Behind the spectacle, the ugly truth about North Korea’s ‘mass games’
The grandeur of North Korea's annual Arirang or "mass games" celebration really is something to behold. Tens of thousands of performers dance and march with smiling precision across the world's largest stadium stage, under fireworks and light shows, as thousands more, many of them children, flash placards with a level of coordination that seems flatly impossible. It's little wonder that every July, when North Korea holds the mass games to mark the anniversary of the Korean War, international media outlets take a rare trip to Pyongyang, and much of the world becomes transfixed.
But there is more to the mass games than meets the eye. For all the flash and splendor, the event is in many ways built on -- and could even be said to perpetuate -- the very worst of the hermit kingdom, from the dangerous militarism to the human rights abuses to the race-based ultra-nationalist ideology underpinning it all. This may be one of the most amazing shows on Earth, but it's also an extension of some of its greatest cruelty.
The mass games are a spectacle of truly amazing performances, but, according to reports from defectors, it's also the result of mistreatment and coercion, including of the children who participate in large numbers. It's true that the citizen-participants do, by all indication, enter the event seeing it as a high honor and privilege. According to compilations of defector testimonies, though, participants are often given little food or even water and, to instill discipline, can be restricted in how often they may visit the bathroom. Reports are worryingly common about child participants developing cystitis or other urinary tract ailments as a result.
(Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
The event is even more than a culmination of North Korea's everyone-is-a-volunteer-or-else culture. It's an extension and product of its official state ideology. That holds, convincingly for many North Koreans, that they are a pure race, beset by wicked foreigners, who can only survive by absolute fealty to the ruler and permanent readiness for the final war that is always just around the corner. The ideology leads directly to the country's vast and horrifically cruel gulag system, its system of totalitarian oppression, its nuclear-powered militarism and its occasional but uncontrollable attacks on the outside world.
If you look closely, you can see all of this in the mass games: the celebration of Korean racial "purity" that is a byword for superiority, the deification of the leader as a sun or mountaintop and, of course, the goose-stepping soldiers whose similarity to past goose-stepping military parades is no coincidence.
The games are also, most famously, built on celebrating a lie. North Korean textbooks, and the narrative of the entire mass games, hold that the Korean War was begun by U.S. imperialists and their South Korean lackeys but ultimately won by North Korea's brave leader Kim Il Sung. In fact, the Korean War was launched by a surprise invasion from the North and fought to a bitter stalemate only after a million-plus Chinese troops came to Kim's aid.
Still, there's much to be learned from the mass games -- not as a show of human gymnastics but as a rare, unadulterated lens into how North Korea sees itself and its place in the world. To understand that, and the deadly serious lessons we can learn from one of the most spectacular shows on earth, I talked to Aidan Foster-Carter, a North Korea scholar at Leeds University. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.
WorldViews: When most people see the mass games, they see the spectacle, the gymnastics, the color. What do you see?
Aidan Foster-Carter: I see those things, too; certainly they are impressive gymnastics and so forth. But I see two other kinds of things which give me pause. I’m a sociologist, and I worry about how reality is constructed. And I think there are a lot of questions about how this particular, rather strange reality is constructed. Questions like how these people got to be there, what their situation is like, health issues. And then the actual content. People are so full of the wonderful ooh and ahhs of all this that they don’t notice the, to my mind, incredibly pernicious messages that are actually being put across.
In general, there is always totalitarianism, there is a grotesque cult of personality, there is militarization -- people will remember that North Koreans have many thousands of kids, however many it is, flipping colored cards like human cartoons. And there are lots of guns and weapons. But this year, in particular, it’s got a theme. They’re marking the 60th anniversary of the armistice which ended the Korean War, by any point of view a vicious and horrible war in which some 4 million people died.
