In the early 2000s, the Communism seemed to be the ultimate outdated question. The USSR had collapsed, the countries it occupied and dominated were liberated at the same time, and no one dreamed of a Marxist future anymore. Obviously there remained Chinabut it was said to be less communist, at that time, than on the path to a form of authoritarian capitalism, and some residues, seeming frozen in another era. The most caricatured was North Korea, Stalinist fortress.
It was at this time that Alain Destexhe, then a Belgian senator (CNews viewers are now familiar with him), visited that country – on a trip to restore relations between the Belgium and North Korea. With a delegation, he toured the country, at least the authorized tour, and he brought back a work, North Korea: journey into a totalitarian dynasty (L’Harmattan, 2001), because our senator has an easy and pleasant pen and he only needs to visit a country to produce a work from it, like a traveler from another time – in recent years, he has written about Jerusalem, about Mayotteand is preparing a book on New Caledonia.
A suffocating world
Alain Destexhe, in his story, emphasizes the crushing of reality by propaganda : his guides, like almost everyone he meets, repeat the obligatory formulas of the regime. They give a preformed speech, always with the same words, the same formulas. The world is locked into a series of ready-made sentences, to the point of becoming suffocating. We want at all costs to push the regime’s guests to repeat them, and we think we will achieve this by making them follow a Potemkin trajectory across the country. Anyone who leaves the route prepared to go and encounter what is hidden will quickly be found and punished: they will be accused of disinformation, because they will have seen what is not allowed to be seen, and they will bear witness to it.
We must see the regime as it sees itself. You must admire its monuments, its architecture, its great men, and believe in its legends. Alain Destexhe often comes back to this: the big gap between the official discourse and the reality of things must not be named. But our senator was curious, very curious, and on a few occasions he knew how to get out of the herd, and get out of the cardboard decor that was offered to him. North Korea: journey into a totalitarian dynasty thus presents itself as the exploration of a large gap.
I believe the comparison between the Western world and the USSR of yesterday is relevant
We come away from this book published a quarter of a century ago with an astonishing feeling, as if, from time to time, it pointed towards the worst faults of our world. Obviously, the Western world has nothing to do with North Korea and I would not for a moment want anyone to believe that I am suggesting the opposite. I believe the comparison between the Western world and the USSR of yesterday is relevant – I do not believe it is with North Korea, a dynastic country, a veritable gulag at the end of the world, a radical expression of what Karl Wittfogel called the “Oriental despotism”.
But reflection on totalitarianism says something about our societies – because totalitarianism is not external to modernity, it is its fundamentalist expression. It represents an entirely conditioned society, locked in a utopia, where language no longer serves to describe the world but to make it inaccessible. It offers a staging of social life to which we must adhere, and anyone who comes out of it to expose what the regime represses to its margins is presented as a saboteur.
I come back to Alain Destexhe, for whom I have a lot of respect. He who practices what we could call political tourism could tomorrow take a look at our societies, carry out a fine ethnography of our morals among us. Or he could present to us his Belgium, the first conquered and lost country in Western Europe, the laboratory of Europe without Europeans. From this point of view, he could tell us our future.
