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A Glimpse into Utopia

This monday's Glimpse into Utopia begins with the most famous perfect society, that of Thomas More's 1516 "Utopia." Everyone knows about it, and most believe it to describe an ideal society. After all, who would expect a society called "Utopia" to be a totalitarian nightmare? Yves Guyot briefly summarizes More's vision of a perfect society:

More sets out in his comfortable fashion the geography of the Isle of Utopia. He places therein fifty-four cities, all built upon the same plan and with identical institutions; a territory of not less than twenty miles square in extent, the duty of cultivating which is apportioned between a certain number of families, is attached to each town: each family consists of no fewer than forty men and women and of two bondmen. Every year twenty citizens who have spent two years in cultivating the land return to the town and are replaced by twenty others. All the inhabitants of Utopia, both men and women, labour, but only for six hours a day. They have few wants, their clothing is made of leather and skins which will last for seven years. Their meals are taken in common, the women being seated opposite to the men. Travelling is rendered almost impossible. Every town is to contain six thousand families: when a particular family is too rich in children, it bestows some of them upon those which have not enough. Marriage is surrounded with formalities; the community of women is unknown, and adultery involves slavery.

The form of government consists of a prince elected for life and of a body of magistrates and officers elected for one year. The Utopians are men of peace, but they make war at need and employ mercenaries to carry it on. Religious liberty is established, but whosoever does not believe in the existence of Providence and in the immortality of the soul is incapable of receiving employment.

You can read More's Utopia here to see his complete vision of static technology, eugenics, and totalitarian organization of social life. But as I promised, I'm only going to show a "glimpse." Too much of any Utopia can be bad for a man's sanity.

So I'll move right on to North Korea following Kim Jong Il's rise to power. Now, many of my readers would not class the Hermit Kingdom among the visions of perfect societies such as the noble and mighty Incas (I'll get to their noble and mighty civilization later), the Anabaptist movement, or the labor workshops of Babeuf. But then again, many of my readers are not celebrities and college professors. Those of us who do not have film crews or captive audiences cannot be expected to understand that if it were not for Kim Jong Il's taste for booze and kidnapped women, North Korean Juche socialism would have become a unique-heritage-affirming paradise.  Our irrational and racist skepticism does not change the fact that Kim Jong Il and every other dictator sought peace and prosperity in a Utopia, even if it required that no more dissident eggs be left to make omelettes.

Here are some brief glimpses into the everyday life of those in the paradise on earth that is North Korea, courtesy of Courtois et. al's "The Black Book of Communism":

Once a week each and every North Korean attends an obligatory indoctrination meeting and a criticism and self-criticism meeting. The latter is known in North Korea as a "balance sheet of life." Everyone must accuse himself of at least one political fault and must reproach his neighbor for at least two faults.

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North Korean cadres receive a number of privileges and material benefits, but they are also under extremely tight control. They are forced to live in a special area, all their telephone conversations are closely monitored, and any audo or video cassettes in their possession are regularly examined. Because of systematic jamming of foreign broadcasts, all radios and televisions in North Korea can only pick up state channels. To make any journey, special permission is required from the relevant local authority and the necessary work unit. In Pyongyang, the capital and hence the showplace for the country, all housing is tightly controlled by the government.

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In a state claiming to base itself on socialism, the population is not only carefully monitored and controlled; it is also subject to disparate treatment depending on social origin, geographic origin (that is, whether the family originates in North or South Korea), political affiliation, and recent signs of loyalty toward the regime. In the 1950's the whole society was carefully subordinated into fifty-one social categories that powerfully determined the people's social, political, and material future. This extremely cumbersome system was streamlined in the 1980's; now there are only three social categories. Even so, the system of classification remains very complex. In addition to these three basic classes, the secret services are particularly vigilant in regard to certain categories within the classes, particularly people who have come from abroad, who have traveled overseas, or who have received visitors.

The country is divided into a "central" class, which forms the core of society, an "undecided" class, and a "hostile" class, which includes approximately one-quarter of the North Korean population. The North Korean Communist system uses these divisions to create what is in effect a sort of apartheid: a young man of "good origin," who might have relatives who fought against the Japanese, cannot marry a girl of "bad origin," such as a family that originated in the South.

Although this system in its early days may have had some basis in Marxist-Leninist theory, biological discrimination is much harder to justify [Note: some of the authors of the Black Book are still communist, and in sentences like this betray their greed for power]. Yet the facts are there: anyone who is handicapped in North Korea suffers terrible social exclusion. The handicapped are not allowed to live in Pyongyang. Until recently they were all kept in special locations in the suburbs so that family members could visit them. Today they are exiled to remote mountainous regions or to islands in the Yellow Sea. Two such locations have been identified with certainty: Boujon and Euijo, in the north of the country, close to the Chinese border. This policy of discrimination has recently been spread beyond Pyongyang to Nampo, Kaesong, and Chongjin.

Similar treatment applies to anyone out of the ordinary. Dwarves, for instance, are now arrested and sent to camps; they are not only forced to live in isolation but also prevented from having children. Kim Jong Il himself has said that "the race of dwarves must disappear."

And here is their description of the not-so-normal life of those living in this paradise:

    There is no way of knowing exactly how many executions have taken place in North Korea, but an indication can be gained from the penal code. At least forty-seven crimes are punishable by the death penalty. These can be broken down into crimes against the sovereignty o the state, crimes against the state administration or against state property, crimes against individuals, crimes against property, and military crimes.

Kang Koo Chin, on of the great specialists on the North Korean legal system, has estimated that in 1958-1960, a period of particularly brutal repression, at least 9,000 people were rejected from the Party, tried, and sentenced to death. Extrapolating from this estimate to include the other nine purges of similar scale, one arrives at a figure of 90,000 executions. For now, this figure must be merely an estimate of the size of the problem; perhaps one day the Pyongyang archives will reveal the full story.

People who have escaped from the country have attested to the routine execution of civilians for crimes such as prostitution, treason, murder, rape, and sedition. The crowd is invited to participate, and sentencing is accompanied by cries of hatred, insults, and stone-throwing. Sometimes the prisoner is kicked and beaten to death while the crowd chants slogans.

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Classes of prisons:

• "help posts" which are essentially transit camps where people await trial for minor political crimes and non-political crimes
• "Work regeneration centers" which house between 100 and 200 people who have been labeled antisocial, ineffective, or simply lazy. Most major towns have one of these centers. People stay for between one month and a year, often without ever having been to trial or even haven been charged with a specific offense.
• Hard-labor camps. At least twelve of these exist in the country, each holding between 500 and 2,000 people. Most inmates there are common criminals accused of theft, attempted murder, rape, or similar crimes. Children of political prisoners, people who have been caught attempting to flee the country, and other minor political prisoners are also incarcerated in these camps.
• Deportation zones, where "untrustworthy elements" such as former landowners or people with family members who have escaped to the South are kept. Tens of thousands of such people are placed under house arrest in distant regions.
• Special dictatorship zones. These are full-fledged concentration camps for political prisoners. Approximately a dozen such camps exist, containing a total of 150,000-200,000 people. This figure is approximately 1 percent of the population of the country, a much lower share than that in the Soviet gulags in the 1940's/ This figure should not be interpreted as a sign that the Koreans are particularly lenient, but as a sign of how cowed the population has become.
  

The few eyewitness descriptions of these camps mention total isolation- high barbed-wire fences, German Shepherd dogs, armed guards, surrounding minefields- poor and insufficient food, and extremely hard work, involving the excavation of mines, quarries, and irrigation canals, as well as wood-cutting operations. Prisoners work twelve hours a say, followed by two days of "political training." Hunger is perhaps the worst torture; detainees try to eat anything from frogs and toads to rats and earthworms. Prisoners not only suffer progressive physical decay; they are also used for special tasks such as the digging of secret tunnels or work at dangerous nuclear projects. Some have been used as moving targets during shooting practice by guards and troops.

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Other guards described experiments carried out in the camp, including deliberate efforts to starve prisoners to death so that their resistance could be studied. According to An Myung Chul,

The people who carry out these executions and these experiments all drink before they do it. But they are real experts now; sometimes they hit prisoners with a hammer, on the back of the head. The poor prisoners then lose their memory, and they use them as zombies for target practice. When the Third Bureau is running out of subjects, a black van known as "the crow" turns up and picks out a few more prisoners, sowing panic among the rest. The crow comes about once a month and takes forty or fifty people off to an unknown destination.

Next week, I think I'll detail the joy that was Campanella and Anabaptism.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 25, 2005 23:30 EST | Permalink | comments |
culture of death, libertarianism, a glimpse into utopia

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