Totalitarian Friday!

The weather’s so nice out today, I figure what better way to celebrate it than to go on a whirlwind virtual tour of the few remaining totalitarian hell-holes left on the planet. Libya? North Korea? I’m looking at you.

I find I have an abiding morbid fascination with these sorts of societies. How does such deep, entrenched military, political, and ideological capture occur? What do the denizens of these societies really think of the place? What do they do for work and recreation? How can such squalor and oppression last for so damn long? These are awfully complicated questions, so here’s some recent stuff written about each country that I found fascinating. First, North Korea.

Christopher Hitchens wrote about his trip to North Korea several years ago in Vanity Fair. I can’t find the piece online, but it’s in his excellent essay anthology, Love, Poverty, and War. In it, he addresses the burning question of all closed societies: do the slaves really love their chains? Do North Koreans really believe the maniacal propaganda spoon-fed them from birth? Do they actually worship Kim Jong-il and his father, Kim Il-Sung, who "eternally" holds the title of president of the country even though he died in 1994? Do they really think that North Korea is the envy of the entire world?

I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a cafe makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men’s room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it’s almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn’t like that.

Echoing the perceptions of Czeslaw Milosz in his incisive and terrifying book, The Captive Mind, Hitch then gets to the totalitarian essense:

It’s an "as if" society. Uniformed female traffic cops do pirouettes at intersections, though there are no cars. Newspapers come out, though they contain no news. Restaurants produce menus of non-existent dishes. At the airport, there are barely any planes. In the national art gallery—they understand that you have to have a national art gallery—almost all the paintings are of the same two people.

In a recent article in Slate, Hitchens reviews a new book by B.R. Meyers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. In it, Meyers argues that understanding North Korea’s ideology as some mongrel fusion of Eastern bloc Communism and patriarchial Confucianism is misplaced. Instead, we should "regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia." Hitchens concludes his review:

Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

Well next to that bit of sunshine, Libya’s own brand of autocratic misery looks like a spa retreat.

A new essay by Michael Moynihan in Reason Magazine describes his recent visit to "the world’s only Islamo-socialist personality cult." Unlike North Korea, Libya and its monomaniacal dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, have been making tentative steps in recent years to open the society and reengage the international community. Moynihan doesn’t see much hope for success:

Tripoli, Libya—Perhaps I overestimated the bien-pensant British understanding of “modernity.” When the BBC reported that “at Tripoli’s ultra-modern airport…you could be almost anywhere in the world,” I expected at bare minimum a Starbucks, a fake Irish pub, and (this is the ultra bit) a bank of vending machines dispensing iPods and noise-canceling headphones.

Well, perhaps we came through Libya’s spillover airport, its Midway or Stansted, because this is “anywhere in the world” only in some mad, dystopian-novel sense. Available for purchase are Egyptian gum, cheap watches celebrating 40 years of the Libyan revolution, and glossy magazines with Hugo Chavez on the cover. Sinister men in baggy uniforms, all puffing Marlboros, shout at each other and disappear with my passport. I later find out this bit of theater was required because I possess a passport stamp from Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. After some discussion, my personal government apparatchik informs the entire staff of Libyan customs that, on orders from high, this particular learned elder of Zion can be allowed through. […]

[…] Remove the oil economy, and it isn’t entirely clear what Libyans do for money. The only shops I spot are selling either vegetables or cigarettes, sometimes both. There are markets trading in all manner of junk: old sewing machines, toilets, fake perfume (Hugo Boos seems particularly popular). The most frequently promoted product (aside from the ubiquitous face of Qaddafi staring down from countless billboards) is, inexplicably, corn oil. After decades of crippling trade sanctions under an aging and increasingly batty dictator, and with no tourism industry to speak of, Libya’s economy is a shambles. In their latest Index of Economic Freedom, the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal rank the country 171st out of 179, only slightly edging out the Union of the Comoros and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Whereas Hitchens found no hint of cracks in the facade that encases Kim Jong-il and his vile regime, Moynihan sees evidence everywhere in Libya of a society that has left its decrepit leadership behind, ideologically and culturally, many years ago:

No matter how hard governments try, though, it is increasingly difficult to close a country to all malignant Western cultural influences. The tighter the controls, the more pedestrian the content that sneaks through. Libyan teenagers have scrawled “50 Cent” and “Tupac” throughout Tripoli’s largest souk. On a crumbling yellow wall outside a bootleg DVD shop, someone was inspired—doubtless by a contraband hip-hop CD—to scribble “fuck yo” in defiance of nothing much at all. Inside the DVD shop, the Hollywood film Fat Albert is available for a few dollars—popular, presumably, because the title character, like most Libyans, lives in a junk yard.

Indepedent journalist, travel writer, and war correspondent Michael Totten visited Libya a few years ago, and wrote a wonderful dispatch of his experience, complete with fantastic photos (including the amazing Berber ruins in the Sahara). He too found plenty of evidence that the beseiged and beaten residents of Libya do not for a second buy into the corrupt and defunct ideology cult of their ruler. Totten spoke to a shopkeeper in Tripoli, asking him his opinion of Qaddafi; and in a country where one person in six works for the secret police, Totten tried to assure the man that he was a foreigner and it was safe to talk candidly:

He thought about that. For a long drawn-out moment, he calculated the odds and weighed the consequences. Then the dam burst.

"We hate that fucking bastard, we have nothing to do with him. Nothing. We keep our heads down and our mouths shut. We do our jobs, we go home. If I talk, they will take me out of my house in the night and put me in prison.

"Qaddafi steals," he told me. "He steals from us." He spoke rapidly now, twice as fast as before, as though he had been holding back all his life. He wiped sweat off his forehead with trembling hands. "The oil money goes to his friends. Tunisians next door are richer and they don’t even have any oil."

"I know," I said. "I’m sorry."

Totten assessed the city’s brutal aesthetic:

Now that I knew the layout of the city, I decided to return to Green Square alone. I wanted to know what the real Tripoli, the not-touristed Tripoli, looked like. It was worse on foot than by car, and exactly what I expected: all right angles and concrete. Almost everyone in this part of town lived in a low barrackslike compound or a Stalinist tower. Landscaping didn’t exist. There were no smooth edges, no soft sights, nothing to sigh at. Tripoli’s aesthetic brutality hurt me. I walked parts of the city hardly any foreigners ever bothered to see. It looked post-apocalyptic, as if it had been evacuated in war or hit with a neutron bomb.

Like Moynihan, Totten also found much of Tripoli to be a lifeless junkyard:

The main drag along the sea into the city was one straw short of a freeway. There were no houses, businesses, restaurants or shops along the way — only clusters of vertical human-storage units surrounded by empty lots the size of a Wal-Mart.

Trash was smeared on the sidewalks. It clogged all the street gutters. Almost every available blank space (and, oh, were there plenty of those) was a dumpsite.

There’s no heartening moral at the end of any of this. The suffering and death wrought by these two men is, in the end, unimaginable to us.

Well, wherever you are tonight, the least you can do is to remember to take a long, languid stroll, and be forever humbled and thankful that the purely random accident of your birth did not land you in such circumstances.