THE WORLD’S CRAZIEST COUNTRY
Beijing. I’ve just come back from two weeks in a hermetically sealed land. No internet, no cell phones, no contact with the outside world. It is George Orwell’s 1984 made real, where its inhabitants truly, deeply, passionately love and worship Big Brother.
These people were born on an isolated political island cut off from the world, and have lived all their lives surrounded by a sea of state-worship propaganda. The State makes every effort to prevent them from learning anything about their country or the world it doesn’t want them to.
The word that summarizes being here is suffocation. You are constantly, ubiquitously, unrelentingly suffocated with the deification of the rulers. The films on television or in the theatres are propaganda productions without exception, with unending smiling, laughing, happy faces, everyone so joyously doing whatever their work is.
There is never, ever, the slightest hint of criticism, cynicism, or irony. All forms of art are suffocatingly saccharine, all the pictures, paintings, songs and singing are beautiful, smiling, and sugary sweet. This is the Land Without Irony, where Doubt is never permitted.
You’d think that this is the world’s craziest country. But after returning from my second venture into it – I was here two years ago as well – I am convinced that it isn’t. I’m now headed for one even crazier – much crazier, in fact. Where have I been and where am I going?
I’ve been in North Korea. I’m bound for America.
During last two weeks, I led and guided two large groups of Americans and Canadians all through North Korea. The account of my first sojourn there is Pelosi in Pyongyang, from September 2010, which contains a nutshell history of North Korea. The best book to read about North Korea is The Impossible State by Victor Cha, which came out just a few months ago.
North Korea is by far the world’s most oppressive state. Its people have less freedom than anywhere else on earth. Americans have astronomically more freedom – yet around half or more of all Americans are like the North Koreans mentally, and what makes this truly crazy is that they are not forced to be, they freely choose to be.
The goal of the Pyongyang regime is to seal North Koreans off from the world. Foreign visitors are not allowed to interact with anyone on the street. For the average North Korean, there is no access to the Internet, there are no foreign sources of information such as newspapers, magazines, television/cable. No radios capable of receiving a foreign signal or short-wave are allowed. No cell phones capable of making or receiving an international call are allowed.
The personality cult of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-Sung (1912-1994) is nothing short of deification – to the extent that this is year 101 in the North Korean calendar, starting with year 1 as that of Kim’s birth (there is no year 0). Since his successor son, Kim Jong-Il, died last December, the deification process for him is going full-bore. Huge pictures and statues of them are everywhere in every city and town.
Perhaps you remember seeing on TV news clips last December of North Koreans crying their guts out lamenting Kim Jong-Il’s death. You, like everyone else in the rest of the world, most likely laughed at such religious lamentation over a short fat Stalinist fruitcake.
What was displayed on North Korean television, however, was a collection of video clips of people crying in total misery from all over the world – taken from stories on various disasters like earthquakes and calamitous accidents – with the claim that this showed the entire world was mourning the death of the Dear Leader just as deeply as North Koreans were.
In America, we have a communications surfeit, not a blackout. We have instant access to information on any subject or news item from a multitude of sources and perspectives in the US and globally. Yet scores of millions of Americans impose a news and information blackout on themselves. They see only what they want to see, hear only what they want to hear, believe what the government and Big Media want them to believe.
The evidence that the Zero Presidency has been an economic and national security disaster, as well as being one of the crookedest and most corrupt in US history, is overwhelming. This should be obvious to anyone with a three-digit IQ and the slightest willingness to examine the evidence. Yet scores of millions of Americans willfully and perversely blind themselves to it.
In North Korea, the State infantilizes people. In America, people have infantilized themselves.. In North Korea, people are forced to behave like children. In America, people demand to be treated like children, and are outraged when they are not, as Romney has (“47% see themselves as victims” – i.e., as children). See Infantilizomania from September 2005. Zero has succeeded in infantilizing scores of millions of American adults.
In his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells a story about a Zek, a prisoner in the Gulag, who finds an ant in the bottom of his teacup. The Zek notices that the ant is trying to crawl out, so the Zek gently pushes the ant back down to the bottom. The ant tries to crawl out again, and again the Zek pushes him down.
After the third try, the Zek begins to count. One hundred eighty-two times the ant tries to crawl out. One hundred eighty-two times the Zek carefully pushes him back down. There is no Try #183. The ant simply huddles at the bottom, occasionally wandering around, but never again does it try to escape. The Zek can go away for a while and come back to find the ant still there. It has given up any attempt to be free.
Solzhenitsyn saw the ant as a metaphor for the Russian people. They had tried and tried and tried to liberate themselves from Communist tyranny, only to find themselves pushed down into Gulags and mass slaughters so many times that they, like the ant, had given up. The Soviet Union was like a giant teacup, where its inhabitants huddled at the bottom and passively accepted the rule of their Marxist masters.
What Solzhenitsyn described, however, is no metaphor. It is the psychological condition (which has a neurochemical basis) known as learned helplessness, which experimental psychologists can induce in lab animals such as rats.
The lab rats are placed in a cage with an electric grid on the bottom. At random intervals, the rat’s feet get a mild shock, similar to a shock of static electricity we get from touching a door handle after walking over a plush carpet. The rat freaks out over this and tries to escape, but it is trapped in the cage. After repeated attempts, the rat gives up.
No matter how much the experimenter continues to shock it, the rat will just lie there and take it – and here is the important point – even if the door to the cage is opened and the rat can clearly see it can now escape, it will stay and be shocked. It has learned to be helpless and will no longer try to be free, even when it can easily and obviously do so.
North Korea has induced learned helplessness in its people to a far greater degree than the Soviet Union. It operates a string of slave labor camps known to researchers as the Hidden Gulag, containing between 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners and their families (parents and children – Kim Il-Sung decreed in 1972 that up to three generations must be punished in order to wipe out the “seed” of class enemies).
The horror of the Hidden Gulag is vividly told in Blaine Harden’s book, Escape From Camp 14.
The terrifying fear of being “sent up to the mountains” to a gulag camp, combined with the omnipresent Kim worship, induces learned helplessness in North Koreans on a true 1984 level, where they actually do love Big Brother.
One consequence of learned helplessness is learned stupidity. Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il are always portrayed as geniuses of towering intellect. Kim Il-Sung’s ideology of Juche – his version of Marxism-Leninism – is man’s highest achievement of philosophical and political thought. Kim Jong-Il’s genius is most clearly demonstrated in his 1982 treatise, On the Juche Idea, considered as the officially definitive statement of Juche.
I bought an English language edition in Pyongyang and tried to read it with a straight face. I failed. It is pathetically amateurish – gibberish and slogans repeated over and over again, bordering on the moronic, riddled with one blatant contradiction after another. Just now here in Beijing, I discovered that it’s online – you can read On the Juche Idea to see how bad it is.
Yet North Koreans think it is the apotheosis of brilliance. Learned helplessness causes learned stupidity – in North Korea and in America.
The enormous difference, which makes America much crazier than North Korea, is that while North Koreans live in a cage with an electrified grid, Americans don’t. In America, the cage door is open, the grid is not electrified, you are free to escape, there is actually no cage at all. Yet they pretend there is a cage, refuse to leave it, and have taught themselves to be helpless. In America, learned helplessness is self-induced.
It is one thing for a dictatorship and economic ruination to be imposed on people at the point of a gun – particularly if those people don’t have any guns with which to fight back. It is entirely another for a people to willingly impose a dictatorship and economic ruination on themselves. Being the victim of a mugging or murder is not being crazy. Committing suicide is.
On November 6th, scores of millions of Americans will vote for American ruination, dictatorship, and national suicide. They are far crazier than North Koreans. There will also be scores of millions who will not do so – but will there be enough of them?
That we have to ask the question, that it is a real question that as of now we don’t know the answer to, is proof of the suicidal, masochistic insanity engulfing America. The greatest, freest, richest, most successful country in human history is on the verge of willfully, with self-malice aforethought, extinguishing itself. If that is not crazy – clinically and literally insane – there is no meaning to the term.
Maybe we’ll dodge the bullet – but there is a bullet, fired from a gun aimed by Americans at their country’s heart. So whatever the outcome of November 6th, the consequences will be dire. If Romney wins, we at least have a chance to overcome them. But just how do you overcome the demands of scores of millions of infantilized masochists determined to thwart your every effort?
If Zero wins, we have no chance at all, or very little of one, on any kind of national level. Yet we – you and I – are neither suicidal, masochistic, nor crazy. We have to continue to live as best we can – but how?
On November 7th, many Americans will be celebrating, many will be in bitter depression – and no matter who they are the country will be in a lot of turmoil, and, yes, craziness. No matter what happens, we have to be prepared for it.
One of the best ways for you to do so is to attend the Washington DC Rendezvous November 9-11.
I initially called it the Victory Rendezvous, as I was so solidly confident that Zero’s election in 2008 was an act of only temporary insanity from which a majority of voters would surely recover in 2012. My confidence has been shaken now. I still can’t make myself believe that Americans could be so impossibly, ridiculously stupid to reelect Zero – but I didn’t think they could have been that stupid to elect him in the first place and they were.
We can’t take a chance that Zero will win and not be prepared for it. As soon as I get back home, I’ll be putting together a Rendezvous program that will help us prepare for whatever happens after the election. It is absolutely critical that we plan – what to do to save our skins if Zero wins, how best to take advantage of a Romney victory.
Being in North Korea really sobered me up as to how deranged a frighteningly large number of Americans has become. We are on the verge of becoming the world’s craziest country. It’s touch and go. I hope and pray that we’ll have a Victory Rendezvous – but we may have to have a How to Save Ourselves Rendezvous.
We’ll be prepared for either outcome – and I quite frankly think it is vitally important for you to be with us. Please try to be.
Meanwhile, we have little more than a month to do what we can to stop our blessed nation from leaping off Suicide Cliff. Nobama 2012.