager to believe:

South Koreans in Pyongyang stood out in their colorful Gor-Tex jackets like exotic birds against the monochromatic North Korean landscape. Almost all carried digital cameras, a rarity in the North.

While North Koreans trudged through the empty boulevards on foot, the South Koreans were transported in fancy tour buses, some of which sported color television monitors and video recorders.

The South Koreans were not permitted to go out unescorted and had to wear large nametags around their necks. At one point, a disoriented man in his 80s, born north of the border, tried to wander out of a Pyongyang hotel in search of his home village, but was blocked by a courteous but insistent North Korean doorman, said a South Korean visitor who witnessed the encounter.

Overall, the South Koreans said, they got the impression that North Korea was on a charm offensive. For example, when some tourists complained about a scene in the mass games that showed North Korean helicopter commandos battling what seemed to be South Korean soldiers, the material was promptly cut out.

The mass games were blatantly designed to tug at the heartstrings of South Koreans. Named “Arirang” after a popular Korean folk song, the program was replete with sentimental tunes and operatic skits about separated families reaching for one another across barbed wire. The show used more than 100,000 performers, many of them holding colored cards to make up intricate mosaics.

She also reports extensively on how the North Korean propaganda machine has picked up on the “reunification baby,” and suspicions that the conception was timed for just that purpose. The North Koreans, who shamelessly purloin bible stories for their official propaganda, are trying to make it into a mystical nativity omen–something that Christians and objectivists can despite with equal intensity.

The idea is unproven but plausible. It wouldn’t have been difficult to time the conception accordingly, and the parents are clearly hard-core North Korean stooges. The child was born in a North Korean materity hospital. It would not have been difficult for the mother to feign labor, and for the hospital to induce it.