Is Freedom the most expensive word? A journey to North Korea
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Avila, Renata
Pelevic, Maja
Whereas contemporary states, societies and citizens are said to be interconnected and interdependent as never before in human history, North Korea appears as a sui generis void in international relations; a place beyond the realm of comprehension, being neither a part of our world nor of our era (…). The visuality of showing a dark North Korea serves as a discursive marker of difference. It helps to establish particular binary relations that distinguish, for instance between freedom / oppression, wealth / poverty, development / decline, and hope / despair.” The performative discussion on Freedom will take the audience on a journey through North Korea, through an interactive, multi media...
 Okay, so this talk might be not what you're expecting. This talk will not show the typical pictures of North Korea, you know, the parade, the soldier, the stadium, the children singing coordinated songs and doing acrobatic. Because what you're seeing here, Maya, I will explain what it is, a secret material extracted from there. Yeah, it is actually just an ordinary video that has been shot when I was in North Korea last year. You're not supposed to shoot videos from the bus. It's forbidden. Do not take photos of working people is what they say to you. So I found a way by using my mobile phone, putting it in here and just pretending like I'm looking straight forward. And this is the video that you see here. The thing is that you can see in this video is that it looks quite familiar. As you will be watching it for the next 23 minutes, you can see that it looks maybe like your city, maybe like Berlin, maybe like something else. You'll see people walking around doing normal things. And this is the thing that we would like to talk about, about the familiar side of North Korea, about the things that are not usually been presented and seen in the mainstream media. As we are, of course, especially the last couple of months, used to seeing these nuclear threats, tortures, Gulags, concentration camps and all the words that are fit to go with this country. Not concerning the other side of it, of course, as every society in North Korea has its own complexities. Yes. And basically what we were discussing is if you are really uninterested with the things that we are going to talk about, you at least can watch something that you will never see in mainstream media. And I think that it is interesting when we were preparing this talk, obviously our nationalities and our own realities came into play while preparing what freedom is and what's happening in North Korea. Because one of the things that we discussed is how people think that it is all that we are shown about North Korea is a kind of a performatic thing, a parallel reality. And it reminded me of my first visit to Cuba when I was a little girl and how my grandma was convinced that everything that I was shown and everything, all the wonderful things that my parents and me were talking about the workers, about the schools, about the cigar factories, about everything, it was just for the tourists. And yeah, it was very actually similar to my experience in North Korea as all the realities that we have been experiencing while we were there, that were not the realities that we are used to seeing. The people from my group that were mostly Western tourists perceived as some kind of fake realities, like it is completely impossible to have normal people walking around, smiling faces. So it was because we were there on a very specific date, it was actually their national holiday, the day of the sun, the day of the birth of their President Kim Il-sung. And so all the people were on the streets and we were walking by and then we went to a hill, we were climbing the hill and at one point there were some old ladies, really nice old ladies, they were dancing in these traditional Korean dresses and they asked us to come and dance with them, which we of course did and we danced for a while. And after a couple of minutes we left and I heard my friends from the group that were actually I think from Germany talking about the grandmothers, the old ladies being completely fake and they said, did you see how they put those fake old ladies there? And I was like, why would they do that? Why wouldn't those be normal just ladies, you know, experience their national holiday? No, no, no, it's completely fake. It's fake as the subway. And we were in the subway, there were some fake pioneers there. And then I thought, okay, so is this possible? That they're really thinking that the whole nation and of course there are tourists all the time in North Korea, Russian, Chinese and of course Western is going to have this Truman show made for us, the Western Eye, to see and perceive so that we can see that they are living a normal life. And that is the way that these images that we see all day are actually deeply political and they actually deeply have to do with our political and social context that we are coming from. And it is a very hegemonic point of view which happened to me also as I come from a country, I come from Serbia, it's the ex-Yugoslav country and of course after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the socialist project and the wars in Bosnia, Milosevic and everything, we experienced 10 years of very heavy sanctions and after these 10 years in the beginning of the 2000s, we had a very similar experience explaining all the people in the Western world that we were not killers, that we're completely normal people, that we come from a country that has lots of stuff to offer. And also we had in a way, just one way of getting out of this, of getting liberated from this and that liberation was actually the liberation by a liberal democracy project which we are living now as one of the poorest countries in Europe. And that you mentioned, I remember when you came back from North Korea, at the same time an American friend of ours was just back from North Korea and how the personal experiences also, the views on a place are shaped by our background because Maya came like, oh my God, it's amazing, you will not believe it. It feels like I'm back in Yugoslavia. And the American guy was like, oh my God, I survived my trip from North Korea. It was horrible for not, it was horrible. We were like, watch all the time. We were followed all the time. It was this cult to this leader everywhere. You will see the cult of the postures of the dynasty and you will, you cannot, oh my God, you cannot do anything without the state knowing. Sounds familiar? Yeah, it completely sounds familiar. And also when we talk about this kind of, you can say visible and invisible surveillance. Of course, when you're in North Korea, you have free guides. They're all free guides that are always with you. You can't leave the hotel without them. You go into and free lines like you're in elementary school and you have to completely obey the things they say. And you are in a way in a very surveilled state of mind. But then when we compare this kind of surveillance, this visible kind of surveillance to the invisible kind of surveillance that we have in today's world, then we can go back to the film they lived, the, you know, a film from the 80s, the SF film, where we have the visible and invisible ideology where at one hand you have the visible, you know, ideology where you know in North Korea you have billboards all around saying, I don't know, we live in the best country in the world, kill America and whatever it says in the billboards. And you, of course, as you see, have the leaders all around. And then you have in the movie They Live, you have this perfect free democratic world with all the other billboards we have all around and also all the other stuff that's happening in our day-to-day basis. But when you put the glasses on, like in the movie, you actually see the world black and white and then on the place where the shiny billboards are, you see messages like, obey, consume, marry and reproduce, obey the system, don't challenge the system and all the stuff that in a way create our minds today in a different kind of surveillance state that we're living in today. It is somehow, you know, that they have the cult of personality, we have the cult of capital and all our surroundings is oriented. If you dare to challenge this cult that in our society today we have to capital, I mean, it is almost, if you dare to think of alternative economic models and we have many examples of dissidents and people who have dared to challenge the system, you're crushed as the same way as if they in North Korea challenged the leader, they're crushed somehow. But somehow it is also interesting how things the Korean way. I remember, I love the example of Sweden, you know, like we have our way to fulfill contracts and to be able to enforce contracts in all the democracies today. And this story is really, really, really funny on what happened to the Volvo's in Sweden, Swedish Volvo's in North Korea. We loved if you can share that. Yeah, actually it's a story about doing business with North Korea, which is not such a good idea. The Swedes tried doing it and realized it in a hard way. So in the 80s when Sweden gained diplomatic relations with North Korea, they actually told them, okay, now we're going to give you as a present, well, kind of a present, 5,000 Volvo's that you can pay off after two years in this great credit rates and you'll be really satisfied and the North Koreans said no problem, they took the 5,000 Volvo's and after two years the Swedes were like, okay, so are you going to start paying for the Volvo's and the North Koreans were like, what Volvo's? And they said, the Volvo's we gave you, the 5,000 Volvo's, they said, we don't know what you're talking about. These Volvo's actually are on the streets of North Korea today still driving, you can see them actually, they're one of the few cars there. And while preparing this talk, we realized that we have the same deal with the Volvo's we have with our politicians today, you know. We go to the ballot, we fill the votes, they promise us Volvo, they promise us that they will pay the Volvo's, politicians promise that they will deliver health care, politicians promise that they will take care of the environment, politicians promise many, many, many things. And we are left like the Swedes with the Volvo situation, we see the politicians there, there and the promises just evaporate as they do. And that in a way reminds me of the freedom of choice story because in today's world and today's modern democratic society as we like to call it, we have a lot of choices of course, we have a choice to do what we want, we have a choice to use the internet in the way we want, we have a choice to buy what we want to travel, all the choices that the North Koreans actually don't have. But then at the end, do we have a choice to change the society we live in, which would be in a way the freedom that we're looking for, that we can really change things that are crucial to our system. So that is the choice we don't have and there, that is the border of our freedom actually today, which I think is a big problem when comparing these two things. And then we go to the issue of liberation because all that we read in the newspapers is that these people are begging for liberation and they want to be liberated from this terrible dictator and they want to get out of this system, that's what we are told. And we have very little chance to, well, frankly, we do not know what they want, but we have very clear examples of how the liberation of Libya ended up, how the liberation of Iraq ended up, Afghanistan and many, and you have the concrete example of Yugoslavia, what happened there. Yes, and we also, there is one interesting thing, and that is that North Korea has always been presented as a country for what it lacks. So we always think of North Korea, okay, it lacks light. Like when you see satellite imagery of North Korea, you see this mysterious black hole, you know, above South Korea and between China, then if they don't car, they lack cars, they lack advertising, they lack the internet. So they lack a lot of things, but then we never think what do we lack and they actually do have and that is free education, free housing, free healthcare, they actually have non-GMO food, they don't have advertising, they don't have this, you know, consumption mania that we have in the Western world. And at the other hand, of course, what Yurenata said, the liberating process which we had in Serbia was only one way, so there was no chance to keep any of the good things we had from socialism during Yugoslavia. We had to satanize all that and just go into a very, very straightforward privatization process with the privatization that is going on with all our public institutions and which happened to all of the countries that were liberated and you gave a good example with Libya. And going back to the hero, you know, the American hero in North Korea, one of the things that we were discussing that I loved was this attitude of the person coming from, look at this horrible, terrible place, I mean, they risked their lives doing tourism in a five star hotel seven days in North Korea. And it is a lot of pretending and a lot of pretension on the Western view of this country and how these people who had, I mean, how much can you get to know a culture that you don't speak the language and a place that you really do not understand because it really operates in different rules than your country by just going seven days. Yes, it's completely impossible. And talking about North Korea, which happens all the time, like lots of photographers, lots of journalists go to North Korea and they say, now we will reveal the real North Korea. Now you will see what you have never seen before. And actually, these people that reveal these things from the country, which are mostly photos we've seen a hundred of times and very similar images, they're actually called heroes. So the heroic moment that we have of people getting out information from the country, which you hear very often, is one very heroic moment of getting this information out. And on the other side, we have the treating of heroes that really reveal some important information that has to do with the problems of our society, which we actually know about because we live in it. They are, of course, called criminals. They're called traitors. They're kept in detention. They're kept out of the country or they're imprisoned. So we can look at the situation in our own backyard to look at the... Journalist describes as non-state agents, journalists describe as whistleblowers crushed and facing long sentences or just dismissed and excluded from all activities in society. And that brings me also to another thing. Let's liberate North Korea. Okay, let's... What about taking a look at what happens with the people who managed to escape? And that's very, very...that's the way we liberate people in the system that we live today. Yes, and well... What happened to them? Yeah, well, we, of course, see a lot of defectors giving talk shows and talking about their terrible experience in North Korea, which probably some of that really happened in North Korea. But the thing is that we never see the defectors that, of course, they have to leave the border from China and then mostly they go to South Korea and they end up in a center called Hanabong Center where they're actually being, in a way, taught to be proper citizens of South Korea. They have to forget the things they're used to in North Korea. They have to adapt to this new system and most of them are treated as potential spies and not most of them, but a lot of them, I think 90% of them are probably treated as second great citizens that have very heavy economical problems and they're not treated in a proper way, which we see is also happening, of course, with the refugee crisis where, on paper, we are helping the people, but then we see the position they are in, in most cases, the border fences, the terrible refugee camps and all the other stories that we know are happening today. So, at the end, what happens in North Korea is that Western democracies use to put on that all the bad things in one, all the demonization in one of a country that they cannot really control. And something that we were discussing is that the power of images and the power of images that are captured and that are pushed on us constantly on what is ideal and what is permissible and what is... Yes, and what is included and what is excluded in these images, because, of course, that in a way you can always include the things that the story you want to tell. So, damages are not just images by themselves, but they also talk about the story of the person that is taking this image and, in a way, putting some kind of textual context in this specific image. And how ideology works in general. Yeah, and how ideologies at the end works. Yes. And going again on... Well, it seems that we have a checklist and that checklist is the checklist that if you fulfill all these requirements, if you have a free market economy, if you have free press, so-called free press, if you have no restrictions on foreign capital, if you have on paper human rights standards, if you have NGOs and a Pride parade, and if your army collaborates with other armies and your intelligence service, collaborates with other intelligence services, you can get away with torture, you can get away with so many things that your country, as long as it fulfills that list, will never be under scrutiny. And we have seen that in Turkey, we have seen that in Brazil, we have seen that in... Even in Croatia, in Serbia, we have seen it in Saudi Arabia, we have seen it in Egypt, we have seen it in so many places. And it seems that only when the situation gets really, really, really inconvenient for this checklist, the media treats them as North Korea, no? Yes, of course. And it's a projection. Yes, and then we always have this projection of the repressive practices in the other, and that is the way that we work. So we lived in a very paranoid society where we have this enemy that is somewhere outside, and this enemy is somewhere far, and we are not this enemy. So there was this great sentence by Mladen Dolar, a philosopher who said during the 90s that Balkan is the unconscious of Europe. And so in a way today, North Korea can be some kind of an unconscious of the Western world. So by projecting these repressive practices as gulags, tortures, surveillance, detentions, the unfreedoms, all the unfreedoms we have in North Korea, we can actually, in a way, see also a reflection of ourselves. And so what you were talking about, challenging new kind of democracy, we should maybe, instead of thinking, oh, this is terrible, this terrible Russia, this terrible Trump or terrible somebody else, tomorrow will be terrible North Korea, we should think of bad things that are happening here and bad things that we are aware of and that we are actually not doing anything or we are doing little to change it. And why are we doing little? Because we are in a position. What? No, I am not saying that we are not, no, no, no, I am not saying that we are not, I am just saying that, okay. So continuing with this, this is precisely, the point is, this talk is, it is and it is not about North Korea, it is about the reflections of our country that we do not know, that we know very little about, no one knows much about it and all the images and all the things presented about it are- And we of course know about our own countries and that is the thing that we should, I am not saying that we are not doing nothing and I think that this kind of a conference should open different kind of topics and challenge the mainstream point of view. If you are used to hearing maybe projections of other stuff, but what is the problem? You can take the microphone. And basically analyze our privileges and also analyze and evaluate how our freedoms are being restricted. Yeah. Obviously there is some sort of controversy. Are you maybe just maybe accept some counter speech from the audience that we can discuss? Yeah. I will absolutely do that. Love Out Loud is the concept of the Republic. I am sorry, normally I wouldn't bash the presenters who present before I present my work, but sorry, I couldn't really stand it what you are talking about, especially taking the history of East and West Germany. Of course there is a lot to complain about in our systems as well and yet we are here complaining. How many journalists in North Korea have you talked about? The situation they report under. There is no way you had an open discussion like this complaining about the system there. I tried with my friends from Syria. I tried to explain them. Well, I would have a look at, okay, here you could go on the street here and yell, Merkel is a bullshit bitch. You might be called rude, but you wouldn't be as arrested and sent to a gulag for that. Try that in other countries. Try that in Syria. It wouldn't work. I think that's a good test. Yes, but we were actually talking about that as long as you're not really changing the system, you can really say whatever you want about the system. I know you're maybe satisfied with the system you live in, but there are people that are not and that is also a freedom of choice, I think. But the thing is, we can't change the system here and that's part of democracy. We don't like the way the system goes because the decision is made by all of us and maybe some people vote for AfD and they change the system in their way. That is part of democracy. We can't change the system, but I don't like the system either, but I wouldn't be able to complain about the fact that people vote for CDU. Okay, I would love to, I would love that you ask a person in Greece about their choices and their democracy and whether they have really the ability to decide their destiny. More questions or comments? Do you want to choose? There are questions here. I think he was first. Could you present yourself? Sure. I come from Afghanistan and I have been through all these Western bullshits. I know, you know why the Western countries are doing this to us. For 15 years we are in war and nobody even raised their voice as long as the war industry is going on, as long as there is the checklist that they presented, there will always be war in Syria, in Libya and everywhere because they are looking for black gold, not for peace and prosperity. There was a gentleman in the first row that wanted to. Thank you. Oh, you're holding. I think you did a brilliant piece here because the key message I take away is you want to make us aware of our blind spots and you, I think, brilliantly demonstrated your own blind spots. I have not seen a single image of a rural area in North Korea. I haven't seen a single image of any poverty which is there. And so you are absolutely right. In the selection of your images, you already make a political statement. And I think in your effort to create an equidistance, they are shitty, we are shitty. You go in, I think, a good direction again to make us aware of the blind spots which I have, which you have, but by making an equidistance you miss the point because there we lose the nuance. There we lose. If you say, I get crushed there and I get crushed here, it's wrong. It's a lie. You don't get in the same way crushed if you criticize Merkel. You go get crushed somewhere else. So I think you are in a way making a wonderful opening for a good conversation by demonstrating how things are easily misleading. Thank you. Do you want to give a clap? One last. Yeah, thank you. I'm Gregor Konsak. I lived in Seoul actually for four years to pursue my PhD there in inter-Korean relations. I think you presented very much the North Korean perspective on this. It is true that there is a... I mean, this is not positive or negative. I think this is out there and there is a propaganda ongoing and our picture of North Korea is very flawed, but at the same time also the North Korean perspective is not correct. It might be true that North Koreans think they are normal. But we cannot talk about their perspective as we are not North Koreans. But just as North Koreans think that their system is normal, so are the nuclear weapons, they have normal. But other people have the correct results. And so are the prison camps normal. It is normal that they live their life. It is normal that they dance in their handbook. I think this is not something strange, but it is about the threat North Korea poses to the other world that is the problem. And what about the other world that poses a threat to the other world? No, no, no, no. I have absolutely agree with this. I mean, this was a strong provocation on thinking and rethinking on what we push to decide on other people's destiny and also the responsibilities that come with it. We might not share the, I mean, we absolutely not share the same ideas and ideology and back. I mean, our interpretation of the things that we see, we do it with the things, I mean, with bias, of course. And it was more a description on how the Russian of our freedoms is there, is here, is there, and is disguised. And North Korea is the extreme, it's absolutely the extreme. And while preparing this talk, something that I observed is that now we see as utopia our spaces of resistance and our spaces of dissenting space have shrinked so much that we, it seems that we are struggling to think and rethink alternative models. Of course, this is not the alternative that we want, but the thing is that the system keeps pushing and saying there's no alternative. And there is alternatives and we shouldn't trash completely one system for the other system that will deliver practically not the same but will erode other rights. So what I'm trying to say is that in no way this was an apology of what I mean, I completely ignorant of what's going on there. What I am very, very well aware is that in my country, 5,000 kids die a year because of starvation and no one says a word because of the checklist. So yeah. Concerning the time and the lots of questions, what about this and what about that? I'm proposing to end this here. I'm quite sure that lots of you have questions for them afterwards. I think we can do this, but it would be unfair to the next speaker as well. So if you agree on that, you can meet with us. Be around. And thank you.
 Okay, so this talk might be not what you're expecting.  This talk will not show the typical pictures of North Korea, you know, the parade, the  soldier, the stadium, the children singing coordinated songs and doing acrobatic.  Because what you're seeing here, Maya, I will explain what it is, a secret material extracted  from there.  Yeah, it is actually just an ordinary video that has been shot when I was in North Korea  last year.  You're not supposed to shoot videos from the bus.  It's forbidden.  Do not take photos of working people is what they say to you.  So I found a way by using my mobile phone, putting it in here and just pretending like  I'm looking straight forward.  And this is the video that you see here.  The thing is that you can see in this video is that it looks quite familiar.  As you will be watching it for the next 23 minutes, you can see that it looks maybe like  your city, maybe like Berlin, maybe like something else.  You'll see people walking around doing normal things.  And this is the thing that we would like to talk about, about the familiar side of North  Korea, about the things that are not usually been presented and seen in the mainstream  media.  As we are, of course, especially the last couple of months, used to seeing these nuclear  threats, tortures, Gulags, concentration camps and all the words that are fit to go with  this country.  Not concerning the other side of it, of course, as every society in North Korea has its own  complexities.  Yes.  And basically what we were discussing is if you are really uninterested with the things  that we are going to talk about, you at least can watch something that you will never see  in mainstream media.  And I think that it is interesting when we were preparing this talk, obviously our nationalities  and our own realities came into play while preparing what freedom is and what's happening  in North Korea.  Because one of the things that we discussed is how people think that it is all that we  are shown about North Korea is a kind of a performatic thing, a parallel reality.  And it reminded me of my first visit to Cuba when I was a little girl and how my grandma  was convinced that everything that I was shown and everything, all the wonderful things that  my parents and me were talking about the workers, about the schools, about the cigar factories,  about everything, it was just for the tourists.  And yeah, it was very actually similar to my experience in North Korea as all the realities  that we have been experiencing while we were there, that were not the realities that we  are used to seeing.  The people from my group that were mostly Western tourists perceived as some kind of  fake realities, like it is completely impossible to have normal people walking around, smiling  faces.  So it was because we were there on a very specific date, it was actually their national  holiday, the day of the sun, the day of the birth of their President Kim Il-sung.  And so all the people were on the streets and we were walking by and then we went to  a hill, we were climbing the hill and at one point there were some old ladies, really  nice old ladies, they were dancing in these traditional Korean dresses and they asked  us to come and dance with them, which we of course did and we danced for a while.  And after a couple of minutes we left and I heard my friends from the group that were  actually I think from Germany talking about the grandmothers, the old ladies being completely  fake and they said, did you see how they put those fake old ladies there?  And I was like, why would they do that?  Why wouldn't those be normal just ladies, you know, experience their national holiday?  No, no, no, it's completely fake.  It's fake as the subway.  And we were in the subway, there were some fake pioneers there.  And then I thought, okay, so is this possible?  That they're really thinking that the whole nation and of course there are tourists all  the time in North Korea, Russian, Chinese and of course Western is going to have this  Truman show made for us, the Western Eye, to see and perceive so that we can see that  they are living a normal life.  And that is the way that these images that we see all day are actually deeply political  and they actually deeply have to do with our political and social context that we are coming  from.  And it is a very hegemonic point of view which happened to me also as I come from a country,  I come from Serbia, it's the ex-Yugoslav country and of course after the dissolution  of Yugoslavia and the socialist project and the wars in Bosnia, Milosevic and everything,  we experienced 10 years of very heavy sanctions and after these 10 years in the beginning  of the 2000s, we had a very similar experience explaining all the people in the Western world  that we were not killers, that we're completely normal people, that we come from a country  that has lots of stuff to offer.  And also we had in a way, just one way of getting out of this, of getting liberated  from this and that liberation was actually the liberation by a liberal democracy project  which we are living now as one of the poorest countries in Europe.  And that you mentioned, I remember when you came back from North Korea, at the same time  an American friend of ours was just back from North Korea and how the personal experiences  also, the views on a place are shaped by our background because Maya came like, oh my  God, it's amazing, you will not believe it.  It feels like I'm back in Yugoslavia.  And the American guy was like, oh my God, I survived my trip from North Korea.  It was horrible for not, it was horrible.  We were like, watch all the time.  We were followed all the time.  It was this cult to this leader everywhere.  You will see the cult of the postures of the dynasty and you will, you cannot, oh my God,  you cannot do anything without the state knowing.  Sounds familiar?  Yeah, it completely sounds familiar.  And also when we talk about this kind of, you can say visible and invisible surveillance.  Of course, when you're in North Korea, you have free guides.  They're all free guides that are always with you.  You can't leave the hotel without them.  You go into and free lines like you're in elementary school and you have to completely  obey the things they say.  And you are in a way in a very surveilled state of mind.  But then when we compare this kind of surveillance, this visible kind of surveillance to the invisible  kind of surveillance that we have in today's world, then we can go back to the film they  lived, the, you know, a film from the 80s, the SF film, where we have the visible and  invisible ideology where at one hand you have the visible, you know, ideology where you  know in North Korea you have billboards all around saying, I don't know, we live in the  best country in the world, kill America and whatever it says in the billboards.  And you, of course, as you see, have the leaders all around.  And then you have in the movie They Live, you have this perfect free democratic world  with all the other billboards we have all around and also all the other stuff that's  happening in our day-to-day basis.  But when you put the glasses on, like in the movie, you actually see the world black and  white and then on the place where the shiny billboards are, you see messages like, obey,  consume, marry and reproduce, obey the system, don't challenge the system and all the stuff  that in a way create our minds today in a different kind of surveillance state that we're  living in today.  It is somehow, you know, that they have the cult of personality, we have the cult of capital  and all our surroundings is oriented.  If you dare to challenge this cult that in our society today we have to capital, I mean,  it is almost, if you dare to think of alternative economic models and we have many examples  of dissidents and people who have dared to challenge the system, you're crushed as the  same way as if they in North Korea challenged the leader, they're crushed somehow.  But somehow it is also interesting how things the Korean way.  I remember, I love the example of Sweden, you know, like we have our way to fulfill  contracts and to be able to enforce contracts in all the democracies today.  And this story is really, really, really funny on what happened to the Volvo's in Sweden,  Swedish Volvo's in North Korea.  We loved if you can share that.  Yeah, actually it's a story about doing business with North Korea, which is not such a good  idea.  The Swedes tried doing it and realized it in a hard way.  So in the 80s when Sweden gained diplomatic relations with North Korea, they actually  told them, okay, now we're going to give you as a present, well, kind of a present, 5,000  Volvo's that you can pay off after two years in this great credit rates and you'll be really  satisfied and the North Koreans said no problem, they took the 5,000 Volvo's and after two  years the Swedes were like, okay, so are you going to start paying for the Volvo's and  the North Koreans were like, what Volvo's?  And they said, the Volvo's we gave you, the 5,000 Volvo's, they said, we don't know what  you're talking about.  These Volvo's actually are on the streets of North Korea today still driving, you can  see them actually, they're one of the few cars there.  And while preparing this talk, we realized that we have the same deal with the Volvo's  we have with our politicians today, you know.  We go to the ballot, we fill the votes, they promise us Volvo, they promise us that they  will pay the Volvo's, politicians promise that they will deliver health care, politicians  promise that they will take care of the environment, politicians promise many, many, many things.  And we are left like the Swedes with the Volvo situation, we see the politicians there, there  and the promises just evaporate as they do.  And that in a way reminds me of the freedom of choice story because in today's world and  today's modern democratic society as we like to call it, we have a lot of choices of course,  we have a choice to do what we want, we have a choice to use the internet in the way we  want, we have a choice to buy what we want to travel, all the choices that the North  Koreans actually don't have.  But then at the end, do we have a choice to change the society we live in, which would  be in a way the freedom that we're looking for, that we can really change things that  are crucial to our system.  So that is the choice we don't have and there, that is the border of our freedom actually  today, which I think is a big problem when comparing these two things.  And then we go to the issue of liberation because all that we read in the newspapers  is that these people are begging for liberation and they want to be liberated from this terrible  dictator and they want to get out of this system, that's what we are told.  And we have very little chance to, well, frankly, we do not know what they want, but we have  very clear examples of how the liberation of Libya ended up, how the liberation of Iraq  ended up, Afghanistan and many, and you have the concrete example of Yugoslavia, what happened  there.  Yes, and we also, there is one interesting thing, and that is that North Korea has always  been presented as a country for what it lacks.  So we always think of North Korea, okay, it lacks light.  Like when you see satellite imagery of North Korea, you see this mysterious black hole,  you know, above South Korea and between China, then if they don't car, they lack cars, they  lack advertising, they lack the internet.  So they lack a lot of things, but then we never think what do we lack and they actually  do have and that is free education, free housing, free healthcare, they actually have non-GMO  food, they don't have advertising, they don't have this, you know, consumption mania that  we have in the Western world.  And at the other hand, of course, what Yurenata said, the liberating process which we had  in Serbia was only one way, so there was no chance to keep any of the good things we had  from socialism during Yugoslavia.  We had to satanize all that and just go into a very, very straightforward privatization  process with the privatization that is going on with all our public institutions and which  happened to all of the countries that were liberated and you gave a good example with  Libya.  And going back to the hero, you know, the American hero in North Korea, one of the things  that we were discussing that I loved was this attitude of the person coming from, look at  this horrible, terrible place, I mean, they risked their lives doing tourism in a five  star hotel seven days in North Korea.  And it is a lot of pretending and a lot of pretension on the Western view of this country  and how these people who had, I mean, how much can you get to know a culture that you  don't speak the language and a place that you really do not understand because it really  operates in different rules than your country by just going seven days.  Yes, it's completely impossible.  And talking about North Korea, which happens all the time, like lots of photographers, lots  of journalists go to North Korea and they say, now we will reveal the real North Korea.  Now you will see what you have never seen before.  And actually, these people that reveal these things from the country, which are mostly  photos we've seen a hundred of times and very similar images, they're actually called heroes.  So the heroic moment that we have of people getting out information from the country,  which you hear very often, is one very heroic moment of getting this information out.  And on the other side, we have the treating of heroes that really reveal some important  information that has to do with the problems of our society, which we actually know about  because we live in it.  They are, of course, called criminals.  They're called traitors.  They're kept in detention.  They're kept out of the country or they're imprisoned.  So we can look at the situation in our own backyard to look at the...  Journalist describes as non-state agents, journalists describe as whistleblowers crushed  and facing long sentences or just dismissed and excluded from all activities in society.  And that brings me also to another thing.  Let's liberate North Korea.  Okay, let's...  What about taking a look at what happens with the people who managed to escape?  And that's very, very...that's the way we liberate people in the system that we live  today.  Yes, and well...  What happened to them?  Yeah, well, we, of course, see a lot of defectors giving talk shows and talking about their  terrible experience in North Korea, which probably some of that really happened in North  Korea.  But the thing is that we never see the defectors that, of course, they have to leave the border  from China and then mostly they go to South Korea and they end up in a center called Hanabong  Center where they're actually being, in a way, taught to be proper citizens of South  Korea.  They have to forget the things they're used to in North Korea.  They have to adapt to this new system and most of them are treated as potential spies  and not most of them, but a lot of them, I think 90% of them are probably treated as  second great citizens that have very heavy economical problems and they're not treated  in a proper way, which we see is also happening, of course, with the refugee crisis where,  on paper, we are helping the people, but then we see the position they are in, in most cases,  the border fences, the terrible refugee camps and all the other stories that we know are  happening today.  So, at the end, what happens in North Korea is that Western democracies use to put on  that all the bad things in one, all the demonization in one of a country that they cannot really  control.  And something that we were discussing is that the power of images and the power of images  that are captured and that are pushed on us constantly on what is ideal and what is permissible  and what is...  Yes, and what is included and what is excluded in these images, because, of course, that  in a way you can always include the things that the story you want to tell.  So, damages are not just images by themselves, but they also talk about the story of the  person that is taking this image and, in a way, putting some kind of textual context  in this specific image.  And how ideology works in general.  Yeah, and how ideologies at the end works.  Yes.  And going again on...  Well, it seems that we have a checklist and that checklist is the checklist that if you  fulfill all these requirements, if you have a free market economy, if you have free press,  so-called free press, if you have no restrictions on foreign capital, if you have on paper human  rights standards, if you have NGOs and a Pride parade, and if your army collaborates with  other armies and your intelligence service, collaborates with other intelligence services,  you can get away with torture, you can get away with so many things that your country,  as long as it fulfills that list, will never be under scrutiny.  And we have seen that in Turkey, we have seen that in Brazil, we have seen that in...  Even in Croatia, in Serbia, we have seen it in Saudi Arabia, we have seen it in Egypt,  we have seen it in so many places.  And it seems that only when the situation gets really, really, really inconvenient for  this checklist, the media treats them as North Korea, no?  Yes, of course.  And it's a projection.  Yes, and then we always have this projection of the repressive practices in the other,  and that is the way that we work.  So we lived in a very paranoid society where we have this enemy that is somewhere outside,  and this enemy is somewhere far, and we are not this enemy.  So there was this great sentence by Mladen Dolar, a philosopher who said during the 90s  that Balkan is the unconscious of Europe.  And so in a way today, North Korea can be some kind of an unconscious of the Western  world.  So by projecting these repressive practices as gulags, tortures, surveillance, detentions,  the unfreedoms, all the unfreedoms we have in North Korea, we can actually, in a way,  see also a reflection of ourselves.  And so what you were talking about, challenging new kind of democracy, we should maybe, instead  of thinking, oh, this is terrible, this terrible Russia, this terrible Trump or terrible somebody  else, tomorrow will be terrible North Korea, we should think of bad things that are happening  here and bad things that we are aware of and that we are actually not doing anything or  we are doing little to change it.  And why are we doing little?  Because we are in a position.  What?  No, I am not saying that we are not, no, no, no, I am not saying that we are not, I am  just saying that, okay.  So continuing with this, this is precisely, the point is, this talk is, it is and it is  not about North Korea, it is about the reflections of our country that we do not know, that we  know very little about, no one knows much about it and all the images and all the things  presented about it are-  And we of course know about our own countries and that is the thing that we should, I am  not saying that we are not doing nothing and I think that this kind of a conference should  open different kind of topics and challenge the mainstream point of view.  If you are used to hearing maybe projections of other stuff, but what is the problem?  You can take the microphone.  And basically analyze our privileges and also analyze and evaluate how our freedoms are  being restricted.  Yeah.  Obviously there is some sort of controversy.  Are you maybe just maybe accept some counter speech from the audience that we can discuss?  Yeah.  I will absolutely do that.  Love Out Loud is the concept of the Republic.  I am sorry, normally I wouldn't bash the presenters who present before I present my  work, but sorry, I couldn't really stand it what you are talking about, especially taking  the history of East and West Germany.  Of course there is a lot to complain about in our systems as well and yet we are here  complaining.  How many journalists in North Korea have you talked about?  The situation they report under.  There is no way you had an open discussion like this complaining about the system there.  I tried with my friends from Syria.  I tried to explain them.  Well, I would have a look at, okay, here you could go on the street here and yell, Merkel  is a bullshit bitch.  You might be called rude, but you wouldn't be as arrested and sent to a gulag for that.  Try that in other countries.  Try that in Syria.  It wouldn't work.  I think that's a good test.  Yes, but we were actually talking about that as long as you're not really changing the  system, you can really say whatever you want about the system.  I know you're maybe satisfied with the system you live in, but there are people that are  not and that is also a freedom of choice, I think.  But the thing is, we can't change the system here and that's part of democracy.  We don't like the way the system goes because the decision is made by all of us and maybe  some people vote for AfD and they change the system in their way.  That is part of democracy.  We can't change the system, but I don't like the system either, but I wouldn't be able  to complain about the fact that people vote for CDU.  Okay, I would love to, I would love that you ask a person in Greece about their choices  and their democracy and whether they have really the ability to decide their destiny.  More questions or comments?  Do you want to choose?  There are questions here.  I think he was first.  Could you present yourself?  Sure.  I come from Afghanistan and I have been through all these Western bullshits.  I know, you know why the Western countries are doing this to us.  For 15 years we are in war and nobody even raised their voice as long as the war industry  is going on, as long as there is the checklist that they presented, there will always be  war in Syria, in Libya and everywhere because they are looking for black gold, not for peace  and prosperity.  There was a gentleman in the first row that wanted to.  Thank you.  Oh, you're holding.  I think you did a brilliant piece here because the key message I take away is you want to  make us aware of our blind spots and you, I think, brilliantly demonstrated your own  blind spots.  I have not seen a single image of a rural area in North Korea.  I haven't seen a single image of any poverty which is there.  And so you are absolutely right.  In the selection of your images, you already make a political statement.  And I think in your effort to create an equidistance, they are shitty, we are shitty.  You go in, I think, a good direction again to make us aware of the blind spots which  I have, which you have, but by making an equidistance you miss the point because there we lose the  nuance.  There we lose.  If you say, I get crushed there and I get crushed here, it's wrong.  It's a lie.  You don't get in the same way crushed if you criticize Merkel.  You go get crushed somewhere else.  So I think you are in a way making a wonderful opening for a good conversation by demonstrating  how things are easily misleading.  Thank you.  Do you want to give a clap?  One last.  Yeah, thank you.  I'm Gregor Konsak.  I lived in Seoul actually for four years to pursue my PhD there in inter-Korean relations.  I think you presented very much the North Korean perspective on this.  It is true that there is a...  I mean, this is not positive or negative.  I think this is out there and there is a propaganda ongoing and our picture of North  Korea is very flawed, but at the same time also the North Korean perspective is not correct.  It might be true that North Koreans think they are normal.  But we cannot talk about their perspective as we are not North Koreans.  But just as North Koreans think that their system is normal, so are the nuclear weapons,  they have normal.  But other people have the correct results.  And so are the prison camps normal.  It is normal that they live their life.  It is normal that they dance in their handbook.  I think this is not something strange, but it is about the threat North Korea poses to  the other world that is the problem.  And what about the other world that poses a threat to the other world?  No, no, no, no.  I have absolutely agree with this.  I mean, this was a strong provocation on thinking and rethinking on what we push to decide on  other people's destiny and also the responsibilities that come with it.  We might not share the, I mean, we absolutely not share the same ideas and ideology and  back.  I mean, our interpretation of the things that we see, we do it with the things, I mean,  with bias, of course.  And it was more a description on how the Russian of our freedoms is there, is here, is there,  and is disguised.  And North Korea is the extreme, it's absolutely the extreme.  And while preparing this talk, something that I observed is that now we see as utopia our  spaces of resistance and our spaces of dissenting space have shrinked so much that we, it seems  that we are struggling to think and rethink alternative models.  Of course, this is not the alternative that we want, but the thing is that the system  keeps pushing and saying there's no alternative.  And there is alternatives and we shouldn't trash completely one system for the other  system that will deliver practically not the same but will erode other rights.  So what I'm trying to say is that in no way this was an apology of what I mean, I completely  ignorant of what's going on there.  What I am very, very well aware is that in my country, 5,000 kids die a year because  of starvation and no one says a word because of the checklist.  So yeah.  Concerning the time and the lots of questions, what about this and what about that?  I'm proposing to end this here.  I'm quite sure that lots of you have questions for them afterwards.  I think we can do this, but it would be unfair to the next speaker as well.  So if you agree on that, you can meet with us.  Be around.  And thank you.
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