Is Freedom the most expensive word? A journey to North Korea
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:21
Okay, so this talk might be not what you're expecting. This talk will not show the typical pictures of North Korea. You know, the parade, the soldier, the stadium, the children singing coordinated songs and doing acrobats. Because what you're seeing here,
00:42
Maya will explain what it is, secret material extracted from there. Yeah, it is actually just an ordinary video that has been shot when I was in North Korea last year. You're not supposed to shoot videos from the bus. It's forbidden. Do not take photos of working people
01:00
is what they say to you. So I found a way by using my mobile phone, putting in here and just pretending like I'm looking straightforward. And this is the video that you see here. The thing is that you can see in this video is that it looks quite familiar. As you'll be watching it for the next 23 minutes, you can see that it looks maybe like your city,
01:23
maybe like Berlin, maybe like something else. You'll see people walking around doing normal things. And this is the thing that we would like to talk about, about the familiar side of North Korea, about the things that are not usually been presented and seen in the mainstream media.
01:41
As we are, of course, especially the last couple of months, used to seeing these nuclear threats, tortures, gulags, concentration camps, and all the words that are fit to go with this country. Not concerning the other side of it, of course, as every society in North Korea
02:01
has its own complexities. And basically, what we were discussing is if you are really uninterested with the things that we are going to talk about, you at least can watch something that you will never see in mainstream media. And I think that it is interesting, when we were preparing this talk,
02:20
obviously our nationalities and our own realities came into play while preparing what freedom is and what's happening in North Korea. Because one of the things that we discuss is how people think that it is all that we are shown about North Korea is a kind of a performatic thing,
02:42
a parallel reality. And it reminds me my first visit to Cuba when I was a little girl, and how my grandma was convinced that everything that I was shown, and everything, all the wonderful things that my parents and me were talking about, the workers, about the schools, about the cigar factories, about everything,
03:01
it was just for the tourists. Yeah, it was very actually similar to my experience in North Korea as all the realities that we have been experiencing while we were there, that were not the realities that we are used to seeing. The people from my group that were mostly Western tourists
03:23
perceived as some kind of fake realities, like it is completely impossible to have normal people walking around, smiling faces. So it was because we were there on a very specific date, it was actually their national holiday, the day of the sun, the day of the birth of their President Kim Il-sung.
03:41
And so all the people were on the streets, and we were walking by, and then we went to a hill. We were climbing the hill, and at one point there were some old ladies, really nice old ladies, they were dancing in these traditional Korean dresses, and they asked us to come and dance with them, which we of course did, and we danced for a while.
04:01
And after a couple of minutes we left, and I heard my friends from the group that were actually I think from Germany talking about the grandmothers, the old ladies being completely fake. And they said, did you see how they put those fake old ladies there?
04:20
And I was like, why would they do that? Why wouldn't those be normal, just ladies experience their national holiday? No, no, no, it's completely fake. It's fake as the subway. When we were in the subway, there were some fake pioneers there. And then I thought, okay, so is this possible that they're really thinking that the whole nation, and of course there are tourists all the time
04:41
in North Korea, Russian, Chinese, and of course Western, is going to have this Truman's show made for us, the Western eye, to see and perceive so that we can see that they are living a normal life. And that is the way that these images that we see all day are actually deeply political, and they actually deeply have to do
05:01
with our political and social context that we are coming from. And it is a very hegemonic point of view, which happened to me also as I come from a country, I come from Serbia, it's ex-Yugoslav country. And of course, after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the socialist project,
05:20
and the wars in Bosnia, Milosevic and everything, we experienced 10 years of very heavy sanctions. And after these 10 years, in the beginning of the 2000s, we had a very similar experience explaining all the people in the Western world that we were not killers, that we're completely normal people, that we come from a country
05:40
that has lots of stuff to offer. And also we had in a way, just one way of getting out of this, of getting liberated from this. And that liberation was actually the liberation by a liberal democracy project, which we are living now as one of the poorest countries in Europe.
06:01
And that you mentioned, I remember when you came back from North Korea, at the same time, an American friend of ours was just back from North Korea and how the personal experiences also, the views on a place are shaped by our background because Maya came like, oh my God, it's amazing,
06:21
you will not believe it was, it feels like I'm back in Yugoslavia. And the American guy was like, oh my God, I survived my trip to North Korea. It was, it was, it was horrible for not, it was horrible. We were like a watch all the time. We were follow all the time. It was this cult to this leader everywhere.
06:43
You will see the cult of the posters of the dynasty and you will, you cannot, oh my God, you cannot, you cannot do anything without the state knowing. Sounds familiar? Yeah, it completely sounds familiar. And also when we talk about this kind of,
07:03
you can say visible and invisible surveillance. Of course, when you're in North Korea, you have free guides. They're all free guides that are always with you. You can't leave the hotel without them. You go in two and three lines, like you're in, you know, elementary school and you have to completely obey their,
07:21
the things they say. And you are in a way in a very surveilled state of mind. But then when we compare this kind of surveillance, this visible kind of surveillance to the invisible kind of surveillance that we have in today's world, then we can go back to the film they lived,
07:43
you know, a film from the 80s, the SF film, where we have the visible and invisible ideology where at one hand you have the visible, you know, ideology where you know in North Korea you have billboards all around saying, I don't know, we live in the best country in the world,
08:01
kill America and whatever it says in the billboards. And you'll, of course, as you see, have the leaders all around. And then you have in the movie they live, you have this perfect free democratic world with all the other billboards we have all around and also all the other stuff that's happening in our day-to-day basis.
08:22
But when you put the glasses on, like in the movie, you actually see the world black and white. And then on the place where the shiny billboards are, you see messages like obey, consume, marry and reproduce, obey the system, don't challenge the system,
08:40
and all the stuff that in a way creates our minds today in the different kind of surveillance states that we're living in today. It is somehow, you know, that they have the cult to personality, we have the cult to capital. And all our surroundings is oriented. If you dare to challenge this cult that in our society today, we have to capital,
09:03
I mean, it is almost, if you dare to think of alternative economic models, and we have many examples of dissidents and people who have dared to challenge this system, you're crushed as the same way as if they, if they in North Korea challenged the leader,
09:21
they're crushed somehow. But somehow, it is also interesting how thinks the Korean way. I remember, I love the example of Sweden. You know, like we have our way to fulfill contracts and to be able to enforce contracts
09:42
in all the democracies today. And this story is really, really, really funny on what happened to the ball boss in Sweden, Swedish ball boss in North Korea. We love if you can share that. Yeah, actually, it's a story about doing business with North Korea, which is not such a good idea.
10:01
The Swedes tried doing it and realized it in a hard way. So in the 80s, when Sweden gained the diplomatic relations with North Korea, they actually told them, okay, now we're going to give you as a present, well, kind of a present, 5,000 Volvos
10:20
that you can pay off after two years and this great credit rates and you'll be really satisfied. And the North Koreans said, no problem. They took the 5,000 Volvos. And after two years, the Swedes were like, okay, so are you going to start paying for the Volvos? And the North Koreans were like, what Volvos?
10:41
And they said, the Volvos we gave you, the 5,000 Volvos, they said, we don't know what you're talking about. These Volvos actually are on the streets of North Korea. Today, still driving, you can see them. Actually, they're one of the few cars there. And while preparing this talk, we realized that we have the same deal with the Volvos we have with our politicians today.
11:02
We go to the ballot, we fill the votes. They promise us Volvos, they promise us that they will pay the Volvos, politicians promise that they will deliver healthcare, politicians promise that they will take care of the environment, politicians promise many, many, many things. And we are left like the Swedes with the Volvos situation.
11:23
We see the politicians there, and the promises just evaporate as they do. Yeah, and that's in a way reminds me of the freedom of choice story, because in today's world, in today's modern democratic society, as we like to call it, we have a lot of choices, of course.
11:41
We have a choice to do what we want. We have a choice to use the internet in the way we want. We have a choice to buy what we want, to travel, all the choices that the North Koreans actually don't have. But then at the end, do we have a choice to change the society we live in, which would be in a way,
12:00
the freedom that we're looking for, that we can really change things that are crucial to our system. So that is the choice we don't have, and that is the border of our freedom actually today, which I think is a big problem when comparing these two things. And then we go to the issue of liberation,
12:20
because all that we read in the newspapers is that these people are begging for liberation, and they want to be liberated from this terrible dictator, and they want to get out of this system. That's what we are told. And we have very little chance to, well, frankly, we do not know what they want, but we have very clear examples of how liberations ended,
12:44
how the liberation of Libya ended up, how the liberation of Iraq ended up, Afghanistan, and many, and you have the concrete example of Yugoslavia, what happened there. Yes, and we also, there is one interesting thing, yeah, and that is that North Korea has always been presented as a country for what it lacks.
13:03
So we always think of North Korea, okay, it lacks light. Like when you see satellite imagery of North Korea, you see this mysterious black hole above South Korea and between China, then they lack cars, they lack advertising, they lack the internet,
13:20
so they lack a lot of things. But then we never think what do we lack, and they actually do have, and that is free education, free housing, free healthcare. They actually have non-GMO food, they don't have advertising, they don't have this consumption mania
13:41
that we have in the Western world. And at the other hand, of course, what Jurena said, the liberating process which we had in Serbia was only one way, so there was no chance to keep any of the good things we had from socialism during Yugoslavia. We had to satinize all that
14:01
and just go into a very, very straightforward privatization process with the privatization that is going on with all our public institutions, and which happened to all of the countries that were liberated, and you gave a good example with Libya. And going back to the hero,
14:21
you know the American hero in North Korea. One of the things that we were discussing that I loved was this attitude of the person coming from, look at this horrible, terrible place. I mean, they risked their lives doing tourism in a five star hotel, seven days in North Korea.
14:41
And it is a lot of pretending and a lot of pretension on the Western view of this country and how these people who had, how much can you get to know a culture that you don't speak the language and a place that you really do not understand
15:01
because it really operates in different rules than your country by just going seven days. Yes, it's completely impossible. And talking about North Korea, which happens all the time, like lots of photographers, lots of journalists go to North Korea and they say, now we will reveal the real North Korea. Now you'll see what you have never seen before.
15:21
And actually these peoples that reveal these things from the country, which are mostly photos we've seen a hundred of times and very similar images, they're actually called heroes. So the heroic moment that we have of people getting out information from the country,
15:41
which you hear very often, is one very heroic moment of getting this information out. And on the other side, we have the treating of heroes that really reveal some important information that has to do with the problems of our society, which we actually know about because we live in it.
16:03
They are of course called criminals, they're called traitors, they're kept in detention, they're kept out of the country or they're in prison. So we can look at the situation in our own backyard to look at- Journalists are described as non-state agents,
16:21
journalists are described as whistleblowers crushed and facing long sentences or just dismissed and excluded from all activities in society. And that brings me also to another thing. I mean, let's liberate North Korea. Okay, what about taking a look at what happens with the people who managed to escape?
16:42
And that's very, very, very, very important that we leave today. Yes, and well- What happened to them? Yeah, well, we of course see a lot of defectors giving talk shows and talking about their terrible experience in North Korea,
17:01
which probably some of that really happened in North Korea. But the thing is that we never see the defectors that of course they have to leave the border from China and then mostly they go to South Korea. And they end up in a center called the Hanawon Center where they're actually being in a way taught
17:22
to be proper citizens of South Korea. They have to forget the things they're used to in North Korea. They have to adapt to this new system and most of them are treated as potential spies and not most of them, but a lot of them, I think 90% of them
17:41
are probably treated as second great citizens that have very heavy economical problems and they're not treated in a proper way, which we see is also happening of course with the refugee crisis where on paper we are helping the people
18:02
but then we see the position they are in in most cases with the border fences, the terrible refugees camps and all the other stories that we know are happening today. So at the end what happens with North Korea is that Western democracies uses to put on that
18:21
all the bad things in one, all the demonization in one of a country that they cannot really control. And something that we were discussing is that the power of images and the power of images that are captured
18:41
and that are pushed on us constantly on what is ideal and what is permissible and what is... Yes and what is included and what is excluded in these images because of course that in a way you can always include the things that the story you want to tell. So the images are not just images by themselves
19:03
but they also talked about the story of the person that is taking this image and in a way putting some kind of textual context in this specific image. And how ideology works in general. Yeah and how ideologies at the end works. Yes and going again on,
19:24
well it seems that we have a checklist and that checklist is, the checklist that if you fulfill all these requirements, if you have a free market economy, if you have free press, so-called free press, if you have no restrictions on foreign capital,
19:43
if you have on paper human rights standards, if you have NGOs and pride, pride parade and if your army collaborates with other armies and your intelligence service collaborates with other intelligence services,
20:01
you can get away with torture, you can get away with so many things that your country, as long as it fulfills that list, will never be under scrutiny. And we have seen that, I mean, we have seen that in Turkey, we have seen that in Brazil,
20:20
we have seen that in, even in Croatia, in Serbia, we have seen in Saudi Arabia, we have seen it in Egypt, we have seen in so many places and it seems that only when the situation gets really, really, really inconvenient for this checklist, the media treats them as North Korea, no?
20:42
Yes, of course. And the projection. Yeah, and then we always have this projection of the repressive practices in the other and that is the way that we work. So we lived in a very paranoid society where we have this enemy that is somewhere outside
21:02
and this enemy is somewhere far and we are not this enemy. So there was this great sentence by Mladen Dolar, a philosopher, who said during the 90s that Balkan is the unconscious of Europe and so in a way today,
21:22
North Korea can't be some kind of an unconscious of the Western world. So by projecting these repressive practices as gulags, tortures, surveillance, detentions, the unfreedoms, all the unfreedoms we have in North Korea, we can actually, in a way,
21:42
see also a reflection of ourselves. And so what you were talking about, challenging a new kind of democracy, we should maybe, instead of thinking, oh, this is terrible, this terrible Russia, this terrible Trump or terrible somebody else, tomorrow or terrible North Korea,
22:01
we should think of bad things that are happening here and bad things that we are aware of and that we are actually not doing anything or we are doing little to change it. And why are we doing little? Because we are in a position, what?
22:28
No, I am not saying that we are not, no, no, no, I am not saying that we are not,
22:42
I am just saying that, okay. Continuing with this, this is precisely, the point is, this talk is, it is and it is not about North Korea, it is about the reflections of our country that we do not know, that we know very little about.
23:01
No one knows much about it and all the images and all the things presented about it. We of course know about our own countries and that is the thing that we should, I am not saying that we're not doing nothing and I think that this kind of a conference should open different kind of topics and challenge the mainstream point of view.
23:21
If you are used to hearing maybe projections of other stuff, but what is the problem? You can take the microphone. And basically analyze our privileges and also analyze and evaluate how our freedoms are being restricted, yeah.
23:40
Obviously there's some sort of controversy here. Are you maybe, just, maybe accept some counter speech from the audience that you can discuss? I will absolutely do that. Love out loud is the concept of the Republica.
24:05
I am sorry, normally I wouldn't bash the presenters who present before I present my work, but sorry, I couldn't really stand it what you're talking about, especially taking the history of East and West Germany.
24:21
Of course there's a lot to complain about in our systems as well and yet we are here complaining. How many journalists in North Korea have you talked about the situation they report under? There's no way you had an open discussion like this complaining about the system there. I try with my friends from Syria,
24:41
I try to explain them, well, I would have a look at, okay, here you could go on the street here and yell Merkel is a bullshit bitch. You might be called rude, but you wouldn't be as arrested and sent to a Gulag for that. Try that in other countries. Try that in Syria.
25:00
Wouldn't work. I think that's a good test. Yes, but we were actually talking about that that as long as you're not really changing the system, you can really say whatever you want about the system. I know you're maybe satisfied with the system you live in, but there are people that are not and that is also a freedom of choice, I think.
25:20
No, but the thing is, we can't change the system here and that's part of democracy. We don't like the way the system goes because the decision is made by all of us and maybe some people vote for AfD and they change the system in their way. That is part of democracy.
25:41
We can change the system, but I don't like the system either, but I wouldn't be able to complain about the fact that people vote for CDU. Okay, I will love that you ask a person in Greece about their choices and their democracy and whether they have really the ability to decide their destiny.
26:04
More questions or comments? You wanna choose? There are questions here. I think he was first. Could you present yourself?
26:21
Sure. I come from Afghanistan and I have been through all these Western bullshits. I know why the Western country is doing this to us. For 15 years, we are in war and nobody even raised their voice. As long as the war industry is going on, as long as there is the checklist that they presented, there will always be war in Syria,
26:42
in Libya and everywhere because they are looking for black gold, not for peace and prosperity. There was a gentleman in the first row that wanted to.
27:00
Thank you. Oh, you hold it. I think you did a brilliant piece here because the key message I take away is you want to make us aware of our blind spots and you, I think, brilliantly demonstrated your own blind spots.
27:20
I have not seen a single image of a rural area in North Korea. I haven't seen a single image of any poverty which is there and so you're absolutely right. In the selection of your images, you already make a political statement
27:40
and I think in your effort to create an equidistance, they are shitty, we are shitty, you go in, I think, a good direction again to make us aware of the blind spots which I have, which you have but by making an equidistance,
28:01
you miss the point because there we lose the nuance. There we lose, if you say, I get crushed there and I get crushed here, it's wrong, it's a lie. You don't get in the same way crushed if you criticize Merkel. You go get crushed somewhere else. So I think you are, in a way,
28:22
making a wonderful opening for a good conversation by demonstrating how things are easily misleading. Thank you.
28:41
One last. Yeah, thank you. I'm Gregor Konczak. I lived in Seoul actually for four years to pursue my PhD there in inter-Korean relations. I think you presented very much the North Korean perspective on this. You know, like, it is true that there is a, I mean, this is not positive or negative.
29:02
I think this is out there and there is a propaganda war ongoing and our picture of North Korea is very flawed but at the same time, also the North Korean perspective is not correct, right? It might be true that North Koreans think they are normal. North Koreans think they are normal. We cannot talk about their perspective as we are not North Koreans.
29:21
North Koreans think that their system is normal, so are the nuclear weapons they have normal. But other people have nuclear weapons also. And so are the prison camps normal. It is normal that they live their life. It is normal that they dance in their hanbok. I think this is not something strange but it is about the threat North Korea poses
29:41
to the other world that is the problem. And what about the other world that poses a threat to other worlds? I absolutely agree with this. This was a strong provocation on thinking and rethinking on what we push to decide on other people's destiny and also the responsibilities that come with it.
30:03
And we might not share, I mean, we absolutely not share same ideas and ideology and back. I mean, our interpretation of the things that we see, we do it with the things, I mean, with bias, of course. And it was more a description
30:22
on how the Russian of our freedoms is there, is here, is there, and is disguised. And North Korea is the extreme. It's absolutely the stream. And while preparing this talk, something that I observed is that now we see as utopia our spaces of resistance
30:42
and our spaces of descent in space have shrinked so much that it seems that we are struggling to think and rethink alternative models. Of course, this is not the alternative that we want, but the thing is that the system keeps pushing
31:01
and saying there's no alternative. And there is alternatives and we shouldn't trash completely one system for the other system that will deliver practically not the same, but will erode other rights. So what I'm trying to say is that
31:22
in no way this was an apology of what, I mean, I completely ignore what's going on there. What I am very, very well aware is that in my country, 5,000 kids die a year because of starvation and no one says a word because of the checklist. So yeah. Concerning the time and the lots of questions,
31:42
what about this and what about that, I'm proposing to end this here. Yeah. I'm quite sure that lots of you have questions for them afterwards. I think we can do this, but it would be unfair to the next speaker as well.
32:01
So if you agree on that, you can like, we will be around. Yeah, I'll be around. Okay. And thank you. Thank you.