Countries that call themselves communists have never had good press in the West. They are portrayed as absolutely indescribable hells, populated by bizarre, even disturbing humans, who have nothing in common with us. We rightly denounce communist propaganda which, it is said, would brainwash our comrades, but all too often we find nothing to oppose to it except a caricatural counter-narrative.
Remember the East German swimmers at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, unfairly labeled monsters; the Red Army hockey players, presented as emotionless machines at the same time; or even all the “bad communists” who threaten in Hollywood productions.
Nowadays, as most of the so-called communist countries collapsed before converting, with more or less success, to liberalism, only China and North Korea remain to feed the anti-communist fantasies.
Like some of you, I have read the overwhelming and essential black book of communism (Pocket, 1999), I know the heavy historical record of this ideology and I do not intend to justify this indefensible system. I remain ill at ease, however, in front of the dehumanizing gaze that is still cast on the nationals of these countries. I have always been sensitive, without believing in it, to the communist promise of a fairer world and, for this reason, I have always refused to regard with condescension the citizens of the countries which claim it. Their experience interests me.
The last contemporary incarnation of pure and hard communism, North Korea today serves as a punching bag for good democratic souls around the world. We laugh at its leader Kim Jong-un, who is often presented as a dangerously incompetent madman, we pity the country’s nearly 26 million inhabitants, who we imagine fanaticized by the regime’s propaganda, and we say to ourselves that all that, really, in 2022, is impossible.
However, write the French koreanologist Juliette Morillot and the journalist Dorian Malovic in Korea of the North in 100 questions (Tallandier, 2018), “before being ruled by an authoritarian regime, North Korea was a nation populated by human beings with a sensitivity, a culture and an unwavering pride in belonging to a country that against and against Logically they love deeply”. In an interview published on the website ofAsialyst in 2016, Morillot even goes so far as to say that “it is time to treat North Korea as a normal state” since “systematic demonization is counterproductive” and harms the North Korean population first.
The latter, of course, remains shrouded in mystery, given the very hermetic nature of the country. In Nothing to envy to the rest of the world (Albin Michel, 2021, 480 pages), her formidable investigation into “ordinary lives in North Korea” finally published in pocket format, the American journalist Barbara Demick lifts the veil on this locked up people.
Correspondent of The Angels Times in Seoul in the 2000s, Demick stayed nine times in North Korea between 2001 and 2008 and, above all, she interviewed around a hundred North Korean refugees mainly from the city of Chongjin and now living in China or South Korea. South. His investigation, originally published in 2009, follows the painful journey of six expatriates – four women and two men – and tells it with a consummate art of storytelling.
With Demick, we discover, in fact, that “love also exists” in North Korea, although it is expressed with astonishing modesty, that “Koreans like to spoil their children” and that they are deeply attached to their country. We are also forced to note, however, particularly at the time of the great famine of 1995, the brutality of the regime which hammers out incessant propaganda on the greatness of the Kims, the reigning dynasty which imposes permanent ideological surveillance and which puts in prison or in the post anyone who dares to question the single party truth that, thanks to the Kims, North Korea has “nothing to envy the rest of the world”.
Captivating and instructive, Demick’s book did not however enchant Morillot and Malovic, who urge caution with regard to the testimonies of refugees, often cashed in at a price of gold and made more terrifying to satisfy the media or southern evangelical humanitarian organizations. -Koreans who exploit them to justify their proselytism.
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, write Morillot and Malovic, is undoubtedly one of the rare countries for which ignoring all ethics, fabricating or not verifying one’s sources is commonly accepted, even in the major press headlines. Reading these two remarkable books back to back is the thing to do to discover Korea with lucidity.