Saturday, February 12, 2011

North Korea

Netflix streaming to the Wii attached to our ancient CRT used to require a physical disk. It has recently switched to using Wii internal storage [1]. I did the update today and looked for a documentary to test with [3]. I hoped for the BBC, but had to settle for National Geographic [2]. Since I have some Korea connections, I chose Inside North Korea (2007, 52 min).

It's a remarkable video. There was nothing there I haven't read, but video communicates a rich awfulness even photographs can't manage. In a history full of astounding cruelty and evil, Kim Jong Il's North Korea stands tall with Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's China, Hitler's Germany and the Congo's Congo.

On the other hand, Nat Geog is no BBC. There's room for a more complex documentary about what they omitted. The family members of the team's minders, in particular, have probably spent the last four years dying in an NK concentration camp for their failure to stop covert filming. It's never explained why the remarkable team of Nepalese surgeons agreed to the undercover journalism. They may exaggerate the isolation and control of NK.

I was reminded of the Maoist era documentaries of China I saw as a child. The control of the party seemed complete, the population genuinely brainwashed. This was a time when millions were dying of Mao's famine, but that was not well known at the time. The brainwashing turned out to be mostly illusions born of fear and terror, and, for most, readily reversible.

There's a good chance that NK's government will collapse sometime in the next ten years. I hope then that someone will then be able to safely interview some of the people from this documentary, and ask them what they were really thinking when they wept tears in praise of one of humanity's great bastards.

[1] The install required a firmware update and is mildly geeky, but the streaming works remarkably well. Even with our feeble DSL service, and an AirPort router 2 floors above the Wii, the video quality was excellent. Of course our low res TV isn't very demanding ...
[2] BBC licensing discussions must be hellish.
[3] The Netflix-Wii UI is atrocious. I recommend locating streamable movies on computer, then searching them on the Wii.

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