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Un fragment din God Is Not Great de Christopher Hitchens:
"In the early months of this century, I made a visit to North Korea.
Here, contained within a hermetic quadrilateral of territory enclosed
either by sea or by near-impenetrable frontiers, is a land entirely given
over to adulation. Every waking moment of the citizen—the subject—
is consecrated to praise of the Supreme Being and his Father.
Every schoolroom resounds with it, every film and opera and play is
devoted to it, every radio and television transmission is given up to it.
So are all books and magazines and newspaper articles, all sporting
events and all workplaces. I used to wonder what it would be like to
have to sing everlasting praises, and now I know. Nor is the devil forgotten:
the unsleeping evil of outsiders and unbelievers is warded off
with a perpetual vigilance, which includes daily moments of ritual in
the workplace in which hatred of the "other" is inculcated. The North
Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-
Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father
of the state, Kim II Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he
could make it work in practice. Yet even Orwell did not dare to have
it said that "Big Brother's" birth was attended by miraculous signs and
portents—such as birds hailing the glorious event by singing in human
words. Nor did the Inner Party of Airstrip One/Oceania spend
billions of scarce dollars, at a time of horrific famine, to prove that the
ludicrous mammal Kim II Sung and his pathetic mammal son, Kim
Jong II, were two incarnations of the same person. (In this version of
the Arian heresy so much condemned by Athanasius, North Korea
is unique in having a dead man as head of state: Kim Jong II is the
head of the party and the army but the presidency is held in perpetuity
by his deceased father, which makes the country a necrocracy or
mausolocracy as well as a regime that is only one figure short of a
Trinity.) The afterlife is not mentioned in North Korea, because the
idea of a defection in any direction is very strongly discouraged, but
as against that it is not claimed that the two Kims will continue to
dominate you after you are dead. Students of the subject can easily see
that what we have in North Korea is not so much an extreme form
of Communism—the term is hardly mentioned amid the storms of
ecstatic dedication—as a debased yet refined form of Confucianism
and ancestor worship."
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