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| IRINA MALENKO |
I am just back from my first trip to DPRK (North Korea) where I spent 11 days visiting various historical sites, museums, factories, schools and nurseries, universities and also a farm – and I fell in love completely and unconditionally with this beautiful country and its gallant, modest. friendly and very hard-working people! To be honest, at present I am still suffering – not from jet-lag, but from a cultural shock of being back to the sad reality of things here, in Northern Ireland, in this capitalist world.
I was a bit cautious in my expectations of what I would see in Korea, because I am well aware of the economic difficulties in that country caused by the American sanctions and by the collapse of the word socialist system (plus some very serious natural disasters in the 1990s). But what I saw truly exceeded my very best expectations! It was indeed like having landed in another world – and a far better one than we ourselves live in.
Probably that was what the USSR was before I was born, when my mother was young (from the stories that she tells me.) Even though the Korean culture is very unique in many ways and quite different from the European ones, I still felt so much like at home, from the very first moment. I absolutely cannot understand when some people who have been here, felt “threatened” in any way or “bored”. First if all it is a very calm, serene place. Streets are clinically clean (we couldn’t even see any garbage bins on the streets, because people don’t throw anything on the ground), people are kind and quiet, you don’t see any drunk fighting, there is no what they call “night life” (capitalist style), and I absolutely loved it.
It is very safe too as the people are very honest. It must be the only country in the world where you can leave your bag anywhere, and nothing will happen with it. There are no “pick-pockets”. What a relief to live in such a society! I felt very relaxed in Korea. The streets in Pyongyang are very broad and green, the scenery – both in the cities and in the countryside – is gorgeous, the shops are certainly not empty at all (in fact, there is a good choice of everything and it was filled with people buying), but there are no window displays as such – just as it was in the Soviet Union – because the shops are there to serve the people, not to push them into buying things they don’t really need.
The monuments there are breathtaking, all if socialist realistic style, with national character. Maybe it was easier for me to feel like at home in Korea, because I was a bit familiar with what I would see and visit there, not from the Western capitalist propaganda, but from original Korean sources, even back 25 years ago when I was a school girl (I had a subscription to a Korean magazine in Russian), and also because we Russians are culturally Eastern people too, even though some of us deny it. Actually, when you are in DPRK, it makes you proud to be Asian!
The children that you see on the streets are all very busy with something useful. They do sports, play music, visit museums, help the parents – you name it – Korean children are absolutely amazing, very intellectual, talented, and they are the joy and pride of the country. They don’t try to behave or look older than they are (like in Europe) and they don’t hang around sniffing glue or breaking windows like they do in the town where I live (where it is common that kids get expelled from school at the age of 7 for bad behaviour, and by the age of 10 many of these kids start drinking and smoking). In fact, I would send the whole young generation of my town to Pyongyang for some behavioural therapy!
There are so many cultural activities in Korea, and it is all freely available to everyone. The books are very cheap. Those that paint a picture of “North Koreans” as some sort of sad looking robots, are definitely lying: what we saw there, were modest, hard-working people who like to smile, like a good joke, are “not afraid” of foreigners (even though they are not used to them – but how many foreigners come to Korea, scared of by the US propaganda?) and basically, just live their quite lives and sincerely enjoy the benefits of socialism.
And that is why I think, they so often get misunderstood in the West: to understand them, a Westerner has to imagine a society based on totally different values then the one he or she was brought up with. Imagination fails them ad most people that grew up under capitalism, are very cynical and simply cannot imagine than people can genuinely believe in the socialist system and work very hard to develop the country – because they Care. They care about their country, their fellow-countrymen and the future of their children. The capitalist mentality teaches us that one can only pretend to believe and to care for such things, but the reality of Korea is different. Many achievements of the Korean people I would not have believed myself in, if I would not have seen them with my very own eyes. I could write volumes about them, Buy I better show our readers some photos. Now, do these people look “unhappy”, ”hungry” or “oppressed” to you?
And I cannot and will not take from any “critics” the nonsense that we “haven’t seen the real life because we were only shown a few show-cases”. Of course we were shown everything and the grandeur that is real to life – and we have seen everything from all walks of life of the country, bar none!
It reminds me of the likes of “Voice of America” and the “BBC” were speaking about the USSR when I was a child: If I listened to them, I simply could not recognize my country, the Soviet Union in their “horror stories”. That was not the life that I and others were living in the USSR, and, these same “horror stories” and lies are being repeated about the DPRK now.
We have a saying in Russia: “A pig will always manage to find some dirt” and this fully applies to the capitalist media! Somehow when this capitalist media visits one of the so-called “democratic” countries in Africa or in Latin America, they are not very keen to take pictures of the horrible slums in which poor people live and their despair, – but in DPRK these journalists are always frantically searching for the “slums” for the “beggars” – and when they cannot find them, they simply blatantly lie - for example (I saw on Internet a photo of a farm girl having a rest on a railway line during lunch time –from a farm nearby - and the note attached to this photo read: “Homeless girl in North Korea”.)
Of course due to the trade boycott instigated by US imperialism, life is not as easy as it could be in Korea at present (and how would life be now in Holland or Germany if they would have lost over 80% of their trade partners overnight?), but what I have seen in North Korea, has very much inspired me. It brought out all the best in me – my dreams, my aspirations, having a goal in life, knowing what values really matter and what is simply rubbish.
It really gave a new meaning to my life. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a living proof that “Another World is Possible!”
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