At an early age, I became fascinated with Germany. It all began with German philosopher Christian Wolff, and his philosophical treatise, the “German Metaphysics”, or Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt.
No. Really, I was just intrigued that a country would build a wall dividing its capital city in half. On The Brady Bunch, Greg and Marcia hung a curtain between their two sides of the coveted attic bedroom they both wanted but this seemed much more sinister than that.
I remember watching a film about the Berlin Wall in 6th grade. It was a bleak, somber documentary about how everyone in the East wanted to come to the West but the Communist government in the East forbade defection. To prove their point, the film showed desperate people scrambling to the West. One woman crawled under the barbed wire and it caught on her sweater, exposing her bra. Once she was safely on the other side, the West Germans hugged and welcomed her, despite having just seen her rack. “Wow,” I thought. “Those West Germans sure are awesome. Their government must be outta sight.”
But East Germany was a pit of despair. Because I was 11 or 12, I assumed “Communist” and “Nazi” were basically the same thing. Shit, Russia was a communist country and they were fucking nuts! They made their people stand in line all day just for bread. In America, we could buy bread in, like, two minutes or something.
When the wall came down, Germany became far less interesting, unless you consider World War I and II interesting. But a few weeks ago, I got to thinking about North Korea and that crazy son-of-a-bitch, Kim Jong-Il.
I admit; I didn’t know much about North Korea—who does? All I knew was that Kim Jong-Il was a dictator who looked like the creepy kid in your biology lecture who would eventually bring a gun to class. Also, he made a pretty hilarious puppet in that Team America movie. Luckily, I have Netflix, so I decided to watch the National Geographic episode called Inside: North Korea. Super spy correspondent Lisa Ling traveled to The Dark Side posing as part of a film crew documenting an Indian doctor’s miraculous cataract surgery that would help over 1,000 people in North Korea recover their sight. But really, Lisa was there to uncover the mysteries of this dark, foreboding place.
It was an interesting documentary. I learned that all men in North Korea wear the same weird uniform that Kim Jong-Il wears. I learned that everywhere you go, there are pictures of the Great Leader, statues of the Great Leader, park benches he sat on in glass cases, etc. It’s clear that Kim Jong-Il is worshipped in North Korea. When patients regained their sight as a result of the eye surgery, they fell to their knees to thank The Great Leader but not the doctor. They seem to pray to him as others pray to God.
I decided I needed to figure out what the film was that I had watched in 6th grade about The Berlin Wall. I happen to be a champion Googler, so, I found it on YouTube pretty quick. It’s called The Wall and it was produced in 1962. The opening sequence features a group of young boys playing with a ball which bounces over the wall, to the other side. They stand, staring at the wall, their eyes full of fear.
“We ain’t never gonna get that goddamned ball back,” they must be thinking.
The rest of the film is narrated by a man whose entire family lives in East Berlin while he luxuriates in West Berlin. He communicates with them by waving and doing hand signals. We see a terrifying sequence of people jumping out of windows in a building that was half in West Berlin and half in East Berlin. One woman is even being held by Communists as she attempts to drop from a window. The music is dark and ominous as nameless, faceless Communists destroy people’s lives. And there it is, at 6:00 minutes in: people scrambling through barbed wire to the West as the music grows frantic.
Watching this film again, which is just over 9 minutes long, I was amazed at how different it seems now. Back then, I was terrified of East Germany. I thought of it like that pit in Return of the Jedi in which people are slowly digested over 1,000 years. Now, I see this film for what it truly was: propaganda.
If you have seen any of the German propaganda films about Jews made around WWII, you know how appalling they are. You can see them clearly as tools to insight hate for the Jewish community. But what’s propaganda and what’s fact? It’s hard to tell.
Propaganda is dramatic; it uses stark, uncomfortable, well-placed images and creepy music to make its point. In the 1980s, propaganda was everywhere. I knew nothing about the USSR and yet, I was afraid of it. Red Dawn is classic propaganda: the country is invaded by Russian, Cuban and Chinese armies and a group of uneducated hillbillies save us all from the Communists. The Children’s Story is a short film that was featured on television based on a short story about a classroom in an American school after a totalitarian government has taken over the United States. The new teacher tells the students that everything is going to be different now. Then she forces them to cut off pieces of the American flag. For many years, I remembered the giant scissors she made them use.
So I can’t help but wonder: how much of what we see about North Korea is designed to make us fear and hate the country, its people and its culture?
We hear a lot about Kim Jong-Il and most of it has us shaking our heads and saying, “That fool is cray-zee.” According to “sources” he has a bizarre obsession with rabbits; he once kidnapped a film director and his actress wife and forced them make communist propaganda films; he helicopters live lobsters to his armored train. It’s very possible that all the things said about him are true. But it’s also possible that it’s all lies, designed to make us believe that the spaceship that is North Korea is being driven by a madman.
And what’s the point of propaganda? To plant the seeds, to convince and to eventually justify. Justify sanctions, an invasion, a massive bombing, mass murder, etc. Because if we believe that North Korea is on the brink of all-out insanity, we won’t question it when our government decides to pull the trigger.
Of course, I’m a cynic. I don’t believe everything I see on the news. I thought the trial and execution of Sadaam Hussein went a little too quickly and smoothly. When it was announced that Osama bin Laden had been found, killed and very quickly disposed of at sea, I raised my eyebrow at Tom Brokaw. But my point is, just because our government tells us that something is real doesn’t mean it is real. Now that Kim Jong-Il has gone to that glorious rabbit farm in the sky, what will we be lead to believe about his son and successor?
This does not mean that corrupt, destructive governments do not exist. One thing I know for sure is that North Korea is no fan of the United States, and, because of their nuclear weapons and massive army, they are capable of massive chaos. But there was a North Korean man in the film who pretty much hit the nail on the head: when Lisa Ling asked him how Kim Jong-Il could defend his small country from the likes of a super power like the United States, he responded, “The United States has no idea how to deal with us.” He’s right. So we manage perception. The news in North Korea is all strictly controlled by the government. Those poor people don’t even know that Britney got engaged over the weekend. But how much of what we hear is exactly what our government wants us to hear? How much information is manipulated? And how many people are falling for it?
The Wall
James Clavell’s The Children’s Story (It’s in 3 parts and it’s not the best quality)
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