My little part of the world is having a pretty stonking Olympics. The Korean Pensinsula has 11 gold medals so far, only seven behind joint leaders China and the US.
Most of that is thanks to South Korea, which as I write is still hanging on to third place with France and Britain nipping at its heels. But, as ever, it's the North grabbing the headlines. Proving that Kim Jong-eun isn't the country's only well-fed resident, one of North Korea's weightlifters managed to lift triple his own bodyweight, helping it pick up four golds in the first few days of competition.
As much as their physical feats, it was the athletes' subsequent words that got the attention - with crushing inevitability, they said the whole thing was thanks to the Kim family. "The only thing that I can think of right now is to run to our dear leader with my gold medal in hand," said the 19-year-old female weightlifter Rim Jong-sim.
Some cunning reporter thought of a way to get an answer that didn't involve Kim: where did you train for this event? No such luck... "In the embrace of our dear leader," Rim replied. "That's where we could blossom. With whatever talent we had, we could blossom in his embrace."
The natural assumption is that the athletes say this stuff to stay in favour with the regime. As for the question of why they don't all run away on these trips abroad - presumably they get cushy treatment back home, or they're scared about what would happen to their families.
But there's another theory, which would probably be more unsettling for most foreigners. Yesterday I spoke to Brian Myers, a contributing editor to The Atlantic - whose influential book on North Korean ideology and propaganda, The Cleanest Race, I mentioned in my last post. Myers thinks it's a mistake to look at North Korea as a communist state in the mould of the USSR, saying that it is much more an extreme nationalist model like Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. And like those states, he says, the regime enjoys the fervent support of a surprisingly large number of its people.
Unlike Soviet dogma, he says, North Korean ideology has never paid that much attention to high living standards - in fact, for the last decade its domestic propaganda has made no secret of the fact that the South Koreans are much better off. The central theme is the moral purity and superiority of the Korean race (betrayed by the Southerners who have sold out to the US imperialists) - and a sense that this transcends any consideration of material wealth.
That ideology was reflected in a propaganda release this week, when the state news outlet mocked "the Goldman Sachs Investment Bank of the US" which had forecast a gold-less Olympics for the DPRK. "[The Olympic] successes represent the inexhaustible strength of the DPRK, which can never be gauged by the Western view of value and criterion," it said.
And many North Koreans enthusiastically buy into these ideas, says Myers, a professor at Dongseo University in Busan who has studied the country for the best part of two decades.
"People need to get away from the assumption that everyone must be cycnically griping about the leader, and putting on a happy face for the cameras," he says. "North Koreans feel a genuine identification with the state. To be disloyal to the state is to be disloyal to the race, which is unthinkable."
Myers said that on his recent visits to North Korea he had the impression of a gradually improving economy (it did indeed grow slightly last year, according to the South Korean central bank) and a broadly patriotic, motivated population - the latter more so than in the South, he said.
It's not the first such account I've heard - and it's hard to square these reports of heartfelt enthusiasm for the regime, with the appalling stories of human suffering that have emanated from the country. The more I learn about North Korea, the more mysterious it seems.
Most of that is thanks to South Korea, which as I write is still hanging on to third place with France and Britain nipping at its heels. But, as ever, it's the North grabbing the headlines. Proving that Kim Jong-eun isn't the country's only well-fed resident, one of North Korea's weightlifters managed to lift triple his own bodyweight, helping it pick up four golds in the first few days of competition.
As much as their physical feats, it was the athletes' subsequent words that got the attention - with crushing inevitability, they said the whole thing was thanks to the Kim family. "The only thing that I can think of right now is to run to our dear leader with my gold medal in hand," said the 19-year-old female weightlifter Rim Jong-sim.
Some cunning reporter thought of a way to get an answer that didn't involve Kim: where did you train for this event? No such luck... "In the embrace of our dear leader," Rim replied. "That's where we could blossom. With whatever talent we had, we could blossom in his embrace."
The natural assumption is that the athletes say this stuff to stay in favour with the regime. As for the question of why they don't all run away on these trips abroad - presumably they get cushy treatment back home, or they're scared about what would happen to their families.
But there's another theory, which would probably be more unsettling for most foreigners. Yesterday I spoke to Brian Myers, a contributing editor to The Atlantic - whose influential book on North Korean ideology and propaganda, The Cleanest Race, I mentioned in my last post. Myers thinks it's a mistake to look at North Korea as a communist state in the mould of the USSR, saying that it is much more an extreme nationalist model like Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. And like those states, he says, the regime enjoys the fervent support of a surprisingly large number of its people.
Unlike Soviet dogma, he says, North Korean ideology has never paid that much attention to high living standards - in fact, for the last decade its domestic propaganda has made no secret of the fact that the South Koreans are much better off. The central theme is the moral purity and superiority of the Korean race (betrayed by the Southerners who have sold out to the US imperialists) - and a sense that this transcends any consideration of material wealth.
That ideology was reflected in a propaganda release this week, when the state news outlet mocked "the Goldman Sachs Investment Bank of the US" which had forecast a gold-less Olympics for the DPRK. "[The Olympic] successes represent the inexhaustible strength of the DPRK, which can never be gauged by the Western view of value and criterion," it said.
And many North Koreans enthusiastically buy into these ideas, says Myers, a professor at Dongseo University in Busan who has studied the country for the best part of two decades.
"People need to get away from the assumption that everyone must be cycnically griping about the leader, and putting on a happy face for the cameras," he says. "North Koreans feel a genuine identification with the state. To be disloyal to the state is to be disloyal to the race, which is unthinkable."
Myers said that on his recent visits to North Korea he had the impression of a gradually improving economy (it did indeed grow slightly last year, according to the South Korean central bank) and a broadly patriotic, motivated population - the latter more so than in the South, he said.
It's not the first such account I've heard - and it's hard to square these reports of heartfelt enthusiasm for the regime, with the appalling stories of human suffering that have emanated from the country. The more I learn about North Korea, the more mysterious it seems.
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