"Far from being a Confucian or Stalinist patriarchy, in other words, North Korea is that very rare thing, a dictatorship without a father principle. Erich Fromm once wrote that such states can have no conscience—an assertion that Japan’s exploits under another “parent leader” would seem to confirm. Though not nearly as destructive, North Korea has often behaved on the world stage in a comparably irrational and unpredictable manner. Rashness is celebrated on the home front, too. The masses are daily reminded that because they are uniquely good—Kim: “There is no people as good as ours in the world”—they should remain true to their instincts. Not surprisingly, then, social and domestic life is marked by a far higher degree of violence than was the case in the old Soviet bloc. Foreigners tend to miss all this. A recent British documentary about life there, which pitched the popular fallacy of North Korea as an old-school communist state, bore the title A State of Mind. When the film was screened in Pyongyang, officials renamed it A Country of Feelings. It was their way of making clear that, as Nietzsche might have put it, theirs is more a Dionysian than an Apollonian society."
— Kim Jong-Il is dead. What’s next for North Korea? B.R. Myers pondered Dear Leader’s death in 2008. Read more at The Atlantic
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