Mass Insanity

When I was a kid, and the Soviet Union was a going concern, you generally had to read between the lines to spot the crap in their news services. Yes, it's possible that the workers all heroically volunteered to work on their rest days for the greater good of the worker's paradise; anyone might do that if they were suitably convinced that the country was under threat. But it's much more likely that they were told that working hours had been extended starting this week, and they grumbled and did what they were told.

What you didn't generally see was an open announcement that the place was a nut-hatch, such as we had from the North Koreans a few months back. The Guardian has the story: after a huge explosion, a number of people were killed rescuing portraits of Kim Jong Il. The North Korean news agency reported that two workers on lunch break "were buried under the collapsing building to die a heroic death when they were trying to come out with portraits of President Kim Il-sung and leader Kim Jong-il".

Now, these portraits are everywhere in North Korea. So take a minute and try to imagine what would make you risk your life for a widely available portrait of, well, anyone. At a stretch, I can imagine someone racing in to retrieve irreplacable pictures of a dead relative. It would be sad, but people do funny things in the heat of the moment. But a portrait of George Bush? Tony Blair? Hu Jintao? Not likely.

KCNA also had reports of people rescuing the portraits before their own children, which would be diagnostic of clear-cut mental illness anywhere else on the planet.

North Korea, though, has a cult of personality around their leaders. Portraits of them hang everywhere, or else. People have reportedly done prison time for accidentally defacing the portraits. Those portraits really are as valuable as human lives, when you consider the possible consequences of letting one be destroyed or damaged.

In a sane country, such deaths would be considered a sad thing. There might be an enquiry, to make sure it didn't happen again. Perhaps an education program on what is and is not worth saving in a fire. Some soul-searching on what made people so fearful of letting a portrait burn.

North Korea reports them as "heroic deaths".

A really admirable leader would be extremely saddened by that. But then, a really admirable leader would not have presided over the climate of fear that led to this.

North Korea is a nut-hatch. They even tell you they're a nut-hatch. But at the moment, they're an extremely heavily armed nut-hatch.